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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JF Ptak Science Books Post 1027
{Another in the History of Dots series.]
The molecular chemistry of dots of 1947 is a beautiful thing, worthy of a powers-of-ten episode, though I can only do a gigantically scaled down version of it (a powers-of-two maybe) given pixelation and its dot-defeating and necessary tendency to relieve roundness and introduce squares everywhere.
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 996
This story is more about Ho Chi Minh’s capture of French silk than about anything else–it is a peep into the future following the end of the French endgame in Vietnam, which came abruptly with their defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
[Detail/larger image below.]
The siege there started on the 13th of March, and lasted 57
days, until May 7th, 1954. The
commanding general of the Viet Minh forces, Vo Nguy Giap, achieved an enormous
victory over the French—the first time a guerrilla force readjusted itself into
a conventional force to defeat a Western army. It was the end of the line for the French military involvement there and it just so happened to be
the beginning of Vietnam as an object on the American foreign policy event horizon.
Just a week after this notice appeared, Dwight Eisenhower made his domino
speech:
“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would
call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set
up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the
certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a
disintegration that would have the most profound influences.conference…”
Vietnam was supposed to be one of those dominoes. Evidently all of the dominoes were the same size regardless of the size or international presence of the country. It was also the same sort of domino even if had appealed for American recognition of its democracy-laced post-WWII government. And it was a domino still even if the United States had helped fashion the events that necessitated the movement of that country toward domino-hood. No matter. The U.S. decided to back the French in reclaiming their war-lost possession, in spite of the fact that the French were still doing business during the war with the Japanese occupying force in Vietnam, and in spite of the fact that the French re-armed Japanese troops to help fight against the “insurgent” forces of Ho Chi Minh. It was an ugly decision, and I suspect FDR was just too sick to deal with it properly.
Nine years later, the French had finally been soundly defeated and Vietnam thought that it had finally gained independence. Not so.
The picture here is of dots–the field of battle at Dien Bien Phu, littered with silk parachutes–cargo dropped by the French air force to the defenders of the garrison….most of which, evidently, fell well outside the French-controlled perimeter and into the hands of the attacking Vietnamese army. These were the exploding dots of the falling domino.
If these dots stood for something, they could stand for the coming wave of death and misery, a graphical representation of what was to come over the next 25 or so years.
I reckon there to be about 500 parachutes/dots in this picture.
Each of these dots could be assigned a number, each representing a gross statistic for the war, from 1950 to 1975:
U.S. forces killed in action: 100/dot (58,000 killed)
U.S. forces wounded in action: 300/dot (313,000)
Army of the Republic of Vietnam, killed in action: 500/dot (263,000)
Army of North Vietnam, killed in action: 2,000/dot (1.1 million killed)
Civilian deaths, North & South Vietnam: 4000/dot (2 million killed)
Civilian deaths caused by North Vietnam during the war: 300/dot
Civilian deaths caused by “North” Vietnam, postwar consolidation and reeducation: 1,000/dot
Civilian deaths caused by the U.S.: 175/dot
All deaths for the war, 1950-1975: 8,000/dot (using a figure of 4 million).
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 968
Part
of the History of Dots series that I find so attractive is the dot’s great
equalizing effect. The dot has the
potential of making everyone, everywhere, feel the wonder of mighty
insignificance—the Earth, for example, depicted from far away, a dot in the
cosmos, the solar system a dot in the galaxy, the galaxy a dot in the realm of
galaxies. And then back again, powering perspective
back inside us, finding the common thread of humanity again at the cellular level,
a dot of sameness.
For
example, the map drawn by Sir William Herschel must have been a staggering
thing to see when it was first published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1785–at least
by the popular viewer. The enormity and
expanse of galaxies was not yet understood, and to see (at this time) our own
sun relegated to a point of sameness in what he deduced to be a spiral-shaped Milky
Way Galaxy among many others could well have been an astonishing experience to
a first-time viewer.
So
to for at the other end of the spectrum with the embryological work of Karl
Ernst von Baer (an Estonian educated in
who worked in
as it was published in his De ovi
mammalium et hominis genesi (1827).
His work established beyond all doubt that the reproductive processes
for all mammals were generally the same—or without fundamental difference—from other
animals. And since “mammals” included “man”,
it came as quite a shock to the popular audience that the basic facets of
reproduction were little changed between dominant predator and all the other
stuff. At the professional level Baer’s work was of enormous importance in the development
of cell theory which would lead to natural selection…and he also established embryology
as a discipline.
And so the substance of dots at opposing ends of measurement, bringing about a similarity of recognition. Dots.
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 918
{This post continues some new and unusual cross-categories in this blog, like Missing Things Making Holes; Bombs as Breads. Today’s bit combines the “Blank, Empty and Missing Things” with “The History of Dots” categories.]
Alfred
Donne (1801-1878), physician, experimenter, microscopist and
photographer, is best known for things other than what he should
probably be best known for: his discovery of the third element of the
blood, platelets. Donne had a wonderful vision, and was among the very
first on the scene to write about and employ the spectacular invention
of the daguerreotype in chemistry and microscopy. As a matter of fact,
Donne, along with his collaborator Leon Foucault, produced the very
first engraved images of photomicrographs for his cytology paper of
1840. (He was also the first to use electricity in producing a medical
illustration, and was among the first modern physicians to write on the
great efficacy of mothers using their own milk in breast feeding their
children.) The discovery of platelets paper of 18421–preceding two
other works published in the same year–does indeed identify the new
object, but actually fails to make a methodological examination of the
new body, calling the new units “globulins du chyle” (or small globules, derived
from plasma). He also fails to make a drawing of what he saw; so, the
combination of these two important elements asked the reader to accept
his findings on faith, the tools of reproduction of his observations
not being present.
And so we remember Donne for some other significant
things, and less so for his lightly-interpreted and un-illustrated, and missing, “dots”.
Notes
1.Donne, Alfred. De l’origine des globules du sang, de leur mode de formation et de leur fin. Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Sciences, Paris, 1842, 14: 366-168.
(Overall the history of the
discovery of platelets is complicated:
Leewenhoek (1675) and Henson (1782) were the first to fully describe the “undefined”
particles of the blood; Donne’s work was then more fully described by Beale in
1850, and then again (identified as “small corpuscles” by Zimmerman in 1860 and
then again by Schultze in 1874 and Laptschinski (also in 1874). William Osler
then enters the scene in 1880, followed by Giulio Bizzozzero who was the
first, in the years 1881 -1882, to establish central role of platelets
not only in physiological haemostasis, but also in thrombosis. Anyway it is a longish and not-clear-to-me
history.)
I posted this at the end of last year, the end of my first year of blogging–I quite like it. A nice way to end the year. Again. On dots.
In closing out my first year of blogging, I’d like to take an incidental look at one of our language’s most important fragments. Like Mr. Eliot’s observations of Baudelaire being a fragmentary Dante, and like the brilliantly arranged frammenti of Piranesi, the great bits of our communication processes owe a breathy thanks to the lowly period. A dot. A point. It separates to provide analysis and coherent recognition of thought.
A simple dot. (.) But dots are as little or as big as you need: there’s “Little Dot” (the cartoon character of Harvey Comics, created 1947, who was fascinated bylines and dots and dashes), “Admiral Dot”, polka dots, Mama Dots. Dots get considerably ratcheted up in quantum dots, and then expanded beyond that with the idea of the dot as an abbreviation for the multiplication sign, both of which increase things rather than bringing them to an end, a conclusion. The dot used after a musical note delineates that there is an increase in time by half, which would be an interesting notation to adopt in literature, if we were somehow able to magnify and increase that which would normally have been ended by the same notation.
Dots have formed the background to some of the most significant scientific illustrations of all time, like these two images, the first of which Descartes’ illustration of the decomposition of the rainbow, found in his Dioptrics, a fabulously important illustration. The second is from Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae (1684) which display his theory of vortices, accommodating an idea of physics eliminating atoms and vacuums and joining matter and space, matter being constantly deflected from moving in a straight line, moving in vortices. Then of course there’s the fantastically appreciated advancement of Samuel Morse’s telegraphic instrument and his abbreviated transmitting alphabet (his “code”), which fascilitated the distribution of information in the 1840’s in the same sort of way that the internet increased the flow and ease of data in the 1990’s. (Actually that’s only half correct for Morse, as his was a system of dots and dashes.)
Things get more interesting if we expand the idea of the “dot” to a “point”, as just about everything we have discussed in math for thousands of years has been based upon the idea of a “point in space”, forming the bits of the coat hanger on which the whole fabric of the heavens has been hung. Going the other way, there’s the decimal point, which brings us to negative powers of ten, into smaller and smaller worlds, to the incomprehensibly small, showing that “nothing” probably doesn’t exist. (We’ll leave the idea of “spot” alone, tonight.)
That’s quite a bit of expansion from a word that starts out life in Middle English as the definer of the head of a boil.
But this year will end in about 50 minutes from now, and I wll be able to put the final keystroke to the final sentence to my final post of the year, and put it all to sleep. And the year will end, at 11:59:59, precisely. On the dot.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 889
I like bumping circles as modes of graphically conveying quantitative data—it is more unusual than most ways of portraying statistics and belongs mostly in the 19th century.
The first example is relatively early, in the first class of this sort of information display, published in Thomas Bradford’s (1802-1887) superior Comprehensive Atlas Geographical, Historical and Commercial in Boston in 1835. Circles are the entire métier of this chart, showing the sizes of the continents and oceans, concentric circles nested inside each other, then branching out into three columns of progressively smaller circles showing the comparative sizes of islands, seas and lakes, all (interestingly) presented on
the same scale. It is a virtual one-stop, single-image display showing the graphical sizes of 59 geographical entities in relation to one another, making the understanding of their comparative sizes a simple, understandable, matter.
Prettier but (initially) more difficult to use are the next two charts, the first showing the areas and populations of countries compared to that of the United States (in 1890), and the second showing the public debts of those same countries. At first the display looks a little confusing. But once you settle in and get your eyes accustomed to the manner of presentation, the charts are actually very easy to use and very useful.
Moving over from circles to dots is this population map by Frère de Montizon Armand Joseph, Carte philosophique figurant la population de la France, published in 1830 (as the first of its kind).
The ubiquitous pie-chart only made its first appearance in 1801, the work of he gifted and possibly polymathic William Playfair. He was an engineer (serving as apprentice to the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle, and personal assistant to James Watt) and economist, and occasional mathematician, who also invented the line graph (1786), bar chart (1801)and circlegraph(1801). But for this and all of his other work, he died in poverty and not comfortable1.
NOTES
1.Works by William Playfair include:
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This installment of the continuing thread on the history of dots questions the sublime machinery of the primum mobile in the work of Galileo, particularly in his The Siderreal Messenger (Sidereus nuncius) of 1610. The reception of this extraordinary work was deep and profound, and the images of the “dots” were of extraordinary importance.
The perfection
of the Creator’s plan was being shown to be not-so-perfect in the late Renaissance, a major chink
showing up in the work of the dead Copernicus in 1543, which showed that the
Earth was not the center of the great cosmological eye. In the same year the body was also shown to
be not so much built in god’s image with its bitter working revealed in one of
the greatest anatomy books ever written, Vesalius’ revolutionary De Humani Corporis Fabrica .
Problematic bits
started showing up regularly wrapped in scientific proof: the existence of a vacuum, thought to be
impossible given the perfection of creation, was shown to exist in Otto von Guericke’s Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de
vacuo spatio (
1672).
The
stupendous idea of additions to the night sky, which had been thought to be
immutable and unchanging, came into being with Tycho Brahe’s 1572 discovery of
a new star (Nova) in Cassiopeia and added to in 1602 by Kepler’s announcement
of another new star—both events showing that the night sky was not complete and
that it was actually changing.
When you
consider Galileo and his use of the newly-invented telescope it is usually a little
far down on the list of accomplishments that his explosion of the night sky is
considered. In addition to everything he
did (applying mathematics to the study of physics, understanding
the physics of motion, developing the telescope and the microscope and other
precision physical instruments and so on) Galileo pointed the
not-yet-astronomically-used telescope to the sky and expanded the size of the
universe by a factor of ten. It was so
utterly astonishing an idea I can hardly think how the not-prepared mind of
1610 would’ve reacted to the idea.
Certainly it was not a happy acknowledgment coming from the Holy
Father, though a simple defense could’ve been that this miracle was divinely
revealed ,and that it was there all of the time but just unknown to humans, and
so not threatening the orthodoxy of Christian belief. But that wasn’t the case, and Galileo would
soon enough be in trouble with the church and its inquisition in short order.
The dots in this image are the dots of never-before-seen stars, part of an
unobserved sky that was revealed only under magnification. The size and scope of the new bigness of the
universe was staggering, and of course opened the question immediately to the
possibilities of yet a larger universe revealed under yet more
magnification. I don’t know the answer to
this, and I wonder where Galileo might have publicly mused about how big the
universe might actually be, and if he ever dreamed about the possibilities of
telescopes that were 15 feet across rather than just two inches, and what those
beasts might reveal.
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 683 Blog Bookstore
Part of the History of Dots series
It is interesting to think of the importance of dots in the first revolutionary changes in 500 years in the history of art. Honestly, there wasn’t anything epochal that happened between the re-discovery of perspective (ca. 1330-1400) and the arrival of Impressionism (and just afterwards of non-representational art) in the 1872/3/4-1915 period.
Dots aren’t brought to bear formally in the revolutionary movement until the early 1880’s. Impressionism for all intents and purposes is formed with the Societe Anonyme in 1872 (whose members included Monet, Pissarro, Degas, Sisley, Morisot and eleven others), and perhaps more realistically in 1874 when the Societe exhibited its first salon. (The first show held at the Nadar Studio in Paris in April 1874; a tiny, one month long affair, compared to mammoth exhibitions like the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1867.)
It was Georges Seurat who brought the whole world to the dot experience with his artisitc method of Pointilism, in particular with his magnificent Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte, an enormous work given its composition—dots. The dots replaced the brushstroke, and their placement in relation to their color was an absolutely brilliant innovation, establishing a perfect result for the viewer when examining the work as a whole. (It may well be that the French chemist an designer Michel Chevreul made this discovery a few decades earlier, noticing the effect and changes in color depending on placement and—in his case, with fabric—color in the dyes for his material.)
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), the discoverer of nothingness in art and the introduction of the first 
non-representational paintings in art history (1913) used his fair share of dots in his exploration of the previously invisible. One good example is his 9 Points in Ascendance (1918), which is nothing but black dots, an impossible composition just two decades prior to its creation.
In the middle of this appeared the half-tone illustration, the great liberator of photographic illustration in popular publication. Invented in the late 1870’s by Stephen Henry Horgan and used in the Illustrated London News for the first time in 1881, it made the publication of accurate images much feasible and economical. No longer were readers dependent on the accuracies of artists interpreting photographs or photographed scenes—the photographs themselves were now publishable at little cost and in high quality, vastly increasing the veracity of published reports dependent upon images. This was revolutionary in its own way, democratizing the sharing of images and icons.
And so in just thirty years the lowly dot availed itself of some of the most spectacular achievements in modernism. Of course we can say the same of the line, but this is, after all, a history of dots.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 701 Blog Bookstore
This Scientific American article on the smart/odd/analog transmission of pictures via telegraph (14 September 1895) by W.H. Lowd, can make you say “ohhh, of course” out loud. Mr. Lowd’s insight came fifty years after the Morse telegraph came into being, thirty years after it becomes the greatest means of communication, twenty after the first multiplex telegraph, and in the same year as Marconi’s first successful wireless transmission. It was though an ingenious inspiration whose utility lasted for about 60 seconds—which is about how long it took to develop a smarter way of transmitting an image in its entirety.
Mr. Lowd recognized that he could transmit the outline of a picture by placing on opaque tracing of the picture on top of a telegraphic ciphering sheet and then transmitting the coordinates, which when received on the other end could be connected by short lines into the picture that was being transmitted from the sending end. 
Images constructed of numbers and letters and such had been made for centuries before this; this however is a very early use of this idea that was employed to human-representational transmit the object electrically over distances by wire. Emoticons—a more abstract version of this idea–such as we know them today are actually better than 150 years old. They appear as early as 1857 in the telegraphers’ world, and somewhat earlier in the typesetter’s arsenal. (For example, a later attempt, taken from Puck Magazine No. 212, page 65, 30 March 1881, shows us something that we took to be “new” in the 1980’s as having roots that spread downwards into history by another 120 years.)
But Mr. Loud’s idea was pretty, I must admit, even though it was far from being the answer to the question it addressed, with a more pleasing, technology-based solution appearing by 1899.
(A successful apparatus for the true transmission of an image by wire is seen here, below, and was produced in 1899/1900.) 
The other bit that is interesting is that this transmission of an image necessitated an early Surrealist-like poem, dictated by the cipher/codes that were use by necessity to send the picture.
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History of Dots, Part 15
Soft on the Heals 
of
the 1898 Planetary Visits post (earlier today) is this 1541 Books of the Planets (Das Planeten Buch.
Von Natur, eygenthumb, und wirckung der siben Planeten…), which was published
in Strassburg by Jacob Cammerkander.. It
is a collection of medieval German accumulated astro-data and posie, cobbled
together by an anonymous author, and strung together for the masses—it was
evidently very popular, eager fingers pulling the many editions to pieces (and such), so that very few now exist.
The dot that I have in mind here is the standard astronomical depiction of the sun, and it appears brilliantly-n-black in the bottom panel close-by the image of Saturn racing across the sky.
To