Ptak Science Books

Monumentally Bad Writing: Recovery from Thermonuclear War, Loan Forgiveness, and Taxes, 1966

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1430

In the entirety of the text of Social and Behavioral Factors in the Implementation of Local Survival and Recovery Activities (written by William Chenault, Richard Engler and Peter G. Nordhie in August 1967¹) there is little evidence that its authors fought to rid themselves of their Thesaurus of Obfuscation.  A dissected version of their effort would've made for good, clean fun, adding their bits to a Menckenian database of extraordinarily-written governmentese, but since all of this involved surviving thermonuclear war, the "fun" part is obliterated.  What, exactly, was it that the authors were trying to accomplish?  Perhaps in all of it they weren't constructing anything devious at all--perhaps their incredible assault on meaning was simply written in a language understood by their audience.  That, or they really didn't intend to have heard what they were trying to say,, if there was anything that was being said at all. (This report is available from our blog bookstore.)

The baseline to this pamphlet is this:  that in a post-thermonuclear war United States there will be survivors; the survivors will have "hardships", but the hardships will be overcome; the key issue is to get survivors to work together to put the country back on its feet militarily and economically;  survivors will need "incentives" to work together; the strong will survive, and others will have to be thrown under the bus.  There will be worries about compensation for destroyed property, shipping schedules, trust in money, and a certain amount of debt forgiveness.  There will be tax--sales tax.

There is no mention of the amount of death or the continuation of the dying in the year or two post-attack, but there is a graph, and the graphs not pretty.  It doesn't get very much mention. 

“...communities of [nuclear] disaster struck individuals need to define their needs and activities in the immediate context of the community”. pg. 5.

 “The tendency of nuclear disaster is to isolate communities..” pg 6

I've written often on this blog¹ about spectacularly bad thinking in planning for post-Apocalypse thermonuclear war America, mostly on government/agency reports that write about the impossible being done by survivors in impossible ways, painting the specter of impossibility and liquid death in turgid, unprovable prose.

This study reports of the ways in which American society can survive and rebuild following a devastating nuclear/thermonuclear war. The authors list five consequences of “severe attack”:

#1. Tremendous destruction of property...

#2. Disruption of transportation and shortage of fuel for motive power together with an associated disruption of regional specialization and significant breaks in geographical continuity.

#3. Drastic reorientation of effective economic demand”

#4 . General disruptions of normal interindustry flows

#5. Shortages of technical and professional manpower in some fields.

I particularly like #3. Also the use of words like “shortages” and “disruption”.  And why they stopped there I really don't know. 

Much of the report is an examination of how to get the surviving elements of society back on its feet via carrot-and-stick methods, coaxing people into working together, with the eventual goal of restructuring the country, building America back again, observing capitalism, the tax codes, exchanging labor exchange units for goods and services.

“Personal and group motivations would continue to be related to economic organization and production as they are in the preattack society” (pg 1)

“It follows that the nature and direction of many recovery activities will be determined by national, not local, requirements” (pg 3)

“Individuals must be motivated to implement policies and perform activities dictated by national economic interests”. (pg 4)

It is assumed that the character of the post-attack country would be pretty much the same as it was before thermonuclear war, and that we all want to return there. The report states that one of the most important elements of that society is the military and its capacity to protect people and industry. Therefore the survivors of nuclear war must be induced to work on a national scale to maintain the military and thus the stability of whatever was left of society, in spite of the fact that “in the heaviest attack, the loss of familiar landmarks, relationships and dependencies would be unsettling to survivors”.  (I'm not sure what “dependencies” relates to, whether they are child or the need for pharmaceuticals or the need to watch the news on television. This is unclear.)

Generally, there are a host of activities suggested to compel compliance, depending on where a community is in a 9-part destruction grid. There are incentives like food and water, medical treatment, and of course loan forgiveness. These inducements must be considered because enforcing compliance militarily is not an option, as the report states:

“It is doubtful whether a very widespread employment of a force to secure participation in recovery activities is feasible” (pg 7)

Meaning I guess that the U.S. Armed Forces will no the enforcing mandatory compliance schedules for recovery—or at least they weren't writing about it “preattack”.

But the authors clearly assume that there will be something approximately preattack life in the post-attack world. Amidst the horror and chaos, we read that

“Businessmen, in particular, but others as well, would experience disturbing and subtle changes in familiar institutions and in such bases of mutual trust as methods of establishing or verifying credit...or estimating delivery dates”--pg 11.

“Disturbing and subtle” changes to delivery, indeed.

We further read of “widespread readjustments of status, status symbols, and values” (page 11) which no doubt would come if all of your possessions were burned up, or lost or destroyed in some way, along with the owner. It is definitely difficult to maintain status relationships in the evidence of no status and no relationships. Of course this whole deal is complicated by the issue that status symbols are also relationships and associations, much of which could also be gone in the same fire cloud.

If your valuables and house and such weren't destroyed, then you were expected to go out and work for the community, and not spend your time inside your house protecting it from people who didn't have anything.  This issue is sort of addressed here:

"Measures for the control of displaced persons, obviating the necessity of individuals devoting their time to the protection of their homes, represent one form of indirect influence on the motivation of potential workers to abandon maintenance activities." (pg 50).

Which means, I think, that there will be some sort of control or protection so that people don't need to spend their time securing their possessions. 

But the thing that will make people work for the greater good, the compliance with the orders of rebuilding the country, will be "economic incentives...or a penalty for nonparticipation)".  Payment would be made with money or food.  The next incentive:  housing, or "more desirable dwelling places for those participating in recovery activities".    It remained to be seen though in this report what it was specifically that represented "recovery activities" or how the compensation per work bit was handed out. 

One way to raise the necessary capital to fund this post-attack world was through taxes, "a structure of indirect taxes could be developed, with higher rates applied to non-essential goods".  (pg 53).    On the other hand, just a few paragraphs later, the authors discuss getting rid of an income tax in favor of direct taxes, which means that taxes survive  the atomic nightmare. 

This continues on and on, a cascade of some wincing ideas tumbling over themselves, settling into a confusing mist of wording and logic that is difficult to translate.  Perhaps that was the inention.  Perhaps not.  There's not much left in the bottom of a smoking, radioactive hole, except for smoke and radiation.

Lastly, I wonder why “post-attack” is hyphenated in these reports and “preattack” isn't?

Notes

1. See for example Bad Grandeur, Predicting Post-Nuke USA (1966) and the Loss of 76% of all Authors

The Nonsense of Strategically Meaningful Phrases, Finding Pillows int eh Post-Nuclear Attack World, 1968

Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Department, the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the "Awkwardness of Nuclear Holocaust, and others.)

Wheels of Fortune and Destiny--Beautiful Circles of Robert Fludd, Lorenzo Spirito and Sigismondi Fanti (continued)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1429

(1)  Destiny
Robert Fludd’s (1574-1637), title page for his  Utriusque Cosmi . . . Historia (1617) features this complicated astrological wheel with a Vitruvian-man-like image at the vortex of the imaged pulls and pushes of the cosmos.  In addition to everything else, real and imagined, Rosicrucianism and astrology and puffy-birds, Fludd, who was  an English physician, delved deeply into the real stuff of the world in this book in addition to all of the other make-believe--optics, the musical intervals, perspective drawing, hydraulic engineering, construction of lifting machines, military engineering and many other interesting, physical science topics.  But this drawing, right there on the title page, reveals Fludd’s real interests and shows what governs what he does.  Everything else, the math and and the physics, services this need.  Of course the image is beautiful, which is why it is here, but it is also a deeply personal, exploitative, cover-all for the things that Fludd *wanted* to find. 

I can't resist adding the following Fludd image, which appears in the same book and may be one of the most iconic images of the Fludd opus, these beautiful circles showing the areas of thought and consciousness of the human being:

(2)  Wheels of Forture

In Le Passetemps de la Fortune des dez, written by Lorenzo Spirito in the late 15th century¹ and published in this pictured format in 1559--a delightful little book with many² zodical illustrations and the first printed illustrated book on fortune-telling—appears this gorgeous wheel of fortune wood engraving.

“There are 20 questions, grouped around a wheel of fortune on which are represented four men; to each man a reference is added to a list of kings… These 20 kings in their turn guide the enquired to 20 planets; the table of dice casts attached to these planet contain 56 references to the 20 spheres of the planets. After one has found their way through these stages, they finally reach 20 prophets who each have 56 three-line answers to give….”

The wheel sends the reader to a king; the king to a sign; the sign, with a throw of dice, to a wheel; the wheel to a prophet, and then to the peek into the future.

Spirito 2

Referring to the image below: “In this opening, the leopard (left) is cut in a thick outline and modeled with precise curved lines. The leopard's formal pose is particularly appealing because it projects a dignity commensurate with the animal's position in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. The dolphin (right) is similarly cut and set within a sea of curved lines against a well-defined architectural background. The dolphin's design reflects classical

origins. The animal projects an aggressive attitude, suggesting the dolphin's importance as protector of the city of Venice. The well-designed woodcut borders of the hunt (left) and the putti at play (right) are symbols of the vagaries of life, in which good fortune and calamity are equally possible.

(3) Wheels of Destiny 2

In Sigismondo Fanti’s Triompho di Fortuna (Triumph of Fortune), printed in Venice in 1526, the second illustrated fortune-telling book to appear in print.  Fanti's book, like Spirito’s, functions as a game in which the seeker follows cues that lead from figures of Fortune to houses and then to wheels, spheres, and astrologers, the path determined by either a throw of the dice or the time of day at which the book is consulted.

As this is not really an area I know very much about I’ll just quote the commentary on this illustration from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

“When the reader reaches the indicated page, a choice must be made between two wheels. The upper one represents all the possible combinations (twenty-one) to result from a throw of the dice, while the lower is bordered by the first twenty-one hours of the day. If no dice are handy\—and it's not too late at night\—the seeker can turn to the lower wheel and choose the segment that corresponds to the current hour.”

“The pages representing wheels are bordered by eight alternating frames containing a series of musicians, astronomers, artists, writers, popes, rulers, and other distinguished figures of the past and present, labeled differently at each appearance. Among the artists named are Andrea Mantegna, Raphael of Urbino, and Baldassare Peruzzi, the designer of the frontispiece. On the page shown here, at right, the astronomer and artist are identified respectively as the book's author, Sigismondo Fanti, and the painter Dosso Dossi (died 1542), who was also from Ferrara and who has been plausibly credited with the design of the figural borders.”

NOTES

1.  Lorenzoi Spirito's book was very popular, going into at least five printings in the 15th century alone following the first printed edition of 1482.  Fortune-telling works such as this were extremely popular and well-used--so much so that it has led experts in this area to conclude that the books were basically worn out of existence, which might explain why so few of them have survived to the present day.

2.Description of the Spirito book from Christie's auction house:  38 leaves. Roman type. 56 lines and headline. 2 woodcut full borders (one incorporating Da Ponte device) repeated to 6 impressions, full-page woodcut wheel of fortune, 20 woodcut portraits of kings from 15 blocks printed 4 to a page, 20 pages of dice throws with 20 woodblocks of signs, 20 circular woodcuts of signs within wheel of text set within one of two borders, 20 portraits of prophets and other Biblical figures."

Dentists and Mushroom Clouds--the Nuclear Mundane in Planning for the Thermonuclear Post-Apocalypse

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1428    Part of a long series on Atomic and Nuclear Weapons History

How can a person--how can I--write about Nuclear Holocaust as being mundane? When it comes to reading how some people mundanely responded to planning for surviving it.

It is a very deep Disturbia into which people fall when writing about the millions of details in accounting for the unaccountable, writing about the medical/physical/psychical consequences of surviving a bomb when dozens might well be detonated at the same time, the millions of details overtaken by billions of other details not mentioned and perhaps not imagined. 

I've collected some wide non sequiturs dealing with the matters of the nuclear apocalypse from a publication called Military Medicine in an article entitled "Mass Casualties, Principles Involved in Management",  which were papers delivered at the 62nd annual convention of the Association of Military Surgeons, 1956.  Sometimes the chapter heading says it all, giving wide pause; and sometimes you have to wade in a little, but you don't need to go very far, or very deep.  Overall the issue of the absolutely overwhelming devastation and the impossibility of dealing with the human consequences of nuclear war do absolutely get written about, but it occurs somewhere inside each contribution, which is front-loaded with pop-iconic understatement and then followed up with vast simplification. 

Then of course there is the official-speak in quietly stating screamingly bad things: "a wide disparity will in all probability exist between patient load and medical resources".  There's so much like that in this publication that it is hard to keep up, like differentiating sands on a beach. 

[I resisted including the section on the use of dentists in the post apocalypse--it was too painful, and I ran out of steam.]

 

 

A Note on Teaching Math, Unexpected Art, and Picturing Things Differently

JF Ptak Science Books   Post  1427

Stereo viewing geometrical figures may or may not be useful--I find it a little off-putting, creating a slight dizzying effect, though I'm sure it helps others (particularly children?) see complex geometrical figures a little more easily., especially when it comes to crystalography images. Education was certainly what Henry Vuibert , the author of Les Anaglyphes Geometriques had in mind when he published the work in 1912.  He had a long history in mathematics education, having founded the firm that bears his name back in 1877, a publishing house specializing in school texts in the maths, physics and general sciences.  (We offer the book for purchase at out blog bookstore.)

Vuibert's book is a very early example of the use of the anaglyphe--examples of the use of the method go back to the 1850's, when d'Almeida used a version of the idea to punctuate lectures using a magic lantern; the (printing) process of the anaglyphe wasn't patented until the 1890's by L.D. DuHaron.  It does confuse me or remind me quite a bit of Oliver Byrne's beautiful monster The First Six Books of Euclid in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of readers... printed at the Chiswick Press by C. Whittingham for William Pickering in 1847.  The book is, well, unusual and probably not at all usefu1¹.  Bryne replaced all of the algebraic notation, identifying letters and almost all of the descriptive text with color and color codes, leaving Euclid mysterious, hidden, awkward, impervious, and, yes, beautiful². As a matter of opinion this work presages the cubists (and especially Piet Mondrian) by 60 years, and all by accident artwork. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are certainly much earlier works that tried to get at a fuller representation of geometrical objects, not the least of which was a 16th century Elements of Euclid in which the figures were cut-out paper, pasted into the book and attached to a string so that the reader could pull out the illustration and see it displayed in three dimensions. The elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first translated into the Englishe toung…³, printed in London in 1570, was no doubt a great and exasperating labor of love, a complex "pop-up" book accomplished with sixteenth century technology.  (The photo below shows the Smithsonian Institution's copy.)

Of course there's the very old fashioned way of representing mathematical concepts, and that's with sticks and stones and blocks and such.  For visceral memory and practical applications, the idea is hard to beat, unless of course, you really beat it , which is difficult to do.  But to me that's just what Major G. Mackinlay did in his Realistic Arithmetic,  for Teaching Children the Elements of Arithmetic by Means of Special Blocks⁴, published in London in 1900--his ideas for the use of blocks was very sound and stable; his instructions (and in particular his illustrations) for what to do with the blocks was not.  I am reminded of inscrutable, badly translated and designed instructional manuals for tech stuff that need a manual for the manual. 

Here's one of the folding plates describing how to assemble the blocks:

Then there are other sorts of wooden (and etc.) three-dimensional models, such as the (600+) gorgeous geometric designs housed in the Institute Henri Poincare, transferred there from the laboratory of geometry of the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris in 1928⁵.  Most of these models were constructed around the time of vast change in mathematics and art (1900-1920), which means that many of them predate the revolutionary ascensions of  Cubism and non-representational art.

And as long as were at the point of unintentional and under-recogniozed epochal works, I think that there is a broad book that could be done on exactly this topic, calling into play such examples as Georgina Houghton, Victor Higo, Emily Vanderpoel, and many others. 

Georgina Houghton, for example, produced this non-representational painting in 1870 (or thereabouts):

 And Victor Hugo, from the 1860's

And Emily Vanderpoel (1900 or so):

In another, much earlier case of removing detail and adding abstraction for the sake of simplicity in representing an idea,  Erhard Schoen, in his Unnderweissung der proportzion und stellung der posssen liegent und dtehent, printed in Nurenberg  in 1538, presented these cubed figures (below).  He used simplified geometric form to stand in for the curvy humans, replacing them with proportional stacks of boxes which would more easily explain to the younger reader how to represent the human body in space and in proportion to other things. 

I think that these were monumentally combative images showing humans in a radical, previously unknown way, much like the moving-through-space-and-time photographs of the somewhat forgotten 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 this sample 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. 

  And Duchamp's Nude Descending (1912):

 

I do want to make it clear that this is just a simple note, a thinking-out-loud piece on how attempts to visualize things differently for the sake of explanation or education can come "unintentionally" close to what would become epochal works.  More later.

Notes

1. Augustus De Morgan, mathematician and logician, wrote a very highly critical book A Budget of Paradoxes in which he describes hubbub, fakirs, frauds, perpetual motion machines, squaring the circle efforts, millstones and other useless books in the maths, and in here he sniffily dismisses Byrne's work. At best, to De Morgan, the Byrne book is "curious". But useless and curious, as I have seen many thousands of times, does not mean that it can't be attractive and beautiful, and the Byrne book is probably the leading candidate in the Bad & Beautiful category.

2. In his Victorian Book Design McLean calls the Byrne book "...one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the whole century...a decided complication of Euclid, but a triumph for Charles Whittingham [the printer]".

3.  This is also the first appearance of Euclid in English.  The full title: The Elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung by H. Billingsley, citizen of London; whereunto are annexed certaine scholies, annotations, and inventions, of the best mathematiciens, both of time past and in this our age; with a very fruitfull praeface made by M.I. Dee, specifying the chief mathematicall scieces, what they are, and whereunto commodious; where, also are disclosed certaine new secrets mathematicall and mechanicall, untill these our daies, greatly missed. London, Imprinted by I. Daye, 1570.

4.  From the Report of the Annual Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1906:

 

5.  From the IHP website:  "Most of the models  were created by Martin Schilling in Leipzig between 1900 and 1920 and  a few of them  (in wood)  were made between 1912 and 1915 by J. Caron, Professor of Descriptive Geometry in charge of  the "graphic work" course at the ENS at the beginning of the century (between 1912 and 1915)."

Also this:   "In the thirties, the surrealists, led by Max Ernst, were interested in these geometric objects. André Breton alludes to them in  "Crise de l'objet" , an article  in the magazine  Cahiers d'Art (May 1936, No. 1-2, p. 21-26.). Man Ray took photographs of the models, which where published in same issue. He would later use them to compose what he called  "Shakespearean Equations". Many artists, painters, architects and sculptors drew inspiration from them."

German Military Medical Retreat, Coastal Poland, 1915

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This image, from the 22 Juli 1915 issue of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) shows a collection of German soldiers that were treated at a medical aidstation.  The woman in white is the German crown princess, accompanied by her four navy-uniform-clad sons, are adrift in a sea of wounded and recovering soldiers who I guess were given leave from the war, celebrating their survival at the old spa and vacation spot Ostseebad, in Zoppot (Sopot, Poland).  (The issue may be purchased at our blog bookstore.)

And the detail:

And another:

Miss Atomic Bomb: the A-Bomb in Popular Culture--Comics, Cakes and the Will of God

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1425

I've written dozens of posts on this blog about atomic bomb history and where the bomb has shown up in popular culture.  This installment is on the bomb in very popular culture

Miss Atomic Bomb is an icon of some sort for the relationship of the bomb with society, or, perhaps the bomb and Vegas, which is where this picture was taken. I guess there are reasons to put pretty women in front of computers (in the 1950's/60's), cigarettes and automobiles--why not with The Bomb?

The atomic cake (with matching headware):

The caption to this story from Life magazine (1946) reads: "U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H. P. Blandy, his wife, and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry cut a cake made in the shape of a mushroom cloud at a reception for Operation Crossroads, November 6, 1946."  Actually Blandy was an early (August 1945 or thereabouts) forward thinker about how to deal with the U.S. owning the bomb and  international control.  I have little doubt that he probably thought that the cake was a bad idea, but, well, he did what he needed to do.

There were all sorts of comic book adventures dealing withe the atomic bomb, right from the very beginnig (as it seems the earliest of them appears a month after the Hiroshima bombing).  These are just a few examples with the a-bomb on the comic's cover(s):

 

Bizarro--I don't know the story of this image in Picture Parade, only having the cover graphic--perhaps that's enough, perhaps we don't need anything more, perhaps the backstory would spoil a perfectly bizarre image with something perfectly benign.  Or perhaps not. 

Bizarre but for different reasons--a pocket-sized ball bearing patience game. Tokyo is included as a target for this game but in actuality was not considered atomic-bomb-worthy, mainly because it was decimated,  blanketed with a firebombing  that destroyed a host of the city just weeks before the first blast. (On March 9-10, 1945, 339 B-29’s dropped 2000 tons (4 million pounds, about 496,000 bombs) of the incendiary M-69 on Tokyo.  Two initial passes were made on the city, marking a large, burning “X” in the city.  Each plane had the capacity to cover a drop area of 350 feet by 2000 feet, which means a much greater area was affected. The citizens of Tokyo met their ends with buckets of water and brooms in defense. Hours later fifteen square miles of the city were destroyed.  In the months prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 66 cities were bombed with M-69, killing about a million people, and wounding more.)  Fresh cities were needed for the atomic weapons so that there effectiveness could be judged against a palette of a normal. intact city, and not one that had been previously attacked. 

  And still more bizarre, when you combine all of the aspects of the race to the bomb with the race to god and the people who would believe such a thing.  This advertisement belonged to a mail order religico empire builder, Frank B. Robinson, (1886-1948), who claimed himself to be a prophet of god, had conversations with the Creator, and in general used whatever was of interest in the newspapers to drive interest in his ministry by mail.  It looked like his creation--Psychiana--wasn't much more than a feel-good, self affirming, positive-thinking enterprise driven by a man with a personality big enough to be on speaking terms with the god, who in the ad below somehow was selling "the atomic power of the spirit of god in us"  because we are composed of atoms.

And of course on the other end of this:

This is an example of a host of end-of-the-world, post apocalypse movies (and books, and short stories, and so on) made to scare and entertain.  Judging from the trailer the more-modern television series Jericho owes a lot to Ray Milland. 

Mel Morris  published God's Atomic Bomb  in 1945, which means he must've worked a little feverishly to pump up his bible prophesy and history to include the new atomic weapon to replace whatever else he had been using as a prophecy for end of times.  (As it turns out, "God's Atomic Bomb" was more tempest and disaster in the bible, and not (whew!) the bomb itself.  Though as we've learned from scientologists and the sort-of creative mind of Ron Hubbard, a civilization came to the earth thousands of years ago and pummeled it with "atomic bombs" and other nastiness, polluting humans for milennia to come.  But that's another story--suffice to say that Morris found many dozens of examples of "God's Atomic Bomb" being used in the deep biblical past, and that the use of the real atomic bomb in 1945 was pre-ordained, and not without its figurative historical counterparts.  I'm not sure why any of this was necessary outside of proving to some small minority that these preachers could at least be contemporary and topical. 

The following is not the worst idea regarding the survival of nuclear holocaust, though it is an extremely bad one.  (Atomurbia, which makes the entire country a suburb to itself and therefore nothing, and which I write about below, is perhaps the worst idea that I have seen on combating the Soviet menace.)   But this one, which appeared in Life magazine in 1950, does come close, setting up post-attack suburbs (for "refugees") and which takes some pre-attack city planning into some account.  There is a lot of planning for people in cars to make their way out of the city, which reminds me of the evacuation maps of Washington D.C. (which were still being handed out in the early 1980's), which sends people on their way east and west depending upon the last digit of their car's license plate being an odd or even number. 

One reaction to impending Doomsday was to construct concentric outer highways around metropolitan areas, “life belts around cities (which) would provide a place for bombed-out refugees to go”. In the birds eye view provided here, we see the plan in action, the main parts of which are an 8-lane “express” highway belt 10 miles away “from the built up edges of the city” , and a 6-track railway belt five miles further out, these accompanied by various feeder arms stretching straight-away from downtown.  In between the two outer rings would be land that would be kept free of development, so that farms and tent cities could be constructed after the attack. There would also be major collections of hospital and fuel depots in the greenbelt area.  Infrastructure would already be in place (gas and electricity, supplied with power from who-knows-where).   Shopping centers and a giant “motor pool:” would also already be in place, waiting for the Doomsday clock to strike midnight. 

This idea of city planning was one of many offering the prospect of safety from nuclear attack by spacing out the population of the United States so that the Soviet Union wouldn't have enough nuclear warheads to take everyone out.  It called for the redistribution and resettlement of virtually everyone in the country, and is one of the most spectacularly bad ideas that I have come across in this field.  (I wrote about it earlier in this blog, here.)

This issue of Life offered the possibility of hope that 97% of the American population could survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. It was a hard sell of a bad idea of insane optimism.

 

 Sylvian Kindall's Total Atomic Defense (published by a very severely right-wing publisher in 1952) is one of a series of books made for a deceived American population, offering the general reader both fear and hope, often from the same, exact source. But Kindall has a  somewhat diffident approach, offering his belief that the country and its population can largely  survive an all-out nuclear war--intact.  Chapter 10 tells the remarkable story of how to make the captial city of America atom-bomb proof, mostly by digging it into the side of a mountain.

 

 

Again, this is just the barest touch of the top of a huge pile of such stuff--and I've not even mentioned duck-and-cover films.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The First X-Ray of an Atomic Explosion Inside a Person? Superboy/Superman & the Atomic Bomb, 1945-1964

JF Ptak Science Books  (Continuing  Post 1140)

I don't know why, but I cannot remember ever having seen an x-ray of an atomic explosion taking place inside of a person, before today.  I guess that Superboy's body is susceptible to x-rays but is also at the same exact time capable of preventing a nuclear explosion from escaping his body--all except for the "nuclear fire" coming from his mouth.Now that's some sort of body control! The men in white seem pretty confident, being so close to the Trinity-like action and all.

Superboy evidently needs fewer ribs than humans, and it looks like the detonation point is right on the transpyloric plane, taking out kidney, liver, gall bladder and just about everything else.  And his spine doesn't show up, either--along with a lot of other innards.

 

The original (published in September 1964) comes from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and they point out that this issue comes right after the signing of in-air nuclear weapons testing ban (after a speech by JFK in June 1963, marked by a memorial that was about 10 feet away from where I used to practice the shot put in D.C.)

This mushroom cloud doesn't take place inside of Superman, but it does seem to take place, well, oddly--there was no text that I could find that accompanied this image, so we'll have to leave the story arc to imagination. 

And, well, if you're not having an atomic explosion in your stomach and not combating one, I guess as Superman you could cover one (image found here):

\

 

 

Big Gs--Grim & Gross Saturn: Grandville, Goya, Galileo and the German Gnostics

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1424

I was getting ready with what was supposed to be the real post for today when I stumbled upon this woodcut of the Roman god Saturnus.  What makes this image so terrifically compelling is how benign it is—in its weird, mechanical, disinterested observational manner the artist conveys almost nothing about the act that we witness as the god plots his way across the sky in its celestial chariot.  Saturn (equated with the Greek Kronos, and the Titan father of Zeus, and also the name of the gaseous oblate six planet) commits acts of horror, and becomes, again and again, perhaps the greatest coward of the Roman pantheon of questionable deities. 

It begins with Saturn being told his future:  that at some point in his life his son or sons will supplant him, catch him, replace him and kill him.  And the best thing that Saturn can think to do is to methodically eat his children, and he does manage to consume all but one—Zeus—who then fulfills the prophecy; but then again, who wouldn’t?  There is really very little like this in mythology—and, really, why should there be?

Our artist—or engraver—is George Pencz (1500-1550), alive and dead very neatly at the century and half-century mark, and his work ("The Life of the Children of the Planet Saturn") is illustrated in Folge der Planeten .  The image of Saturn racing along with his son’s head in his mouth looks naive compared top the rest of the illustration, which is a very lively, if quiet, depiction of the industry that his dead sons would have applied themselves to if they hadn’t been consumed by their father.  The illustration of Saturn is very disturbing to me, particularly when you notice the son-in-waiting, who is watching his father eat his brother, and in an incredibly pathetic and heart-breaking way is trying to protect himself by holding his head.  I think it is so very moving because it is a perfectly logical (from a child’s point of view) reaction to an unimaginable terror, and perhaps this is how Pencz can best deal with the vile god.

Images of Saturn really are legion, but there are a host-and-a-half that are pretty uspetting, like the one above, and the one coming, below. I think that the one that is the test against which all others are measured is by Francisco Goya, who during his “black period” painted the truly terrifying image of Saturn devouring his child right on the wall of his house in 1824 (or thereabouts). It really is bad stuff. The scene as painted by Peter Paul Rubens isn't much better.

 

Admittedly, J.I.I Grandville (1803-1847) didn't conceive of this series of bridges as a plausible means of interplanetary travel and is in all probability an allegorical creation, but the image does--in an odd way--allow a dialogue on the idea of moving from planet to planet, which was still pretty solitary thinking in the mid-19th century. Although this didn't have a direct effect on the perception of man's place in the solar system, it did have a great and direct impact upon a vast number of illustrators and cartoonists who followed in his considerable wake.

This image comes from Grandville's Un Autre Monde, published in 1844.

In addition to an interplanetary bridge that there is another singular creation here in Grandville's cosmos--a balcony constructed of the rings of Saturn (if indeed this was supposed to be Saturn--it is as advantageous as not to think of it in this way) and if we think of a balcony being a place to watch and observe, then we are brought instantly to W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, which is a textural masterpiece, and mostly I guess a novel about everything that Sebald observed in his walk through Suffolk.  (Another Saturn-related work of fiction is Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut,  a very mature and insightful 1959 novel which really has nothing to do with anything here; I just needed to throw that in, what with him being a master storyteller, crank and human-caricaturist-observer and all…)  And so by 1844 it comes to pass that one French caricaturist/imaginist comes to draw an extraordinary and impossible land/space bridge between the planets only 234 years after Galileo  first glimpsed Saturn's "handles"--give the optics of his telescope Galileo didn't see the rings of Saturn as such, seeing rather two "extra bodies" on either side of the planet  It would take another 65 years and accumulations of observations by some of the greatest names in the history of astronomy (Galileo, Casini, Hevelius, Huygens) to show that the disk (singular) on Saturn was actually a series of rings.  (I should add that the first photograph of Saturn's rings is not made until 1883.

Which somehow brings me to the troubled world of the "Saturn Gnosis", the Fraterniti Saturni.  Actually the only place I'm getting to here is a picture (above), which I tried to understand before I realized what it was, and how much of an expanding hocus-pocus (otherwise defined as  "woo woo" in the words of James Randi) rabbit hole of diminishing returns it leads to, a dizzying history of competing complexities and nonsense.  But the image (found in a book edited by Eugen Grosche, (Offizielles Publikations-Organ der deutschen Gross-Loge Fraternitas Saturni Orient Berlin,  1929), comes from a psycho-sexual-astrological-magical group (one of a number of such associations in Germany and particularly Berlin in the 1920's), and seems no less a part of reality as does Grandville's Saturn.  Sameness ensues when you try to approximate the volume of limitless emptiness, or belief.

A Million Miles of Barbed Wire? (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

 The following photos were found in my small collection of World War I news photo service images, all of which were made in 1918.  They show the preparation of barbed wire entanglements--these were devilish things, made to grab a soldier and suck them in into a deeper hold when resisted, like a sort of sharp, metallic quicksand.  Since there were something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during WWI, I think that it might be a safe bet to say that there were a million miles of barbed wire fencing laid down--that would be equal to about 75 feet of wiring for every soldier who served, or about 200 feet for every person killed. Given the tactics, the trenches, the barbed wire, the machine guns, the gas, and so on, it is no wonder that there was very little advancement over battlefields that stretched for miles and involved hundreds of thousands of troops, costing (sometimes) hundreds of thousands of casualties.  It would have been just insane-nasty to have to charge through fields of this stuff while being bombed and shot at by people in holes.  (All three original photos are available at our blog bookstore.)

No gloves, here, not for the soldier weaving the wire or for the spinner in the background:

I notice that in this photograph the only person wearing gloves is the lead model, front-and-center:

Here's the support staff assembling the

The Old is New Department: Refuting Darwin with Commas, Adjectives, and the Creator (1873)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1423

I wasn't going to write anything at all about this pamphlet, but the vocabulary was so strong and vehement, and reminded me so much of what we can read in today's daily press, that I thought to at least pick out some of the choice morsels. 

Darwinism Reproved and Refuted, published in Washington D.C. in 1873, is left without any attribution to the author, the writer not caring to sign his/her name, not even to use as the wood into which some shingle with a weak social sciences/psych/religious Ph.D. could be nailed.  It is just left to the imagination or indignation that the writer didn't or couldn't feel confident enough to actually sign their work.  It is also one of hundreds if not thousnads of anti-Darwin vehemence--there is a chance I guess that there were more of these things written than there are visible-to-the-naked-eye stars in the night sky.  (The original pamphlet is available at our blog bookstore.)

The author has little room for Mr. Darwin's work¹, clearly on a super-rant over The Descent... and on the theory of evolution, using such colorful words in runny purple prose like "\repugnant, revolting, unsophisticated, outrage, deadening influence, peculiar, fallacious, cunning"--and this coming from the first two paragraphs.  Needless to say, even though  the writer was too weak to sign their name, they did have some strong opinions. 

"Utterly false, radically and fundamentally wrong, futile in the extreme, unreliable, ungrounded, false, short-sighted (in relation to god), ridiculous..." continues the author. The endowments of the Creator stuff doesn't work its way in until the third page, when the adjectival and adverbial assault was already on it way, all without the assistance of any scientific counterexamples--but then the rest of the work is dedicated to proving the godless nature of Darwin's work and its escape from scientific reality.

We find this:  "Evolution is founded on materialism, which is another term for atheism"...."let this doctrine be compared with the Mosaic account of creation, and then the student of nature determine if he will choose for his progenitors Darwin's pair of ring-tailled [sic] monkeys, or 'Adam...' "

And so that's what we get to in the refutation:  the Creator.  Old version of a contemporary complaint to get Darwin tossed out of classrooms to protect the youth of America, replacing it with divination.  The author writes:  "In the investigation of nature which is the proper province of the scientist, the most effectual method of studying it, in order to render this subject clearly intelligible to the human mind, is to regard the economy of nature as a form of government, having God for its founder, its Supreme Ruler, and Law-giver."

There's not too much one can do with that, and even though it sounds antique, isn't necessarily so, because the philosophy exists today, only with fewer commas. 

Notes:

1.  By 1873 Darwin already had produced an epochal body of work, including but not limited to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859),  On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects (1862), On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants  (1865), The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and  The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1873)