A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Pont, and many other places… 5000+ total posts since 2008.

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Category: Daily Dose from Dr. Odd

Daily Dose of Doctor Odd: Disappeared NYC, 1946

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is part of a series on destroyed New York City that includes New York City: Attacked by Tentacled Flying Saucers, Giant Flying Snakes, Glaciers, and Mining Missile Space Aliens, 1929-1941 and H-Bomb Wipes out Brooklyn, among others.

”This is a story of the immediate tomorrow – and of civilization headed down the inescapable road to destruction – down the road that we have, already, selected – and its nightmare end.”

Chandler Davis wrote this nightmare for Astounding Stories in 1946, and the artwork of the deteriorating-before-your-eyes Statue of Liberty fits this blog’s series of Disappearing New York series. Davis is a very interesting man–Ph.D. mathematics from Havard and professor of math at Toronto, a New York-born man who started his sci fi career early (age 20, with the story above) and who iimmigrated to Canada after his relsease from his HUAC-inspired prison term. Davis was probably a born Leftie, a radical, and it evidently never left him.

The cover art is by William Timmins.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — Future, History of the — History of the Future
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Sierpinski Triangles & the Empire State Building

JF Ptak Science Books Daily Dose series [Also part of the History of Lines series]

So, Nat’rists observe a flea

hath smaller fleas that on him prey,

And these have smaller fleas to bite ’em, and so on ad infinitum.

–Jonathan Swift, 1733

There are a lot of triangles in this fabulous photo of the construction of the Empire State Building in 1931–a lot. At least fifty–more if you use your imagination or get your pinhole specs out. It is simply an excellent photo in which I’m seeing things of a reducible nature–not in the sense of a Sierpinski triangle/sieve/gasket, obviously–but just a simple exercise along those lines (ha!), experiencing the image by recognizing different sorts of boundaries within it.

[Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections, here.]

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — History of Lines — Industrial & Technological art — Perspective — Photography
GEAR-PUNK: German Technical Advertising Art, 1920’s

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post [Part of a series on German Design]

Two odd pieces of German technical literature stared up at me from the bottom of a box of such things, both of which contained excellent examples of advertising technical art in addition to their technical content. But it just so happens that in this case the artwork that helped pay for the publication of the previously interesting and important technical and scientific information is of more interest now than the information wrapped around the ads. The sources of these images include the Festschrift zum Hundertjahringen Bestechen der Zeitschrift of the Dinglers polytechnisches Journal (1920), and Wirtschafliche Technik…Organ des Bundes Detscher Civil-Ingenieurre (1920). Somehow the ads retain a certian light touch in the midst of their occasionally massive heaviness. Or perhaps it is just robustness, solidity? If nothing else there are an artistic anti-approach to what was going on in the world of art, the opposite of the disappearance of concrete or natural forms and replacing them with ideas and colors.

Again, these are just two slim issues of rather obscure journals. I’ll add to this collection in the German Design section as they come up.

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Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — German Design
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Eels -with- an Eel Map

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Part of the Daily Dose of Dr. Odd series

Yes, this is totally out-of-context, but this title staring up at me from the bottom of a box was so unexpected that at first glance I thought it was in a European language of some sort. Spacing and such. But there it was, just a pamphlet on ill investigations for a 25 year period. It is simply an odd thing, to my mind.

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Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: The Future-Punk of Astoundingly Big Things

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

There’s the Big Bang, Big Ten, big fall, big dream, Big Band, big shot, Big Apple, big picture, Big Bird, Big Brother (and Sister), Big Lebowski, Big Sur, big year, Big East, Big Kahuna, big ego, (really) big show, big money, Big Shot and big deal, and many others, all sorts of “big” things. And then there are the Really Big things, like these astoundingly big things from the pulpy covers of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, from the 1940’s to 1971. [The source for all of this artwork is at Coverbrowser.com, here.]

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Anticipation, History of — Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — Future Punk — History of the Future
Daily Dose from Dr. Odd: a Novel of a Worm-Conscious Pig

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

[I just could not resist making a note of this book–sorry.]

Before there was Babe there were other pig stories, though not many I think with a bearing on pigs and worms. Or worms in pigs. But that is the bent in this tall-and-slender volume, which I initially selected for three other reasons: (1) because of its odd cover (gilt-stamped “Sincerely Yours/Lenore Muth” rather than the title; (2) the caption to the portrait of the author (“‘Nurse” said I wonder if it IS worms’ “; and (3) the first line of the book (“As a child I played with pigs”). So the book had both everything and nothing going for it before I ever got to the content, which is indeed the story of a pig with worms.

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Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Arithmetic of 1935

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Arithmetic of 1935 is an interesting book discussing the four prinipal operations of mathematics, though it is not quite Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935. It is however a very neat and orderly and in some ways exhaustive treatment of its subject, and that it does share with the brilliant choreography of Mr Berkeley.

I’ve touched on Mr. Berkeley’s work a couple of other times on this blog: Bio-Mathematics in Busby Berkeley Musicals (here) Mr. Mole, the Stationary Busby Berkeley of Mass Crowd Installation Photographs, 1918 (here).

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Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — mathematics, logic
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Fabulous Spherical Spacecraft from Pulpworld

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

Piecing my way through the great collection at Cover Browser, looking for science fiction pulp covers for images of Enormous-and-Montrously-Huge-Outer-Space-Things, I developed a very small collection of spherical spacecraft and/or “stuff”. They’re quite lovely, I think.

[All of the images I used below I selected from the big and wonderful collection at Cover Browser, here.]

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Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — Future, History of the — Technology, History of
Daily Dose of Dr. Odd: Chess Covers from Science Fiction Pulpworld

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

I don’t often see pulp sci fi covers decorated with chess figures, but I did find these three, recently. The first, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow” is interesting because of teh author. Or “authors”, as Lewis Padgett is a pseudonym for a husband and wife writing team, Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. And although there is a small sub-genre of married people.couples writing books together, few of them have taken a separate name for their efforts. “Padgett” is one of them. In any event, the chess pieces are unusual, and their appearance on the cover of a journal such as this makes this doubly-so.

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
Wholly Mondo Bizarro: Outsider Thinking, 1888

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1844

It is difficult to lose your reader right in the very title of your text. But I do think that John Penn (“the Greatest of Living Authors” accomplishes this in his

Right from the Star-Chamber! Wholly Moses Another Coutnry Heard from Another Presidential Candidate declines the Nomination! Big Little Franklin Puts in its Disclaimer and Begs to be Heard Before the Big–(June)–Bug Convention... And on and on.

I can find nothing for Mr. Penn, who claims that this is Volume 3 Number 2 of a magazine called The Revelator (June 1888), a magazine that doesn’t seem to exist in the holdings of the massive WorldCat/OCLC. The message of the slim and fragile pamphlet is–in the most kind appreciation possible–unclear. There seems to be a lot of political something going on, though it is a tangled webby road. Much of the center stage seems occupied by the election of 1888, when President Cleveland was renominated in a peaceful convention, but then bested by Republican challenger Ben Harrison in the electoral college in one of those elections where most stuff seemed to be going relatively fine in the United States. (Cleveland would come back to defeat Harrison in 1892.) So references to something like “Big Little Franklin” might actually refer to Benjamin Franklin Jones (1826-1903) who was the chair of the RNC from 1884-188 and the force behind the failed James Blaine nomination in ’88. Some references are obscure but solid, and some are just obscure and unsolid, and others turn the deep corner of obscure and fly into the arms of mondo bizarro.

Perhaps it was all just theatre. And perhaps it was the work of someone who had some money and insisted of giving a platform to his black-and-white kaleidoscope, and had the thing printed (if not published) there in Concord, Pennsylvania, in 1888 (also known here as “J.P. 6600”).

Here’s the last page–the pamphlet is too delicate to open and scan any of the interior–perhaps this is enough:

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Absurdist, Unintentional — Daily Dose from Dr. Odd — Outsider Logic