JF Ptak Science Books

World War I Photographs--Full Metal Jacket, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books       Quick Post

I do believe that this is a Lewis Machine Gun, one of the most popularly-used automatic weapons by the BEF (and of American design). It was a gas-operated weapon firing a .30-06 Springfield at 500/600 rpm with an effective range of about a half-mile.  The drum magazine (not present here so far as I can see) held 47 and 97 rounds.  These soldiers were all business.

The original is available here.

How YOU Can be One of the 97% of Americans Who Survive Nuclear Holocaust, 1961

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1378

Well, I'd think that this issue of LIFE magazine would've sold in the hundreds of millions with the promise it makes here--right on the front cover--that 97 out ot 100 Americans could survive a nuclear slugfest--if only they were to follow the instructions of this article.

We only get to the marrow of the issue after wading through a few articles and ads for Hires Root Beer, Maiden bras, silk skin girdles, Bayer aspirin, Schlitz beer, Old Taylor Whiskey, Ge "telephone color" night table clocks, scotchguard raincoats, Lanolin Plus Hair Spray Net, Marja bras, Red Rose cologne, nylon carpet, Maidenform girdles, NY Life, Sealy mattresses, Metrecal, Corn Flakes, Hammond organ, John Hancock Life Insurance, Friskies dog food, Cahmpion spark plugs, Budweiser, BF Goodrich tires, Tang, RCA, Anacin, Speedstick deodorant, Castro convertibles, B+W Whiskey, Kodak and  Vista TV.  Probably I missed a few. When you get to the big ad for Royal Crown Colas with the white-hatted BBQ cook getting a kiss with a big wiener on a stick, you've arrived at the article on saving the life of your family and your country.

If only we could build enough shelters--and by "we" I mean "you", and build them properly, and outfit them, and are able to get to them in the 14 minutes that you might have to get to your destination, and you stay down long enough and the attack light enough, then probably some people will survive.  How these folks got the 97% number is an issue of faith--I think that they must've steeped themselves in mystical prayers to secretly reformulate the percentage "23" into "97" without actually telling anyone.  I figure that this was the key to survival.

I've written many times on this theology of survivability (see the series on atomic and nuclear weapons on this blog, here) but seldom does one see such an incredible, indefensible claim such as this, and splashed across the cover of America's most popular picture magazine, accompanied by a letter of support from Camelot.  Somehow in the great looming nuclear confrontation that actually comes to pass, somehow "only"3% of the population doesn't make it.  Of course if there was a natural catastrophe in which 3% of the country was killed--that would be about 4.5 million in 1961 population or about 9 million in 2011--it would be an absolutely phenomenal tragedy. (Ofcourse there were many European countries that lost more than 3% of their populations during WWI and WWII, but that's another story).  But to escape nuclear Armageddon in this country with 3% loss is much better than other government figures published around the same time that predicted casualty rates exceeding 100 million. 

But hearts and minds are won abroad and at home, so the homefires must have been stoked to prevent a colossal depression from befalling the country, which of course goes hand-in-hand with the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, with all policies somehow making it possible for the rush to the abyss to be the one thing that was keeping us (in a Zeno-ish paradox) from falling into it. 

But 97%?  You can read the article here from page 95 for the full story. 

 

 

Baseball and the Rifle Team at the NYSE, 1927

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1377

Is there nothing else that shouts out $15 trillion market cap than this NYSE basketball team?  Well, probably.  These photos appear in a New York Stock Exchange personnel department publication for 1927, and as the HR -arm of the Exchange,  devoted itself to all things necessary to the average employee of the 1300-person entity.  The NYSE seemed to be fairly well involved with the health and free-time status of its workers, reporting on programs for self-betterment, general reading, health care, health insurance, savings and spending, training, "mental guidance", retirement plan (singular), and so on.  These photos come from the "Employee and His Play" section, and discusses the achievements of the many sports teams hosted by the Exchange. 

 

World War I Photographs: Panorama, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

I recall, I think, that this was the largest photograph of war printed during World War I, looking to be something on the order of 8x16 feet or so.  This photo of the photo was printed by Underwood & Underwood, and stamped "British Official Photograph", printed sometime in 1918.  It seems that this is an actual battle scene, which was a very uncommon thing among war photographs for the Great War--more so for this group of photographs(News Photo Service)  produced by pool photographers for equal distribution among subscribing newspapers and periodicals. Actual combat photos distributed by the News Photo Service agencies were not a high priority, unless they depicted routed or retreating or being-defeated Germans--it was not a popularly-disributed subject, mainly for propagandist purposes. (The original photo is available for purchase here.)

I expect that this photo would've given the view a you-are-there effect, as the main characters in the composition were about life-sized--an attempt of slice-of-life experience.  There is a surprising amount of foreground in this picture, though.

A Romance of Swivel Chairs, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1376

The Borden Company--at one time the largest producer of dairy products in the U.S.-- published the little pamphlet (Modernization Handbook) from which these pictures below are taken. Published in 1945, this slim work was meant to entice owners of luncheonettes and pharmacy/soda shops to upgrade their businesses, so that they could sell more product, so that they could buy more supplies from Borden.  Borden wasn't offering financing, just supply-side friendly advice to the folks selling their goods.

A large amount of this "modernization" had to do with swivel chairs/stools, chairs around a long lunch counter that stood to serve the maximum number of people in a small space in the minimum amount of time, all while giving the patron a maximum visual field to the other stuff for sale in the establishment.

I've got to say that there is a long simple elegance to this--sitting at a table within sight of the person cooking your meal, check-to-jowl with probably-unknown fellow diners, getting your food quickly and probably freshly and with minimum fuss. There is definitely pleasantness seeing your food prepared before you, a better type of fast food, far removed to a comparatively superior land when compared to dealing with simple human interfacers between customer and the Conglomerate Cook of the modern fast-food behemoths.

 

 

And if you were to turn around in your chair,  this is what you would see:

Of course this was all about sales for Borden, and that's fine, especially when the end result of the money-making idea produces the ultra-sweet highly anticipated sound of your plate sliding arorss the linoleum countertop.  Don't forget your napkin. 

Note on an Alphabet of Computer Names in Fiction

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1375

First of all let me say that I know almost nothing about Science Fiction--this  list started out  while looking for questions asked of computers in works of fiction and movies, but the question on questions is far deeper than I can deal with in a simple sit-down, though I did collect some interesting names of fictional computers along the way.  For this very preliminary list of computers in fiction I include computers with actual names--therefore, and unfortunately, beasts like the NORC-like computer that let loose Hell's Kitchens in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.... is not included because so far as I can remember it has no actual name, and names are important when you're creating an alphabet.  Also I tried to look for images of the computers themselves, but since I stayed mostly in the 1940's-1960's, there are not many of those. 

So here this is and please take pity--again this is preliminary and I hope to start filling in what made these machines interesting quite soon. In the meantime there's an excellent list compiled at Wikipedia, here.

AM, from Harlan Elison's short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (1967).  AM "speaks" via paper tape, as below, using International Telegraph Alphabet No 2 (ITA2), a (much) earlier pres-ASCII-ite language, in this case saying "I think, therefore I am". 

ALPHA 60.   From the film Alphaville, Jean-Luc Goddard, 1960.

The Alpha and Omega of Computer Questions; Asimov, 1953 and 1955

JF PTak Science Books  Post 1375

 

Following up on yesterday's post on the world's first (popularly-published) computer magazine (Computers and Automation)  is this Isaac Asimov short story on what might be the first great computer question.  The story in mind, "Question", appeared in the March 1955 issue of this same magazine, a two-pager sandwiched between an ad for Remington Rand UNIVAC and an article on computers and weather prediction.  It is the first appearance too of Asimov's massive computer of the future, Multivac, a giant machine with corridors and nooks where technicians could stop and have a seat to enjoy a cup of coffee.  And it seemed to at least one worker that it wasn't quite right to be sitting inside the machine, that the billion-tube, two billion relay computer was more than just a flow of electrons. (The ENIAC, which was basically the world's first computer, had 20,000+ tubes, so a billion as  conceived by Asimov would've been a very big machine indeed, a 500,000-ENIACs-sized behemoth.) And a very hot one.   The workers wondered if you could ever tell if the machine was alive, if it thought on its own, if it attacked aparat from its instructions and programs. 

As it turns out, the answer was positive, and not only that, but Multivac could speak.  Its answer to "the question" was "who...am...I...?", repeated several times in the closing sentence of this rocket-fast short story.  I guess that that would give you pause, as it would anyone had the question come to them from their own computer while communicating along the spine of the great global "mind", the Internet, and perhaps someday it will, at some time in the near-ish future when the height of our own computer-y heights looks as quaint to them as a half-million ENIAC idea of 1955's premier scifi writer looks to us today.

I know almost nothing about Asimov, but he seems to return to this idea of the Big Computer, Multivac, and ultimate question a few years later.  It seems as though there was an issue of serendipity involve with the structure of the "Question" story and that of another writer's ending for a story called "Problem for Emmy" by Robert Sherman Townes. Asimov admitted the similarities but also maintained that he didn't know of Townes and had never read his story--be that as it may, Asimov promised that he would never reprint the story, and it seems as though he never did.  But it looks as though he resurrected his idea somewhat, which is fine, because the whole idea of ultimate/penultimate questions and massive computers is a great genre. 

Asimov wrote a story called "The Last Question" in 1956, a year later, writing about a trillion years of human history in the space of another terrifically-short short story, the short story that Asimov found to be his own favorite.  If "Question" posted the ultimate question put to the super-colossal Multivac computer,  ultimate question in "The Last Question" may well then be the ultimate answer.  You'll have to see the ending of the story for yourself to see what it was--I can't spoil it. 

Notes:

1.  I'm just a little surprised that Asimov was hung up on tubes in 1953--transistors had been in the air by 1947/8, published in 1948, and pretty-published by 1952.  I figure he should've been aware of them and how they would transform computer construction.  Maybe not. Perhaps he just wanted to write about a billion-tube computer. "Multivac " stands for "muliple vacuum tubes", and then "multiple vacuum tubes analog computer", so using transistors might be a little at cross-odds with the name and the idea of the machine.  It woulod be interesting to put together a list of questions/answers of these early fictional machines, a longlist of which appears here.

2. The two characters in the story by the way are named "Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov", both of which suggest the name Alexander Graham Bell to my head.

 

The World's First Popularly-Published Computer Journal

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1374

Nothing quite gives you the taste for the ancient history of a very modern topic--like computers--than by looking through some of the earliest popular publications on the subject. This can actually be done pretty quickly if you wanted to just get a broad taste for the subject in its modern infancy--just reading the titles of the papers and taking in the advertisements might be enough. So here's two volumes of a very scarce and interesting journal by old Edmund Berkeley that may do this job perfectly.  Berkeley was a bona fide mover and shaker in the early days of electronic computing in the United States--he had a lot on his mind, contributed many written words and ideas, and also tried to make a fair living while doing so (there was a bit of Sideshow Ed in him for some of the things he tried to sell.  

Computers and Automation, the brainchild of the brainy not-child Edmund Berkeley, was the first popularly-published  magazine published regarding the computer, its applications, it programming, and really just about everything else.  (It appeared seven years after the Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation  was published in 1943, almost entirely to the mathematics and engineering communities.) Computers was published by Edmund Berkeley & Associates in NYC beginning in 1952., beginning its publishing journey as The Computing Machinery Field, its name changing to Computers and Automation in February 1953 (in volume 2, number 2).   All issues have some fair space devoted to advertising, even though the issues generally ran between 32 and 40pp. Berkeley was a real-enough mathematician, engineer and computer pioneer, but he also had a pretty large taste for making these interests pay--which was essential, as the original print runs were not very large, though his advertisers were impressive. (According to the first issue, approximately 1200 people were on the mailing list for the journal, with around 2000 issues being printed each number. All told, this is not a large print run, and thus not many of the early issues have survived.)  He was not averse to being somewhat outre with his journal—in addition to having contributors like Grace Hopper and Alton Householder, he also had Fletcher Pratt and Isaac Asimov writing some pretty arresting pieces from the SciFi/Futurama point of view.

A Note on the Advertisements: in short, they’re wonderful. For example, on the back cover of vol2/1 is Edmund Berkeley & Associates “SMALL ROBOTS”, advertising “Simon, the Mechanical Brains”, “Squee, the Robot Squirrel”, and other gadgets. To give you an example the other ads in this issue alone are for “The Circle Computer”, “General Ceramics Ferramic Cores”, “Magnetic Metals Co. Amplifier Cores”, Ross Ashby’s “Design for a Brain”, Consolidated Engineering’s SADIC System, Monroe Calculator’s Monrobot Electronic Calculator, George Philbrick’s “Computor (sic) products”, and a lovely two-page spread for Remington Rand. Further into the year are ads for Burroughs, IBM (604 ands 607), Electronic Associates Inc, Prokar capacitors, and many others.

Some of the subjects include: The ERA 1103 computer, NIMWIT, Applications of the Computer, what the computer *is*, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper’s compiler, mechanical translation, Harper’s subroutines, the cost of coding, computer “self-repair”, automation at Ford, and so on.  Also includes perhaps the earliest announcement of the first all-transistor computer (October 1954, IBM’s “new experimental transistorized computer” , the earliest (?) printing of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics in a scientific journal, and more.

Each section generally has three of the following categories (per issue) : computer glossary, roster of member organizations, who’s who, an annotated books and journals section, and other aligned concerns.  For example, there's this bit, an application (cut-out) card for "Who's Who in the Computing Field for December 1952"--utterly simple, it seems as though anyone who filled out the card was in, the "who's who" part of this that we normally celebrate with fame or achievement really was just telling the rest of the people in the field who was exactly who.

The contents:

Volume 2/1, January 1953. 45pp.

Householder, A.S. Brains, Electronic and Otherwise; Williams, S.B. (President, ACM) What Computers Do; Murphy, E.F. and E.C. Berkeley. Automatic Computers on Election Night.

Volume 2/2 , March 1953. 37pp.

Boehm, George A.W. Gypsy, Model VI, Claude Shannon, Nimwit and the Mouse; Paynter, Henry. Water and Computers; and the editor Berkeley, The Concept of Automation, and Berkeley (with Neil Macdonald, Berkeley’s other name). The ERA 1003 Automatic Computer

Volume 2/3, April 1953. 40pp.

Fletcher Pratt, The Art of Solving Secret Ciphers and the Digital Computer; Berkeley, Avenues for Future Development in Computing Machinery;  Gene Hegedus, Hungarian Prelude to Automation..

Volume 2/4. May 1953. 33pp.

Grace Murray Hopper,  Compiling Routines; A.D. Booth, Mechanical Translation; Marshall Stone,  Medical Diagnosis.

Volume 2/5. July 1953.

Yehosuha Bar-Hillel (the great logician),  Machine Translation; George Boehm, Robot Traffic Policemen; Rudolf Flesch,  How to Talk to Computers.

Volume 2/6. September 1953.

Tommaso Fortuna,  The Soviet Union: Automatic Digital Computer Research.; Wainwright, Lawrence Wainwright,  Digital Computer Questionnaire; and a general DISCUSSION: “How to Talk About Computers”, with GG Hawley, Samuel Scharff, C.B. Crumb, and EC Berkeley.

Volume 2/7. October 1953. 36pp.

Brown, David W. Brown Computers in the Factory; Neil (Berkeley) Macdonald,  The Flood of Automatic Computers. 

Volume 2/8. November 1953. 40pp.

John W.Carr  III. Who Will Man the New Digital Computers?; E.F. Cooley,  Electronic Equipment Applied to Periodic Billing; Glenn.Hagen,  Air-Floating: a New Principle in Magnetic Recording of Information.

Volume 2/9 December 1953. 36pp.

Clippinger, Richard Clippinger, How a Central Computing Laboratory can Help Industry; R.T. Wiseman, “Combined” Operations in a Life Insurance Company instead of “fractured operations”.

These are the contents for 1953; the volume for 1954 bulks up a little, but is still under an inch thick.   The MTAC journal stays quite slender throughout its pre-1960 life (it has virtually no advertisement and is entirely academic), and there are more and more computer articles appearing in old stand-by associated journals like the Proceedings of the Institute of  Radio Engineers (which by 1959 will published a massive supplemental volume called "the Computer Issue" which I'll talk about soon.  For the time being, I just wanted to make an inroad into this journal--I'll expand on he articles in just a bit. 

"What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" and Walter Pitts

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1373

I was walking around a 1959 issue of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers I found this fantastic article byt he great Walter Pitts.  What was Mr. Pitts and a frog's brain article doing here?  Well, it all makes sense, really, and I was very happy to unexpectedly find Pitts here when I was looking for something else.  Walter Pitts (1923-1969) is one of those very important but now somewhat faded names in the history of American science.  He was a brilliant young man turned into a brilliant mature one, a logician/cognitive psychologist who corresponded with Russell on the Principia at age 15 and who went on to develop (with Warren McCulloch) some of the fundamental ideas in what would be known as neural networks.  The work was really much more far reaching, touching work in the fields of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, neuroscience(s), philosophy, cognitive sciences and of course computer science.

Pitts was a genius I'm sure,  a sort of Matt Damon-type character from the movie Good Will Hunting¹. He was offered a chance to study with Russell in the U.K. at 15, but refused and wound up running away from home to go to the University of Chicago to listen to Russell lecture, and where he stay on, finding another great logician, Rudolf Carnap (then at Chicago) and offering him critiques on his new work.  Pitts would blow like the wind in and out of Carnap's office, the logician spending months trying to find out who and where Pitts was--and what he was was a homeless teenage boy.  Once found, Carnap got Pitts a low-level maintenance job.  I'm not sure what Pitts was doing before he switched ships and jumped (still homeless) to MIT in 1942, where he was introduced and was impressive to the not-to-be-impressed Norbert Wiener, and where he also met Warren McCulloch, with whom he would work on the Leinbizian idea of the nervous system as a sort of universal computer, publishing their outstanding "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" in September 1943.²

Right before this paper--which is considered to be a founding effort in the field of neural networks--Pitts published three other papers of interest in this same area (and in the same journal)--all published when he was 19 years old. "Some observation on the simple neuron circuit",    "The linear theory of neuron networks: The static problem", and "Some Observations on the Simple Neuron Circuit" were all efforts leading up to his paper with McCulloch one year later.  {These three original papers are all available for purchase on our blog bookstore site.] Impressive work, especially for a 17-year-old, and particularly for a new, high entry point journal published by the University of Chicago, entertaining the logical structure of neural nets as coded circuitry, a new way of looking at the mechanistic view of philosophy of mind. 

Things however really didn't go well for Pitts: he was fiercely, probably tragically "shy" or demanding of his own attention, exceptionally modest, and with very few personal relationships.  Just a few years later, a rift developed between the wife of Norbert Wiener and McCulloch, and was of such vehemence that anyone maintaining a friendship with McCulloch would be shunned by Mrs. (and therefore, necessarily in this case, Dr. )Wiener.  And thus Pitts remained friends with McCulloch and lost contact with just about everyone else, making his working/contributing life quite difficult.  Little is known about what happens to Pitts in the 1960's, but it wasn't good, and he wound up dead, featuring symptoms indicative of severe alcohol abuse, in 1969.  He was 46, and his best work was already 25 years old. 

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Notes:

1. We read in this  wonderful account of Pitts from Neil R. Smalheiser's  appreciation, Walter Pitts ( found in:  Perspectives in Biology and Medicine - Volume 43, Number 2, Winter 2000, pp. 217-226):
[Introduction ] "The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten. Walter Pitts was pivotal in establishing the revolutionary notion of the brain as a computer, which was seminal in the development of computer design, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and theoretical neuroscience. He was also a participant in a large number of key advances in 20th-century science. Yet while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him. Here, I have collected reminiscences from his friends and associates to provide a unique insight into a remarkable life; if some exaggerations and embellishments have crept in, they only underscore the basic truth that Pitts was a man with Gumption ability..."

2. Warren McCulloch remembers Pitts in this way:  “In 1941 I presented my notions on the flow of information through ranks of neurons to Rashevsky’s seminar in the Committee on Mathematical Biology of the University of Chicago and met Walter Pitts who then was about seventeen years old.  He was working on a mathematical theory of learning and I was much impressed.  He was interested in problems of circularity, how to handle regenerative nervous activity in closed loops. …   For two years Walter and I worked on these problems whose solution depended upon modular mathematics of which I knew nothing, but Walter did. “ (McCulloch, 1989, pp. 35-36, cf. McCulloch, 1965a, pp. 9-10).

 

Outrageous Analogy Dept: How Hitler Can Help in the Post-Nuclear-Attack USA, 1967

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1371

"Understanding, n.  A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house.  Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse."  Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"The German experience in reordering an industrial economy for total war in the midst of conflict offers insights into planning for postattack conditions"--Stanford Research Institute, 1967

If such is the case for understanding, then I think that those responsible for the pamphlet German Wartime Industrial Controls:  an Analogy to Recovery from Nuclear Attack intended to ride their house in the Kentucky Derby and upgrade the kitchen in their horse.  After all, ideas are just connections among words, though it seems that here it might be just between words, or suggestions between letters, although the words might all be privately defined. [The original document is available form our blog bookstore, here.]

This pamphlet is another one of those monuments of living proof showing the impossibility of defining where the "bottom" might be in the well of bad ideas--even when you strangle this Nazi business into its own, narrowly-defined category, trying to extricate the logic of its titanically bad idea, the pamphlet instantly ignites when removed from its ether-y vacuum of under- and over-think and  exposed to oxygen. 

It was the Stanford Research Institute (Menlo Park, California) that produced this thing, carved whole and with precision from a quivering block of fat and federal dollars.  If the title doesn't stop time, the first page will.  There we are introduced to Albert Speer (1905-1981), Minister of Armaments and War Production and architectural joyboy for Adolph Hitler.  We are told about the basis for his exceptional achievement in reordering the German economy to all-out war production thus:

    "...a vast armament production would have to be obtained through scrupulous attention to increased production efficiencies and the most effective use of fixed supplies and essential materials and skilled labor.  Speer developed a unique variant of conventional economic planning for a controlled economy and applied it successfully..." (from page 1.)

Speer, a high-ranking Nazi party member since 1931 and intimate of Hitler, was convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, and sentenced to 20 years at Spandau prison, not the least of which was for his broad and acknowledged use of slave labor.  The "P" in the square standing on its edge at the top of this post is the symbol worn by a Polish slave laborer--there were some 12 million people abducted/arrested/stolen by the Nazis to work on various parts of German society. 

Perhaps this was part of the "scrupulous" detail and the "effective use" of fixed supplies that the author of the Stanford paper was writing about?  Surely anyone studying Speer's methods would have known this--that the author would chose to ignore this sets every moral compass everywhere into free spin. 

But such is the realm of the coin in the ugly, a bubbling bulk of post-attack scenario scripting done at the taxpayers' vast expense in waging the Cold War is littered with vocabulary meant to redirect the attention, essentially to change the meaning of words in discussing the outcomes of vast nuclear war.   For example, we find the phrases "period of fractionation", "the break in traditional economic time series" and "production degradation" in certain documents  (which I discuss in an earlier post here)  used to describe the breakdown of the American social and  industrial base following a nuclear war.. These are just three of thousands of such examples, not the least of which is nuclear "exchange", which is a conceit suggesting something less than the U.S. and the Soviet Union blasting away at one another with spectacularly deadly weapons. (Perhaps the thinking is that such a situation wouldn't necessarily be a "war", and so it is something less than that, like the Korean War really wasn't one but a U.N. policing action.)

But enough of this, were not even a full page into the report, which I remind you tells us we can find useful lessons in Hitler's monstrosity, particularly about war production--that is producing materials post-attack so that we can either defend ourselves or attack again, all by taking a look at Germany, and particularly  "the improvisation by gifted industrialists driven to the limits of their power and imagination" (page 12 of the report).  It is difficult to want to read this report because everywhere I look there are Orwellian Ghosts--half-referenced facts wrapped in Newspeak, available at random.  For example, on page 31, in discussing oil and rubber production, I find:"The output of the new synthetic Buna-s rubber was increased to 22,000 tons in 1939 and to 69,000 tons ion 1942 by accelerated production of new plant."  The "new plant" is the think tank version of "new plants" (the plural is left off of many things for unknown reasons but I guess mostly for a form that seems to have more economo-cache than the simple English expedient), which is a very simplistic way of telling of the enormous production battles in Germany to come up with their own, home-brewed (and not foreign-dependent) rubber (the super-necessity of all things military).¹ The other part not mentioned here in what seems to be a disingenuous appraisal of Nazi rubber production is the increase in 1943/1944, particularly from the "new plant" at Monowitz, which was also known as the Buna Works, and better known yet at Auschwitz III, where slave laborers were put into work-or-die situations producing Buna-s as part of the overall Auschwitz complex of forty camps and subsidiaries. 

Here's another example, tying Hiter and (Fritz) Todt and Speer together--Todt was "one of Hitler's most important administrators", who would be replaced by Speer "who had been an assistant to Todt"--though not mentioning that Todt had used millions of slave laborers (Zwangsarbeiter) in doing his "administrating".  Speer would do the same.  

ANd so on and on this paper crawls until it reaches its end, which is published on detachable sheets on pages one through three, pullaways for the executive summary so that the text and subsequent documentation and analysis could be discarded.  It seems to have been a waste of detachable paper when the whole thing could be thrown away at once.  The author makes a case for studying the Nazi situation because it was the closest thing in modern times to use as an analogy to the possible scenario in America after nuclear war, and then launches into an analysis of Nazi "competitiveness".  The author never comes close to making a compelling argument for the closeness of fit for its major assumption, though, and as far as I can tell the logic of it just doesn't work,which makes the rest of what follows unnecessary.  I guess they could've kept their federal grant by identifying ideas that wouldn't work as America post-attack analogies--which is also useful--and could've easily used what they had here for that purpose.   But at that point I'm not sure what is the more ridiculously-titled idea--I couldn't imagine someone reading the report on why Nazi industrial controls weren't a good analogy, because it seems tautological and unnecessary; and yet the opposite is what gets thought about and published, in all of its error and omission, swimming in its own turgid muck.  This is what people were thinking about in 1967 when, evidently, houses didn't have roofs. 

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1.  Germans were forbidden to import chemicals and food from 1933-1937, forcing Germany industry to come up with their own versions of things like rubber, meaning that there were many new places in which Buna-s (BUtdiane & NAtrium) was produced.  That rubber production increased so much was a function also of not being able to import the stuff. 

 

 

 

 

The First Photo Inside of the Information Revolution--the Transistor, 1949

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1370

One of the things I love about working my way through old scientific journals is when I find the issue that I'm looking for and scroll down the list of contributors to find the significant article that I want.  Long list, usually; and then, after making my way through 30 or 40 lines of tight type of the index I find it. [This by the way is one of those experiences that is being replaced by the digital library.]   Even though the paper on pp 1208 through 1226  of the 15 April 1949 issue of The Physical Review looks like any other, it is today seen as revolutionary. The entry for "Physical Principles Involved in Transistor Action" by John Bardeen (two-time Nobel in physics) and Walter Brattain (Nobel '72) shows up about halfway down the index, sandwiched in some very good company (Enrico Fermi's "Origins of Cosmic Radiation" and a number of others), and does not show up bolded, or highlighted, or with an asterisk.  Such is the nature of publication in the academic journal world, everything delivered with equal weight. (The original publication is available for purchase here at our blog blookstore.)

It makes me wonder though how it would've felt to open this journal for the first time back there in mid-April '49, turning to page 1210 to see the microphotograph of the cutaway of a model of the transistor.  This was the defining technical publication on the transistor¹, which was the first massive step towards microminiaturization and the explosive new growth in the computer, allowing far more powerful machines to be designed in far less space, in far less amounts of time, and on and on.  It is one of the first steps in the Information Revolution, moving the computer from massive racks of electronic tubes to more simple, elegant, nimble and by-far faster circuit boards with transistors (and resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, etc.) to make an electronic circuit.  This would be the standard for computer construction, only supplemented by Jack Kilby (TI)  and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Camera) in 1958/9 with the integrated circuit, where transistors are made smaller still and produced in groups on circuit boards rather than individually.

The photo above shows a cutaway of the transistor, and is the first time it was published--the first photo of what was one of teh 20th century's greatest inventions. 

Notes

1.  The paper was published simultaneously in the Bell System Technical Journal; Bardeen and Brattain were with the Bell Labs.  The Bell journal also contained another revolutionary paper in the same volume, Claude Shannon's "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems", which is one of the most important early papers on electronics and cryptology.  (We also have a copy of this classic paper for sale at our blog bookstore site.)

Why I Like Pictures

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1369

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Printed images are interesting in that they exist at all, at least in pre-modern (ca.1900) times. When you think of the total amount of time that humans have been thinking--like the possibilities of all total ideas for all people for the past, say, 10,000 years—and think about the 10x10^9 neurons firing for everyone all the time, and the numbers of books and pamphlets and journals and such printed before 1900, the access to the archive of the human condition looks a little paltry compared incomprehensible amount of good thinking that has gotten away. (Humans haven't helped themselves all that much in this regard, given the deep, long, wide history of the planned destruction of libraries throughout time.) 

There are more stars than books. Lots more—10^22 stars versus 1.3x10^8 books (or the stuff that an odd Google study classified as “books” for their scanning and advertising appetites). There's also bacteria and other microorganisms alive in/on the human flora than books (and blood cells too for that matter). Until the 18^th century (and really into the 19^th) the practical means of producing a book were set to restrictive, upper-class access. For most of human history the ability to even record a thought on transportable material was a deep issue; getting it reproduced somehow was extraordinarily difficult, especially if you belong to the not-yet-existent working class. Even if we just consider works that are 1455-1800 era the illustration was not a common thing, which is odd to me since it seems the image could show in less space what was being described in the text (and for argument's sake here we'll just say that production facility for the illustration and a page of text were equal). I have a funny feeling that if you weighed all of the pages of text against all pages of illustration in all books published from1455-1800, illustration would be enormously, fabulously outweighed.

Which is why in my mind “pictures” are so interesting—they are rare, and so that when they were published they were deeply considered objects.

All this changes though in the nineteenth century when production facilities increase, costs go down, the finished product is available more cheaply to a growing class of people who work for a living and have a disposable income. Newspapers and magazines begin for real in this century, paper costs go down, ability to print at high speeds goes up, and suddenly there exists an addition to the concept of “disposables” —information commodities. For the first time a mass of material is produced to be replaced in the next day or week, disposable reading material. There are more images reproduced and distributed in this century than in the entire history of man on earth. Of course all of this look like nothing, today, now that almost everyone in the U.S. (at least) can be their own publisher/producer of original or found work, which means of course that people in 2086 will look back oat our abilities as we do on the 19^th century. And so it goes.

This is why I like pictures—they're comparatively rare, and the tell as much of a story as you will allow. I enjoy scientific and technical images as much as anything, for their dreamy amount of detail and revolving possibilities of 3-D display and such; maps too, for pretty much the same reasons (and that one usually doesn't memorize them, at least not the detailed ones). Of particular interest on this blog has been maps-with-a-purpose, particularly  cartographic propaganda, like this 1937 Nazi-published map showing the "danger" posed by the Czechoslovakian air force to Germany.  It is a graphic representation of the Big Lie, an element of design intended to transmit an idea to a reader who really doesn't need to do so, being able to get the idea of the the data being presented in the map in one quick visual.

The scientific images demand that you see the difference with what came before to truly appreciate them—one of my favorite examples of this is Robert Hooke's engraving of a magnified flea. The microscope was brand new, and this image, which appeared in Hooke's magisterial,epochal work Micrographia¹, presented as much of a new world to people in 1665 as Galileo's reporting in Siderus on the massive number of new stars that he had seen with the telescope he used to look up rather than just across. People would have had no idea that such a magnificently detailed creature such as this flea existed, as they simply couldn't see it. Same too for the stars, which (with the exception of Brahe's Nova and such) had been seen to be “perfect”, an harmonious fixed number, though a relatively simple innovation using materials that had been around for centuries brought a new world to bear. (One is tempted to say that in his new, massive book that Hooke included "only" 38 images; but one has to remember that Hooke did all of the drawings by himself, and actually rushed the book into print as he sensed a market for it which combined nicely for his need for money..Hooke was correct about the market for the book.)

The purpose of some scientific images are difficult to identify when faced with them for the first time and out of context, but once rectified they can be beautiful renderings of complex relationships, like Ernst Chladni's patterns of vibration revealed to us via sand on metal plates (in his Discovery of the Theory of Pitch, 1787), and the Weber brothers' exacting drawings of wave forms  (from 1825) (and shown below, respectively).

 

Adding mercury to mercury: the sensational drawings by the Weber brothers as they observed the changing wave fronts made by a drop of mercury into a pool of mercury:

 

Rene Descartes depicted the interpretation (in his  Principles of Philosophy of 1644) of light and its physiological reaction in the brain in this iconic image, as follows:

the lines of sight depicting binocular vision, observed (and compressed) by the eye's "particles" and processed by the pineal gland which in turn manipulate the "fluids" in the control of nerves and muscles. 

Agricola's De Re Metallica (from the first Latin edition f 1556) displays many interesting cross sections of Renaissance mines:

There is so much more, and it may be possible that there were millions of pages of illustrations during our time period.  Harvey's demonstration of the flow of blood in the human body pictured by fingers and a forearm (in his On the Motion of the Heart and Blood, 1628), Descartes' analysis of how the human eye "sees" (An Analysis of the Eye, 1637), Agricola's cross sections showing how to construct mines (1556), Scheiner's illustration of the apparatus he built to observe sunspots (1611),  Borelli's study of the mechanics of the human body (1680), Rosalind Franklin's x-ray photograph of DNA (used by Watson and Crick to depict the structure of DNA), Thomas Young's illustration of light-wave interference (1803)

Then there are the pictures of the interior of the Fizeau apparatus as it captured the velocity of light so:

 

Classifying images, like this of Porphyry's (logic) Tree and Raymond Lull's diagrams of life and decision, are in constant appearance for centuries, excellent ways to provide method and organization to large quantities of information and for problem solving. While not exactly a generator in the sense of Jorge Borges' Library of Babel or Jonathan Swift's take on Lull's writing machine, the antiquarians did produce very interesting, elegant, beautiful ways of story information and ordering information.  The Tree of Porphyry is far more concise–an abbreviation--compared to the infinitely expanding hexagonal rooms filed with books and attendant librarians in  Borges' universe. 

The Ars Magna/Thinking Machine of the 13th century Lull (also known as Ramon, Raimundo and Raymond, Raimundus and Raymundus Lull, Lully and Lullus and Lulio), was the ultimate organizer of how sentences can be made and knowledge produced/uncovered (particularly if you want to please the logic of the church and the Creator), and which was also written about, described and worried-over by Borges.  There are many other early figures in this category to be sure (Lewis Carroll, William Jevons, and even in a way Mr. Venn, not to mention Leibniz and his calculator,  and all of the changes in scientific method and (English/Dutch) mathematical concentration on applied mathematics of the 17th century that made thinking about the industrial revolution possible.

Images of ebb and tide, of cause and effect, of bones inscribed in clouds and solids manufactured of gas, of the steps of discovery, of the integral drawing of the integral pieces, of cross sections detailed enough so that you too could build your own locomotive, or guide yourself through a paper transverse dissection of the human brain--this is the great essence of images. It is interesting to look at these things forensically, to identify all of their components and articulate the symbolism, to look at the image cautiously, judiciously--sometimes this just results in insights into the artist who may have been tired and was working through just another piece of drudgery and tried to make their work a little more entertaining.  This doesn't add much to the understanding of the event, but it does give the scene a fullness,  like, for example in this image of the killing of Archimedes from  Histoire Universelle published by the ubiquitous Peter van der Aa in Amsterdam at the turn of the 18th century--it falls in line with many of its comrades of this event  in that it depicts the tragedy in the second before it occurred.  One thing it has that other scenes do not--a barking dog.  Maybe it belonged to Archimedes, maybe not.  But there was a dog depicted here, and it was barking at the scene, probably barking at the man about to stab the mathematician, which means it would've been the mathematician's dog.  But Archimedes certainly didn't hear the dog if he couldn't be interrupted by the battle outside his door or the Roman who yelled at him to turn.

 

 

This blog is written and illustrated around the very loose idea of "the history of ideas", and is quite image-driven--there are probably about 5,000 pictures reproduced here now, a wide selection of illustrated thinking in the sciences and many other fields.  This includes one classifications of an image series that really don't exist—I mean they were images intended for one purpose but for the passage of time (and sometimes removing them from context) they become something completely different, entirely new, providing unintentional insights into their artists and times.  I find exploring in images this way to be fascinating, noticing the semi-hidden and/or unnecessary, extravagant, extra-necessary bits that were intentionally placed by the artist, as in this example of Archimedes' dog, or with the characters that are sometimes found as "filler" and which are basically wholly unrelated to the intention of the illustration.  For example in this application of the imaginary forensic arts microscope, we see this series of pictures of a standard view of the town hall of Antwerp; but what we see advancing under magnification is a very interesting set of occupations displayed in absolutely minute detail.

First, the majority of the engraved image, followed by a close-up of the center of the building (the three doorways), and then by a closer view still of doorway three:

The truly interesting bit here is barely observable in the original; but, under magnification, we see a very rich and minuscule "engraved photograph" of a slice of daily commerce and street life in Antwerp.  If you look at the central entrance to the town hall you can see three main (and large) doorways, and if you look closer still, you'll see something leaning against the portal at right.

Extraordinarily, what the artist snuck into the original is a tiny (2mm) figure watching over several tables of her (fruits?/vegetables?) ware, waiting for a customer. There doesn't seem to be much interest in her stuff, currently, and she has allowed herself a little relaxation, leaning against the doorway.  I've found this sort of extremely minor subject matter and its ephemeral connection to the larger work at hand to be just fascinating.  I wonder why such detail would be added--why would the artist, or engraver, take such care and interest in such minor visions.  Perhaps this is just what was at hand on the days the artist fleshed out his work; perhaps it was the work of the engraver, alone, incising yet another semi-boring architectural image; desperate for a little artistic activity, adding some interesting, almost-invisible touches, here and there.  Perhaps no one would ever really notice them, but whoever was responsible for adding such incredible, extra-dimensional details would certainly enjoy knowing they were there, recognized or not.

Another good example is found in Guiseppe  Zocchi,Veduta della Piazza della SS Nunziata Statua Equeftre di Ferdinando Primo, Fonti, e Loggie Lateral,shows more good work with the possibilities of ephemeral populations, where among the many details we see an invalid being pulled in a small cart, and a half-obscured  man with a staff leaning against the back of the monument.  And of course there's much more--you just need a little magnification to see the human element of the artwork. 

At the end of the day one of the most enjoyable of all image classifications for me  are the classifications of image series that really don't exist—I mean they were images intended for one purpose but for the passage of time (and sometimes removing them from context) they become something completely different, entirely new, providing unintentional insights into their artists and times. They are also on the outer-edge of being pre-Outsdider Outsider art.  One of my favorite examples in this genre is this 1941 pamphlet which isn’t so much “interesting” as it is interestingly illustrated, where all of the semi-coherent  interest resides, the text having left coherence far behind, somewhere, in it own intergalactic dust. When I first encountered it this was the only instance that I had ever seen of New York City floating in space with the Earth floating happily in the background--now I've collected at least three other extra-New-York-City's-in-space in the last few years. 

 

 

This is also a nice example of extra-NYCs, where there are several other instances, balancing out the larger collection of the opposing missing-NYCs, like this 1902 example showing the city sunken and out-of-sight, disappeared under its own weight:

There's also the sub- or  supra-category of extra-Earths department, where I have at least five other examples, including this remarkable effort by Victor Segno of Los Angeles, who in 1929 published this fantastic image depicting extra-human empty alien souls being dropped on the earth to repopulate the place after it had been cleared out by "brain waves".

And so I guess that would be the perfect place to exit this short appreciation of pictures. 

____

Notes.

1.  As Hooke states at the end of the 28-page introduction  to the work: …"it is my hope, as well as belief, that these my Labours will be no more comparable to the Productions of many other Natural Philosophers, who are now every where busie about greater things; then my little Objects are to be compar'd to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an Elephant, or a Lyon.”.

An Elementary and Perhaps Useful Cheat Sheet for Names of Big Numbers

JF Ptak Science Books

I thought to include this little cheat sheet for the names of large numbers—I didn't know the name for some big number, and had to go and find it. Here's a bunch that I cobbled quickly together to serve as a recipe should you ever need a big-number-name and not know it.  I've only used the modern American and British versions of these names, and I've avoided numbers that just won't work for me here (as I'm just looking for simple stuff) like

(~ googolplex^{1,941,887,670,000}), (years),  which is the "scale of an estimated Poincaré recurrence time for the quantum state of a hypothetical box containing a black hole with the estimated mass of the entire universe, observable or not, assuming a certain inflationary model with an inflation whose mass is 10⁻⁶ Planck masses."  so says University of Albert physicist Donald Page, quantum cosmologist and Stephen Hawking co-author. 

A googol is already a big number at 1x10¹⁰⁰; a googolplex is terrifically larger, being 10^googol,  or. 10(10¹⁰⁰).

I've left out almost everything, actually, including the beautiful numbers from ancient India, including the sublimely-named "untold" as exactly 10^10*2122  appearing in Bodhisattva's maths in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra..

Hindu theology incorporates spectacular leaps of time, numbers which jump geometrically, reaching ever greater heights, describing a small part of a small bit of teh beginning of the Cycle of Brahma.  (See far below.)

I'll save the suspense—the largest number identified here is 1x10^3003, which is a millinillion, and it looks like this:
100.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000. 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.00 0.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.

000.000

 And the rest (I'm sorry to say that one cannot make columns in typepad posts):

10⁶ Million

10⁹ Billion

10¹² Trillion

10¹⁵ Quadrillion

10¹⁸ Quintillion

10²¹ Sextillion

10²⁴ Septillion

10²⁷ Octillion

10³⁰ Nonillion

10³³ Decillion

10³⁶ Undecillion

 

A Note on Alchemy and Gravitation

Belief systems like alchemy and intelligent design have dialogues of persuasion; the sciences on the other hand explain rather than persuade.

I'm not sure why this hasn't occurred to me before, but there is a crucial element of Paracelsian philosophy and alchemy that is sort of correct, in a way. The map of the universe that they sought to drawn on the human body to represent the macrocomos in the microcosmos, the influence of the stuff of creation on our daily life, was correct in a way that they hadn't suspected. And it was brought about by a man who vigorously pursued alchemy for decades, hoping that it would provide a link to the vast pool of somethingness that he didn't yet have answers for, as well as the questions he didn't yet know that he wanted to ask.

Newton had abandoned alchemy completely by 1696, nine years after the publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the great “external” influence of the universe coming to bear on humans on earth. The alchemists would be shocked perhaps by this connection, and I'm sure that what they were looking for wasn't that physical bodies attract with a force proportional to their mass as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime which governs the motion of inertial objects, let alone that it was one of four fundamental forces.

But the alchemists were on the road to someplace, just not the Royal Road. I imagine too that transmutation must've taken it squarely on the chin in 1818, when Berzelius published his findings of the atomic weights of 45 (of 49) known elements, showing that atoms (thank goodness we did not call them “seeds” like some) existed and the elements were entirely different...meaning that the very basis for transmutation was removed, that mercury could never be made into gold, owing to the differentiation of the nature of the elements themselves. That must've been a crushing experience, making alchemy a harder persuasion to perpetrate.

 

 

 

World War I Photographs--Parade of Military Snow

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This news photo service image--stamped "Hearst-Pathe News Agency" on the back--is frm the winter of 1917/1918 and shows a patriotic snow parade somewhere in the United States.  The snow looks prodigious, judging from the piles in the foreground and also the accumulated snow on the windowsills, and I imagine that all of the snow floats were sculpted mainly out of exiting snow in the street.  It is a delightful scene, to me, and hosts a variety of smaller, lovely images in vignette. (The original is available from our blog bookstore.) For example:

The man in shadow and sleeping figure (boy) in the buggy complement the white-mustachioed bowler-wearing man to the left; the men looking on in the foreground are interesting, too--plus there's that laundry in the background.  Given that the laundry is out (and wasn't just left out during the storm) and that no one seems to be particularly bundled up against cold, I'm going to guess that there was a break in the weather that pushed the temperature higher than normal, with almost everyone taking advantage of the warm snap, as people do everywhere, all the time.  I also like the tiny American flag on the tall pole at left.

And so:

And again:

I'm not sure what the flag is on the side of the Dreadnought, and it seems as though someone has stoked a small smoking fire in the metal tubes functioning as the ship's smokestacks--a nice touch!

Also I like this quickly-produced oil painting version of the photo--I knew that there was a very nice overall composition to the image, but really couldn't find it until I did this: