JF Ptak Science Books

A Charming "First" Traveller's Guide to Rome in Full Text, 1600

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I was very happy to find a full-text and nicely-navigable copy of this classic work online. Giorlamo Francini's Le
Cose maravigliose dell'alma citta di Roma, anfiteatro del mondo : con  le chiese, et antichita rapresentate in disegno / da Girolamo Francino ; con l'aggiunta del dottor Prospero Parisio (In Roma : Ad instanza di Gio. Antonio Franzini, & herede di Girolamo Franzini) was printed in 1600 and is considered an iconic work on travel writing, as well as one of the first sophisticated/modern "guide books" to the city of Rome. It was pocket-sized, and contained all manner of information about buildings and artists--useful info, if you had never been to the city before. It was also a distinct difference from books intended to the pilgrim; this book was definitely looking for a popular, general readership, looking to benefit in their stay in Rome by having a literary, artistic, and architectural key to the city. 

The illustrations are charming and lovely--even though small (less than two inches square),  they provide just enough detail for you to unmistakeably identify the principle structures.   The full text (with illustrations) is located here.

Black Sky and Morning Arrows

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

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

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

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

A Few Examples of Renaissance Icons in Science Emblemata

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1885

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

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

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

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

The Life of Enormous Baroque Curves in Womens' Fashions

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Theodore Andrea Cook wrote a lovely book called The Curves of Life, published by the admirable firm of Constable and Company in London in 1914, a book which is filled with all manner of marvels of insight in finding curves in natural and created situation. (I wrote a little about the book in an earlier post about stairs, here.) The beauty of spirals found in fero-concrete, geometries of Minoan clay seals, the beauty of the human laminae of cochlea of interval, the colon of the Dogfish, Maori war canoes, and so on, were all subject matter ripe for the discriminant picking of Mr. Cook as he explored the depths of curves.

One thing that perhaps escaped his grasp--at least in this book--was the curve in the costume of Baroque women oif semi-high (or at least non-ordinary) standing. As I've seen a number of times in some illustrated books, the trend towards the curvilinear is absoutely outstanding. The example that I came across tonight is an excellent example. Of course there was no great need to supply interesting bits of social life in these engravings of famous architectural achievenents outside of supplying a human scale to the structures, but as if often the case the artist (or engraver) went a little further than was really demanded by the artistic "needs" of the image and provided some interesting and at times very unexpected glimpes into somewhat-common street life

This image comes from Regles des cinq ordres d'architecture de Jacques Barozzio de Vignolle, which was originally written by Vignolla (1507-1573) in 1560. and published in 1680 or so.  The engraving of our interest here is "Elevation du Portail de la Cathedrale de St. Paul de Londres", and the main part of that is the 1% in the bottom quarter, showing a very roundish dress. 

An outstanding curve of high fashion, not seen in the Cook book.

This also reminds me a little of bombing fashinistas in an earlier post I wrote (here), showing parachuting (though they look a little like bombs) on this 1904 image. 

 

 

Audioclasm in the Soundosphere: on the Storage of All of the Sound that Has Ever Been Made on Earth

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1883

• Where in the Density Map of all Noise Ever Made on Earth would human sounds be located?

I've written often (but not recently) about unusual images and ideas that are sky-borne--a Strange Things in the Sky Department.  Today's late-ish addition started out being about Halley's Comet (and Halley's comets", though that's for a different post) and the images artists and pundits produced showing the possible devastation that the comet would rend on the Earth in its wake.  These are interesting images and there are many of them, the ideas of comet impacting he Earth in negative ways being ancient and plentiful. 

But in pursuing a loose-end in this I stumbled onto another very interesting strange-thing-in-the-sky thing, and this time it is a piece of the "sky" itself.

It happens in a short work of scientifiction by Gardner Hunting (1872-1958), called The Vicarion  (Kansas City, Mo, Unity School of Christianity, 1926)--a book that started out life I think as a missionary work to non-believers as a profession and support of some sort of faith.  I don't know about that part--but the idea that most appealed to me was that in some way, the sounds of Earth were being recieved and embedded in "the aether", and that a machine called the "vicarion" was invented to interpret these sounds writ large and small in the sky.

Its an intriguing idea. For science fiction.  This is the place where ideas such as these may flourish, where you can stack up the If if if if if (etc.) Then statements to the sky and back, where you can identify the front of the sky and touch it and come back--this is where these ideas can work. Sort of.

What is intriguing here is not so much that human voices had been preserved in the no-longer-existence "aether" and that this vicarion could reproduce these long-lost sounds.  It is, rather, the idea of what this collosally large and deeply impregnated aether must hold besides human voices. I mean, why limit the ability of either the vicarion or the aether to deal with just human sounds?  

All things being equal, or at least equalizing location  and pitch and timbre and so on, why isn't then all noise a local ambient color, and why isn't all of it being recorded?

And given ths, where in the Density Map of all Noise Ever Made on Earth would human sound be located?

And why if this aetther was recording something in the vast ocean of air--the stuff in which the exchange in the average density of air molecules would bump into one another and indicate "sound" as a pressure fluctuation--as insipid and relatively exceptionally minor in the vast cacophony of earthly noises as sounds produced by human, why wouldn't the aether be recording everything else?

I'm not just talking about, say, the sound of insect antennae (which I guess would be a furious sound/information points for any one second of all of the insects with antenae moving on Earth), but also the sound of the water cycle (evaporation) or the collision of pollen molecules and so on?  I imagine that to the aether there might not be that great a distinction in these noises, especially from thousnads of miles away.  If you can detect a human voice from 20k miles, then hearing evaporation or photosynthesis or stuff on molecular levels doesn't seem far-fetched.

These speculation were certainly not the objective of The Vicarion--a religious message was meant to be observed and delivered in the page, a call hither-to thee was to be the outcome.  But it does make for an interesting series of usually-impossible-to-answer questions, like:  what would produce the most noise (audible to human hearing) for any given moment in time at any distribution of equal points on the planet?

Without thinking too deeply, I'd have to give the quick anwer as "ocean waves".  This is highly debatable, obviously.  And if this sound could have been recorded,  I wonder how much storage capacity it would take to have archived every moment of sound produced by water waves since the beginning of water? 

And then add into that all of the sound ever produced by ants, and then spiders, and so on. Every sound, ever.

Its a real eyebrow-raiser, and a fun exercise provided by an unusual source. 

I'm working on a Density Map of the Audioclasm--I think it may look something like this effort by Botticelli trying to map out the effectiveness of Dante's Divine Comedy (a scary accomplishment, frightening and heavy--you can almost feel the very burden of Hell coming down upon you. Here's a good link for a zoomifying version of this map so that you can see its elements in detail):

 

 

Girdle vs. Goedel: the Pink Ice Girdle Ballet of 1951 vs. Logic. Part I of the History of Holding Things In

JF Ptak Science Books  

[My thanks to Patti Digh for providing the idea for the Goedel part of this adventure into Playtex and Logic--she did so because (a) they fit together and (b) girdle/Goedel sounded almost identical to a woman who once lived in Munich!]   

In the long history of Holding Things In, perhaps the newest of its members was upon us only recently. In the long, deep past we have held our breath, hidden our anger, stowed our emotions, and so on, but it was only recently that we began to hold our bellies in.  One of the masters of Holding Things In for this period turns out to be the sublime logician and re-inventor of modern mathematics (by putting one piece of the great Hilbert to sleep), Kurt Goedel, who towards the mistakenly-self-engineered end of his life, held on to everything, virtually--he organized and filed almost very piece of paper that he came into contact with at any level, became ever more reclusive, and at the end (due to his theories of people/institutions wanting to kill him) refused food and, of all things, water.  Surrounded by the smartest people on the planet (including his friends Einstein and von Neumann) up there at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Goedel withered away until he had almost no shadow. It is a bad irony that he could be so inconceivably unmovable and restrained while at the same time, and in the same life, offered such incredible newness to the maths--both ends of the mountain at the same time.

1951, the year in which these girdle advertisements appeared in Life magazine, was also the year that Goedel present us with the Goedel  metric, and also in which he received (with Julian Schwinger) the first Albert Einstein award (and of course delivered his famous Gibbs lecture  "Some basic theorems on the foundations of mathematics and their implications").

The popular introduction of the girdle I think that this happened at about the same time for the sexes, only these conveniences were much more often advertised for women than they were for men.  Slender and non-existent waistlines for women were more of a cultural identifier than a slim-hipped man, and the ads for his cheaters appeared far less frequently than those for women.

The first widespread appearance of the girdle for the sake of vanity must have occurred during the 19th century, or perhaps a little later is my best guess--but the first time the device began to appear for the common woman must've come around the time when there was time for leisure, or shopping, or of being seen in public in short intervals.  And that I believe is a Victorian-age invention.

But the binder doesn't come into fabulous presence until the distribution of mass population illustrated magazines, or I should say the advertisements that made these magazines possible:  production like LIFE (from which these 1951 images come) reached far more women than the popular older periodicals like Harper's Weekly or other polite mid-19th century journals for women.  The advertisements were certainly more enticing, the possibilities more rewarding, and the girdle comfort levels far higher than their predecessors, and the availability of disposable income for women far greater--and so incidentals like the girdle became more greatly commodified, and moved into the "essentials" category. 

The idea of these ads seem horribly revolutionary: on the one hand, the badly-named and hyphenated  Playtex product "Pink-Ice" squeezed women into new tight but  malleable molds, while at the same time promised some sort of ballet-like freedom because of it. Like the creeping ("two steps forward and one step back") communism of the time, Playtex promised the possibilities of enhanced freedom through restrictive clothing (in a "peace through strength" vision).  In any event, and in spite all of what I just wrote, the pictures are kind of amazing.  

[I'm well aware that this may be one of the worst things ever written about Kurt Goedel--the Renault Dauphine of Goedeliana.  But it doesn't matter, because in all of his powers, Goedel could absolutely prove that g_d existed, and that  I don't.]