Ptak Science Books

Visual Display of Data: Who Had What in Strategic War Materials, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1991  

 
 This dense, complicated table showing the distribution of strategic raw materials (published in The Illustrated London News 3 August 1940) I is a decent example of how not to display data.

 Perhaps there’s just too many variables to try to control here in one visual display: it tracks twenty raw materials by percentage of access for thirteen different countries, with the entire graph being displayed in a sort-of progression according to metric tons of material. Maybe it’s the varying widths of the bars representing the material, maybe it’s the complex designs distinguishing the countries, and maybe its just too many lines. The only time this really works for relatively-offhand use is when you’re looking for one country in particular, and then the eye allows it self to just concentrate on the solid black (Germany) or the stars in a bar (U.S.) When the graph is used in this manner it displays rather quickly that Nazi Germany doesn’t control a whole lot of the combined tonnage of the twenty strategic materials, which was a particularly good thing for the general reading population in the Allied world to see, because the war was not going so well at this early stage. (At this point in the war—less than a year old now in Europe—the Battle of Britain had begun though it was still weeks away from when the massive Blitz begins, and Hitler had just toured Paris…it was not a good time for Britain, and a worse time for France. The

Soviet Union is listed still with the Axis as it was still 10 months away from being attacked, Hitler turning on his allies in Operation Barbarosa in June 1941.)

A little further effort would show that the Allied countries are mainly lighter, with the “belligerent” or neutral countries are darker, showing the lighter is on top with darker beneath, and that in general the Allies control more of these materials than the Axis.  It is also interesting to not ethe relative smallness of control by Great   Britain, though when you throw in the rest of the British and then the French empires the possession summary changes dramatically.

So the data is there, and there’s allot of it, and its fairly nimble—its just that the visual display is not pretty or easy to use .  

WWII as Advertising Prop, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books 

I was making my way through LIFE magazine for 1943 and was struck by the ratio of the number of advertisements using the war as a backdrop (and American soldiers as convenient props) for sales against the actual space dedicated to war reporting.  Concentrating on just two randomly selected  weekly issues (November 1 and November 15 1943) I was surprised to find  28 ads (most of which were full-page); there was no war reporting in November 1 and just half a story (on the history of the Prussian General staff) in November 15.  Most of the ads were directly war-related, the companies mostly relegated to vast production of war goods, like General Motors, Cadillac and Boeing. The others were less clear, like the ad pictured here for Green Giant peas and corn.  This company was informing the home front that if there were shortages of their product it was because they were selling it to the Army or Navy--others were more adventurous for their spirited attempt at patriotism. I'm not sure that Wembly Ties really needed to include a GI in their ad, nor did I like the use of American soldiers to sell Interwoven socks. 

Looking Straight Down Department: the Topography of Hell

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1920

The interesting thing about Hell--Dante's Hell--is that it has been shown and reconstructed and imagined for a long time--eight centuries--and, outside of painting, most of the representations seem to be in cross-section. That is why this image from the famous exposition by Alessandro Vellutello's 1544 struck me so strongly--it is a mostly straight-down look at the miserly and the prodigal in the fourth circle of Hell. 

 

"… I saw multitudes
to every side of me; their howls were loud
while, wheeling weights, they used their chests to push.
They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: Why do you hoard? Why do you squander?' --Canto VII, lines 25-30

This image depicts the great, tiring but tire-less, endless, despicable joust of the miserly and the prodigals, going at each other with large, difficult-to-move stones.  Pluto is supposed to be in the middle, but I don't see him here.  The artist though has made the men basically unrecognizable, giving them little character to their faces and virtually no differences in their bodies--Virgil tells Dante that they have lost themselves to something else, that there is no "there" there, that Dante--who would normally speak with the people he was coming into contact with--would not be able to interview them as they were too absorbed in their vicious need. 

As has been seen in the many maps constructed for the Divine Comedy over the years--but especially during the Renaissance--Hell for Dante was a real place, a nine-layered inverted cone of measured depth and width commensurate with the sin, and established under the city of Jerusalem.  Dante visited the place

"... but who art thou
 That hast inquir'd of us?" To whom my guide:
 "One that descend with this man, who yet lives,
 From rock to rock, and show him hell's abyss."      (Inferno XXIX, 89–92, trans. Cary)

entering Hell on Good Friday and emerging from Purgatory on Easter morning, taking three days to travel through the two places and straight through the center of the Earth. 

Here are a few examples of the cross sections that are the great standard bearers of Dante's visions:

The  Hell of Dante by Pietro da Fino, 1568:

The circles of Hell from Commedia di Dante insieme con uno dialogo circa el sito, forma et misure dello Inferno by Filippo Giunta, Florence, 1506.

Again, just a few examples of the cross sections of Hell to contrast with the scarce looking-straight-down-at-Hell image above. 

Interesting Images of Renaissance Hell--on Title Pages

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1917

Images of Hell do not often appear graphically depicted right on the title page of books, even though books speaking to Hell and warning us of its coming number in the hundreds of thousands, if not more, particularly if you interpret religion as the means for keeping people away from the ring of fire.    Few people are shy about depicting Hell in general, though there evidently is some reluctance (or forbearance, or oversight) to showing it front-and-center on the title pages of books.

A terrific exception to this rule is Jacobs de Voragine’s Passional, Hyr hewrrey sick an dath winter deel, printed in Basel in 1511, and illustrated by various and unidentified Strassburg woodcut masters.  In this extraordinary title page we see the vision of the adoration of the Virgin Mother and child supported in a rose of light, aided by guiding winds and various floating saints, and shown lowering the holy book directly to the city of Strassburg. In either corner positioned above the temporal city and below the firmament are two visions of hell, one less vicious and the other more so:  to the left we see some of the pious praying for better judgment as they are about to be consumed by the background flames, while to the right is a far more ambitious and morbid vision of hell featuring the famous Hellmouth.  The Hellmouth makes appears all throughout the history of art (as we can see in this Brueghel painting, for example), but it is a little curious that, outside of the mention of Leviathan (translated from Hebrew, Job 41:1), Hellmouth (as the entrance to hell) doesn’t make an appearance in the Bible.
 

What is more easily found, at least in the artwork on title pages throughout the Renaissance and the Baroque, are images of people about to be sent to hell. A good and chilling example of this can be seen in the artwork for Thomas Murner (1475-1537) De quattor heresiarhis ordinis Praedicatorium de Observantis nuncupatorum…, printed (again) at Strassburg in 1509.  The pamphlet tells the story of Johannes Jetzer and his accomplices (including four monks) who were tried (under torture) for blasphemy after it was revealed that they colluded to defraud people with a bogus story of religious visions, employing the bloody tear of Mary.  All were found guilty and the four monks were burned alive at the stake—Jetzer having escaped—and sent immediately to the deeper, more fiery, pit.

This isn't quite showing the coming of hell as in the first case, but it is getting close.  In any event, I found it interesting to see the depiction of the Bad Place right there on the title page of the Murner bokk.

Master of Little but Curious About it All (1839)

JF Ptak

This print has been hanging here and there at home for many years--it has always been amusing, and somehow warming. 

"A _M of A, and Dealer in Curiosities" was "published as the act directs 30 July 1839", is an etchign which depicts, I guess, a lettered/educated man who winds up as a seller of scientific and intellectual bric-a-brac and interesting bits, perhaps wonderful natural history/physics materials, perhaps trivialities.  He seems satisfied to me, regardless of the little man over his shoulder making a face, a reminder perhaps to not take the curiosities too seriously.  [There's also another face off to the right, peering into the image (see below).]

The Record of Arts & Science that our dealer is reading has some interesting parts to it:, including something on new mechanical flight and a new diving bell--it would've been more interesting historically if it had mentioned the brand-new Daguerre invention. 

Sequential Illustration and the Seven Stage Rule of Human Decay

 JF Ptak Science Books       Post 1910

Among graduated indicators the semi-physical allocations of measurable units time must be the most significant--or at least in modern times, over the last few hundreds years, when the popular class was able to afford time-keeping devices so that they could have a greater appreciation and control over time past and future.  Simplified articulations of long periods of time is generally not a topic of illustration, however--art and illustration showing the development of a story is generally not a common occurrence in published form. 

It is not terribly uncommon in ancient and early modern times, though.  Trajan's Column is an excellent example of a sequential story, this told in stone; legends and myths and other stories are told in vases and friezes in Greece, and in various codices and altars in Mayan and Mixtec cultures. 

But in more modern times the telling of the sequential stories in published form, again, is not a common thing.  Even the telling of the story of the development of, say, a tree or the  life cycle of a bird is just not a common occurrence, in spite of the more-popular appearance of graphical and expressive modes of displaying quantitative data in the mid-19th century. 

Perhaps the most common of the early transitions in displaying these stories since the Renaissance have been in the telling of the lives of the Saints, or in the Passion of the Christ, or in the depiction of the legend of Adam and Eve (as in the work of Lucius Cranach, above).  There are interesting cycles showing the Christian mythic formulation of the creation of the world, as in the case of Thomas Burnet's (illustrated title page to his)  Sacred History of the Earth  where there is a glorious seven-sphere display of the beginning and ending of our planet. 

[Source, with full text, here.]

I wonder though if one of the most popular and common sequential depictions of an important and shared story is that of the ages of man/people:  generally they show a pyramidal showcase of silhouettes or full-body portraits of one person as that body develops and decays over the major decades of a life.

They would normally appear in a configuration like the following:

And earlier on, very famously, like so:

(I've written about and identified these and other related depictions of the ages of man here.)

 I came to think about all of this again after reading an interesting post in the excellent Public Domain Review blog where I found this absolutely delightful "barometric" rendition of the stages of life, a sequential, top-to-bottom graphical display of the stages, but without illustration.  I cannot remember seeing such a "list" before, and was not familiar with the book from which it came (The art of invigorating and prolonging life, by food, clothes, air, exercise, wine, sleep, &c and peptic precepts, pointing out agreeable and effectual methods to prevent and relieve indigestion, and to regulate and strengthen the action of the stomach and bowels ... : to which is added, the pleasure of making a will ... which was printed in 1822 by Constable for Hurst/Robinson in London, the full text of which can be found at the Internet Archive). 

And the "Rule of Seven" which precedes the longer list above:

It is interesting to note that this was the fourth edition of this work, and that the end of the book, the very synopsis for ideas of full life and longevity, the whole is topped off by a chapter on happy-making and your personal will. 

There were many admonishments that made and still make perfect sense found in these pages:  early to bed and early to rise sort of material.  Plain, but sensible.  Eating early. Dressing sensibly.  Eating (for the time) modestly. Interesting recipes. Pure air making for "a diverted mind".  Good advice for the mature bookbuyers there in first quarter 19th-century England.  I imagine that most of those readers were no doubt born in the second-to-last decade of the 18th century, which means that their instructions on Daily Life business was from their parents who got their information from their parents, which means by 1822 much of the handed-down wisdom relating to diet and exercise was from the early 18th century.   Perhaps this work was the breath of fresh air that people needed, making it popular enough to find its was into at least four editions. (Also worth noting is that the average resting pulse rate for the readers of this book was said to be 60, which I think is lower than the American national average today.)

There is of course a suffocating number of ill-advised recommendations, like for athletes, where the consumed foods should not include veal, lamb, pork, fish or cheese puddings, "or vegetables", which leaves little room for anything besides red beef, which was to be had in quantities, including beef pudding, jellied beef, and "beef tea". There was also a lot of beer and malt liquor drinking, with suggestions for "three pints of home-brewed" to be had with dinner, followed by three glasses of wine ('the less, the better")--then again, clean/drinkable water was a tough go at times, so beer was a common-enough stand-in.  All things being equal, the advice utilized whatever was the good data for the time. 

The long list from birth to death of supposed and impending accomplishments is interesting particularly for the "decaying" part (which is outlined in the second chart) of life, where we find that at age 54 a person should be conducting their mathematical works, after which (from 55 to 60) one is relegated to pursuing "former works".  (After all, the period of general decay according to the Rules of Seven chart begins at age 6x7.) And it is here that the creative life ends, because from this point to the preparation for eternity the life is spent enjoying one's earthly works.

In any event, I just wanted to point out the unusual nature of the "William Jones' Andrometer", which is a display of information that is outside my usual experience. 

Note:

I briefly considered including "logic trees" in this description, as they do tell a story, in a way.  Particularly
Porphyry's Tree came to mind (which was a classification in diagrammatic form on different kinds of being) and then Pacioloi's summary of ratios from his Summa de arithmetica (1494). They do certainly represent a structured depiction of thought, but they are not a narrative, though they would provide the structure for one. Anyway, I'm convinced tonight at least that these diagrams don't belong in the sequential illustration discussion.  (And in a weird way these diagrams enter the modern conversation so far as their overuse is concerned. Even in the Middle Ages the idea of the logic tree was being so over- and mis-employed that they would remind the modern reader of the "Top 15 (or whatever number) Photographs of Butterflies (and again, whatever he counted thing might be).)

 

 

Porta's Visions, Big & Small: On "Magic", Chaos and Not Inventing the Telescope

JF Ptak Sciene Books   Post 1906

[Detail from the title page of Natural Magic, below.]

Giovani Baptista della Porta was a magus, or a natural (science) "magician", who searched nature for similarities that would serve to build a broad template of forced  understanding of seeming likenesses, looking for the great connector in the exceptional and the unusual, the stuff outside of the formerly Aristotlean world.   Natural Magic is his magnum opus, an expansion of  its earlier version (Magna naturalis)  published in Latin in 1558, which Porta expanded to twenty sections in 1589. The 1589 edition was a maturing of the 1558 edition, toning down the philosophical/religio-mystic basis for the ordering of the natural environment with an approach more suitable to observation and experimentation. It was an encyclopedic work of vast proportions, a gold-mine of information and clever wishfulness, and very accessible due to Porta’s  wide inter-personal travel, very wide reading and critical abilities, clear reasoning and deep vision:  the book was hugely successful, going into at least twelve Latin, four Italian, seven French, two German, and two English editions in the early modern era. Natural Magic, which first appeared in English in 1658, concerned itself with magic, alchemy, optics, geometry, cryptography, magnetism, agriculture, the art of memory, munitions, and many other topics, all grouped together and refined, distilled, into a cloudy assemblage of natural knowledge—it would end up that the magical whole was worth far less than the sum of its parts. 

But the parts were pretty considerable, and much of the information was spot-on for the time, not the least of which was a very capable demonstration and explanation of a lensed camera obscura. 

What I’m interested in right now though is the title page of the book (pictured above).

It turns out and as we can see in the top image of the title page, Chaos is not some subspace trajectory of cellular automata, or in Dr. Brown’s/Einstein’s dancing dust—it is right above us.  This recognition of its regular, localizable structure probably does not support parameterization, or anything else for that matter, except to say that it is definitely “pretty”.  The title page has nine illustrated compartments:  the four corners depict the four elements, the two opposing middles show art and nature; the bottom shows the author, illuminated by the knowing sun.  The top center image is the element showing “chaos”, which I’ve chosen to use a map, identifying where exactly chaos might be.  I’ve not seen an antiquarian map identifying chaos, though I have seen a number showing lots of other non-existent places, like heaven and hell and purgatory and Eden and the Kingdom of Prester John, to name a few.  But not chaos.

It is very interesting to note that while in the process of looking at nature, and observing connections real and imagined, and creating ways of organizing and storing information in the brain, Porta conceived of a telescope, and this several decades in advance of Galileo. (The idea of the telescope stretches pretty far back, though.  The idea seems ancient, though the scientific thought on the matter really weren't present until the 13th century with the work of Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste, and then with Nicolsa of Cusa (in 1451) doing experimental work on the properties of lenses, and then on to John Dee and Thomas Digges in 1570/1.  Porta seemed right about there, just ont he edge of the invention of an instrument which would have allowed him to see farther and deeper than anyone else before him, but he didn't follow through.  He mentions in the 1589 edition of Magiae:

    "With a Concave lens you shall see small things afar off very clearly. With a Convex lens, things nearer to be greater, but more obscurely. If you know how to fit them both together, you shall see both things afar off, and things near hand, both greater..."  (Porta would expand this section of the 1589 book (section XVII) into a complete and separate work in 1593,  De refractione optices.)

I do not know what happened to this idea, or why it didn't flourish in Porta's hand like it would in those of Galileo less than three decades latter.

Porta was a very  nimble and penetrating man--his Magia naturalis was a dissecting tool for the complexities that he saw around him, and his later works were in some ways continuations on this theme.  The first two books following Magiae were concerned with private visions of Very Large Things:  the first, De furtivis literarum notis (published in 1563) was one of the earliest works on cryptology.   This looking-deeper book was followed three years later in 1566 by a book on how these thoughts could be organized in the mind.  Given the spirit of the times and the difficulty of actually recording what it was you saw, Porta wrote  Arte del ricordare, which addressed the very idea of memory and then the more applicable bits of mnemonic devices.  He looked for more hidden messages in his next work--on the physiology of hands--but it didn't see the light of publishing day until after Porta died.

Working in the areas of pharmacology, hydraulics, military engineering, physiology, and physics, among many other areas, Porta published De aeris transmutanionbus (1609) on meteorology; De distillatione (1610), on chemistry; Coelestis Physiogranonia (1603), on a sort of "writing in the sky" and both a blast and support of astrology; and De humana physiognomonia libri IIII (1586), which was a work physiognomy and discerning function from structure. There were other books, not to mention at least 17 dramatic works.  Porta was basically unstoppable.

All of this takes me back to the question of wondering about his inability (?) to see the possibilities of the telescope. In all of his books on deterministic vision, and of seeing things deeply--whether it was in the sky, or in chemical experiments, or in seeing the structure of a plant incised with its function in nature, or in the complexities of memory, and so on--it is a mystery to me how he could have left the development of the telescope along. 

 

Letters Inscribed in the Sky: Gaffarel, Kircher and Curious Ideas

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1905

Could we satisfy our selves in the position of the lights above, or discover the wisdom of that order so invariably maintained in the fixed stars of heaven......we might abate.....the strange Cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starrie Booke of Heaven.  Thomas Browne¹ (1605-1682) in his major Hermetic effort, The Garden of Cyrus, or The Quincunciall Lozenge, or Network Plantations of the Ancients, naturally, artificially, mystically considered (published in 1658).

The Garden of Cyrus is a neo-Pythagorean insight weaving together all manner of visions in nature and art, and the art of nature and vice versa and so on, all tied up in universal thinking about these intersections in terms of the great quincunx patterns and the number five and it various variants in terms of latticework and the figure X. 

 

"What is more beautiful than the quincunx, that, from whatever direction you regard it, presents straight lines?-- Quintillian's Institutio Oratoria VIII.3.ix

The Browne quote relate to the work of J. Gaffarel, who saw connections in art and nature quite literally in the structure of the heavens, among other places--but it is his "star-writing"  that I'd like to address a bit here.  His provocatively-titled Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles  ("Unheard-of Curiosities concerning Talismanical Sculpture of the Persians, the horoscope of the Patriarchs and the reading of the Stars") was published first in 1629 and then many times thereafter well into the 18th century.  Garrafel (1601-1682) presented to the world a wide class of interesting subjects which had previously been thought of as being outside the normal realm of academic discussion, the subjects being mainly seen as dogmatic occultism.  What Garrafel did was very interesting, writing about these areas as discussion-builders, as "curious" topics that could or should be considered to widen general inquiry. (In an interesting article, "The Use of Curiosity in Early Medieval France and Germany" the author  Neil Kenny writes of Gaffarel, "Making occult knowledge into conversation rather than a dogmatic system made [his work] less likely to be universally censured")

His work definitely interesting and curious, though the use of that word didn't save him, as some of the topics  were verbotten--certainly Gaffarel was aware of this, and he tried his best to write about them in a way that the ruling intellectual powers would not find offensive, but it didn't work, and his book was found to be abusive and was banned by the Sorbonne. This was such an integral action that Gaffarel succumbed to not one but two retractions.

What is of primary interest right now with Gaffarel is his interpretation of writing systems, and how frequently they seem to exist exclusive of human manufacture.  It seems that a fair percentage of the time that these appearances came in the form of agate. and that these durable micro- explorations in agate go back thousands of years, expounded by Pliny and some of the other ancients, who followed the origins of humanity back into the rocks. This was a popular idea for the origin of animate beings, propounding itself for centuries, even winding up in the bony lap of Leibniz of all people, who wrote that “men derive from animals, animals from plants, plants from fossils, which in turn derive from bodies that the senses and imagination represent to us as being totally dead and formless”. Stones therefore held the seeds of the formation of the world; all things living, breathing, and not.

Our own Athanasius Kircher, the definition of polymathic ability and superior imagination was responsible for many such observations and discoveries. It seems to me that as much as Kircher gave, he took away, keeping ahead of his critics and the rest of the scientific community with tremendous output…people I think just couldn’t keep up with him. He found all sorts of things in stone: as early as 1619  he exhibited an image of   St. Jerome (in no less a place than the cave of the Nativity in Bethlehem!) that he found in agate. His Mundus Subterraneus (1661) is a home to a wide range of these objects: quadrupeds of all shapes and descriptions, human full-length portraits, hands with jewels, and even the Virgin Mary and child. AS spectacular as these are there is always more: the magnificent cityscape (reproduced here) and the sublime discoveries of a full set of the alphabet and a series of 15 geometrical drawings, all naturally impressed in stone.

Gaffarel's principle and perhaps first-on-the-scene notion (though some of it may have appeared in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (first published in 1533))  was the elements of an alphabet--the Hebrew alphabet--was found not in stone, but actually written in the night sky. In the stars.

It was another sort of artificial language, an entire alphabet, though this was written in the sky; Hebrew letters transcribed in the stars, lines connecting them here and there.  Replaceable letters from one point to another.  The possibilities of the formation of actual words was present.  This seems to have been the first time this idea appeared in print. 

Notes:

1. Browne's writing is both beautiful and difficult, or complex and impenetrable, as can be seen from the very opening paragraph of his work here.

That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may passe for no blinde apprehension of the Creation of the Sunne and Moon, in the work of the fourth day; When the diffused light contracted into Orbes, and shooting rayes, of those Luminaries. Plainer Descriptions there are from Pagan pens, of the creatures of the fourth day; While the divine Philosopher unhappily omitteth the noblest part of the third; And Ovid (whom many conceive to have borrowed his description from Moses) coldly deserting the remarkable account of the text, in three words, describeth this work of the third day; the vegetable creation, and first ornamentall Scene of nature; the primitive food of animals, and first story of Physick, in Dietetical conservation.

2.  An interesting article in the blog 8vo appears here on Gaffarel's celestial writing.

Scientists on Stamps

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Ancient Myths Modern: the Other Statue of Liberty, ca. 1911.

JF Ptak Science Books     Post 1887

In working on an alphabet of the occupations of children in 1910/1920 America based on the photographs of the immortal Lewis Hine (and found via looking at other materials on the excellent Retronaut website), I came across this extraordinary image:

The detail seems to show lip rings on what I think is a very young woman.  She is very slender (you can see very thin wrists), and is wearing a number of layers of clothes, not the least of which is a long white apron on top of which sit Civil-War-like shawls,  She is stepping into the street, caught mid-stride. It looks as though it is frosty, the sidewalk and steps seem to have a thin veneer of ice  It is cold. And she is carrying an ungainly, heavy burden, which might weigh half of her own weight. And she is young.  And she has no gloves.

Where did she go?

It also that Hine--in his notes onthe back of the photograph-- identifies her with kindness and grace as a "tenement gleaner".  (In my notes I was less kind and called her a "ragpicker" I'm a little ashamed to say. Mr. Hine taught me a lesson.) Gleaner.

Hine documented things that were part of everyday life that made cities like New York what they were, much of which went unnoticed, or scuttled by intentional indifference. People like this made the city run--then as now--and Hine was one of the early photographers in the United States who "discovered" these people and made their standing a cause of his life. 

Like many other pioneers/artists/social observers, Hine (1874-1940) didn't fare so well in his later life. After four decades of huge service in photography, people became disinterested in his past/present/future work, and Hine lost his resources. And his house. And then, in a few years, his life.  His personal collection of negatives and prints were given by a relative to the New York Photo League, but they were displaced when the League was dismantled in 1951.  Unsettled, they were offered out to places like the Museum of Modern Art, which rejected the collection. Ultiamtely, fortunately,  the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, accepted the collection and saved it from the unknown.

This image easily could have been Atlas, but Libertas seemed better.

Source:  New York Public Library Digital Collection. "Photographs concerning labor, housing and social conditions in the United States. / L. W. Hine. " 
 

Black Sky and Morning Arrows

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I've just written a short post on the beautiful key to iconography by Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overa descrittione d'imagini delle virtu, viti, sffetti, passioni humane, corpi celesti, Mondo e sue parti..., which was published in Padua in 1611.  The version I used was an 18th-century English translation with new illustrations--now though the translation was very appreciated, the images were not so.  As I pointed out, they do serve the purpose of illustrating the specifics in iconography, the images were not that pleasing.  I wanted to include here an example from the original, and in particular the imagery of "Dawn".

It is a gorgeous thing, a very striking, very strong woodcut showing the messenger of the new day coming, attacking the night with arrows of dawn. 

I enjoy he earlier, more robust images for this iconology, even though there are many variants to choose from--there were more than 40 editions of this work since its first non-illustrated edition in 1593--but given it all I much prefer the early 17th century flavor. 

A Few Examples of Renaissance Icons in Science Emblemata

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1885

These images come from a later (and English edition) of Cesare Ripa's essential keybook to Renaissance iconogrpahy, the Iconologica overa descittione d'imagini delle virtu, viti, affetti, passioni humane...first published in the early 1590's with Ripa's artwork.  I don't much like the English version of his work, nor do I care that much for the artwork (inferior in most ways to the great craftsman-like feel of the Renaissance images), though it does serve the purpose of place-holding the symbolism and explaining the elements of the icons.

I've chosen a few emblems for the sciences to illustrate this important work of deduction and explanation, as it would be an aid to anyone interested in the art of the Renaissance--and that would be an interest at virtually any level.

I chose "Arithmetic" as my first example because of the lovely parallels found in the folds of Arithmetic's dress--musical notation, underneath which we see the faint "Pars Impars" (even and odd) to help settle the old scores of symmetry.  The connection between music and mathematics is thousnads of years old, and though I might've used "mathematics" rather than its oldest branch (of "arithmetic") to show the ancinet connection between music and numbers, it should be remembered that not every aspect of arithmeic is standard, and that there is a good and strong relation between music and "higher arithmetic" (number theory).  In general I just like the emblzoned connection here between the two, showing a temporal sequencing representation, a placing of music in relation to number right out there in time-and-space,an adept of the mental image of music. There is no doubt that when a viewer was finsihed with this image that there is a lasting property of the mathematical properties of sound and teh harmony of number.  Its not exactly "music of the spheres", but it does work. 

• 
  
  Good transliterated description are to be found on the Alchemy Website, here; the English-language version cane be found here.

A Partial Alphabet of Thai Onomatopoeia--Words for Usually-Unusual Noises

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1882 

 [Joom]  Sound of a pebble being thrown in a pond

[Seet]  Sound of someone eating something very spicy

I'm not sure that the idea of phonoaesthetics comes into play with the concept of onomotopeia--perhaps they're mutually exclusive. Or inclusive?  Does cacophony fight euphony in lists of words that are composed to sound like the thing they represent? Or perhaps it is a given quality of this state that some of these words must sound cacophonus--"zok", "thak", or even "ptak" (which I saw in an issue of Sgt. Rock in the mid '60's as the sound bullets make when they strike a wooden dock)--simply because of what they represent, and must be so. 

Then of course there's the issue of onomatopoeia that look like or presented like the sound they are describing. For example, the word "Whaam" that appeared in comic book and which was famously derived as art by Roy Lichtenstein. 

When researching this I came upon cross-cultural examples of onomatopoeia--big an diwde and beautiufl and very far-ranging. It is a rich literature, and the examples are varied and deep. TO display an example I chose a list of  of Thai onomatopoeia, all of which have been collected by the author of  Weird Vibrations, who collected  these many fine examples one-by-one and for whose work in this and other areas I deeply enjoy and appreciate. I include them below in an odd alphabet of oddness--all that I've done here is separate them into a handy assembly, but let's make sure that all of the credit of collection and transliteration belongs entirely to Weird Vibrations.

For example:  "[Seet]  Sound of someone eating something very spicy" is a curious word, mainly because I'm not sure what this might  like unless "seet" is a quick ontake of breath.  "Joom" is a lovely word, and it really does sound like a pebble striking a pond surface.  Here are the others:

Thai Onomatopoeia (alphabetized to the English-language action rather than the Thai transliteration).  Try sounding them out--many sound like their sounds, which might give a little credence to Mr. John Locke's theory of knowledge (or not).

A

[Gra It Gra Eeuan]  To delay action through words

B

 [Guy] Sound of someone bragging

[Krok Kraak]  Sound of fluid bubbling in the stomach

C

[Gra Jaawng Angaae]  Sound of children crying annoyingly

[Khaak]  Sound of coughing something up

The Archaeology and Secret Evolution of Meat--a Collection of Posts

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

I've collected some of the unusual posts that I've done on this blog regarding the hard tendencies and shallow measures of meat. 

The Ineffable Religiosity of American Meat Memory, here.

 

Women Meat Pioneers of 1943, here.

 Anatomy of Womanly Desire–Aprons, Plastics and Meat, here.

 "The String Department" and "Curled Hair Machines" at the Meat Plant  (here)

Spam, Smeat, Spic, Prem, Mor & Arf: Food by Any Other Name  (here)

States of Perfection: the Refrigerated Archaeology of Meat, here.

Food, Food Packaging and Creating Desire: the du Pont Company, WWII. (here)

Selling to Simple Women, 1939:  "She's Not Interested in Bloody Meat", here.

The Importance of Bridges in the Invisible Evolution of Meat, here.

 

 

The Evolution of the Rock: the Progress from Exisitng to Thinking and Back Again, 1510

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1818

This delightful semi-progression of existence was found in Charles de Bouelles' beautifully titled Que hoc volumine continuentur; Liber de intellectu; Liber de sensu; Liber de Nichilo; Ars oppositorum; Liber de generatione; Liber de sapiente; Liber de duodecim numeris; Epistole complures, and printed in 1510 in Paris.  It is, in a way, in a light way, truly a representation of a literal progress of the state of things, perhaps from an  Aristotlean point-of-view.

I've no real expertise in this matter whatsoever, and I don't know the de Bouelles book, but I can do a bit of interpretation of the woodcut, which displays different stages of the existence of all manner of things--of all things.

It starts at left with a rock, with an inanimate object ("Minerale", and then "Petra":, with the overall statement of its being, "est"--that it, it "exists".  This is the common basis to all eight stages of progress:  "est" all the way across, and all the way down. 

Next are the plants, the "vegetables"and "arbor", which live ("vivit"); followed at close heal by animals, "equus", which have"sensibilite", or senses. and sense, "sentit", which is a shared ability of four of the eight stages.

The shared height of progress comes next, in man, of "rationale", who is capable of thought ("intelligit"); these factors are shared by the scholar ("studiosis", who comes next, "virtus").   It is next that we start our descent, back to the simple existence of things, to the "est": the sensate, living, existing luxuriant, observing himself in a mirror, determined to see all that was possible to see.  "Luxuria" follows, a man eating, enjoying nothing but the pleasure of consumption, simply "living"/Vivit".  And then, lastly, to "acedia", to the indolent man, sitting, performing no task, doing nothing:  existing, "est".  Up and down, back to the rock.