Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Blank and Empty Space: Tobias Stimmer’s Spare Portraits

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 713 Blog Bookstore

This is part of a continuing series of posts on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.




































Paolo Giovio’s (also known as Paulo Jovio, 1483–1552) Elogia vivorum bellica 
virtute illustrium (or "Praise of Men Illustrious for Courage in War") published 
in 1554 and Elogia virorum literis illustrium (1577) are two of the most 
beautiful woodcut productions of the later 16th century. They were illustrated 
galleries, a sort of supra-advanced Renaissance LIFE magazine of famous 
people in the arts and military. They were, in general, the first time the portraits
of the vast majority of these 180+ people had been seen in a printed forma, 
the mysteries (if any) of their appearance revealed to the public. The work was 
more than thirty years in the making, with the woodcuts (after the paintings by 
Giovio) being worked by Christopher van Sichem, Bernhard Jobin and the great 
Tobias Stimmer. The portraits included authors, poets and various other 
humanists, as well as military people and their support, plus natural scientists 
and medical people. 

I like these images because of their determined simplicity—at least the portraits 
themselves were simple (done with a real respect for open, blank space), though 
the borders were anything but. This portrait by Stimmer,for 
example, shows very wide spaces of white, un-tapped pieces of the woodblock, 
leaving them open for interpretation.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of

Nothing as a Weapon—American Acquiesence in the Holocaust

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 697 Blog Bookstore

“It may perhaps seem strange, that I treat as often in my
works of the same matter…the contempt of the world, and the meditations of
Death: but if the importance of the subject be considered, and the profit to be
derived thence, a Man will never be wearie of seeing such faire truths under
different presentations.”

Jean Puget de la Serre, The Mirrour Which
Flatters Not, 1639.

Following up on yesterday’s post on lethal number
(in Japan,
1945) I thought I’d have a quick look at another devastating weapon. In the arsenal of human weapons, man’s tongue
must rank quite high, right there with ignorance and knowing conceit. The seven deadly sins must also be considered
lethal weapons, once they turned on themselves, unleashed from the human
condition.

I’d like to focus on self-deception, the welcoming of not
knowing something, of not wanting to know, of stopping: of doing nothing in the face of something needing to be done.

The destruction of the Jewish people during World War II is a history with many
bearings, a complex of actions that seem to have been both elusively
unstoppable and eminently addressable. The psychology of why this
occurred is forensically comprehensible; the ultimate question, after
everything is said and done, is why the extermination was allowed to continue
for years on end. There is a considerable catalog of demons of nonactions and deceits
that I just can’t address now in a short post like this. Though I would like to
know why was it so difficult/impossible for the British government (and in
particular, Anthony Eden)
to allow Palestine
as a safe haven for desperate Jews, engaging in torturously long non-decisions
and bureaucratiuc inscrutabiulity to emergency situations? Why did Franklin Roosevelt
take so long to come acknowledge the documentation of the Holocaust and then
cause almost nothing to be done about it? Why did Sumner Welles act decidedly against any real
action in presenting the full case of the Holocaust to American leaders?
Why would the War Department (represented by Assistant
Secretary McCloy) respond in 1944 that Auschwitz
was both beyond the reach of tactical bombers and not be of sufficient military
interest to divert Air Force resources away from other areas of interest?
The knowledge of vast extermination of Jews in Europe
was known by early 1943, and yet, there was little action taken to do anything
to stop it. Not only that, the issue of emigration for Jews to the United
States or any other country that would have them was caustic and slow; it was
in short a history of the use of the word “no”.

Henry Morgenthau (1891-1967), an old-line politician, was
secretary of the treasury under Roosevelt and
was also the only Jew in the cabinet. It
was he who produced one of the most compelling, and damaging, documents questioning
the American government’s culpability in doing nothing concerning the
Holocaust, when “officials dodged their grim responsibility,
procrastinated when concrete rescue schemes were placed before them, and even
suppressed information about atrocities.”

Its title left nothing to question:

“Report to the
Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews”

It starts so:

“One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the
Jewish people in Europe, is continuing
unabated.

“This Government has for a long time maintained that its policy is to work out programs
to serve those Jews of Europe who could be saved.

“I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that
certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out
this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful
failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken
to rescue Jews from Hitler.

“I fully recognize the graveness of this statement and I make it only after
having most carefully weighed the shocking facts which have come to my
attention during the last several months.”

The full document is reproduced below.

It is a damning document outlining the power of doing
nothing.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank & Empty Things #50: Empty German Soldiers, 1908

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 689 Blog Bookstore

This post–image only, really–is part of a series in this blog relating to the empty, and the blank, and the missing.
“Bogus Supports for Artillery in the Great German Manoeuvers in Alsace” reads the subtitle of this odd drawing that appeared in the Illustrated London News for 1908. “A New Use for Dummies at the Kaiser’s Great Manoeuvers” reads the title, describing a practice action by the German army on the fields of a famous battleground of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). The empty soldiers were made to support the artillery: realistic, uniform-clad straw figures made to accept the bullets of the attacking practice force. Dead soldiers being killed in mock battle by living ones whose own fates would be sorely tempted in six year’s time.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Lost-topia: Looking for the Birthplace of Recorded Country Music

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 682 Blog Bookstore

Looking for 412 State Street, Bristol, Tennessee.

A History of Blank, Empty & Missing Things, #50

Driving through Forks of Ivy, topping Sam’s Gap, crossing the Nolichucky, passing through Unicoi County and into the Watauga watershed, I found myself in Bristol, Tennessee, in the north-east part of the state at corner of southwest Virginia. Bristol is actually on the state line, with half of the city in Tennessee and the other half in Virginia. The dividing line is the main thoroughfare, State Street, a tight avenue lined with early-ish building that hint of the age of the place, but not nearly so. This used to be frontierland, the area surrounding being largely found in the 1750-1775 or so, at a time when the Blue Ridge and the Southern stretches of the Appalachians were the Far Western frontier.

I was after a different sort of frontier adventure on State Street today—a musical one. State Street was the home of the “recording studio” for the renowned “Bristol Sessions”, which is recognized far and wide as the veritable Big Bang of country music.

Ralph Peer (of Okeh Records fame), an entrepreneur/musical spelunker, came to Bristol in July1927 looking for local music played by its hidden talent. There was a large interest in original American music—gospel and blues–from the far reaches of the country at this time, and Peer sought those genres in addition to secular music tat fit neither category–that would be “country music”. He was alerted to the area by his friend, the musician Ernest Stoneman (of an equally musically-rich area in Galax, Virginia), guided by the assertion that the Bristol/Johnson City/Kingsport area was a magnet for the musical talent of the region. He set up a temporary recording studio, renting the top two floors of the Taylor-Christian Hat Company (seen in the postcard image below, just beyond the Tip Top Hotel) at 412 State Street. The initial react to his advertisement was underwhelming, but when an article appeared in the local newspaper in the second week of his two-week stay touting the $3600 that Stoneman received in royalties in 1926 for his recorded music, the floodgates opened, and suddenly Peer was completely booked.

The recordings that Peer made at 412 State Street were spectacular. Among those who showed up was the young Jimmie Rodgers. And Uncle Eck Dunford and Ernest & Hannah Stoneman. And A.P., Sara and (Mother) Maybelle Carter, who recorded their oh-dear-god-beautiful “Single Girl, Married Girl” (and “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow”, “Little Log Cabin By the Sea”, “The Storms are on the Ocean”, “The Wandering Boy”) there on the second floor.

There were 19 performers who recorded 76 songs in an altogether singular moment.

And so, being near Bristol today I went looking for 412 State Street. I must say that it looks as though Bristol was prosperous at some pre-WWII point in the past, the city looking like it needed a scrubbing, with lots of store-front vacancies on its most famous street. Also there seemed to be no 400 block. Having the postcard image of where the hat factory was, I started comparing the buildings on the 500 block to those in the picture, and I had half-convinced myself that the city must’ve changed the numbering system for the street to accommodate what my brain was telling me was the missing building. The match looked pretty good, except for the number of windows.

There were only a few businesses open that I could see, and I popped into one—a music store, its open door allowing the loud rock music from the inside, out—and asked the young woman where the Bristol sessions building was.

She instantly looked sad. “Come with me, I’ll show you” she said, as we walked out to the sidewalk. It was not a good feeling. She looked north on the street, towards the open area of State Street that seemed to have been urban blighted, and I tried to get her to look south, to where I hoped the building was.

“No, no, I’m sorry to say. She pointed north, to a bad 1970’s brick single-story building about 20 0feet away. “That’s it. Or that’s where it used to be. Actually that’s the second building that got built on the site. The one that replaced Taylor-Christian got torn down too.”

She had told the story before, a lot of times. I think that she watched my eyes closely as I tried to focus on the foul building—maybe she saw my eyes get smaller and smaller, trying to size the three story hat factory down to this speckly brick thing. She had to have seen the disappointment, and then the wincing reaction to the building that replaced the iconic structure. I wondered to the woman if it was hard for her to break the news to the folks that came to finds the building. “Used to” she said, “but now I’m used to it”.

It’s a sad end. Especially when I found the little monument erected by the Oddfellows nearby, commemorating the Sessions. It sits on a funny little piece of land, badly overgrown. For some reason there’s a half-dozen sign-less traffic sign utility poles haphazardly placed bizarrely next to it. There’s a parking lot ten feet away. It looks hot and unwanted, like a small graveyard scooped out of its pleasantness and surrounded by traffic (like the Fitzgeralds up in Maryland).

As I drove out and away from the city, I took a few pictures of buildings that were probably once happy and visited. I should point out that once Peer was done, so too was the recording business. The fact that this music was recorded and brought out to the world from Bristol left no real shadow on the city, until recently.

Fitting, unfortunately, tightly with the end of 412 State Street is the street named for Mr. Peer. It has a lovely, old-timey street sign (off State), but the street itself, well… This is just not right.

I was shocked by the unbearable beauty of this little business:

One of the three movie theatres in a two-block span:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of
A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things #49: Yves Tanguy’s Empty Skies

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 675 Blog Bookstore

Blank & Empty Things Department #49

[For another interesting example in this series see: Maps of the Cosmos of Moles, 1671: Astrology, Pseudoscience & Furious Belief]

Surrealist, spider-eating, red-ink-drinking, bohemian template
Montparnassian Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) is perhaps the blankest, loneliest,
emptiest painter of the Surrealist movement.
It seems odd to mare that statement, even to me, what with the
tremendously lonesome images of the somewhat-earlier Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), but
Tanguy has a different lonesomeness/empty quality to him partially because of his very restricted color palette. Whereas de Chirico’s
(pictured just below) paintings are alive with color, Tanguy seems to put the unused

colors back into
their tubes, painting in his all-white and unblemished studio. He gives his paintings an odd quality, milky
somewhat—especially in his skies, which to me look particularly empty, even
though they have substantial texture.(This is differentiated from earlier posts in this blog that deal with blank skies in Renaissance prints, which were truly, completely blank and without any detail whatsoever.) The
play and wash of it all in his paintings gives me the sensation of a taste, and
not a good one—seeing some of his work elicits a metallic, coppery taste, high
in the back of the mouth. I don’t get
any of that sensate confusion form the others like de Chirico, or Magritte, or Francis Picabia, or Marcel Duchamp, or Max Ernst, or Jean Arp, or Man Ray, and etc (though De Chirico does come close).

Tanguy was undoubtedly influenced by de Chirico early on in
his life, even before his painting career began. The standard story is that in 1923 while
riding a bus Tanguy saw an unusual, arresting image in the window of a store—he
jumped form the bus, rushed back to the image and saw that it was a painting by
de Chirico in the window of Paul Guillaume’s gallery. He was much taken by it, and very soon
afterwords began his painting career in earnest, becoming recognized and
semi-established within a few years. (It
is interesting to note that the critic who first gave him positive feedback, F.
Fels, very soon thereafter wrote to Tanguy “You’re finished. You’re going to wind up a surrealist.” ) He
did “wind up” a Surrealist, but he was hardly “finished”.

And what I’m talking about here with the Big Lonely is just limited to the Surrealists–there are plenty of other operating in this millieu (intentional or not), not the least of whom (and painting at about the same time) is the sensationally lonely Edward Hopper, the man who invented shadwos for shadows. But that’s another story.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Missing Images in Art: Depictions of Art by Children

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 668

I think that I can safely say that artwork by children does not make very many appearances in Western art prior to the 20th century. Nor do the originals–considering the ephemeral nature of the effort at art by children, their work just don’t seem to survive. Some of that reason–particularly in America–was the scarcity of materials for kids to produce art with: paper was not inexpensive, and neither brushes and paints. Crayons, invented for chubby and reachy fingers, were not invented for the mass market until 1903. (Crayola sold eight crayons in a box for a nickel. The colors? Black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green.) Then of course the artwork would have to be saved, somehow, for generations. As much as it would be fascinating to find artwork done at age 4 by your great-great grandparents, it would have to survive the cleansing tendencies of four generations of clean-up. End result: there’s just not that much antiquarian chldrens’ art floating around.

It also doesn’t appear as art in artwork. It is possible to find numerous examples of kids’ scratches in stone and such in ancient graffiti, but it doesn’t appear as elements of fine artwork, or, for that matter, in book illustration.

There is an example however in Thomas Truman’s The Nurse’s Rhyme Book, a New Collection of Nursery Rhymes, published in Philadelphia in 1847. The book is filled with unusual illustrations and fantastic ornamental borders, all used in support of some odd, scary, mean and occasionally pretty mid-century posies meant as night-time entertainment for the young ones. Our prize is found on the very last page, the final slug of an illustration to a more-finely illustrated book: a coy, small boy, holding an example of his art, seemingly drawn on a framed slate. He looks happy, pleased, proud to me–on the one hand he is interested in sharing his achievement and on the other is really too shy to share, an emotion I’ve seen from time to time with my girls. As a matter of semi-fact, this is a rare emotion to see displayed in art, the too-shy-to-share routine saved more for fluttery self-conscious Victorian grown-ups more so than for children..

Believe me, after having dealt with books and prints as an antiquarian for almost 30 years, and also having a collection of sorts of antiquarian childrens’ arts, pictures like this just don’t surface very often at all. Over the years I’ve made some annoying phone calls and emails to librarians at art galleries (especially at the National Gallery in DC where I was a pester) explaining my interest and trying to find out if this struck any bit of memory in their brains–I never once had a positive answer. (I expected at some poin tthat someone would say, “Oh yes, of course–there’s a census of that that Mr. Kemp of Yale did in 1977. Or something, some sort of memory for this kind of image.) This is hardly an academic pursuit, but my occasionally ritualistic clawing seems to bear out that these things are just not available.

And why this interest? There is a simple, inherent sweetness in all of this, full of life and hope; something that crosses the generations, looking pretty much as though the emotion in the art was produced yesterday, if not for some of the content. . And that is another charm–like giving a small child a camera to photograph what they see (as in the case of my daughters Emma and Tessie) and see the remarkable results of their 40-inch tall version of my adult world. The insights can be remarkable–not only do we see things from a new physical angle, but also the things of interest, the center of attention in the picture, the stuff that has aroused their interest and curiosity enough to take a picture of, can be incredible and totally unexpected. That is perhaps the greatest interest for me in looking at children’s artwork: it has the continued potential to be slam-brake innovative and filled with the unexpected insight; and it is just not a”normal”view of the world. And in a way the art can hold a key to your own antique memory of childhood; every picture has a possibility for the recovery of your own forgotten insight.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Art History — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Animal Imitation, Tight Corsets, and Perdition: Physiognomy, 1873

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 658 Blog Bookstore

The fabulouslessness and learned foolishness of J. Simm’s horribly-named Animalimitationality and Mentimitativeness; or Animal and Mental Imitation and their Tendencies and Influences on Society, a Lecture, seems a poor-man’s ramble in a polysyllabic scribble. At it base, J. Simms (listed as “M.D”., and who was also the author of A New Physiognomical Chart of Character) presents a two-paragraph idea and published it over twelve pages that seem twelve pages too many. The idea is basically so: humans at time resemble animals because animals imitate what they see, as do humans. That is principally the entire deal, though it evidently was the cause of numerous lecture bookings for Mr. Simms. And what Mr. Simms talks about are the problems of imitation, the results of which are found in tight shoes, tight corsets, big hats, and bad walking, all leading to debauched society and wrecked personal dreams.

There are many things the Simms work is not. It is not a work that encompasses the social geometry found by other people later in the century–those who came across the study of people and immitation and the like legitimately, such as Gebriel Tardem Emile Durkheim, Scipio Sighele and Gustave Le Bon, for example. These folks worked with capable data and reasonable assumptions in looking at how the transmission of data and knowledge takes place between people, and sought to explain the construction of the social membrane in logical and scientific ways. They were trying to address what Marcel Proust would call (somewhat later) “a new distance between ourselves and things”.

Simms was interested in did this too, but did so in terms of how people imitated animals, and how that imitation spread to imitating people, and then fashions, and then resulting in too-tight corsets and too-tight shoes, and wanton neediness, all eading to advanced imitation and, finally, to perdition. The man had an odd vision which obviously appealed to some. And so it goes. There’s not that much difference in the set of assumptions of Simms and those of Dr. Freud, is there?

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Maps of the Cosmos of Moles, 1671: Astrology, Pseudoscience & Furious Belief

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 646 Blog Bookstore

“The first principle [in science] is to not fool yourself.” R.P. Feynman

“The Woo-woo
is all the same, everywhere, anytime, everytime.”—James Randi on the
history of the pseudosciences .

Self-deception and belief in Woo-woo (spurious pseudo-scientific beliefs) is some of the stuff that separates humans from animals. And not in a good way, unless it was all chalked up to an expression of creativity and imagination. I started this post as an entry in the History of Dots category, then in the Blank and Missing Things department, and then simply to the Bad Ideas category. But the more I thought about mole mapping and how extraordinary it was, the less extraordinary it became, especially once the veil of age has been removed. As it turns out, mole mapping is neither more nor less extraordinary than any other system of belief.

Here’s
a sentence one doesn’t get to write very often:
Richard Saunders (1613-1692) was perhaps the foremost historian, astrologer and seer
of human moles and their predictive forces who ever lived. He was far from being the solitary member of
a one-unit class: the use of moles as
predictive and interpretive agents stretches back dozens of

centuries, so the
claim of Saunder’s being its most famous practitioner is not empty,
mega-pseudo-scientific or not. The
mystical commentary on the Torah, the Zohar (a part of the Kabbalah), gets
right to the point of the significance of moles (“the stars of the body”),
transferring the structure of the cosmos and the constellations to the
skin. The seer and soothsayer Melampus
from Greek mythology, in one of his necessarily pseudographic works, writes on
the importance of moles of the face and their zodiacal relations—an idea that
was picked up 2000 years later by the extremely significant mathematician
Jerome Cardano. There was a decent
amount of argument regarding the location of zodiac symbols on the face, as it
turned out.

But
the leading exponent of moles is Saunders, who was also one of the leading
figures in a wide and very powdery period of European non-scientific
sciences. These wonderful images come
from the second (!) edition of his cumbersome but accurately-titled work Saunders Physiognomie and Chiromancie,
Metroscopie, the Symmetrical Proportions and Signal Moles of the Body, Fully
and Accurately Explained; With Their Natural Predictive Significations Both to
Men and Women (published in London, 1671, by Nathaniel Brook), in which he
divines the psyche and the future with peoples’ moles.

The
first figure, detailing the mole locations of a man’s face, is a remarkable,
weird accomplishment, not only because of the exhaustive treatment that is
given to every location of every mole (g_d help us), but also because of the
manner of the engraving. If you look
closely, you can see that it is Fresnel lens-like—it is an engraving composed
of (almost) concentric circles. I cannot
recall seeing such a thing before—needless to say the practice of engraving
would be laborious, and not much practiced.
I’m not even sure what great good it causes, though it does give a
little different idea of depth and dimensionality to the image. The effect that it achieves here though is to
give a solar-system-like background to the moles—something that is much more
spectacularly achieved in the next image.

The
map of the moles of this woman’s body looks to me just like a constellation—and
a constellation is just what they were for Saunders, who viewed the arrangement
of moles on the body like an astronomer searching the night sky for a new
comet. But an astronomer would not be
trying to force governing connections in the starry realms to occurrences on
earth (or heaven, or whatever)—that would be the job of an astrologer, whose
job would be enormously simplified since everything it conjures is
fictional. Had Robert Hooke been Richard
Saunders-like when he made virtually the first microscopic investigations in
human history, he would have been correlating the hairs and pores of the flea
rather than making his minute and beautiful observations.

Saunders
sees mole connections everywhere, even developing sub-classifications to
sub-classes: this is seen in the lovely relational map of face moles to moles
on other parts of the body. (I like the spare curved lines most.)

This
all looks perfectly phenomenal, unbelievable even, from out here in 2009. The fact remains though that the vast
majority of newspapers in his country still carry horoscopes, and most Americans
believe in UFOs, and a not-small percentage of those folks say that they’ve
actually been abducted by Outer Space Aliens. (I calculate that from the
“first” UFO sighting near Roswell 50 years ago that a sighting has been made about every ten seconds since
then. Why all of this interest? And here’s a question among the many that I
have about this stuff–outside the astronomical chances of actually
encountering the other life forms in the universe that do undoubtedly
exist: why do these crafts, which have
spectacular, beyond-physics capacities, have little dotty lights on them?)

And
so as bizarre as images like this might look, many (most?) folks in the present
really haven’t left these ideas behind—they just get changed a little,
upfitted, retro-ripped, and outfitted with flashing lights.

In a
very long career of getting people to think in spite of themselves, James Randi (scientific
investigator, keeper of the scientific method, head of the James Randi
Educational Foundation, and formerly “The Amazing Randi” from years ago) has
one particular mythbust-lecture that I find phenomenal, with a very large “oh
my good god!” capacity for the students at the end of it–if they would but allow it. Listen:
Mr. Randi would explore the possibilities of astrology, asking the group
or class who there believed in it, taking a census of belief. He would then make a very strong, convincing
case for the application of this hope in astrology (he is a very determined and
logical speaker), and then give astrological “readings” to each member of the
group. The readings would turn out to be exact and persuasive—a second tally would be taken of believers, with
the usual results being that (unless they knew who Mr. Randi was or was already
a skeptic or logically un-needy thinker) the class would now consist of an
overwhelming percentage of astrology-believers.

Then
Mr. Randi lets the high-wind boom swing free:
everyone received the same reading. (You can see a short snippet for one of these experience HERE–Mr. Randi has conducted this lecture many times for many different audiences.) The shock of realization is palpable.

On
the telephone this morning Mr. Randi graciously explained this lovely lesson—he
also explained that even after the key ingredient of the lesson was revealed,
and even after he lectured on thought and belief and superstition and logic and
so on, that the people who had already believed in astrology would almost in every circumstance still
maintain that belief. Even in the face
of overwhelming evidence, the idea of belief was no match for fact. Truth, fact, explanation, method, logic—none
of these could put a chink in the armor of belief, and is no match for self-deception.

“The
Woo-woo is always the same, everywhere, all the time. If its not astrology its something else, the basis for all of it is the same” (my
paraphrase) says Mr. Randi. After approaching belief
systems like UFOs and astrology and mentally bending spoons and mind-reading
and on and on, Mr. Randi says that at their base, the stories have a common heritage of need.
And they’re unbendable, and certainly unbreakable, for all of those who need
the belief. There’s no room for
constructive debate and exchange in such belief systems, whether it is
astrology or creationism (I just can’t call it by its other, cleaned-up
name), as they cannot satisfy the basic tenets of knowledge growth and scientific inquiry which, according to RP Feynman, is the willingness to test your beliefs against falsity and to investigate all possibilities that might make them invalid.* Mole mapping predictions and the
fate of a life is no different from any of these other derivations in wishful/hopeful pseudosciences, either—just a different name
for the same underlying system of beliefs, though the moles are a little long in the tooth.

Anyway, creationism or astrology or life-after death–they might as well all be mapping moles.

As Feynman said:

The first principle [in science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.
After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

* Feynman on the scientific method: “It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought
that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over
backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should
report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what
you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain
your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some
other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow
can tell they have been eliminated “ RP Feynman quoted by Ralph Leighton, 1985, p. 341
).

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — History of Dots
Blank & Empty Things #46: Languages of Tree Structure

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 641 Blog Bookstore

A History of Blank & Empty Things , #46

Messages and information, silently displayed data and the announcements of the state of all things are everywhere, all of the time: these things only become part of the language and systematically codified once they are recognized and understood, or at least once the thrust of the message becomes distinguished from the surrounding noise.

One elegant interpretation of above-the-noise display was made by E.P. Keen in 1936 (“Relative susceptibility of ponderosa pines to bark beetle attack”, published in the Journal of Forestry) who established a simple and practicable standardized vocabulary for the discussion and communication of tree health. It is a relatively straightforward idea–based upon many years of keen observation and understanding–which used a pictorial schematic to establish a common baseline for the discussion of tree health/growth. Later on Keen would pioneer the use of aerial photography using various films and filters to determine the extent of damage done to stands of trees (and forests) brought about by drought, pests, diseases and other harmful stimuli–especially when the damage was done not in the visible spectrum.

The Blank & Empty part of tree language comes in the form of cells in the trunk of the tree which reveal–in cross section–the age of the tree and some climatic indicators of during the tree’s growth. This comes in the form of tree rings–the rings are formed by the growth of the cells, the first of which in a new season respond with expansion, and depending upon water conditions will either grow somewhat less slowly than at first or stop growing altogether at the end of the season, and die; the new cells growing in the new season, and the demarcation being what we call a “ring”. This was a fantastic idea, the brainchild of A.E. Douglass at the University of Arizona.

Andrew Ellicott Douglass (1867-1962) was , ironically, an American astronomer at work at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff when, in 1911, he began his experimentation with tree rings.. (I believe that he came to this end trying to ascertain terrestrial climatic conditions in his sunspot research.) The resulting effort was the clarification and near-founding of dendrochronology, with the resulting climatic understanding applicable across many different fields, and all from expanded/contracted cells. Douglass perfected his observation and theory in a three-volume masterwork Climate Cycles and Tree Growth, which was published in 1936.

For an interesting appraisal, see George E.Webb Tree Rings and Telescopes, (the University of Arizona Press), Tucson, Arizona, 1983.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Michelangelo v. Leonardo, Blake v. Newton: Famous Contraries Chess Set

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 638 Blog Bookstore

Some years ago I made a chess set whose pieces forced a
battle between mathematicians and physicists. The pieces were constructed with
a mélange of bric-a-br ac and junk, all with the same bases of dominoes. Each piece was an identifiable person from
the history of their respective fields. And
while the two divisions of science have become necessarily more porous over the
years, there remains no difference that there still is a difference between
math and physics. I brought this set with me when exhibiting my rare bookstore
stock at national meetings for the American Mathematical Society and the American Physical Society, and it
attracted a lot of attention—more so for the choice of who was what piece than
any game that was ever played on it. (The mathematicians were much more
ambitious in offering their opinions on the choices of mathematicians per
position.)   There are chess
sets of “contraries” on the mass production market, though it is usually
limited to Star Wars and Civil War figures—and there it is generally generic
figures for anything outside the King and Queen.

I was intending on doing a post today on the unpleasant
contrariness of Michelangelo and Leonardo. (These guys are two of a small
number of people who are instantly identifiable by one name only, though a very
popular and vastly oversold modern author chooses to use Leonardo’s second name
as the identifier, a distinctly minority position….like referring to Michelangelo
as Buonarotti of Florence.)   And then it struck me how interesting a
chess set would be made up of such opposed figures, happily or not squaring off
against one another on the 64s.

Finding the
contraries is not so simple. Skipping
past Leonardo/Michelangelo (I’ll get to them in a minute) I went to the most
famous of all contrarians in the world of science—Isaac Newton. (Is the “Isaac” really necessary?) During his
famously grumpy and combative lifetime Newton battled a night sky of most shining stars of
his day: Hooke and Leibniz being two of
the greatest of these figures. But I
think for this chess set I’d have Newton squared up against a man who wasn’t even
born during his lifetime—William Blake.
Blake was an impossible anti-Newtonian, making a career of being a
spectacular (and perhaps insane/manipulative) anti-rationalist, a weaver of smoke, playing with and
distorting images like a theramin player, using language to produce dichotomies
in even the most standard of sensate ideas.
Blake was the poster child for thing anti-tech, an anti-scientist out to
save the world from its scientific self,
the rationalist world set to destroy imagination, the “Antichrist
science” hell bent on destroying the soul of art and religion.

“Art is the tree of
life; Science is the tree of death” wrote Blake, and so he chose the
“Athesistic” Sir Isaac to stand for the
beast, depicting him in art as a naked geometer intent on subjugating the world
with a compass and a keen brain, reducing glory to quantification, the work of
Satan.. For most of my life I thought
that this image by Blake was celebrating Newton—I knew little of the poet/artist/poet, and
thought the painting a reverence. When I
understood Blake a little, I saw that
the image was intended as a mockery of Newton and the idea of science—this was an unusual
sensation, because absent the unspopken intention of the artist, you could still take the subject matter of
the artwork two ways.

Blake’s writing
leaves no doubt about where he stood on the issue, even though much of it (to
me) seems not terribly understandable due to its repeated and visceral
self-reference and private language (“Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of energy”, the “ratio of the things of Memory”:

The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man,
and when Separated from Imagination and enclosing in steel a Ratio Of the
Things Of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities To Destroy
Imagination.

Science—embodied
here in Newtonian mechanics, there in Renaissance rediscovery of classical
perspective—was killing the “eternity of the imagination”.

I could well imagine
a “conversation” between the two men:
Blake saying Things, and Newton not able to find any space in his head for
them, answering in silence. OR perhaps
he would be vicious. God knows. Newton died in 1727 when Blake was still in
ueber-dimensional pre-pregnancy, waiting his turn to descend from the heavens,
which was not bound to happen for another thirty years.

In his otherwise
brilliant book, Art & Physics,
Leonard Shlain refers to Blake as a Cassandra, having the ability to see the
future but not being able to say or do anything about it. To think that Blake was “correct” in foreseeing the problems that technology would
bring to people’s lives leaves me baffled:
it is certain that people became more cog-nified with the advance of
technology, but it also allowed for the birth of “free time” for the masses,
giving them some soul and imagination that they would’ve have had if they were
in a flat field in Poland pulling potatoes out of the ground for 18 hours a
day. Perhaps Blake was just referring to
those lucky enough to wear clean white shirts and have a benefactor; perhaps
all of those Others didn’t exist in his many scheduled god/heaven visions he
had every day.   (I should point out that Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience:
Shewing the Two Contrary States of
the Human Soul in 1794, which was actually a varied republication of his
1789 Songs of Innocence with the
addition of the Songs of Experience. Blake exposes the duality of experience and
innocence, of their opposing nature in human existence, neither negating the
other, both trying to survive simultaneously.
His engraved poems really are striking and gigantically, unreservedly, ars-religico-veritas
of the highest Romantic order. And then some.)

Back to chess and
picking out the first pieces: : Blake
and Newton. I’d
have to give Newton the nod for Queen for the sheer enormity of his abilities. Blake gets a pawn’s position, the first piece
sacrificed.

Chess Contraries,
Piece Two: Michelangelo and Leonardo.

It is odd that even
though Michelangelo (1475-1564) and Leonardo (1452-1513) lived in the same city
(Florence) for several years that the only thing that developed between them in
the smallish societal/artist communities was a brew of mutual disdain.   Diplomatically speaking, the men did not
care for one another, though it seems that the junior of the two,
Michelangelo–who was a well-established rising star of 35 or so to the more
famous Leonardo, who was 55—possessed the young man’s temper and was more
outspoken in his dislike of Leonardo. It
does seem spectacular that the two greatest talents of the Renaissance could
live so close together for several years and have no working or collegiale
relationship, no exchange of ideas, nothing.

They did, however,
almost work together in the same (big) room, though that too never came to
fruition. Both men received a commission
from Piero Soderini to decorate the walls of the Council Hall of the Palazzo
Vecchio with massive (20×50’ !) paintings
of great Florentine military victories: Leonardo would paint the Battle
of Anghiari and Michelangelo the Battle of Cascina. Like much else in the careers of both of these men, the projects were unfinished–Michelangelo not even getting beyond the cartoon stage in preparation; Leonardo actually got paint on the wall,s but made an error in trying to quicken the slow drying time, and heated the wax undercoating enough to make the paint run down the wall and puddle on the floor. It is interesting that it would be Guiseppe Vasari–the man who wrote one of the earliest biographies of renaissance painters, and the creator of the Ufizzi Gallery, and a large talent in his own right–who would be brought in to produce one of the large paintings. It seems to some that Vasari, ironically, painted his own work over that of the started and probable masterpiece of Leonardo. (As a matter of fact, there is an art historian who thinks that some of the Leonardo might have survived under Vasari’s work; that story can be seen here.)

I don’t mean to set out for pure contraries (like Ovid’s question
of water and fire–cunctarum contraria semina rerum, Fasti, IV, 783, f–the
yin and yang, and other entities combative at all points. The question here is
for entertaining contraries at some interesting points—that’s good enough. All aspects needn’t be the mutually exclusive
of the other such that if one is true the other must be false. There’s room enough for neither-true-nor-false,
at least for this game, a wide-open Wittgensteinian arbitrary contrary.

It might be interesting to have a look at Vasari’s estimation of Leonardo and Michelangelo; I’ve reprinted the first tow paragraphs for each from Vasari below.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Contraries