JF Ptak Science Books

A History of Dots, Periods & Points, Part I: Descartes and a Year-Ending Post

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In closing out my first year of blogging [2008], I'd like to take an incidental look at one of our language's most important fragments.  Like Mr. Eliot's observations of Baudelaire being a fragmentary Dante, and like the brilliantly arranged frammenti of Piranesi, the great bits of our communication processes owe a breathy thanks to the lowly period.  A dot.  A point.  It separates to provide analysis and coherent recognition of thought. 

A simple dot.  (.)  But dots are as little or as big as you need:  there's "Little Dot" (the cartoon character of Harvey Comics, created 1947, who was fascinated bylines and dots and dashes), "Admiral Dot", polka dots, Mama Dots.  Dots get considerably ratcheted up in quantum dots, and then expanded beyond that with the idea of the dot as an abbreviation for the multiplication sign, both of which increase things rather than bringing them to an end, a conclusion.  The dot used after a musical note delineates that there is an increase in time by half, which would be an interesting notation to adopt in literature, if we were somehow able to magnify and increase that which would normally have been ended by the same notation.

Dots have formed the background to some of the most significant scientific illustrations of all time, like these two images, the first of which Descartes' illustration of the decomposition of the rainbow, found in his Dioptrics, a fabulously important illustration. The second is from Descartes' Principia Philosophiae (1684) which display his theory of vortices, accommodating an idea of physics eliminating atoms and vacuums and joining matter and space, matter being constantly deflected from moving in a straight line, moving in vortices.  Then of course there's the fantastically appreciated advancement of Samuel Morse's telegraphic instrument and his abbreviated transmitting alphabet (his "code"), which fascilitated the distribution of information in the 1840's  in the same sort of way that the internet increased the flow and ease of data in the 1990's. (Actually that's only half correct for Morse, as his was a system of dots and dashes.)

 

Things get more interesting if we expand the idea of the "dot" to a "point", as just about everything we have discussed in math for thousands of years has been based upon the idea of a "point in space", forming the bits of the coat hanger on which the whole fabric of the heavens has been hung.  Going the other way, there's the decimal point, which brings us to negative powers of ten, into smaller and smaller worlds, to the incomprehensibly small, showing that "nothing" probably doesn't exist. (We'll leave the idea of "spot" alone, tonight.)

That's quite a bit of expansion from a word that starts out life in Middle English as the definer of the head of a boil.

But this year will end in about 50 minutes from now, and I wll be able to put the final keystroke to the final sentence to my final post of the year, and put it all to sleep.  And the year will end, at 12:00, precisely.  On the dot.

A Room with a View: Hornor's Panorama of London (1821) and its Cache of Irony

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Before satellite imagery, before airplanes, before balloons, and before photography, the only way of obtaining large-scale and factual panoramic views was to get to a good observation point and draw away.  Thomas Hornor (a surveyor and panoramist, 1785-1844) did just such a thing in 1821:  taking advantage of the cross being removed for cleaning from the top of St. Paul's (London), he somehow convinced the powers-that-be to allow him to construct an observation post for himself in its place for  a long term, uninterrupted and altogether fabulous view of the city of London.  He set up shop up there, about 400 feet above the ground, and stayed, making minutely detailed drawings of the cityscape, working with a telescope and a great deal of reserve.  And some amount of courage--we can see from this detail of his story published in The Mirrour in 1823 that his shack was, well, not the safest-looking shack that has ever been built atop a cathedral. 

The end result was an enormous, fantastically detailed acre-sized painting which was installed and displayed in Decimus Burton's Colosseum. The installation was as much an artwork as the painting--it was affixed to the walls and people would view it from a multi-story observation deck in the middle of the building.  For those who didn't want to climb the stairs to get to the viewing room,  an "ascending car" was fabricated, making the structure one of the earliest buildings to have an elevator.  There is some sort of irony in that:  people would pay to see a painting using London's (perhaps)

first elevator to get to the top of a small structure inside another structure to see a painting made from the top of a large structure of a scene that could be viewed for free by walking outside.  Nonetheless, the fantabulous painting was viewed by more than a million  people before moving on.

I have a feeling that this may be an interesting category to develop (a "room with a View" that is), pursuing other rooms in other tall places. 
For example the last little triangular window is the hole in the sky for something at the Chrysler Building in NYC.  I had heard that it was initially a bathroom that was built for the avuncular Mr. Chrysler, so that he could do his

business higher than anyone else in th world, which seems to have fitted his personality.  After all, he did his fair share of this behavior, having dumped on people of all shapes and sizes, not the least of whom included the architect for his spectacular building, William Van Alen.  He was stiffed by Chrysler because of mysterious and misbegotten ideas arising from old Walter's temperamental and stingy belly--that dear readers takes a lot of ____, not paying the architect who designed the world's tallest building and then to put his name on it.  

I should mention that this little room in the Chrysler building pops up every now and then, perhaps most famously in Kurt Vonnegut's Jailbird, where beautiful Kurt stuffs the head offices of the American Harp Company.

Check out Stephen Oetterman's The Panorama, a History of a Mass Medium (1997) and Bernard Comment's The Panorama (1995).

The Air Bridge to Nowhere: the Friendly Skies, Chicago to Moscow, 1944

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This hopeful and terrifically unbalanced homage to wistful loveliness of the Soviet Union, The Businessman's Stake in American-Soviet Friendship, by Harland Allen, was published in Chicago in 1944, and seems to me a small prayer for what the post-war world might bring about.  Allen forced the then-popular economic thought that the people dangling from the visor of Uncle Joe Stalin's cap were money angels rather than Russian corpses, and that the air lane shown in the trans-polar map at right would soon be filled with American exports headed to Moscow. (Little did he know that in  a decade this line would be the distance traveled by ICBMs, or close enough to it.)  At least that seems to be the hope here, Stalin forcibly melted into the Big Board, the Soviet Union trading on the DOW as CCCP (Inc.).

The small pamphlet received some spirited review support from the Northwestern University School of Law, the Des Moines Register and Tribune,the Society for the Advancement of Management, the Meadville Theological School, and Laird Dell Attorney at Law. And that's about it. But these were ripe times for this sort of pro-Soviet thought:  after all, dozens of millions of Russians had been killed in the fight in the East against their former Nazi allies, and without all of that blood sacrifice I have no doubt that the war would've lasted for some years to come.*  The U.S. had a powerful ally in the Soviet Union regardless of what had happened there in the 1930's and regardless of their attack on Finland and regardless of their Pact with Hitler--from 1942 onward they would hinder and halt the Nazi army and nearly ground the whole thing down to a nub, crushing the German capacity to fight in the west. The atomic bomb was to be untried until July 1945, and the outcome of the war was not yet known.  Love for the Soviet Union was high in the sky at this point, FDR making many airy and superior statements about our new ally, while the rest of the propaganda machine was lubed and oiled for the coming fight.  LIFE magazine went so far as to pronounce Lenin as "perhaps the greatest man of modern times" and that the NKVD was analogous to the FBI.  Even old anti-Soviet hawks like MacArthur publicly pronounced their admiration for the new regime.  (George Patton famously did not.)

Back to our pamphlet: aside from some romantic vision of the Soviet Union, Allen maintained that the U.S. needed to deal with the CCCP because of its enormous army (which he did not want to annoy and fight) and its impending "mastery o the air"--it would be better to trade and make money than it would be to make war.  Allen pointed out that some of the problems of Americans dealing with the political system in the Soviet Union were inadequate reports on what he described as the country's economic "principle of national planning". .(I hardly know what George Orwell might've said about the supremely understated summation of the Soviet system as "national planning" and the fruitless and embarrassingly weak attempt at  controlling language to describe the monstrously repressive regime.)  He continues:  "Journalists have been positively fearful of open-minded reporting in Russia lest they get tagged--or tarred--with the familiar epithet "communist", and then goes on to describe the similarities of the "two great peace-loving peoples". 

And so it goes, on and on in this pamphlet--it just isn't worth going into any further than this.  The euphoric sheen of pro-Soviet sentiment and appreciation wore thinner as the war progressed, truer feelings becoming more exposed as the German army retreated westward, reproducing the famous Minard chart of Napoleon's disappeared army in a war 130 years earlier.  The endgame for European real estate, fumbled badly by the dying FDR at Yalta, brought out the cardboard smiles between the US and the Soviet Union, relations strained to the point that the military employment of the atomic bomb was in some not-minor sense made to bridle Soviet intentions.

But that was still two years hence for Mr. Allen, who I guess couldn't see into the future that far, even if his work was heralded by the Des Moines Register.  He just didn't do a very good job of withstanding the test of time, even though that test ended in 1946.

Blank & Missing People, XXVIII: Mustachioed Number People

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I have been surprised by the strength and endurance of this series on blank and missing people--astonished, really, that there would be so much that would present itself in such incidental ways.  I do not go out of my way to find these things, they just come to me in the course of daily living; perhaps if I looked for them I would see them less frequently.

Mr. 52 and Mr. 53 are part of a group picture of Esteemed British Yachtsmen in the 24 August 1884 issue of The Graphic magazine--it is actually a smartly-conceived thumbnail image index of a double-page photo, an easily-readable key to a complex photo.  The effect of taking it out of context, though, is remarkable, turning the index into a wood engraving of number-only-blank-faced people with facial hair attributes. 

THis image a

Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius, Spectres and Ghosts: Tremendous Titles in the History of Witchcraft.

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Below are 31 titles relating to witches and witchcraft, printed in the 16th through 18th century--they all share some absolutely fabulous title constructions, elements and phrases. For example, the great work by Reginald Scot (listed first, below) contains the following phrasing IN ITS TITLE:

"lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers 
knaverie of conjurors
impietie of inchanters
follie of soothsaiers
impudent falsehood of cousenors
infidelitie of atheiststs
pestilent practises of Pythonists
curiositie of figurecasters
vanitie of dreamers
beggerlie art of Alcumystrie
abomination of idolatrie, the
horrible art of poisoning
vertue and power of naturall magicke,
conveiances of legierdemaine and juggling are deciphered..."

Laurent.Bordelon's title includes the following spectacular efforts:  "Ridiculous Extravagancies of...Magick, the Black-Art, Daemoniacks, Conjurers, Witches, Hobgoblins, Incubus's, Succubus's and the Diabolical-Sabbath,Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius's, Spectres and Ghosts, Dreams, the Philosopher's-Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes,Talismans, Lucky and Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets, and all sorts of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments..."

And on and on.  In my experience the titles of books on witchcraft and demonology are among the most creative and imaginatively flouncy.
Enjoy.

Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Wherein the lewd dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knaverie of conjurors, the impietie of inchanters, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falsehood of cousenors, the infidelity of atheists, the pestilent practises of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreamers, the beggerlie art of Alcumystrie, The abomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magicke, and all the conveiances of legierdemaine and juggling
 are deciphered: and many other things opened, which have long been hidden, howbeit verie necessarie to be known, 1584. Imprinted at London, by William Brome.

Bordelon, L. A History of the Ridiculous Extravagancies of Monsieur Oufle; Occasion'd by his reading Books treating of Magick, the Black-Art, Daemoniacks, Conjurers, Witches,  Hobgoblins, Incubus's, Succubus's and the Diabolical-Sabbath; of Elves, Fairies, Wanton Spirits, Genius's, Spectres and Ghosts; of  Dreams, the Philosopher's-Stone, Judicial Astrology, Horoscopes,
  Talismans, Lucky and Unlucky Days, Eclipses, Comets,sorts of Apparitions, Divinations, Charms, Enchantments and other
       Superstitious Practices. With Notes containing a multitude of
       Quotations out of those Books, which have either Caused such
       Extravagant Imaginations, or may serve to Cure them. Written
       originally in French, by the Abbot B--; and now translated into
       English. London, Printed for J. Morphew near Stationer's Hill,
       1711.

Living Past an Iconographic Prime: Modernity Welcomes the Past

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Woodrow Call, the major and surviving figure in the four volumes of Larry McMurtry’s  Great American Novel/tetraology,  Lonesome Dove, is in his early seventies (about 73 years) old when we see him in the premier volume  Streets of Laredo.  (He is born ca. 1823 and is approximately 20 years old when he first teams up with Gus McCrae in the series' premier installment, Dead Mans Walk (which takes place ca. 1843).  Although he seems to be an old man who is not a part of the times in which he lived, he is far from being without company.  It is easy to think of frontier legends like Pat Garrett and Charles Goodnight as being a part of ancient modern American history—and they were, temporally, but not physically.  Even though Pat Garrett kills Billy the Kid in 1882, Garrett lives until 1908;  Charley Goodnight helps begin the concept of the cattle drive in Texas in 1860, and then lives another 69 years.  Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp became famous in the 1870’s, and both lived until what seems to be an incongruously close time—the 1920’s. It just seems incredible to me that figures like this survived nearly into the lifetime of my father.

The frontier legends below all transcended their place in history by many decades, and brought the idea of a living history just a little closer to comprehension; their survivability brings to bear  how close the grand epoch of the frontier is to America, even in 2008.

Hanging Judge Isaac Parker, (b. 1834) dies 1896

Shanghai Peirce, (b. 1834), dies in 1900.

Judge Roy Bean (b. 1825) lives until 1903

Pat Garrett (b. 1850), dies in 1908

Billy Dixon, 1850-1913

George Bent (Fort), 1843-1918

Bat Masterson, 1853-1921

Thomas Moran, the great painter and the illuminist who brought the West back East before photography, lived 90 years to 1826 .

 Annie Oakley (the"peerless Lady wing-shot"), born just before the war,  height.

Big Tree (Adoeettee) Kiowa Chief, born 1845, lives until 1929.

Black Elk, the great chief, (“Black Elk Speaks”), was born in 1863 and died in 1950.

Revelations and Beautifully-Illustrated Prophesies: Methodius, 1504

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"For the uneducated the pictures are necessary for reading" (Imperitis pro lectione pictura est.)
--from the dedication to Revelationes

So we read in the dedication of this early illustrated work on prophesy. I love that:  "pictures are necessary for reading".

This magnificent woodcut is one of 61 illustrations appearing in Saint Methodius, the Bishop of Tyre,  (Sebastian Brant) [Revelationes] (Methodius primum Olimpiade et postea Tyri ciuitatum episcopus, sub diocleciano Imperatore, in Calcide civitate (que nigropontuz appelatur ut diuus scribit hieronimus martyrio)) and  printed in Basel just past the turn of the sixteenth century 1504. It was the second edition of this work (the first appearing in 1496), replacing the un-illustrated first edition, making its appeal to the lesser- or unread among its readers. the author had been asked to include illustrations for the benefit of all those who could read only pictures--and for many that's all they would need, the 61 images were easily understood and consumed.

Neither edition though was actually written by Methodius, both being, probably, the work of Wolfgang Aitinger, a monk in Ausberg.

Some Samples of Ancient Literature in Prophesy and Prophetic Revelations:

Old Testament Apocalypse  Literature:

Canonical: Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii.; xxxiii.; xxxiv.-xxxv; (Jeremiah xxxiii. 14-26?); Ezekiel ii. 8; xxxviii.-xxxix.; Joel iii. 9-17; Zech. xii—xiv; Daniel.

Extra-canonical:-- Palestinian. 200-100 B.C., Book of Noah, 1 Enoch vi.-xxxvi.; lxxii.-xi, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. 100 B.C. to 1 B.C.:1 Enoch i.-v.; xxxvii.-lxxi.; xci.-civ; Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, i.e. T. Lev. x., xiv.-xvi., T. Jud. xxi. 6-xxiii, T. Zeb. ix., T. Dan. v. 6, 7; Psalms of Solomon. A.D. 1-100 and later:Assumption of Moses, Apocalypse of Baruch., 4 Ezra, Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, Apocalypse of Zephaniah, Apocalypse of Abraham, Prayer of Joseph, Book of Eldad and Modad, Apocalypse of Elijah. Hellenistic: 2 Enoch, Oracles of Hystaspes. Testament of Job, Testaments of the III. Patriarchs,Sibylline Oracles (excluding Christian portions).

New Testament Apocalypse Literature:

Canonical: Apocalypse in Mark xiii. (Matthew xxiv., Luke xxi.).2 Thessalonians ii,Revelation.

Apocryphal: Apocalypse of Peter, Testament of Hezekiah, Testament of Abraham, Oracles of Hystaspes, Vision of Isaiah, Shepherd of Hermas. 5 Ezra 6 Ezra, Christian Sibyllines, Apocalypses of Paul, Thomas and Stephen, Apocalypses of Esdras, Paul, John, Peter, The Virgin, Sedrach, Daniel, Revelations of Bartholomew, Questions of Bartholomew.

Found Images: Penny Lane and the Inexpensive Treat, London, 1896

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"And all the people that come and go
Stop and say hello."  --Penny Lane, the Beatles.

This lovely image comes from Views of London, New Series, "photographed, printed and published by the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Co., Ltd., of Regent Street, London", and printed in 1896.  It shows the street scene outside of the New Law Courts on Fleet Street--new legal chambers that were a mixture of odd Victorian tastes for the modern and Gothic, preserving the Medieval along the way.  But that's not what I'm attracted by here--I'm interested in the little bit at the bottom-right of the image, a little slice of life of common London trying to make a a few bob off the barristers and support staffs from across the street, of all the people who would come in to say "hello"..  As you can see in the enlargement, there are a host of opportunities available for a penny:  meals, rooms, even a bath.  That's the possibility of the hidden life of images like this--the incidental and normally invisible landscapes attached to the object of interest are far more interesting to me than the thing that the camera was pointed at. 

Found Images: The Great Wheel, 1895

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The Great Wheel appears in Views of London, New Series, "photographed, printed and published by the London Stereoscopic & Photographic Co., Ltd., of Regent Street, London, and printed in 1896.  The "Great Wheel" was the Great Wheel at Earl's Court, built in 1895, and was a copy of the great wheel constructed for the International Exposition at Chicago in 1893.  This enormous all-steel tension-supported wheel held 1600 people who enjoyed a twenty-minute ride once-around the 300-foot-tall structure.  It was a fantastic piece of architect.

The photographic reproduction process for the London Views book was by Woodburytype, which is quite fine, and which also allowed for a 3200 dpi scan which allowed for some nice detail to be pulled up in enlargement. 

A Unique Position for Brain Dissection: Estienne's near-immortal classic (1545)

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This remarkable woodcut image comes from Charles Estienne's (1501-1564) De Dissectione Partium corporis Humani linri tres, a 375-page opus illustrated with 62 fantastic full-page woodcuts and published in 1545  This work is surpassed I think only by the masterpiece Fabrica by Vesalius (1543)--the great standard of anatomical illustration.  Actually, historians have determined that the Estienne book was about ready to go in 1539, but due to a variety of problems, was not published until two years following his fellow-classmate's Vesalius' work.  Had things gone a little differently for Estienne, he would most certainly enjoy more ethereal fame than he does now, though I'm sure some of that would be diminished by the weird and exotic nature of many of his prints.  Vesalius chose a somewhat more pragmatic approach, though just about everyone would seem so compared to Estienne.  The Estienne work comes at the beginning of the wave of spectacularly illustrated early books:  Gesner's 1553 Historiae animalium, Georg Agricola's De re meteallica (1556), Pierre Belon's two works on fishes (1555) and birds (1556), Jacques Dalechamps (1513-1588). Chirurgie Françoise... avec plusiers figures des instrumens necessaries pour l'operation manuelle.(1569).and  Matteo Realdo Columbo's (ca 1510-1559). De re anatomica libri XV (1559). are notable examples of defining-efforts of this period, classics of thought to this day.  And beautiful.

The beautiful mind here in Estienne's effort is perhaps the most lovely of all of his illustrations--it is also the most unusual, and the most perspective-abusing.  Our subject is seated in a seemingly-normal armchair of the period, except that the posts lack arms.  The perspective is such that the chair back seems to alternate position, an apparent illusion, changing from front-to-back and back-to-front, while the chair back posts seem to also alternate heights.  Nothing else seems to quite work either:  the floor is at odds with the walls and ceiling, the window is falling inwards, and the chair (again) seems to float when you look at the ceiling.

Be that as it may, the dissection of the brain takes place with the cadaver in the chair, the body held there with pins (one of which is seen coming through the right shoulder.  The four elements of the brain identified A to D are explained in the ornamental legend at top.  We can see the rest of the top of the head placed on the stool at left, just in case anyone was wondering.

Again, the Estienne book was a magnificent and somewhat twisty-unusual accomplishment.  Had he published in 1539, which was a definite "maybe", it would be Estienne who would've been known for introducing such things as the first time the entire human body was discussed and illustrated, and the first time that a serial dissection was presented and illustrated.  But he didn't get the job done in '39, and so he is not known for these things.  But almost.

Something happened to Estienne in 1561:  after he had been appointed printer to the king of France, things went badly, and he went into bankruptcy, evidently dying in debtors prison in 1564.  fine, old, principled and somewhat-monied family or not, Estienne didn't last long in incarceration.

Estienne's other works include:

• Praedium Rusticum (1554), a collection of tracts which he had compiled from ancient writers on various branches of agriculture and which continued to be a favorite book down to the end of the 17th century
• Dictionarium historicum ad policum (1553), the first French encyclopedia.
• Thesaurus Ciceronianus (1557)

Found Portraits Outside and Under Els: Greenwich Street, NYC, 1893

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Just another in a short series of looking hard at NYC photographs, looking for miniature scenes within small scenes within sub-scenes within the whole.  Ken Burns has made a living by wrapping this process around storytelling, I know, but that doesn't mean that us normal folks can't do it too.  This capture is of Greenwich and Morris Streets, made by the John S, Hall & Son firm around 1891.  Morris is a very short bugger of a street, barely five houses long, running into Washington Street (which you can't see because of my bad cropping).  The group of men waiting for the photo to be made are patient, feet close together, all bowlers straight-on, with one man standing nearly in a puddle.  The closer you pull into these men, the more their stories seem wanting to be told. 

Found People in Windows: Hudson Street, NYC, 1865

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This fine-looking, serious and imposing specimen steals the show in the photo made to exhibit the John Peake Pharmacy, from whom this carpenter rented his second-story workspace.  I have no doubt that Mr. Peake is the well-dressed fellow in the tall beaver-skinned stovepipe hat at bottom.  The photograph was made by Marcus Ormsby on :Lower Hudson Street in New York City in 1865--one of the signs to the left of the supposed Mr. Peake says something about a picnic taking place in August 1865.  The poster above that one though says something about "300 Wanted" and looks a lot like Civil War recruitment posters that I've seen--if it was July/August or thereabouts the war would've been over for months....perhaps it was an old poster, perhaps a poster for something else entirely. 

I do like the carpenter in his working window, there above the "a" in "Peake"--he is holding a substantial planer (or moulder?) in his right hand, and wearing what looks like a union/affiliation 4-square cap.  I'm happy to see that he  is steadying himself with his left hand's pinkey--for all of that musky confidence he  seems perfectly well in comfort keeping his whole enterprise artistically balanced with a longish-looking pinkey finger.

The buildings in this photo--not 18th century, I don't think, but probably thirty years old or so in 1865--are virtually covered by signage advertising what was going on inside:  the larger image shows a printer, carpenter, oil cloth merchant ("oil'd clothing"), pharmacist, paintstore, sign painter and card maker, all there and doing business in about 60 feet of street.  The interesting part of the signs is the very free use of the period ".", which ends one-word pronouncements, proper names, and just about everything else--I like that. 

All of this aside, this is just a gorgeous photograph offering a perfect glimpse into a workaday scene in NYC just after the end of the Civil War.

People in Windows: Found Portraits in Little Places, 1887

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This photograph was made in 1887 by the prolific if not mysterious* John S. Johnston, taken from Amsterdam Avenue (between 147th and 148th streets) , and looking east to the Harlem River and the Bronx.  My guess is that there was a three- or four-story apartment on the west side of Amstersdam and Mr. Johnston set himself up on the roof with his view camera to make this shot.  As a photographer Johnston's interests extended to naval/nautical scenes--making photographs of the American fleet as well as racing yachts and such--and recording creeping uirbanism into formerly rural areas in the northern reaches of NYC. 

Of interest here is the brand-new Mount Saitn Vincent Hotel (at left), and the small animal pen located right in fron of it.  The other interesting deal is that there is a considerable amount of trash that has blown up against the fences (especially at bottom) from the winds coming in off of the river--from where I sit it seems as though there might be a foot or two of trash leaning up against the fence. Actually one of the things that my eyes are trained for now is looking at the trash in the streets of old cityscape photographs--it is really remarkable how much stuff winds up on the street and preserved foreverish in photos....one of my favorite images, which I cannot put my hands on this very moment, shows a few fellows leaning up against the side of a newly opened "New York Store" in Austin, and in the gutter in front of them are four ratty old shoes strewn amidst the other less recognizeable trash.

The other interesting bit is the found portrait of the man scene leaning out of his second-floor window in the building at bottom right.  Unfortunately I'm not working with the original so I'm picking up a lot of grain from the halftone, but after playing with it a little in photoshop I've come up with a reasonable look at this man, who must've just been watching Johnston getting his exposure ready.  I have little doubt that if the original were available that we'd be able to discern facial characteristics.  (Actually, I'm looking for myself again--I've found images of me lurking in tiny bits of large crowds in old photographs; sometimes the resemblence is astonishing, really.  This guy already looks big abd bearded and bald, which is most of my story.  If you drop in my eyes, there I am.)

*Johnston lived not far from where this picture was made:  his addresses have been given as 783 Broadway, 1263 Broadway and  508 W. 158th St.  He died at Niagra Falls, where he went to recuperate from a "severe cold" that he caught while making photos at a horse race.  On his deathbed, he refused to identify any friends, or family, and would not give the address of his home.  The obituary reported that he did have a wife and daughter, but they had been estranged "for some time".  I can respect a man whose wish is to go out very quietly.  (I don't know the story about his identification and how the obituary came to be written--that woul dmake an interesting tale.)

God's Odds: the (Very) Fine Arithmetic of Heaven and the Infinite Population of Hell

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Some years ago I purchased a rather large collection from the Library of Congress unimaginatively called "The Pamphlet Collection".  It was not very distinguished, and for the most part, not terribly interesting on the face of it--but it was LARGE and, as it turns out, most of the material in the collection just isn't anywhere else (for good or for ill).  After trying to make sense of the purchase--which was categorized and boxed but I couldn't really figure out what the principle of division was--there was one pile that refused identification because the subject matter was so inescapably unusual, so unexpected, so logic-challenging, that they formed their own genre: they became the Outsider Logic collection.  There are at least 500 of them, maybe more.  They are differentiated from the Naive Surreal collection, which is associated but just happen to look incredibly odd because they are not only way out of context but also their context largely doesn't exist anymore.  

The sample today is a religious tract of some sort--very scream-y, lots of quotation marks, exclamation points, and is thick and stubbily printed, and which really doesn't have a title per se, the front cover simply starting  "Behold I Make All Things New. This work by  V.T. Houteff.It is too long to get an idea of what is really going on, but I happened upon this diagram, which, shall we say, is a little on the outsider side, as the author explains that the Earth "lives" in an atmosphere surrounded by a bubble wall of water.  I like the arrow pointing to "water". 

On the next page to this attractive image was a longish rant on the number 144,000.  It turns out that 144,000 represents the total  number of people allowed into heaven. 

If this is so, where is everyone else?  That doesn’t leave much room for pets, or other animals, or insects.  DO plants go to heaven?  What about amoebic life?  When a person “goes” to heaven, what goes with them?  Are all life forms—microscopic and not—that are always present on a person/body given a free ride?  There’s a lot of life going on oh the surface of the skin and of course inside the body…I guess that would be a "no”, as I imagine Heaven would be ultimately clean. 

I assume that people still have bodies because of the belief—exhibited in this pamphlet of outsider logic and by perhaps millions of other people who are adherents of other faiths and belief systems---that there are 144,000 people allowed into heaven. Wouldn’t there be infinite room for your spirit, which I would imagine to be infinitely small?  Something that has no mass and is not calculable on any level couldn’t ever fill anything up.   

The 144,000 figure is something like 7/100’s of one percent of all people who have lived and are living, which is something like having a one-in-five million chance of getting into heaven right now—that is IF we allowed that heaven could be filled up right this instant.  If there was wiggle room involved—say if g wanted to include the possibilities that there might be a ultimate human population of 1 trillion or something like that, then, well, there are two more zeroes that would go in front of the percentage number (.0007%), to provide for the prospect of heaven not getting filled up until some point in the next 100,000 years. 

What if there were 124,000 people already in heaven?  Suddenly competition gets gigantically fierce, allowing 20,000 places for the current 6 billion, which means that .001% of everyone living gets into heaven and then fill it up.  What would it be like to be the last person in?  Do you shut the door?  Are there people behind you on line? 

And then how good do you have to be to get in?  Better than a baby who dies in childbirth?  That happens about 50 times an hour, worldwide, so far as I can tell.  I’d expect a person like that could get into heaven as they certainly didn’t have much of a chance to do anything to interfere with g_d or its plan.  Once you start throwing in children who die who are under the age where they could commit a foul act, say 5, and then toss in aborted fetuses (which for these cases I’m sure would be called “babies”), that figure of 50-an-hour would jump, probably, two orders of magnitude.  500 deserving babies an hour for thousands of years adds up to a heck of a lot more than 144,000.  Actually the 144,000 total would be hit in less than three weeks.  Which in the course of tens of thousands of years of human civilization and 10,000’s of thousands more to come, that would mean that 99%++++ of all babies and children who die before the age of 5 would go to not-heaven.  It is also hugely problematic because humans may be around on earth for another million years, which cuts the chances of slipping into heaven to seven (or twelve) places to the right of the decimal point.  Those are not good odds.

That, friends, doesn’t sound very fair.

I guess that means that hell doesn’t have a bottom line.  Hell never gets full.

I don’t mean to stomp on any belief systems here, but, well, the numbers sorta speak for themselves.  They also mean that for all of the Jehovah’s Witnesses alive right now—a religion that distinctly shares this 144k belief—that basically none of them alive right now stand any sort of chance of going to heaven.  That is a hard sell.

A statement in fairness to the ancients:

Historically, speaking for the folks thinking about this 2000 or whatever years ago, 144,000 does loom larger than it looks today, of course.  Not only was the population of the world much smaller (by almost two orders of magnitude) but there was also almost no way for anyone living then to accurately guess the global population.  Given a population of 100 million, if everyone alive in the year 1 were to be considered for a filled-up heaven, then about one-tenth of one percent would make it.   Now, if you were an ancient and thinking about the population of the world in general, my best guess is that you’d be thinking in terms of maybe tens of millions. Maybe.  That means the 144k figure would be something believable, sort of, being 1% of the population.  Say we grant the 1% as a given; and that it was a given that the ancients thought in “low” numbers for populations; it is also a given, I think, that they did think in long terms of time, in the thousands of years, at least.  That means if they gave room for heaven to be :”filled up” in a thousand years, and the population of the world didn’t change, it would mean that of everyone on earth as known to the ancients that 144 people a year for a thousand years would go to heaven.  And frankly, those figures don’t look very promising either.   

"The Fall of the Bolshevik Regime", Kereneky in Petrograd 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 435

This photograph--a picture of hope soon dissipated--shows the 1918 portion of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 at just about the time of its, well, “completion”, beginning the period of the Russian Civil War, which would last until the creation of the USSR in 1922.  (The photo is also part of a News Photo Service archive I purchased some years ago in, and was originally released by the Western Newspaper Union.) Alexander Kerensky, who according to the stamped caption of this photograph, was leading an army of “200,000 marching on Petrograd” in order to overthrow “Lenine [sic] and Trotsky” and the “Bolsheiki Revolution”.  Kerensky (1881-1970) was elected second Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government under Lenin following the February (1917) Revolution.  A complex of war (WWI) and domestic/social/political directed chaos led Kerensky and Lenin to opposing paths, and, following the October 1917 revolution, the winner was clear.  Kerensky, according to the data on the photo, was a “David” leading an army in opposition deposed to toppling  the Bolsheviks “next week”.  Things did not go as planned, or almost nothing did, and Kerensky’s army drifted, walked and ran, via indifference, fear and belief to the side of the Bolsheviks.  About the only soldiers who stayed loyal to Kerensky was the 1^st Petrograd Women’s Battalion, a unit of the 1^st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death. (This was the first all-female combat unit in Russia, and although starting out with about a force of 2,000, quickly wasted away under the rigorous and harsh command of its commander, Maria Bochkareva*, down to about a fighting group of 300.)  Kerensky fled the country and began a long series of travels, though ultimately settling in the United States, dying in NYC in 1970 (making him one of the longest surviving principal participants of the Revolutions).

St. Petersburg/Petrograd has a long and important history in the formation of the Russian nation—established in 1703 as the capital of the Russian Empire and remaining so for more than 200 years, it was also the seat of the 1905 Revolution as well as the February and October revolutions of 1917.  Another bit of full-circle was that Kerensky and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) were both born in the not-large town of Simbirsk (now called Ulyanovsk).  Kerensky’s father, as it turned out, taught Lenin at the Kazan State University, a great institution of higher learning featuring non-other than the principal founder of non-Euclidean geometry, Nikolai Lobachevsky, as its rector for almost twenty years (1827-1846). 

 

 

*This interesting, severe, passionate woman through intrigue and loss wound up fleeing the Soviet Union in 1918, winding up in NYC and ultimately meeting with Woodrow Wilson, appealing for American support and intervention to halt the Bolsheviks.  She made the same appeal directly to George V, before winding up back in the Soviet Union, where, in 1918, she was captured.  She was ultimately tried and convicted of being an enemy of the people, sentence to death, and then killed by the precursor to the KGB, the Chaka.