JF Ptak Science Books

Unexpected Uses of Musical Instruments: War Headdress

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 259

I don't mean this seriously, and I'm probably mucking around with a national treasure/iconic figure by even suggesting my flippant title, but I really would like to know what in the world this violin-cello or whatever it is is doing on the head of this figure? Probably ir is just artistic license, meaning that the large-staffed giant (?) would ultimately use music as a weapon (Amphion?); maybe, probably  not.  If anyone knows, I'd love to hear the answer.

The source of this woodcut is the Heldenbuch, das Heldenbuch mit synen Figuren..., a towering work in the history of German ltierature (or at least early German literature)  printed by Heinrich Gran in Hagenau in 1509.  It is a collection of German epic poetry from the period of the Barbarian Invasions (more sweetly
referred to as the "Migration Period", or Volkwanderung) ca. 300-700 ACE, and collected in the 13th century.  It is evidently a luxurious ride through German folklore and legend, with dragons, supernatural beasts, giants, scampering and clever warrior dwarfs, spectacular voyages to the East, shining moments of chivalry, and wide fairy lore.  So, if anyone knows the answer, would they please let me know about the very curious use of this musical instrument?

Just a Very Bad Idea: Toddler vs. Cactus, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books LLC


I know that this was supposed to be just a bit of sciencey/geekoid humor or attempt at it, but, really, the design for the cover of The Story of Cactus  (1937) is just plain stupid.  There's another example of putting children in harm's way for the sake of attracting attention to some sort of sales unit, but this one I think is worse in a category that is made up of things that are just "worse or worst".  Just cringingly bad.  I guess some people might see it as "funny", like some people will laugh at those captured videos on the television showing kids-doing-the-darndest-things and maybe getting getting hurt (as the audience churtles). Its just stupid.

Imagined Neighborhoods of the Far-Away Dead: Park Street Cemetery, Calcutta

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 257

I wonder what this cemetery looks like now, this colonial funiery landscape, all these British occupiers buried in their imagined death community? (Lord Curzon, for one, found it to be "the most pathetic site in Calcutta", which in 1900 was saying allot According to the piece below from the Telegraph, Calcutta, things haven't gotten much better.)  Is there any melancholy left for a place like this, filled with the British working class in the heart of Calcutta?  Perhaps they could never have imagined their Further India slip away on its own, and that they'd be buried in a so-incredibly foreign land?

Seems like this would be ripe terrain for post modernists, having a go at the real and imaginary architecture of dead colonials in a post-colonial world, using a language that only the initiated can understand. (Constructing self-referential vocabularies with slippery exterior-to-the-argument reference points isn't exactly the best way to get to a general discussion...nor doers it seem to be additive when the vocabulary has a life of its own.)

(I had a little go at the post-modernists and constructed a little language generator here.)

From The Telegraph, Calcutta,  16 September, 2007:

South Park Street Cemetery

"First stop: a grim place. But a haunting, beautiful place.
Maintained by the Christian Burial Board, the South Park Steet Cemetery was founded on August 25, 1767. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, William Jones, founder of Asiatic Society, John Hyde, a judge famous for his papers, are buried here, as is Rose Aylmer, the woman who inspired the poem of the same name by Walter Savage Landor. The tombs are in various stages of decay. The sight of the mossy tombstones, mostly imposing, some addressed to persons never known to history, as the headstone that says “here repose the earthly remains of James Miller”, in various stages of decay, but exuding serenity along the network of lichen-covered paths, brings soothing thoughts. If this is the end, it is not so bad. The caretaker is not very cooperative, though, and the place also invites criminal elements after the dark.

But then visitors are not allowed."

Freedom of Speech--a Bumpy Ride in 1919, and Some Good Thinking by Oliver Wendell Holmes jr.

JF Ptak Science Books, LLC  Post 256
                                                            

 

The answer to the question of this pamphlet, Is Opinion a Crime (published by the League for the Amnesty of Political Prisoners, 1919), is “yes”, and yes by a 7-2 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court (in Abrams v United States  250 U.S. 616 (1919).  The case involved political speech which was deemed to be criminal act –rather than an expression of free speech guaranteed under the First Amendment—by violating the 18^th amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917. Earlier in 1919  the court found again against the defendant in a similar case, Schenck v.

United States

, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), the majority opinion famously stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.:

"The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace  are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right…."

 

It was in the Abrams case though that Holmes sided with Justice Louis Brandeis in ten minority opinion, siding with the defendants in this case who were distributing printed material which urged people not to support the American military—with the sole aim, really, of trying to get food to starving Russians. The case was brought against Mollie Stimer “a slip of a girl”, Jacob Abrams, Samuel Lipman, and Hyman Lachowsky, who dumped their leaflets from tall buildings, urging that people not support the  governments’ decision to send troops to Europe to defend Czarist Russia against the Bolsheviks, and to allow the Russian revolution to proceed unhindered by American interests and allow “the people of Russia to pursue their own destinies. 

The Court found that the pamphlets were in violation of the Espionage Act and sentenced the four to between 15 and 20 years in jail. Holmes, in another landmark piece of judicial thinking, held that the defendants threatened no one and no thing, and should not have been found guilty. His contribution is reproduced in full in the continue reading section, with the content given its landscape by the good folks at Wordle.  (Click on the image to for a larger and clearer picture.)

Incidentally this decision was overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio (395 U.S. 444, 1969), in which the Court found that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action.---in this instance defending the 1^st and 14^th Amendment rights of a KKK spokesperson.

Sterilization, Castration and the Road to Purity and Marriage Counseling (1939)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 255

The arithmetical purity of the eugenic response to social excellence was hardly "advanced" when the pamphlets appearing here were printed.   The flavor of  its mathematics, particularly in the nineteen 'teens and 'twenties, was watery and milky, and concerned itself pretty much with "pluses" and "minuses", as in "as a social defective or prostitute" (um, yes, this is true, at least for California) "it is best for the societal gene pool if you just stayed out, on land".  Vagrants, vagabonds, minor social criminals and "some poor", could very well be placed in this category and subjected to forcible castration or sterilization. Mainly though  the  big legal guns of "human sterilization" were generally aimed at the truly vulnerable parts of society, the "insane and the feebleminded".  The pamphlet Sterilization for Human Betterment, published by the Human Betterment Foundation (Pasadena, California),  states that 13,000 people in this category had been "asexualized" between 1909 and 1939 in California. (I should point out that California was the sterilization capital of the United States, with a third of all the national eugenics procedure performed in this state for this period of time) It defends this practice, saying emphatically that "eugenic sterilization is not an experiment", and that "sterilization in this form represents one of the greatest advances in modern civilization". 

It continues:  "(sterilization) has been continuously used by American institutions since 1899, when the first sterilizations were performed in Indians".  What?

"Patients, relatives of patients, state officials, physicians,parole and probation officers, social workers, agree on the value of this practice" which was actually the "prevention of producing defective and handicapped children".  I'm relieved that the probation officers were consulted.

The Betterment people shed more light on the role of sterilization and sex offenses by women. (My bold.)  "Of 304 feebleminded girls sterilized and paroled, 9 out of every 12 had been sex offenders before commitment.  After sterilization, only one out of every 12 became a sex delinquent on parole". 

If this wasn't such an awful story, "sex delinquent on parole", a phrase I've never seen before, might make for a great 1950's trashlit title. (It could've been a series, too:  all you need to do is take the title "Sex Delinquents on Parole" and add something to it, like "...on Parole from Outer Space" or "...on Parole:  Queenie the Slip Crown Breaks Her Knuckles" and so on.)

The sorry story that I've interrupted with this bit of frivolity is that the "sex offenses" that are being discussed here is actually "prostitution".  These young women weren't committing violent acts of sexual savagery, they were just prostitutes, which meant that in most state they were "depraved".  The "feebleminded" girls I would guess were poor or working poor, without the best education, and didn't do well on whatever test was being administered to them to determine their test-taking intelligence. It seems to me that if  the goal was to liquidate prostitution that perhaps the men "seeing" these women should've been the ones faced with the operation. But that isn't how the dominant culture viewed the situation, and that the best way to approach the problem was to remove the reproductive capacities from the weakest members of society.

(Click on this table for a larger, clearer version of the number of forced sterilizations by state.)

 

Germany;This pamphlet was the co-authored spawn of Paul Popenoe (1888-1979) and E.S. Gosney (1855-1942) while both were on the board of the Human Betterment group. In addition to a strict diet of superior morality and race,  Gosney seems to have been the money behind the organization. Popenoe had a background in agricultural genetics with an overdrive taste for eugenics and race, somehow intersecting them with social hygiene and marriage relations. The “dr.” that Popenoe loved to insist attaching to his name was an honorary, unearned degree, which he must have felt he needed in order to secure the proper amount of intellectual identification necessary to write on intellectual identification. The Nazis wasted little time in translating and publishing this work, adding it to their official publications list in 1939. It was one of a significant number of intellectual imports that came into poor, besotted Germany; the imports came nowhere close to the amount of information banished, exported to the necessarily beautiful non-Aryan non-Nazi inferno. It was just the sort of thinly distributed stain that interested people like the Nazis.

I wonder what "Dr." Popenoe thought of this Nazi honor?

The second pamphlet by the same people, Human Sterilization Today,. is in a swift eight pages in which the Betterment Foundation makes it case to use sterilization to check "the misery spread through the community by the unchecked reproduction of the human unit" (italics mine)..  They are closing in on the Big Picture in this work, aiming at the 5,000,000 "who will be at some point committed to state hospital as insane" and the other 5,000,000 "who are so deficient intellectually (with less than 70% of average intelligence) as to be, in many cases, liabilities rather than assets to the race".

This is exhausting reading, but it is a story that shouldn't be forgotten, and could remind us that what we're doing or practicing today might look  like the Human Betterment stuff 25 years down the road. 

What is also deeply unsettling about Popenoe is that from this vast miasmaic idea set of misguided and forced statistics, philosophical racial extremism, "social hygiene", eugenic sterilization of the enfeebled and socially undesirable, he managed to create the very first marriage counseling service/practice in the United States.  The American Institute of Family Relations opened its doors in 1930 (in L.A.!) with this dizzying philosophical semi-brew of sterilization and marriage talk-therapy, happily correlating the whole thing with exploding axis of divorce, love, social failure, racial impurity and castration.  And somehow it all seemed to make sense to allot of people, back there in the past. 

Wordle Word Art: Einstein 1920 and Poincare 1905, Side by Side--Looking at Two Disparate Approaches to Relativity

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 254

Okay, okay--this is definitely apples and oranges here, but it is interesting nevertheless, even if I can't reference the apple and the orange to something that would make sense for both, for something that has shared grounds of commonality.   What we have here is the Wordle version of Henri Poincare's The Principles of Mathematical Physics (1905,and which I wrote about a little here accompanied by the paper's full text), which was his quai-popular attempt at explaining a modified version of what some people call his "relativity" paper of 1904 (On the Dynamics of the Electron, which appeared in the Comptes rednus):

View this ("contrast" being too hard, too unwieldy, too problematic) along with Einstein's 1920 Relativity:  the Special and theGeneral Theory, the book in which he makes a full frontal assault of a popular explanation of his special (1905) and general 1915/16) theories of relativity:

Very little in common, no?  It really is just an interesting set of images, really; I'd hate to think of this as anything approaching content analysis or anything besides this that might look like a "serious" attempt at comparing the two.  I think of them in very simple terms, these two Wordscapes--like looking at two rivers, the one meanderingly serene, while the other looks more contentious, robust, challenging.  At the end of it all the robust Einstein river, unlike the beautiful if not sanguine Poincare river, rushes towards a Niagra; the Poincare, not. 

Mondo Bizarro: Image of the Earth with a Background Earth Floating in Space

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 253

Well, one doesn't get the chance to write a title like that every day, or, for that matter, write about dual/multiple earths, with the earth both in the foreground *and* floating in outer space in the background.  I wrote about a spectacular pamphlet in February in Post 11 that did exhibit just such a thing-- I thought that it was a pretty singular event, writing:

"This is the only known example of the depiction of an extra-terrestrial New York City pictured with the earth in the background.  Huh?  Yes, this is the Big Apple in space—not its OWN space but THE space,  outer space—somehow, impossibly, removed to some something-or-other (actually in this case, a “bubble”) that, while not being the Moon, was something like it, though not actually a solid and without gravity, floating on a base of floating effluvia..."

Listen:  I found another such oddity.  Well, almost.  This is the back cover for a pamphlet called The East Waterway Dock & Warehouse Company:  Harbor Island Terminal", of Seattle, printed in 1920.  The pamphlet and contents is real enough--what caught my attention was the back cover, which very nearly places the earth in the sky above the earth, albeit innocently.  IT just so happens that this was a design/logo for the company, and it was placed in the sky, raising my hopes at first blush that this was another improbable example of Post #11. It is sort of close, visually speaking, especially when I took out ten minutes to manipulate the logo away from the earth so that the image is more, well, incredible.  But the fact of the matter is that the earlier New York City in Space pamphlet may well be a one-item category, particularly when you consider the content and the rest of its illustration, which are (generously) outre. But I'll post new image anyway because it is just such a rare visual  idea and almost-feast.

 

 

 

The Glory of theTechnicolor Electronic Future Arrives: 1942 Electronics

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 253

I'm sorry to report that the publisher and beneficiary of this brilliant 1940's advertising art--General Electric--swallowed up the identity of their artist.  Nowhere in the 1942 publication with the Huxleyesque title of Electronics, a New Science for a New World is there any mention of the poor artist who gave vision to this retread idea...or retread if you don't consider the "electronics" part.  Yes, the art is a little removed and slightly, spatially, naive; and the colors are too much and the symbolism too big (there's allot of host of hosts stuff, offerings up to the big sky),and the images are a little ridiculous,  but they are jolting (for good or for ill) and it really does speak for its time.  And in 1942 electronics was just about to come to the rescue and save World War II:  from tracking aircraft for anti-aircraft weapons to RADAR to the development of computers to the Enigma to the development of the atomic bomb, and on and on, "electronics" did ride in on a white horse to save the day.  I can understand perfectly well the sentiments exhibited in these fabulously bombastic illustrations: the extraordinary power of radio and the beginning of television, the beautifully rendered hands on the front cover (the shadows on the fingernails are done very well) holding the electronic chalice, the baby and the butterfly (and all of that other weird stuff strewn about); all are getting ready for the bigger world that was coming as the beneficiary of this electronic revolution.  And, as a matter of fact, no one really had a clue as to what was coming--that baby would be retiring now, and the changes that occurred during its lifetime are so supremely removed and incalculable from 1942 that it makes even the vast hope exhibited in these electronic icons seem mild.  It also makes me wonder about what brave oceanic beliefs and expectations of the future that we have today will look common and sugary (or saccharin, or whatever) in the year 2074.

The Human Zoo, II: Humans as Exhibits in Zoos and "Zoological Gardens"

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 252

This image comes from the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig), and was printed 6 September 1879 (issue No. 1888).
The caption reads:                                                                                                                                                         

This is the second in a slight series on human beings exhibited in zoos--I wrote earlier on them here, and quote the introductory for this print:

 

"Human ignorance in observing differences among different societies and races has always been a burgeoning, expanding, sub-intelligent subset of other human stupidities, frailties and incapacities.  Sometimes these are exhibited liberally and freely, and stupidly; other times it is difficult to see, vile, menially, sub-rosa, and thoughtfully thoughtless."

"These prejudices been spectacularly exhibited in many ways over the centuries—forced immigration, complete removals, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, slavery, expulsion, legal intolerance, and so on; an entire library can be filled with this stuff.  Sometimes people were gathered together and moved far away; other times they were gathered together and removed into compounds right in the middle of cities in which they lived (as in ghettos, antiquarian “hospitals” and the creation of the more modern asylum, and so on)..."

This second illustration is from two years later and displays "Nubnier" (Nubians, I think referring to people from southern Egypt and northern Sudan) in various poses as seen in the Dresden Zoological Garden.  The Africans were on display there, perhaps exhibited as exotic remnants of ancient kingdoms, or something,  showing them in a war dance, riding horses, in fake conflict, working a loom, goldsmithing, and in a caravan, complete with giraffes (?) and a baby elephant (??).  All I guess made "good gate" for the owners of the zoo.   

Wordle Word Art: 200 Einstein Quotations

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 251

My thanks to Jeff De Cagna for the suggestion of Wordle-ing a favorite Einstein quotation--its a fine idea.  What I've done is take 200 or so quotes and made one large file of them and fed it into the Wordle-izer with the following results (below)  Again Wordle weights words in size according to the number of times it appears in a document, so the resulting image is a wort of word map, a lay of the land if you will of this collection of quotes, showing the words most often used by Einstein (at least in the quotes that I have selected).  The longish quote list is below in the continue reading section(unfortunately without source attribution). 
Clicking on the image will enlarge it and make it clearer.

It is interesting to note that the largest word here seems to be "can", followed closely by "one", which I think is really another way of his saying "you" or "us" or "we"--so, we get "you can" or "we can" or "one can", speaking to the possibility of possibility, of effort, of moving forward, of trying.  Imagination, effort, thought, creation--that's what the man was all about, and I think that's what we see in this word map. 

Wordle Word Art: Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Here again is another Wordle treatment—this time we’ve fed it the first 10 chapters of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). As usual Wordle offers a very interesting insight into word usage even though I was forced to limit the text selection to Book I and stop at the point where diagrams are used to illustrate the text. Be that as it may, even in this limited application, Wordle does surface some interesting bits from the relatively “popular” part of this revolutionary treatise.

(Click on the image to enlarge and make clearer.)

National Socialists Take Control, 1933: Diagram Presentation of German Elections 1919-1933

JF Ptak Science Books LLC    Post 250

This diagrammatic presentation of the German elections from the end of the First World War to the 1933 elections clearly shows the rapid and sustained growth of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, called for short, the Nazi Party (or NSDAP).

It is really the chronicle of the rise of the unemployed sergeant Adolf Hitler’s rise from total obscurity to the chancellorship of Germany in just fourteen years. This is accomplished through a thick and murky collaboration of some of the stupid aspects of the Treaty of Versailles, the failure of the great base of the German economic enterprise, the worldwide depression, and the abject and miserable condition of post-war German society—and of course the rip-tide undercurrent of anti-Semitism, which was healthiest in Germany but still achieving newish heights in Hungary, Poland and of course the Soviet Union. Through a wicked and unrelenting propaganda campaign which fed on fear and retribution and rage in defeat, Hitler secured a rising power base among disparate populations: university students, veterans, farmers, the working lower classes, and a huge dollop of political investment from a number of different industrial sources. When his part almost wins control of the country outright against the creakingly old Hindenburg, and others, in 1933, it is Hitler who outmaneuvers his political rivals to secure the chancellorship and controlling power in the Reichstag. It was all downhill from there, to the ring of fire.

I’ve seldom seen the rise of the Nazi party presented this way in the year of their ascendency—this pamphlet was printed in 1933 by the Foreign Policy Association (founded in 1918 and still in existence) , and written by its chair, James G. .McDonald (who served 1919-1933 as it turns out) for a radio broadcast for 11 March 1933. It is interesting to note that McDonald was the first U.S.ambassador to Israel (1949-1951).

The front cover of the diagram:

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from Einstein's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

Einstein's delayed 1923 acceptance speech for his hideously delayed Nobel prize--finally offered to him in 1921 for his "work on the photoelectric effect" of 1905--is generated here into a piece of Found Word Art, fashioned by the language-generator residing in the WORDLE site. As in the other cases of word art generated by Wordle, the work is the product of the vocabulary-digester at Wordle, which in this case consumed the entire text of the speech and displayed it according to the appearance of the most popularly-used words.  The results of these jaunts into Wordle have been fascinating to me, as I hope they are to you. 

The full text of the Einstein speech (which is tricky to find in full text versions) is below.  I'm sorry to say that I've messed up the equations, trying to fit them into typepad. 

Also you can click on the Wordle display to make it not only larger but clearer. 

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from Einstein's Complete List of Publications

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 248

This piece of Found Word Art is generated by the word-synthesizer at the lovely Wordle site which crunched and counted the occurrence of words in the titles and attributions of Albert Einstein's complete opus. (See our page on the Einstein publications which we used to generate this art here.)

If you click on the image it will become larger and clearer. 

Wordle Word Art--Vocabulary from Einstein's Two Letters to Roosevelt on the Atomic Bomb

JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The newest contribution to my new-found category of Found Word Art is constructed from the text of Albert Einstein's two letters (August 2 1939 and March 7 1940) to President Franklin Roosevelt about the use of the coming atomic weapon.  The text of the letters was simply deposited in the wonder-engine word-atomizer at WORDLE, and the relative distribution of the most commonly-used words were given new representation in relative sizes.  I should point out the earliest post I did on the cautionary letters of Einstein and Szilard to FDR and refer to it for the explanation the occurrences of some of the Wordle words.

If you click on the image it will become larger and clearer.

The complete text of the two letters is found below in the Continue Reading section.