Ptak Science Books

Eugenics, War, and Stupid Stuff

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This paper, "The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War" by Prof. J.A. Lindsay, published in The Eugenics Review in October 1918, ends with the words that I will begin this post with:

"There is some soul of goodness in things evil,

Would men observingly distil it out"

It is a paper that seems a logical extension of something from somewhere, and some of the points are common sensical--but the it is published in this eugenics thing, which pretty much dooms it to eugenics and itself. The qualities of some of his opinions are sometimes of lofty incredulity:

"The loss of life in war is  a question not only of quantity, but of quality."

"War, for obvious reasons, tends to depress the birth rate."

"A remarkable and unexpected result of the war has been a decided decline in the rate of suicide."

"A very unexpected feature of war-time has been the decline of insanity."

"Perhaps the most fundamental gain from the war will be interest in education, and the larger measure of attention devoted to it."

Somehow here at the end of a war in which since 100 million people were killed or wounded Prof Lindsay seems to have written a piece on that great conflict without being somewhat cognizant of the human value of such loss.

And that, as they say, is that.

Full text is located here, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

G.K. Chesterton,. Eugenics and Other Evils, here.

 

Europa Agonistes: Maps of States of Agitation

JF PtakScience Books  Quick Post 

 

 

I've collected a dozen maps here showing an animorphization of battlefield Europa over a period of about 40 years, from the Franco-Prussian War to the beginning of WWI.  They are biting and vicious, and no one seem to receive this bitter sword more savagely than the Russians.  The maps basically need no commentary, so I won't contribute any.  (Thanks to Mark Dylan Sieber's Les Curiosites de Cartes, whose Twitter feed started this interest.)

Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!)

The Dungeon of thy self; thy soul

(Which men enjoying sight oft without cause complain)

Imprisoned now indeed,

In real darkness of the body dwells,

Shut up from outward light

To incorporate with gloomy night

For inward light alas

Puts forth no visual beam

(--John Milton, lines 155–163, Samson Agoniste, published with Paradise Regain'd, 1671)

Statistical Atlases and the Artful Display of Massive Data

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post   

 

[Geological map of the U.S. from the 1870 U.S. Statistical Atlas, here.]

Even though I have used (and owned) these atlases over a long time I've never collected them together in any of the 2600+ entries (2036 longer posts and 500+ Quick Posts)  that I have made to this blog.  So today I include links for the atlases in their entirety, as found on the sumptuous site of the Library of Congress. The books are interesting, fascinating, captivating, and beautiful.

Zoomology of the Lower East Side, NYC, 1900

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2038   

Part of a Paper Micrscope series, Zoomology

Michael Beschloss posted this remarkable photograph of the Lower East Side on Mulberry Street, a rare color photo made around 1900.  There is a lot of life going on here--people posing for the photographer (standing on an elevated platform with a large view camera, no telling who or what he was imaging), people caught in their daily lives, people. Under the Paper Microscope the image reveals all sorts of sub-images, photos-within-photos, making it a fascinating exercise in exploration.

For example, the two men hiked-up on the back of a moving wagon on the bottom-right seem to be enjoying themselves in expectation, the man on the left about to toss something underhanded, the guy on the right in a bow tie getting ready with a smile to enjoy what was going to happen.  To their right:  a man with a sales platform draped from his neck, watching a girl rush by, his pocket stuffed with paper. 

And the full mage:

The Most Beautifully Oddly-Named Washing Machine?

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Washing machines no doubt have been called many things, and they have been named after many great concepts and desires--but I think in the history of naming household appliances, the popular washer produced by Thomas Bradford & Co Laundry Engineers (High Holbron, London and Cathedral Steps, Manchester) in the last part of the 19th century may have had the oddest of them all.   It was the Vowel A--the "Vowel" being the washer and the "A" being the model.  But, still--that was the name of the machine, and it has a definite flavor of the Absurdist to it.

Which is a detail in:

[Source:  Una Roberston, The Illustrated History of the Housewife, 1650-1950, St. Martin's Press, 1999, pp 86-87.]

There was also the Vowel Large E and the Vowel Y--the "A" seems the best of the lot though, for simplicity and symmetry. 

These washers were evidently great aids in the kitchen delights department, and provided for no disappointment. 

Isaac Newton Online

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[Godfrey Kneller's 1689 portrait of Isaac Newton]

The Work of Murray Gell-Mann

I've posted a variety below of the important papers of Murray Gell-Mann (b. 1929, his bio via Nobel.org is here) as they appear in Murray Gell-Mann, Selected Papers, and published by World Scientific in 2010.  Each has a link to the original paper.    [Source:  Google Books] Following this is a re-post of the full list of publications by Gell-Mann as presented on the website of the Santa Fe Institute.  All I've done here is copy the somewhat-difficult-to-read text into a table to differentiate the entries and make it a friendlier document (for me, at least). Again, this is solely the work of those at the Santa Fe Insitute.

Engraving Slow Motion--a Paper Filmstrip from 1844

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2036 

 

It was a curious thing to find, these engraved images of Egyptian dance and movement, seeming for all the world like motion shorthand, a sort of antiquarian Labanotation or kinetography.  They appear in the stray atlas volume here by Juste Adrien Lenoir de La Fage (1801-1862), Histoire Generale de la Musique et de la Danse, which was published in Paris in 1844. I imagine that this is a surprise mostly to me--the Egyptians certainly knew that tey danced, and from the looks of it, they danced with athleticism. 

[Text can be found at the Haiti trust.]

Most of the surprise part of this--the opening the book and having a sense of the "aha!" and deja vue-- were these images' association in my head with the work of the motion picture pioneer and all-around smart guy, Etienne Marey, who in the 1870's created what was essentially the world's first "slow motion" device. One iteration of Marey's apparatus was basically a long series of ganged cameras recording a motion for a simple task at a given time frame and presented on a continuous strip of photographic paper, sort of like a motion picture with the camera speed set at three frames per second. The resulting images were phenomenal and showed people for the first time the exactness of all manners of simple motions--motions that no longer looked so "simple" once all of its aspects could be studied from captured photographic evidence.  Even the act of hopping over a small stool or bending to pick up a bucket of water were enormously revealing in a way like Robert Hooke's Micrographia displayed the great detail and complexity of the seemingly simple fly.  Perhaps the most famous of Marey's series of images was that of a galloping horse, which also for the first time revealed what exactly the horse's legs were doing and proving that almost every painter in the history of art represented the galloping horse incorrectly.  His series of photographs (as in the samples above and below) show a fairly close fit to the work of the futurists (like for example Duchamp) who would come into being after another four decades.

But the la Fage comes earlier still--granted, they are engravings, and they don't necessarily all show a progression of movement, though some of them do--but it makes them very interesting in a capturing-the-moment way like few people had done before.

La Fage, 1844:

Etienne Marey, ca. 1875:

. 

 

And Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending (1912):

 

The Solar, Pre-Fab House--1944

JF Ptak Science Books  

 

This interesting and somewhat futuro-paleo 1944 pamphlet combines two modern interests in one package:  Green’s Ready-Built Homes Present the Solar Home presented both a prefabricated, well-designed house that was also passive solar friendly. The former is a long-established architectural state of achievement; the later, not so--at least on a popular, let's-have-everyone-own-one level.  The architect and engineer was George Fred Keck (1895-1980) , a true modernist, and designer of one of the twelve “Homes of the Future” for the Chicago “Century of Progress" World’s Fair in 1933--this effort (which is also the copyright deposit copy) was published in 1944.

 Soalr panels such as we have known them over the last few decades were not available back in 1944. The “solar home” that he offered here used seasonal variations and house location to regulate heating/cooling, glazing and siding, air movement, and the storage of thermal energy in building materials—mostly, there were lots and lots of transfer-friendly double-paned windows, all of which were forward-thinking ideas for 1944.  In addition the house was prefabricated, making construction easier, simpler, and quicker than any of the stick-built houses being constructed at that time.  There was also an impetus for quick, good construction given the housing shortage caused by the returning WWII veterans. The prefab idea was also a relatively new one in architecture—though there are instances of bits and pieces of prefab architecture reaching back hundreds of years, the first earnest attempts at providing such housing on a mass scale dates only to the 1920’s. In any event, the double-effort here was a fairly early effort at combining these two ideas--and certainly something that seems to have been about 60 years too early.    

 

The Top 100 Cited Papers in the "Reviews of Modern Physics"

JF Ptak Science Books    Reference Tool Series

I found recently a very interesting and useful table of the top-100 cited papers published in the Reviews of Modern Physics (published to 1988, see pp 10-12). It was collected and generated by Dr. Eugene Garfield and for me displays some pretty valuable information. It is arranged alphabetically by author, and since it is in a pretty static format I generated from the converted pdf file an index showing the papers arranged by the number of citations together with the last name of the author and the placement in the RMP--unfortunately the quality of the original pdf was such that it restricted using the title of the paper because it would have resulted in re-entering all of the data. So to use this new table just refer to the original pdf and you'll be able to quickly find all of the rest of the bibliographic information.