JF Ptak Science Books

Found-Poetry in a Technical Work on Bubbles (1896)

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 "The water of those wellis sprynge vp with grete bobles."--W. Caxton tr. Myrrour of Worlde ii. xxi. sig. h4   OED

Rummaging again through the eminently-rummagable early years of Nature¹ I found a lovely little article on the physics of bubbles. The language to me seems delightful, and it comes from the first part of a very long opening paragraph of the paper:

"He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones,

of bubbles in large and small tubes,

of bubbles of air in a liquid,

and of one liquid in another,

of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids,

of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity

and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces."

• [IMAGE: "THAUMATROPE for showing the formation and oscillation of drops." From C.V. Boys' Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them, 1896.]

In spite (or because of) the fact that bubbles are serious things, they are wonderfully named and as C.V. Boys points out in his fantastic Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold Them (1896), they are as magnificent as they are simple: "I do not suppose that there is any one in this room who has not occasionally blown a common soap-bubble, and while admiring the perfection of its form, and the marvelous brilliancy of its colours, wondered how it is that such a magnificent object can be so easily produced".

Bubbles have a long history in experimental physics² and continue to work their magic today--when I googled this title I came up with only three pages of hits, including the following, which in their own little way beg to be read:

• "Film thickness measurements in liquid–liquid slug flow "
• "Effects of Bubbles on the Hydraulic Conductivity of Porous Materials "
• "Bubble deformations and segmented flows in corrugated microchannels at large capillary numbers "
• "Bubble transport through constricted capillary tubes with application to resin transfer molding"
• "Transport of bubbles in square microchannels"
• "Step-Wise Velocity of an Air Bubble Rising in a Vertical Tube Filled with a Liquid Dispersion of Nanoparticles"

From the 1894 article:

"EVERY student of physics has observed the motion of bubbles in tubes. Which of them has not used a big bubble to show the little ones their duty in clearing out the air when filling a barometer tube? Who has not spent his time and patience in whisking a spirit thermometer to drive a bubble out of the column? Mr. Trouton has recently communicated to the Royal Society the result of some researches on this subject. He has studied the behaviour of big bubbles and of little ones, of bubbles in large and small tubes, of bubbles of air in a liquid, and of one liquid in another, of bubbles in heavy land in light liquids, of bubbles in liquids of various degrees of viscosity and with various degrees of surface tension at their surfaces. From this enumeration it is evident that the number of different magnitudes involved is very great, and at the start it seemed almost hopeless to disentangle the effects due to each. The first matter to observe was that, as in other cases of fluid motion, two cases must be distinguished. These are the cases of slow motion and of quick motion. When the motion is slow the viscosity of the liquid causes the flow to be very simple. It entirely stops all whirling and swirling, such as is seen in the water behind a boat. When the motion is quick, on the other hand, the flow is very complicated. Whirls and swirls are set up, and the resistance is increased, owing to the increased energy that has to be communicated to the whirling and swirling liquid for each centimetre that the bubble moves. The slow kind may be described as viscous flow, and the quick as turbulent flow. The most interesting point observed in connection with the turbulent flow was that it was sometimes possible to increase the rate of flow by increasing the viscosity..."

Notes:

1. "On the Motion of Bubbles in Tubes", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 8 February 1894 (vol 49 no. 1267)/ I should point out that Nature back then was almost entirely readable by almost anyone—nowadays of course it is a vastly different story; I stopped my subscription a while back when I found out that I wasn't understanding even the titles of some of the papers....

2. "I have freely made use of the published work of many distinguished men, among whom I may mention Savart, Plateau, Clerk Maxwell, Sir William Thomson, Lord Rayleigh, Mr. Chichester Bell, and Prof. Rücker. The experiments have mostly been described by them, some have been taken from journals, and I have devised or arranged a few. I am also indebted to Prof. Rücker for the use of various pieces of apparatus which had been prepared for his lectures."--C.V. Boys, Soap Bubble and the Forces Which Mold, 1896.

"Experiment for showing by intermittent light the apparently stationary drops into which a fountain is broken up by the action of a musical sound."--from the Boys book.  

“The great excellence of this operation was its mechanical roughness and simplicity"--on Moving a Brick House, 1875

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This is one of the many small articles that appear in major sci/tech/engineering journals in the 19th century that are absolutely so filled with human spirit that it fills your heart with hope for humanity (even if everyone involved has been dead for at least 125 years.  This one is a ravishingly simple three-page report on how to move a (substantial) brick house with a few guys and a horse. The title of this post is taken from the report¹, where (I feel) the writer just took a step back from his work and said "holy ____!", and admired the sheer beauty of the simple and successful approach to a major task. And as it turned out, the house was all of 1/4" from where it should have been, and that was quickly rectified with a screw jack.

And about that lifting-of-the-house business--the main part of the job was done by one man and five screws, and as the writer observes with another fantastic-quote moment, “The screw jacks were set by one man alone, to ensure the equality of strain”! I know it is a technical expression, but "ensur(ing) the equality of strain" sounds very applicable to a lot of things, the equivalent of a bean thread base to a veggie stir fry. 

Here's the article in case you need to move a brick house:

Notes:

1. Charles S. Close, “Moving Brick Houses”, in Journal of the Franklin Institute, 1875, vol 70/100, pp 178-180. 

 

An Episode in the History of Manure: "To barren ground with toyle large meanour add."

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Of the many things that can be said about manure you can't say but can say about its chemical replacement is that it is made from fossil fuels and sucks good stuff from the soil and ultimately makes the farmland it is fertilizing unfarmable. That's what popped into my head when I bumped into this woodcut of a manure spreader while farming something else in the 1829 volume of The Journal of the Franklin Institute. It's a relatively simple improvement to a necessary and laborious job--adding the spreader made the application of manure far easier than have it slide through a jamable sluice in the bottom of a wagon, and certainly a lot easier and more thorough than spreading it by hand. 

And just for the fun of it I checked out "manure" int he OED, where it makes appearances in English beginning in the mid 16th century, and for the hundreds of years the word has been around it has a complicated spelling history (manoure, maynor, maynure, menar, menor,  menore, meynor,  maner, meanor,  meanour, manure, mainure,  manier, manner, mayner,  meanure, menure; maner,  mannor,  mainer,  manna, manner, mannur, manor, manuer; manar, pre-maner, mannor, mannour,  mannur,  manuire, manure,  manour, mainer; U.S. regional (southern) manyo). Here are two examples of early usage that have some poetic sense to them:

• 1664   J. Evelyn Sylva (1679) 10.   "To barren ground with toyle large meanour add."
• 1697   Dryden tr. Virgil Georgics ii, in tr. Virgil Wks. 85.   "In depth of Earth secure Thy cover'd Plants, and dung with hot Manure".

The term "Manure spreader" according to the OED comes into use around 1884, 55 years after this report--except of course this is called a manure "scatterer" which seems to imply less confidence than a "spreader:, though that may have come about due to the modesty of the inventor. 

A Dancingly Anthropomorphic Kinematic Instrument (1912)

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This is one of those posts where I was looking for something in the Comptes Rendus and then found something completely different. The what-it-was was something about Poincare¹, at this point dead for just a week, the second titanic to disappear this year--it is really impossible to understand how he was able to do what he did in a lifespan of 58 years...of course he was a master of nearly every field, and was able to work his math problems out in his head first before writing them out, so it helped to be a multi-genius--and while not finding a notice on his death in the weekly issue I did "discover" an intriguing (and unrelated to Poincare) illustration. 

At first I thought it would be related to an article on the depiction of motion as the drawing seemed to represent the anatomy of two dancers, and have some sort of fourth dimension/art/science relation, or whathaveyou, but then I saw it was a schematic for a part of motion picture camera--a kinematograph/cinematograph--that made 180 images per second, and would be just the sort of instrument used to study fast-moving objects in minute detail. So the schematic really did portray the essence of what the machine did, exploring the designs of motion.  

____________

Notes:

1. Poincare knew basically everything...here's a toss-off from him that has stuck with me: "To doubt everything, or, to believe everything, are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
2. P. Nogues, "Un nouveau cinematographe a images tres frequentes", in Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences, 22 July 1912, pp 273-275. 

Acrobatic Vocabulary and Found-Poetry in Night Dust Removal Technology, 1877

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2573

The heavyily-lithe text of an article in the Scientific American Supplement (1877) on the virtues of the Odorless Excavation Apparatus Company of Baltimore isn't so much "acrobatic" as mentioned in the title of this post as it is "aromatic" (or worse yet, "aroma-acrobatic").  The OEAC of Baltimore was performing a daily routine of high importance and necessity--except that there was a high possibility of offending brittle social virtues if there was a description of what the company actually did without using far too many words. (For example: "The discharging of the contents of privy vaults during the hours of daylight, and without offence or danger to health, as well as the utilization of the matters taken from them for fertilizing purposes, has been a problem long and slow of solution.") This was 1877, after all, and people really didn't write too much about Daily Functions and the technology for dealing with them outside of the deep-end product of manure--and then there was a lot to say about that. Having said that, dealing with the absolutely necessary job of solving night dust/waste/dirt issues was just a difficult thing to do, in print. You can't have the Second Industrial Revolution without people, and you can't have the people without housing them close together so that everyone could get to work, and you can't have closely-housed people without water and the means of getting rid of that and body eliminations, otherwise the nasty biological stuff can ensue. And thus you are left with the great need that nobody really cares to discuss. 

Here's an example of some meandering and circuitous sentences from the 3000 words article, ideas trying to get somewhere:

"To complete this system and render it applicable to
the most extreme cases, as to difficulty of removal of the
material, the plan shown in fig. 6, and called the “ pitting”
apparatus, is resorted to, and consists simply in covering the
approaches to an outhouse with a kind canvas awning,
from which is led a flexible tube to the deodorizer, to destroy
the effects of the gases and odors generated in the disturbance
of the material inside. The awning likewise excludes the
operation from observation.

"This plan is only resorted to
in cases where the contents of the vault has become from
long standing or other causes so unyielding as to preclude the
use of the pump, in which case it is simply removed by
digging, which, in its comparatively solid condition, is not
by any means so disagreeable an operation to the workmen
inside the awning, as was the old bucket system with the
more liquid contents. In this way it is removed in the day
time without offence to either sight or smell."

[Image of the privy door covered by tent, with the special apparatus, as described above.]

And then in all of it there's quite a bit of  Found-Poetry in the discussion of the removal of collections of night dust:

"So far as the deprivation of these deposits of their odors is concerned, it may he said that, if a tithe of the expense

and trouble were expended upon them with this view that is nowadays lavished upon the modern watercloset,they might be made
as comfortable, convenient, and unobjectionable in every way
as the best of them; and that while they may be so readily
discharged of their contents, and in a manner so entirely un-
objectionable as is done under the system shown in the
illustrations, there can be no necessity of their ever becoming
offensive or dangerous."

At the end of the day the article made its point and impact, and I have no doubt that there was a good amount of positive feedback for the Odorless Excavating Apparatus Company of Baltimore.

On Found-Poetry in a Work on Clouds by the Great Chemist, Michael Faraday (1827)

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Tucked away inside a volume of  The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature,  and the Arts¹  is this short contribution by Michael Faraday. Faraday is not particularly well-known for a writerly style although in his huge output of papers and books he was a very effective communicator. I found in this article, "On a Peculiar Perspective Appearance of Aerial Light and Shade" , that he was really very elegant and perhaps even poetic in describing what I think are cloud shadows-- explaining the illusions created by cloud shadows, with the "aerial perspective" part perhaps not having to do with what is normally assumed to be the optical/painterly version of the term, although frankly I'm not sure.

This is the small woodcut that accompanies the three-page article, depicting the "rays" of light coming from a setting sun, which I think is charming in itself:

He writes:

"Although the appearance on this evening was exceedingly beautiful and rare, and the more striking from the absence to the observer of the sun or clouds, and the complete insulation of the phenomenon, yet by close observation upon other evenings, it was found that partial effects of the same kind were very common, and from the manner in which these could be observed the explanation above given fully confirmed."

And the wonderful closing sentence:

"All these phenomena with their variations were easily referrible to their causes and may be observed at almost any sun set in fine weather, but the effect of the first evening so similar in kind though so different in appearance was not again remarked. It is with a view of guarding persons who may observe the same effect against any mistake as to its origin that the appearance with its nature has been thus particularly described." 

I haven't read that much in Faraday, but this does seem to be a bit of a departure--in form and content--and so I thought I'd share it a bit.  

Notes:

1. The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature,  and the Arts (of the Royal Society of Great Britain). London, printed by John Murray,  volume XXII, 1827; 8.5x5”, viii, 418 pp,, 3 engraved plates.  Other interesting contributions in the volume include:  (Thomas Young), "Practical Application of the Doctrine of Chances, as it regards the Subdivision of Risks (by a Correspondent)"; (Michael Faraday, signed "M.F." in the article), "On the Confinement of Dry Gases over Mercury", in the Miscellaneous Intelligence section, pp 220-221; John MacCulloch, "Observations on the Geological History of the Formation of Coal"; and these shorter notices from the "Miscellaneous Intelligence" section including  Wollaston "On Electro-Magnetic Rotation" and  Becquerel "On the Conducting Power of Metals for Electricity" pp 374-378.

Finding Sameness, 1919

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I just found this unusual image in the page of the scarce journal Illustrated World for June 1919.  At first glance it attracted my attention for the design, and then I thought it was utilizing a Sumerian bill of sale--it turns out to be part of an intelligence test.  The subject is asked to see how many of the figures pointed out in the top line (and repeated five times) are repeated in the diagram. This is a lot easier than what I thought the test was, which was looking for five-times-in-a-row repeating symbols--after finding a few symbols repeated four times in a row and not five, I read the directions, and the test was much simpler, esp since someone had already gone through and marked out a bunch.

The cover story for this month was "electrocuting Whales"--and we don't need to go there. 

 

The "Reactionary Lifter" and a Fist of Blood, 1872

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This design screams out --yes, the "outside scream"--for attention of some sort.  It is a five square inch ad crowded into a crowded 140 square inch page in a supplemental section to Harper's Weekly, August 3, 1872.  The circular part is less than two inches in the original but it commands the big page, and is about the only thing your eyes can focus on until the ad is at least acknowledged and/or read. 

The ad is for the "Reactionary Lifter", an uninspired and slightly cumbersome name for an exercise apparatus that was made of hydraulics and pull-me devices that used the person's own weight to exercise against.  The machine itself doesn't seem that interesting, though the price does. At $100 it would take the average machinist or a similar skilled job probably a year to save a hundred dollars while making $10/week and then removing expenses, so this exercise machine was a significant expense. There is no mention of a price in the Harpers placement, which I guess was a good move so as not not frighten off the casual reader. 

In any event, I liked the graphic.

The Eloquence of Baseball (Games), 1904

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Baseball season is either here or almost here, so picking around in old patents on baseball games in December is perfectly allowable.  This game (found at Google Patents) probably has more text on it than just about any game of any sort I've ever seen (and that may actually include Scrabble), and its lazy-staccato descriptions of the "play" are really quite lovely for a board game¹. For example: 

• "too hot for the right fielder's hands"
• "a hot one caught" 
• "2nd baseman not fast enough"
• "fine running catch" and "beautiful running catch" and "pretty left hand catch"
• "good stop, poor throw"
• "would have been a 3-bagger but for the fast fielding by the right fielder"
• "slow work and wild throw"
• "fly muffed"

[Source: https://www.google.com/patents/US772344?dq=catcher+baseball&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiz0--e5L7JAhXK7CYKHWt_CPwQ6wEIVjAI]

Notes:

1.  I haven't read many books on sports in my reading history, but from what I have seen over the years is that baseball literature is good enough to have its own genre. If you're going to read only one or two baseball books in your life, consider one of these: Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (1972);  Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (1965); Jimmy Breslin, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963);   Robert Creamer, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (1974); Arnold Hano, A Day in the Bleachers (1955);  Donald Honig, Baseball When the Grass Was Real: Baseball from the Twenties to the Forties, Told by the Men Who Played It (1975); Bernard Malamud, The Natural, (1952).

 

The Art of Quarreling, 1879--Just in Time for the Presidential "Debates"

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"The art of disputing with dignity and decorum if it ever existed is a lost one"--Mr. Punch

This tongue-in-cheek article appeared in the sharp and occasionally cutting demi-satire English journal, Punch, or the London Chiarivari, in February 1, 1879. It has some fresh and poignant words for advice for quarrelers, which I think in today's vernacular would be applicable for debaters, and particularly the debater-like folks battling it out for their respective party's nomination for the U.S. presidency.  It seems though that this present crew has gotten along using these rules without having necessarily been exposed to them. 

In fear of being redundant and overstating the over-obvious, here are some of the most important rules to quarreling, according to Mr. Punch: 

1) "In the first case as a sort of preliminary training for this pastime it is essential to divest yourself of all sense of good feeling fairness and self respect and get rid of all such fatal weaknesses as courtesy and openness to conviction ..."

2)  "Secondly you must set up an opinion. We say set up advisedly because the establishment of an opinion like the purchase of a carriage is an act of pure volition and has no necessary relation to the intellect or conscience. The more arbitrary and irrational this opinion the better for the special purpose in contemplation. The conviction or assumption that you are the greatest Wisest and best of mankind is very promising principle to start with."

3) "You must then discover somebody of a contentious turn of mind whose pet opinion is diametrically opposed to your own. You will have no difficulty in this."

And so on. 

And the rest of it, in situ:

 

The False Card Catalogs for the Library of Babel

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2538

“Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such “ordainers of the universe” (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries.” ― Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (and also translator of Borges and co-editor of A  Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a book worthy of high consideration as the The Book that you could have with you on a desert island.)

• [On the other end of the infinite library, see an earlier post here on "The Library of One Book", here: http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/10/the-library-of-one-book.html]

In Jorge Borges' "The Library of Babel" (published in 1944 and translated into English in 1962) we find that an infinity, or a universe, or a heaven, is declared to be a sort of endless library, stocked with hexagonally-shaped rooms books filled with books, all the same size, with the same number of characters. The rooms are endless, as are the books, which are written in every conceivable language and containing 29 necessary elements (including the alphabet, and the period, comma, and very interestingly concluding with the space). There are endless varieties of possibilities, and the place is staffed by librarians who have interests and obsessions from, well, A to Z, or A^{z^Z^Z^Z} to Z^{A^A^A} and so on, until we run out of time.  (Others have done some smart thinking on Borges' great thought experiment/short story, and have estimated the size of the library in terms of stacked orders of magnitude beyond the atoms of the universe--but you can find all of that stuff elsewhere with a quick google search.)

And then there's this sample fro Borges on what sorts of books make up the library:

"...the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language . . ."

Here's how you arrange an infinite library: you don't.

The books are not sorted to any sort of classification, only collected to the point that they are together.

The many seem to be written in indefinable languages. Some of the librarians spent their time pursuing the holy grail--since all books that could ever be published would be present here, which theoretically include an index to library, or some sort of organizing principle.

But since there was no verifiable organizing principle at play here, the library was useless as a "library", though for the individual bits, it was perfectly fine. The structure though just turned into a long, endless, shelf.  This might explain why the caretaker/librarians of the place are so desperate.

I cannot recall a mention of a card catalog, which I guess could be as all-powerfully impossible as the library, given that the library is not-classifiable. This is particularly true when you consider that there must also be a catalog of the arrangement of all possible false catalogs of all possible false books in the library, in addition to the true catalog. Perhaps the cards from this catalog would take up all of the space in the universe that would bump up against our own.  

On the other hand, the logician W.V.O. Quine has written in a short piece that the Borges library is finite, because at some point there will come a time that all that can be written or will be written has been written:

"It is interesting, still, that the collection is finite. The entire and ultimate truth about everything is printed in full in that library, after all, insofar as it can be put in words at all. The limited size of each volume is no restriction, for there is always another volume that takes up the tale -- any tale, true or false -- where any other volume leaves off. In seeking the truth we have no way of knowing which volume to pick up nor which to follow it with, but it is all right there."

He reduces this argument elegantly but completely without the humor of Borges, and says that all that is known can be represented in two symbols from which everything else can be derived--a dot, and a dash. He writes: 

"The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters."

    "The ultimate absurdity is now staring us in the face: a universal library of two volumes, one containing a single dot and the other a dash. Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters. It is a letdown befitting the Wizard of Oz, but it has been a boon to computers." [Quine's "Universal Library" is found at Hyperdiscordia, here: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/universal_library.html]

Quine's approximation cuts way down on the size of the library, which evidently would not fit in the known universe, which opens the gates for Heaven, which I think doesn't depend on such restrictions--unless of course it was too big for that, which means believers would be in trouble, and none too happy with being kicked out of paradise to make space for a book.

 

 

Should There be a Post about Question Marks?

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2506

• "You talkin' to me?"--Travis Bickle
• "Is it safe?" -- Christian Szell
• "Who's on first?"--Bud Abbott & Lou Costello

Well, almost a post.

In my haul of the 90,000-item Pamphlet Collection from the Library of Congress some number of years ago oh my brothers and sisters I created many standard and many odd categories into which the pamphlets would hopefully fall into some sort of wishful order. One of the straightforward categories was Titles with Questions, which was actually a combination of a great number of other categories, including the Found-Absurd, the Found-Surreal, and the Glibly Naive, including more-standard selections.  The Question Marks could stand on their own, though, because they were ungainly, so stark, and bizarre, and unexpected--they just demanded a certain consideration for themselves. 

Sometimes these question marks could easily be an exclamation point. 

For some reason these three were separated from the pack, but they're good enough to stand as representatives of the collection, all of which gathered together might make for an interesting exhibition. But for now, three will do.

They bring up a larger though perhaps not-very-interesting issue of other more interesting works in other fields where the title is a question.

For example, here are some good questions, (one in translation):

• "Is the inertia of a body dependent on its energy content?" ("Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?")¹

• "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete"²

As a matter of fact, they're  really good questions--and the person putting the question mark into the title of these papers was Albert Einstein in the first case and then Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nick Rosen in the second.

There are many others to be sure, but it is a difficult question to answer offhand, like this, and will take a much longer think.  (Another good question comes in the title of Richard Courant's book, What is Mathematics?)

There is a recent paper³ of questionable use for someone like me that looks at the rise of the use of question marks in scientific papers over the last fifty odd years or so. (I must commend the author though as he utilized more than 2 million papers in the comparison.)

But then there are the great philosophical questions like "Why did the chicken cross the road?","Does God Exist?", "If a tree falls...?," "Is there Life after Death?", "Father, Why Have You Forsaken Me?", and "Where's Waldo?"

And of course great books have their fair share of questions--I can quickly come up with the following examples and no doubt some real thought will produce many more: P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother?, Horace McCoy They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Ed Albee Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, PK Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Political (Lenin, What is to be Done?), musical ("Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?" by the Carter Family), and question marks in film ("O Brother, Where Art Thou?", "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"), all need to be addressed for such a future post.  

But not right now--for the moment, it is just these three delightful pamphlets.

Notes:

1.  One of the four miracle papers of 1905, published in the Annalen der Physik 18(13):639-641

2. This is the EPR Partadox, a great contribution to physics published in the Physical Review in 1935,  47(10):0777-0780

3.  "The titles of scientific articles have a special significance. We examined nearly 20 million scientific articles and recorded the development of articles with a question mark at the end of their titles over the last 40 years. Our study was confined to the disciplines of physics, life sciences and medicine, where we found a significant increase from 50% to more than 200% in the number of articles with question-mark titles. We looked at the principle functions and structure of the titles of scientific papers, and we assume that marketing aspects are one of the decisive factors behind the growing usage of question-mark titles in scientific articles."-- "Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005", by Rafael Ball, in Scientometrics, June 2009, Volume 79 #3, pp 667-679,

The Unstoppable Mawson (1914)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2495

 Oh bloody hell--was there anyone as tough as Douglas Mawson?  The impossible situations he survived for months on end are just, well, impossible. He just kept going in the most extreme environment in the Antarctic in the face of long and endless perdition--and won. And to be honest I'm not sure who claims him--the Brits because he was born there, or the Aussies because he emigrated with his folks when he was two years old--but I'd fight for him being mine whatever the position on the globe I was in.  I've read Mawson's Will  by Lennard Bickel and also parts of his own The Home of the Blizzard (available at Project Gutenberg but it reads much better with an older print version, so you can feel its big chunkiness in your hands). The books are both about his 1911-1914 Australasian Antarctic Expedition, which Sir Edmund Hilary calls "the most outstanding solo journey ever recorded in Antarctic history", and which is no overstatement.

So when I discovered  that I had a small publication from the Geographical Journal (September 1914)  by Sir Douglas called  "The Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911-1914" I was pretty excited. It is short (29pp) but it seems to be the first time that he addressed the expedition in any detail; it is first-person and very concise, nearly so to the point of brittleness. And it has a couple of killer folding maps (large folding ones for King George V Land and Adelie Land) to illustrate the trek.  There's also a do-not-stand-in-my-way portrait of Mawson, who recounts the trek and what was supposed to be the charting and geological/glaciological reconnaissance of the 1500-mile Antarctic coast southward of Australia. Then there was the tragedy, and his 160km 30-day solo march through The Bad Stuff. 

You can read the article online via Wiley and JSTOR by following this link http://www.jstor.org/stable/1778688?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents and getting a JSTOR permit. If you don't have an account that includes JSTOR, it is well worth the effort of signing up for the free stuff that it offers.  

• There are three film clips in existence for the expedition, found at Australian Screen: http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/home-blizzard/

A King-Hell Review of the U.S.: "Who Reads an American Book?" (1820)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2474

Sydney Smith was a cleric and critic; I don't know much about the former, but I have seen some of the later, and it could be insightful and acidic. Here's an example that I had seen years ago and then bumped into again this morning, a massive and stinging observation on the United States, in general. It comes in a review of a seemingly brickish/factoid work by Seybert, and is a data-trove publication of statistical information, and appears in The Edinburgh Review.

After a lengthy appreciation of the work, Smith can hold himself no more. It is in the final two paragraphs of the review in which he freezes everything stock still, wanting whomever was reading his words to answer his series of questions so that they can form the answers themselves--but no matter, Smith provides the answer in the end, impatient for someone else to do the thinking.  That's okay--the man made a good point.  

In my experience if this wit is remembered at all it is for the opening fragment about the American book--that actually comes way at the end of the page-long paragraph; and it is really in the rejoinder, the final bit of that long sentence ending the paragraph, where the real venom sits, waiting for its victim to step into it.

"...In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? Or what old ones have they advanced? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets? Finally, under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave, whom his fellow-creatures may buy, and sell, and torture?"

"When these questions are fairly and favourably answered their laudatory epithets may be allowed. But till that can be done we would seriously advise them to keep clear of superlatives." --Review of  Adam Seybert’s Annals of the United States, published in The Edinburgh Review (January, 1820).¹

Ouch.  I wanted to get to the main quote straight-away in this short blog post; it is preceded by some rougher stuff, as insightful as the above but not as committed to the overall social memory:

"...The Americans are a brave industrious and acute people but they have hitherto given no indications of genius and made no approaches to the heroic either in their morality or character. They are but a recent offset indeed from England and should make it their chief boast for many generations to come that they are sprung from the same race with Bacon and Shakspeare and Newton. Considering their numbers indeed and the favourable circumstances in which they have been placed they have yet done marvellously little to assert the honour of such a descent or to show that their English blood has been exalted or refined by their republican training and institutions. Their Franklins and Washingtons and all the other sages and heroes of their revolution were born and bred subjects of the King of England and not among the freest or most valued of his subjects. And since the period of their separation a far greater proportion of their statesmen and artists and political writers have been foreigners than ever occurred before in the history of any civilized and educated people. During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the Sciences for the Arts for Literature or even for the statesman like studies of Politics or Political Economy..."

The entire review is worth a read--it is a good overview of the data, and is also peppered with choice nuggets, like this one on Florida:

 Notes:

1.  The review is reprinted in The Literary and Scientific Repository, and Critical Review, Volume 1, by Charles Kitchell Gardner, pp 177-186.

• Read a short, interesting insight into the book that Smith was reviewing here, by Eric Salughter.

Babbage Obituary and Other Babbage Bits

JF Ptak Science Books    Quick Post

[Image source: Giants of Science]

Here's a fine piece of work on Charles Babbage from a very early period (volume 5) of Nature--succinct and tight and only two pages.  (It was buried in the middle of the issue, which surprised me, as I thought he'd be placed up front rather than tucked into the middle. So it goes.)

Some other bits on Babbage on this blog:

• Poe, Babbage, and Thinking Machines, 1836 (here) 
• The Broken Windows of Uncle Chuckles--Charles Babbage Figures Stuff Out, 1857 (here)