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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List of the Victims of 9/11
Listing WTC victims, followed by the plane crews and passengers of American Airlines Flight 11and United Airlines Flight 175. This list followed by the Pentagon victims, and then by the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 77. Lastly are the crew and passengers of United Airlines Flight 93. )
Gordon M. Aamoth, Jr.
Edelmiro Abad
Maria Rose Abad
Andrew Anthony Abate
(Equivalent of 60 pages follows)
JF Ptak Science Books
This is a reposting of from 5 August 2008, one of a continuing series on the development, use and control of
atomic and nuclear weapons.
(Click image to enlarge; the other four pages are located in the “Continue Reading” section, below.)
This paper is one a small archive of background and draft papers and
proposals by the Vannevar Bush group working on the question of the
control of atomic weapons and the formalization of the American
position regarding the use and control of atomic weapons, October
1945-February 1946. This archive consists of 38 documents relating to
the development of U.S. atomic policy, with contributions by President
Harry Truman, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Dr. Vannevar Bush, (future AEC director) Carroll Wilson, Alger Hiss, I.I. Rabi, William Shockley, Frederick Dunn, Joseph E. Johnson, Leo Pasvolsky, Philip Morrison, Col. Nichols, William McRae, Admiral W.H.P. Blandy, George L. Harrison, and others.
I’ve collected several postcards showing the development of Pack Square from 1880-1950 or so. For six years my store was located about 200 feet north of the obelisk, so I felt some attachment to the place, and collected a number of different images showing its development. Postcards are easier to find, less expensive (by leaps and bounds than original photos and such) to purchase, and actually add up to something in a short time. So I post them here for my Asheville friends and readers–the images might actually be useful and interesting to an Ashevillean.
Don’t forget that we sell most of what you see here in this blog, plus many thousands of things more.
See our Blog Bookstore (which has selected items with longer, illustrated description) and the general bookstore (which has much, much more).
Thanks for dropping by! There are more than 600,000 other words on this site (along with another 3,000 images) so have a go. There’s an index of categories to the right–enjoy! Some other recent posts from this blog have appeared in The Economist, The New York Times, Boing Boing, Jezebel, The Wall Street Journal, and others.
It is D-Day+24,090–it is that many days since the beginning o the Allied invasion of Europe, begun on this day in 1944. It was almost four years to the day that Britain lost Europe, backed up to the channel on the pebbled beaches of Dunkerque, 300,000 British Expeditionary Forces (and 100,000 French) waiting to be rescued from a very bad situation, penned in by Nazi forces that never did make the final assault on their nearly-captured prey. The BEF was severely compromised in the evacuation, and the possibility of an invasion of England was real. Four years later, 66 years ago today, it was all over but the fighting, the Allies launching the greatest military assault in history, beginning the endgame of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
This is a picture of my Uncle Walt (Dad’s side) who is posing alongside the six stars proudly displayed by my great grandparents in the front windows of their house in Housatonic, Massachusetts–that’s six stars signifying six members of the household (six bothers) who were fighting in the war. These were blue stars–thankfully, no gold star needed to be sewn over any of the blue ones, though this was tragically not the case with our relatives.
I just wanted to post this for the sake of posting it, and to make sure that I’ll never have these photos misplaced again.
These pictures were made in 2002 just before we left DC for Asheville and show our older daughter, Emma, then 10, romping around the WH and Press Corps Room with a friend. We were there courtesy of a friend of our’s, and the kids were given a long leash to move around. 
After a bit of posing Emma and her friend started running/skipping, and soon were out of the side door of the press room and on their way to the Oval Office, which as it tuns out is not all that far away. The children found it by accident and very easily–almost instantly there was an enormous voice that yelled, “you there, HALT” (just the thing I guess you would not want to hear while skipping towards the Oval Office), and the children did a sort of turn-while-in-mid-air cartoon turnaround sorta thing and came running back down the hall, pretty well put out, a
memory made.
It was a fun time had by all.
I’ll tell the story at another time of when Emma slapped Bill Clinton. True.
(And yes this was the pre-renovation Briefing Room).
The West Wing.
JF Ptak Science Books Post 1034
No doubt that minds were sent reeling by Fritz Lang’s vision of the near-future (the year 2000) in his 1927 science fiction classic, Metropolis. Life and work were one for the vast mass of humans, the drudgery of a cog-like existence in a vast underground machinery set to run a lifeless topside mother-of-all-cities was pressed and punched into the hearts and minds of the viewers.
The creation of a female robot in this movie is one of the earliest that I know of, surprising as there were male robot-like creations going back fairly deeply into the 19th century. Perhaps the creation of female robots was verbotten because of the possibilities for unacceptable sexual fantasies in the high- and post-Victorian world, struggling under the weight of many and multiply-applied inhibitions.
Or perhaps it came too close to some part of the truth of women as captives of their society, with unequal protection of the law, scant political representation, belligerent educational policies, and subjugated sexual vessels, a comparative cog in the male machinery pushing the world around. The disposable nature of the woman worker had already been manifestly and callously displayed in tens of thousands of instances. In cases like the Triangle Waistcoat Factory disaster–in which women were treated no better than their machines, costing the lives of hundreds in a devastating fire–or in the replacement of Rosie the Riveter (as soon as the job-hunting soldiers returned from WWII), and on and on towards the horizon, it has been demonstrated to generations of women that they are inferior bits of apparatus.
The first use of the word “robot” occurred in the science fiction novel/play R.U.R (by Karel Capek) just seven years earlier than Lang’s film; perhaps this in combination with the Expressionist and semi-decadent Berlin Weimar culture and overall indulgences of the 1920’s helped create the possibility of the Eden-less woman-as-robot. Granted the robot’s name wasn’t “Eve”, though it does have the name of the Christian mother of mothers, the seat of early hyper worship, and more popular than Jesus’ name for centuries: “Maria”.
These are not only a child’s crayons, but my wife Patti Digh’s childhood crayons, crayons from when she was a little girl, crayons used by her 5-year-old chubby-fingered self, working away at her art-filled world.. Saved for years by her mother, Patti’s crayons now live here at home in a very tall chemistry beaker. Our younger daughter, Tess, wondered today why nobody used those crayons saying that we should use them to make something “interesting”. And so we did. The crayons are art in themselves, collectively and individually–the closer you look at each one of these beauties, the more you see that they hold their own histories of color.
