JF Ptak Science Books

"Bring Rome in Your Home"--Fascist Women of Italy Radio Broadcasts, 1937

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2603

[Source: Women of Imperial Italy, by Alice Seelye Rossi; printed in Rome, 1937.]

Not anymore. Probably not so much in 1937, though I am sure that the picture of the "fascist" in the "fascist Woman" was prettier and rosier than what people would come to know by 1942.  In 1937, when this pamphlet was published, the "women" were broadcasting far and wide--one aspect of radio propaganda from the Fascists in Italy, a hearts-and-minds attempt at a part of the coercion of Italia imperiale that occupied the years 1935 until the end of the war. By 1937 Mussolini's National Fascist Party (in power since 1922) had extended itself by occupying Libya and by invading Ethiopia; Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia would come between 1939-1941, as would France, when Italy entered the war in 1940 and entered into the country at the tail-end of the German invasion. So the broadcast heard here in 1937 was the beginning of Italy looking for the "Fourth Shore", and deep into Mussolini's Fascist state. (Ezra Pound would also do his level best to look the part of traitor that he was, lobbying the Italians for years before being allowed to get on the air to broadcast to the Allies on his misunderstood and inscrutable economics, vicious and virulent anti-Semitism (offhandedly addressing the U.S. president as "Franklin Delano Jewfeld/Jewsevelt"), and general attempts to tell the U.S. population to not support the war effort against the Fascists and that instead they should be down on their knees praising Mussolini, who he saw as another Thomas Jefferson. And so on.)  

I've shared the few pages in this brief pamphlet on the Fascist Woman as it appears in the pamphlet. For the great majority of people living in the U.S., Europe, Great Britain,  Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and many other places, the idea of the "fascist" would change dramatically in about a year, and then spin its grinding way downward until the start of the war in 1939. 

 

 

 

On The Flood, Comets, and a Recantation (1823-1831)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2592

I pulled a volume at random of the Annals of Philosophy from the shelves--it was volume VI (new series) from 1823. Trying to think of what might be a hot-button issue (in English) for that year, I started flipping through the pages, reading the page headers: Humboldt on volcanoes, Beaufoy's astronomical observations, Mr. Moyle on the temperature of mines, Prevost on the blood, Pond on some astronomical topic, Ramond on the barometer, book reviews, scientific society announcements, and so on. Nothing really drew me in--until in the back, at page 344, this running header: "Prof. Henslow on the Deluge". That was a "something" that I was looking-but-not-looking-for.  

This was a late-ish contribution to the history of the geology of the Great Flood, and in it, John Henslow (a great naturalist and botanist, 1796-1861) postulates that the flood was caused by the near-passing of a comet that disintegrated and contributed its enormous aequeous "nebulae" to the Earth's atmosphere producing the Noachic flood.  He quickly sites a contemporary (one of many), William Buckland¹, in this, who was one of the late leaders in the geological response to the flood, and who theorized a natural history of the flood and a production of an Ice Age.  The belief that there was some scientific basis in the divinely-induced flood was buoyed by the general flavor of the mythology of the flood, which turns up in more than 100 cultures--so part of the Noahic flood argument as being true is the broad cultural base for it. Commonality across cultures like this doesn't necessarily make something real--there are many many parallels between the Bible and other sacred books besides this, like for example the savior descending into Hell for three days before resurrection, and that in stories that precede the New Testament. So common story bases make them popular, though not necessarily correct.

So Henslow thinks about the comet in a long tradition of Genesis geology, like Buffon and his comet. But what is more interesting to me in this issue is another contemporary, Reverend Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge University, who at the end of several decades in theorizing on catastrophic flood geology decided that he had taken a wrong turn.  What happened then, in 1831, was a remarkable refutation of his earlier work. It was an enormous thing, a statement of real courage and conviction to the scientific process.  

Gears, Teeth, Minie Bullets, Cloth Bindings (1864)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2575

Claude-Étienne Minié (1804-1879) was an influential military designer and French officer who designed what was to become know as the "Minie ball". This was a cylindrically-shaped conical-pointed bullet the design of which greatly increased fire at long ranges. The bullet was designed in 1847 and soon became standard issue in Europe and (especially?) in the U.S. during the Civil War.  I'm taking notice of these projectiles after having made this very accidental discovery of the machine that formed them in the Victorian review of technology and invention, Great Inventors, the Sources of their Usefulness and the Results of their Efforts, printed in London in the rockingly good year of 1864.  It makes me think about the fabulous machinery that produces stuff like bubble gum--glorious metallic ideas for production and packaging, all combined in effort to produce a piece of fluff that you chew on and then discard.  With the Minie Ball, though, you have a massively-geared machine used to produce little bits of metal meant to pass more efficiently and with more accuracy through a body. (Also it is another representative of a genre of illustration of looking at the object straight on.)  

 

The cover of the book is interesting in its own right, being bound in an elaborate publisher's cloth with gilt-stamped decorations.  Books before, say, 1800, were almost entirely bound according to the wishes of the customer, who would/could purchase the sheets and have them bound according to their wishes.  That, or booksellers would offer the book for sale in a small election of available bindings.  The cloth binding that we would recognize today really didn't start to make an appreciable appearance until the 1830s, when a simple cloth cover replaced its more-elaborate brethren, making things much easier for the publisher and the bookbinder, allowing for much less expensive production and a quicker turn-around time.  It also brought in a far greater distinction in the now-divergent industries of bookselling and publishing--and of course bookbinding.  So the entry of the semi-standard plain cloth binding also brought in the possibility for design and art in standard book production, with less to the introduction of the decorated cloth cover.  

The cover for the book described here comes from about the second full decade of a standardized-luxury of decoration in cloth-bound books.  Over the years I've paid only a little attention to the decorated cloth bindings of scientific books, but never collected them, something I somewhat regret at this point. In any event, Great Inventors... is a good example of a relatively inexpensive but nicely-designed book cover.  

The Illogical in Pursuit of a Logical End--a Note on the Snark.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2537

   "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
          As he landed his crew with care;
     Supporting each man on the top of the tide
          By a finger entwined in his hair."

So opens the semi- and fully-immortal The Hunting of the Snark. an Agony in Eight Fits, by the fully-and-not-partially-immortal Lewis Carroll, which (if it can said what the book is about) is about eight guys whose professions all begin with a letter "b" plus a beaver in search of a Snark.   In the second of eight Fits that comprise this lyrically nonsensical poem, we encounter a map of the route of possibilities taken by the group, this being in the charge of the Bellman. This is not only the finest map illustrating a Fit that exists, it is also (as I've stated earlier in this blog) one of the most beautiful maps ever published. It is a beautiful map of nothing, showing nothing, and marking the route of nothing.  Perfect for the Snark story.

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Sometimes there is nothing so fine as something that beautifully illustrates the nothing that isn’t there, and this lovely map, unencumbered of all of the elements and details that define the mapness of something,  perfectly explains the origin of its need.

The Snark evidently occurred to Carroll while he was out walking on one bright summer day, on a hillside--actually, it was one line of poetry, and it wound up being the closely line of the book.

  In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
          In the midst of his laughter and glee,
     He had softly and suddenly vanished away—-
          For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

                   THE END

So we had those eight guys and a beaver, setting out from points unknown and going to places not seen.  

This was all started by that string of poetry that entered Carroll's head on his walk.  He didn't know what it meant, and didn't know where it was going; he did however set out to figure it out for himself.  ("I know not what it meant, the; I know not what it means, now..."¹) I find it such a lovely thing that Carroll would spend so much time trying to retrieve the intellectual evidence of where this line came from.  And what his investigation revealed was The Hunting of the Snark.  And at the end of the day, Carroll was no closer to knowing what a Snark was, in spite of all of the writing and commentary and criticism.  Throughout the rest of his life Carroll insisted that he didn't know what the poem meant, though it could have meant something.  It was supposed to have been a work of nonsense and illogic, but I think it fits with the rest of his work on nonsense and the logic of it, so my best guess is that there was nothing quite so logically in his works as the reach of the illogical in pursuit of a logical end.  

• Full text of the Snark, here, via Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13/13-h/13-h.htm  Also a pdf with illustrations:  http://www.archive.org/stream/huntingofsnarkan00carruoft#page/n27/mode/2up

Notes:

1.  This line occurs in Morton Chase's Lewis Carroll, a Biography, published by Macmillan in 1995, p 404.

Mars Misspelled & Cleveland as Canada! (1908)

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In my big, old, sloppy cruiser that is this blog, I have misspelled may things, even after "editing" and forcing my way through squiggly spell-checks (sp?). I am not a good editor, so I appreciate one when I see it, And generally I squint m way through misspellings in others, until they get to be (1) very simple, (2) very obvious, and (3) published. The sheet music shared here is a great example of a something-I-cannot-identify:  first, it is pretty though not well designed; second, Mars is misspelled, somehow; and thirdly, "Canada" has become "Cleveland".  

I'm fairly certain that I have never heard anyone ask/wonder, "Is there life on Mar?", or utter "Mar, the red planet", or "we're being invaded by aliens from Mar!".  "Mar" looms large in the copy for the sheet music, and I just don't know how that was missed--which means it probably wasn't, and was made so to rhyme with "car", though it would've been easy to spice up the slogan and make it all correct if "car" was plural.  

The "cleve" part of  "Cleveland" (at least in the very earliest roots of the word) was no doubt applied to Canada because of the Cleveland to the featured/endorsing singer, Miss Suzanne Sue, of the Cleveland Hippodrome. Otherwise the Jackson car was made 100 or so miles away, in Jackson, Michigan, which means I guess that the Cleveland/Canada designation should've been "Jackson". In any event it seems as though there is something for everyone in this sheet music cover.  

[Source: Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins, http://levysheetmusic.mse.jhu.edu/catalog/levy:060.062]

The Not-so-Sunny Aspect of Easter Island

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2509

The "Easter" part of Easter Island is fairly ironic--new, rising, hopeful connotations packing something not-so-joyful.  I was looking at this engraving from the bookstore, an image from a famous exploration journal of  Captain Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, showing a landing party and very western-looking Polynesians. La Perouse was off on a journey that would take him along the trail of Captain Cook, a scientific/ethnographic/cartographic expedition (along with the appropriate trailing or leading religious/economic benefits of such a thing) that landed him on the island 9 August 1786.  He left Brest on 1 August the previous year, and he would venture round-the-world, or almost, as he would never make it home, disappearing along the northwest coast of North America in 1789.  His journals did complete the voyage, however, being taken back to France by a British ship in Australia.

• [The original print is available for purchase at the blog's bookstore, here.]

The island is so-named because it was first recorded by a European, Captain Jacob Roggoveen, Easter 5 April, 1722. La Perouse was there 64 years later, when things were already quite heated, in a most unfortunate way, for the two clans who shared the island, each already suffering substantial losses, as la Perouse found the place sparely inhabited. 

As you can see there are a few shrubs in the foreground and some other bits, but there are no trees.  Easter Island was by that point largely denuded of trees, making it impossible for the islanders to build boats to fish, and their crops ultimately failing because of the attendant problems erosion and wildlife, making it difficult for much to survive on the island.  The clans set at each other, and had bitter fights, resulting later on in the clans toppling in spite the great  stone figures of the opposite clan. Easter Island became a port of call for slavers, and the population began to disappear into greed and economic lust. 

This was still decades in the future from the la Perouse expedition, his work being published posthumously nearly ten years after the captain's death.

In this  image, though, we see a rather playful interaction between the sailors and the islanders.  In the foreground-center we see an officer with two men and a woman, one of the men fingering a piece of cloth while the officer is no doubt otherwise distracted. In their background two women are seen using a mirror; to the right of them is a small group watching one of the officers draw an image of one of the Moai.  At right, around the Moai, two officers make observations for the ethnographic record, while around the corner at the monument's base an island uses a stick to try to steal one of the officer's hat.

The Maoi were still standing in 1798.  Later in the 19th century, though, after devastating attacks on one another, every monument was toppled. As were the people.  There's really not that much to the Easter-y history of the European part of the island's history, and so the irony of its naming. 

The $5,000,000 Powur Fonetic Alfabet (1890)

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Just two years before the 400th anniversary celebrating Columbus, and in the city celebrating it with a world's fair (Columbian Exposition) of 1892, Charles A. Story set out on his own voyage, seeking support to change the way the United States wrote in ts native tongue. It seems high in the century for this sort of expedition, and Story was not nearly the first to get that, not even the first of 1890, as spelling reform has been a subdued meme in this country for a long time.

What make's Story's story so momentarily interesting is that he sought government intervention to make his dream come true. He was preceded in this strategy by Robert Fulton (who received $300K+) and Samuel Morse ($30k), which was money well spent by  as usually very tight Congress; Story sought $5,000,000 1890's dollars to change the alphabet, at the end of which you would get an alphabet of 66 letters of which only 45 were really necessary.  And 100 schools to teach the new alphabet. And so on.

A curious and Outsidery text illustration illustrative of some misty point:

$5,000,000 was a h of a lot of money back then, and could have been spend of better things and maybe on some worse things (though perhaps not on the latter). 

Mr. Story had a nicely designed cover for his plea; he didn't do quite so nicely on the text illustrations. 

Here's another unfortunate text illustration; this one isn't so much like an Outsider as it is just plain creepy:

How this was supposed to enhance the language, or create new words, in the fine tradition of the development of the English language from the languages of the Aryan, Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and so on, is a $500,000  mystery. 

A Victorian YouTube and the Anti-Hermit Hermit

JF Ptak Science Books  

The "eccentric" versus the "insane" in Victorian England may well have been identified by the amount of available disposable income--if you could afford your whimsy and misery, then you were "eccentric"; if not, then you  were "insane", which also meant that you were culpable of being scooped up by The Authorities and interned if you turned out to be a larger/smellier/more obnoxious nuisance than a simple dot of the street.   That or you may have wound up as an electrically-prodded subject in an experiment by Charles Darwin (Expression of Emotions....).   In this way the past telescopes nicely into the present, less the electrical stimulation bit. 

[Image Source:  Daily Mail, here.]

The image shown below is that of Mr. James Lucas, "the Hermit of Red-Coat's Green, (near Hitchens)", living his life in a most uncommon hermit-like fashion, even for a hermit.  Seems to me that a hermit would be removed from society and be away from people; Mr. Lucas may be of a singular caste of that genre, living his life alone in the very midst of society--he lived in the kitchen of his townhouse, in a single room with a window to the street.  There he lived out his life in full and constant view of the passersby on the busy sidewalk.  Crowds would come by and stare, and Mr. Lucas would stare back--he would rarely, if ever, communicate, though he would ("he was not miserly") give out "farthings and gin" to "swarms of tramps", no to mention sweetmeats to children.   He'd watch people watching him.

He also didn't write (except we are told "upon a check"), and made no physical effort to retain anything that he thought about; nor was the reason for his uncommon lifestyle made known.

He was one son of "an opulent London merchant", and in time proved to be an incorrigible and strong-willed non-conformist (with the funds to do so in some comfort).  He evidently went completely over the edge when his mother died, and after a year of keeping her body in the house removed to the kitchen, where he spent the rest of his days (living there from 1850 to 1874).

 After he died and his room cleaned out for the sale of the family's property, it was discovered that the floor was covered in two feet of ashes and soot from the kitchen fireplace.  Without the family money Mr. Lucas surely would've wound up on a cadaver table long before his seventieth year, suffering real social Dickensian travail rather than that which existed just in his mind.

A Stone-Cold Alphabet and Geometry from Fr. Kircher, 1668

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This is another in a series of posts on images found in the glorious Fr. Athansius Kircher's masterpiece, Mundus Subterraneus, printed in 1668. (One of the main posts on these images occurs here; there are many more if your search under Kircher's name in the Google box at left.)

This fine example of the depth of his observation finds the great Jesuit finding things in rock and mineral samples like agate--in this case he looks at a collection of samples that display found letters of the alphabet and geometrical shapes.

• The original of this image may be purchased via the blog bookstore, here.

A Map of Currents and Seaweed, 1886

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2457

I think that if you squinted your eyes a little to deform your visual field and then looked at this map of the Earth's ocean currents that what you might see is...Mars.  At least that's what I can see if I concentrate on it, or at least the Mars of 1880 or thereabouts, with its large and blotchy seemingly mobile and ambiguous forms skirting around the planet.

• "This map may be purchased at the blog's bookstore, here.  

That said this map does represent a high achievement, displaying the elements of the still young-ish science of oceanography (or at least in the form presented by Matthew F. Maury) and showing the movements of the ocean currents.

This maps comes about a century after the first map to truly distinguish the Gulf Stream (the B. Franklin/Folger map of 1768-1785) and shows the remarkable activity that must have come with the acquisition of the data necessary to show on even this popular map.  There were earlier attempts, of course, notably by the great/problematic Athanasium Kircher in his Mundus... of 1662 though his effort was largely theoretical (and for what it was worth likened the currents to something similar to blood moving though the body, which at least used the work of William Harvey) given the lack of available hard data.  (Eberhard Happel is on a similar wavelength as Kircher with the currents map, and published his map a few years later, though he was mainly a science popularizer who "relied" heavily upon the Kircher map and was nowhere near to being Kircher's intellectual rival, his map is still interesting given its very heavy lining and beauty.) 

In any event, the Houston map is clear and concise--and given its 7"x 9" size, remarkably compelling.

And I just love the seaweed mapping.  

Robert Oppenheimer as a Ted Williams or a Joe DiMaggio?

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2407

Years ago I phone-met the physicist Al Wattenberg. He started his long and fine career under the bleachers at the University of Chicago, working with Enrico Fermi where on December 2, 1942, they achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction.  (The moment was celebrated with a bottle of Chianti donated by Eugene Wigner, and it was signed by all those present at the creation.  It turned out that Wattenberg was the last man to leave the area, and he saw the abandoned Chianti bottle and rescued it--he gave it to the Argonne National Lab where it lives to this day.)

One day I asked him about Fermi and what he was like when he wasn't working. Wattenberg said that he used to play tennis with Fermi, who (paraphrasing here) played tennis like he did physics--meticulous, methodical, careful. He said he was frustrating to play with, and he never beat Fermi at the game.  

I like these offbeat cross-interest metaphors for explaining complicated things. And it was this thinking that brought me to Oppenheimer and the New York Yankees--and that Boston team--in the hope of dislodging a little piece of insight that might come from comparing disparate things. And so far as I can tell discussing Robert Oppenheimer in terms of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio doesn't get very much red carpet room as an idea, and I suspect that there are good reasons for it.  

Let's face it—Robert Oppenheimer left his theoretical physics career sorta behind when he went to win the war at Los Alamos in 1943. I was surprised to see today that his publishing career for the hard stuff stopped around 1950 He was an absolute brilliant light when he started out in 1926, and a massive influence in his field by 1940.

Here's what the production looked like: 

• 1926-29:  16 papers
• 1930-39   36 papers
• 1940-42  10 papers

Which makes 62 papers for the 1926-1942 period . After the war, from 1946-50, there were five papers. And after that, none. That's not to say that he didn't publish, because he did, and was prolific—it was just a different career. Also from 1926-1942 he was a theoretical physicist with wholly different responsibilities than those he would take on in 1942, when he became not only the brilliant physicist but also the brilliant administrator/director/curator, working an almost-impossible job with thousands of creative people and the U.S. Army in shacks  in the desert trying to beat the Nazis to a bomb that would end the war.

After the war Oppenheimer helped to formulate the direction of physics in the U.S., leading Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study as its director;  then he helped formulate American nuclear policy going into the Cold War as the Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission. And then there was the great tragedy of his "security hearings” (1954) which crushed him on a McCarthyite slab,  costing him much of the rest of his career. And then he was dead in 1967.

Had he not gone to war, had he not taken the job only he could have done, what would he have become? His accomplishments were already large--the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, Oppenheimer-Phillips process, neutron stars, quantum tunneling. More than likely one of the things he would be well known for today would be his development of the discovery and understanding of black holes—a singularity that he discovered in with in a paper called printed in Physical Review on September 1, 1939, but this was somewhat premature for the time.  And then came the war.

Millions of other people went to war, too, stopping their lives on one end, starting a new life on the other, and then returning to their previous lives with varying degrees of retention or creation. Two of those folks were Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

Ted Williams went to war too, from 1943-1945. Williams just started out in his brilliant career hitting .406 in ; then two years later, he was gone. Williams was 24-26 years old for the war. Oppenheimer 38-40, though Ted got to play from 1946-1960 when he came back, absent a year that he spent as a Marine fighter pilot during the Korean War (“strafing Commies”). No doubt Williams would have piled up the numbers in a big way had he played ball in those four years

Then there's Joe DiMaggio, who also served for those years when he was 28-30. He had finished up seven years with the Yankees before he left, brilliant—perhaps the most stellar thing about it all (long pointed out to me by my friend, Mr. Baseball, Andy Moursund) was that he hit 219 home runs while striking out 196 times in 7 years. His batting averages were very high, and he was a slugger, and he didn't walk all that much compared to Williams. This seems more in-line with Oppenheimer—a different sort of precision, one where DiMaggio hit for power and rarely didn't hit anything at all, going up swinging but rarely going down swinging at nothing on the third strike. Although he was relatively young went he left for the war, he came back at 30, and played another 6 years,

It may be too weird or nonsensical to think of these sorts of things, let alone thinking of Oppenheimer in units of Joe DiMaggios, especially since Oppenheimer knew/cared nothing about sports². Plus in the alternative histories world we really can't express the potentials of missing years, especially in terms of metaphors from non-related entities.

On the other hand, I did create a physicists vs. mathematicians chess set, matching up people with what their possible position of the board might be, we can probably Oppenheimer to his baseball equivalent.

Perhaps this is also my pneumonia talking rather than my brain, what with Spring Training approaching, and perhaps this was all useless--but for some reason if Oppenheimer suddenly appeared out in the front yard wearing a baseball jersey, I'd see him in pinstripes, with a "5" on his back.  

The Cold War and Spider Webs (1947)

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Blanche Murray wrote this short pamphlet in 1947, the designer completing the cover in the Russian-spider/American-fly motif. Ms. Murray was trying to warn the U.S. that World War III was "happening now" and that Russia had crept into the U.S. on "cushioned paws".

 

The author was more or less correct in the WWIII part, though not so much in the creeping Commie part--my quick-browse didn't find any "Cold War" reference exactly, but that is what she was talking about there in 1947, two years before the Soviets had their own nuclear weapons (with the so-called Joe-1 shot) and three years before the Korean War began. Mr. Orwell called it in October 1945:

"For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors."--George Orwell, Tribune 19 October 1945 ("You and the Atomic Bomb") Here, via Project Gutenberg. 

In any event I like the cover design, which is probably the best part of the pamphlet. Sometimes that is all you really need.  

Feynman on Symmetry

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Richard Feynman wrote this about symmetry in section 52 of the first volume of his Lectures in Physics (1963) the three volumes now beautifully available online at CalTech here. The last two paragraphs are also quoted in Mario Livio's "The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved", Martin Gardiner in "The Ambidexterous Universe", and many other places, probably hundreds of times; I've included the previous two paragraphs for interest's sake.  Feynman, the symmetry master, included a statement about a beautiful gate in "Neiko" Japan, which must "Nikko", though I can hardly identify the gate that he was talking about.  There seem to be many--see the UNESCO Shrines and Temples of Nikko, here--though the candidate in my mind is the extraordinary Yomeimon gate, here. 

52–9  Broken symmetries

"The next question is, what can we make out of laws which are nearly symmetrical? The marvelous thing about it all is that for such a wide range of important, strong phenomena—nuclear forces, electrical phenomena, and even weak ones like gravitation—over a tremendous range of physics, all the laws for these seem to be symmetrical. On the other hand, this little extra piece says, “No, the laws are not symmetrical!” How is it that nature can be almost symmetrical, but not perfectly symmetrical? What shall we make of this?..."

Freedmen and Abandoned Lands Department

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post    On Naming Things series

Through the years I've known a little bit of something about the Freedman's Bureau, but I think I've never known its full name:

This was an act of federal relief proposed by Abraham Lincoln in 1865¹ empowered to help the newly-freed slave transition to their new life.   The "Abandoned Lands" part was very unsettling, in a way equating refugees and newly-freed slaves with real estate.  But it was the language and practice of the time, and economy of presentation, and logic, I guess, that lead to this title.  The bureau here was the Military, which was run by General O.O. Howard.  The Bureau functioned from 1865 until it ran out of steam (along with other Reconstruction efforts and measures) in 1872.

In a way it reminded me somewhat of the fight for the capitalization of the "N" in the word "Negro" (see here)--something that seems beyond the scope of thinking about nowadays, but it was a battlefield for decades after the Civil War, with that "N" not being decided positively until the 1920's in common usage.  "Abandoned Lands" is not the same thinking-point as "N", though it does make one think about what was in the common thinking that these three titles could be brought together as a single bureau, regardless of the hyper- and sub-text of the meaning associations via proximity

Sec. 1. "...a bureau of refugees, freedmen, and abandoned lands, to which shall be committed, as hereinafter provided, the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the [92] control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen from rebel states, or from any district or county within the territory embraced in the operations of the army..."

Sec. 2 "And be it further enacted, That the Secretary of War may direct such issues of provisions, clothing, and fuel, as he may deem needful for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children..."

 

[Source: with thanks to Rebecca Onion at Slate Magazine's The Vault, who posted the original document earlier today and where the name of teh bureau struck me so heavily.]

The Long Fight for Capitalizing the Letter "N" in "Negro"

JF Ptak Science Books   

 

N

 

“I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” W.E.B. BuBois

The history of the power of words is long and complex, and for the most part is on one side or the other of the political and social mirror, at least in the United States. Controlling the meaning of a word or phrase controls the idea which alters the way people approach it, defining the very heart of what may control the impulse for war or peace, which means that people may die as much for words as they will for ideas.

Sometimes the idea of control is even simpler than the word—it may be a simple letter.

Like the letter “N”.

Since the American Civil War (now in its 150^th year as of last month) when the use of the word “Negro” was used to describe African Americans, it appeared in print overwhelmingly with a small “n”. The idea was simple—to use a capital “N” would give a certain amount of respect and social diligence in referring to this race of people with a proper salutation; the small “n” minimized all of that, a symbol that these people were not worthy of having the initial letter of their race capitalized, and that because of their inferiority.

This was also the case with the word “Colored”, which was used in the decades before the Civil War and then lightly after that, giving way to for a short time to “Freedman” and then Negro--”Colored” appeared in print as “colored” in the vast majority of times.

The capital N was a rallying point, a common point of singularity for a large percentage of the Black population in the U.S.--and a very tiny percentage of the White population. We can deduce this because major papers such as the New York Times did not adopt a policy of using the capital “N” until 1930. And as a matter of fact the federal government documents printed “negro” small “n” beyond 1930, even though heavily lobbied to use the more enlightened and respectful “Negro”. The issue was evidently sidestepped throughout the Hoover administration.

There was in the country a racism so entrenched and engrained that African Americans were seen as being wholly unworthy of being dignified with a capital “N”, and it was the natural way of things. As the editor of the Eatonton, Georgia, newspaper Messenger said when asked about the capitalization issue, that he would not be a party to it, because “it would lead to social equality."

And that's just what everyone ws trying to avoid. And like the federal government, the control of the capital “N” extended into historical control as well. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote an article for the venerable American Historical Review, the editor, J. Franklin Jameson, refused to allow the use of DuBois' capitalized “Negro”. As the editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, Jameson refused the capital “N” in the publication until it was terminally embarrassed into doing so, in 1937.

And so it goes, 60 or 70 years of fighting for the minimum respect of capitalization.

And this doesn't even address the use of the reviled “n” word, which is a story unto itself. And in which there was also debate over the years as to whether or not that be capitalized.

Notes:
The major source of the information in this post comes the fantastic article by  Donald L Grant (12/01/1975). "Some Notes on the Capital \"N\"",  Phylon (0031-8906), 36 (4), p. 435, who did a splendid job of research.  There's also a bit of memory pulled from H.L. Mencken's The American Language (4th edition), which was clear and concise, even though Mr. M. had a small social problem here and there with minorities.  It must be said in his defense that the magazine he edited, The American Mercury, "always" used the capital N.