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The search for the Universal often seems prompted by the ache for Something More. The World of Ten Thousand Things is not enough, and yet it's always too much for any single theory of Everything. There usually seems to be a kind of desperation in the effort, which probably accounts for the inevitable sense of fundamentalist fear and anger in the language of such writings. And that's my attempt at analysis for the day. You have an interesting collection of pamphlets, John.
The War of Astronomies, Condensing Caloric, and the Creation of the Universe via Truth (1847)
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2151 Pierre E. Trastour published this remarkable pamphlet in 1847, in New Orleans, a fragment of what was supposed to be an astounding and magnificent work of science that dispensed with commonly-held understanding of math and physics and astronomy. It was a manus...
The "un" can make a narrative of some of these words. From the Joyce list, I like "unsaluted," which wants to spin a story even more seductive than "unlace" or "unbutton."
From the 1828 list, the "unbe" words behave similarly. "Unbenighted" and "unbestarred" beg more information than "unnighted" or "unstarred" would. It's one thing not to be starred, but it's quite another to find oneself not bestarred. How has one failed to be bestarred--the fault of oneself or of another (possibly even God)? Oh, the injustice!
An Alphabet of Unexpected Stems of "Un-" from 1828
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2139 Having just made a post of words using the prefix "un-" in Joyces Ulysses, I thought it would be interesting to see the unusual/unexpected un- prefixed words in Noah Webster's classic 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language. It turns out t...
I wasn't sure I wanted to read this, given the title, since I'm sitting here with tea and bagel, but I peeked and saw what it was about. The sugar photo is amazing. I wonder if all that sugar was, in fact, usable. I wonder what the sugar deep in that pile was like after such pressure and heat. I wonder if it was after this discovery that the Coca Cola Company really took off. That's a lot of sugar. [Wait ... a million tons is only two-days worth of production nowadays. Geez. A million of anything is nothing these days. Twenty years ago, the teabag string industry used a million pounds of cotton per year. It seems an absurd number, and yet it's real. It's actually a small market. This is one reason it's good for me to visit cities now and then, to see a different scale of things.]
Towards an Alphabet of Piles: Church Bells, Sugar, & Nazis
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2133 This six-year-old blog hasn't seen a new series in a few months--today will see the start of something new to go along with the various histories of dots, lines, nothing, memory, boredom, fear, blank things, missing things, imaginary things, and so on, some...
A pi-ku:
Hey, I want a piece
delicious pi nearly
fully rum
Except rounding should probably make the last word "wine" or "beer." A less appetizing pi.
Pi-matic-tron Posie Mnemonic Device Fail
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics."--mnemonic device by James Jeans on remembering pi to 15 places, where each word length assoicates a number in pi. Arndt, Jörg; Haenel, Christoph (2006). Pi Unleash...
Well, you got it in your pocket. That's something.
Emile Borel's calculations seem to point to the random production of the Bible within the current universe. The first monkey likely produces the first sentence. There are 788,280 words in the King James Version, and taking an average of 6 characters per word and dividing by the first monkey's production of 56 characters, similar production by a mere 84,458 monkeys could result in the finished text. Maybe fewer in Hebrew. Of course, I'm not a statistician and even I can see the issue is more complicated, but I'm wondering if Borel proceeded any further considering the work of a million such monkeys. Perhaps it's more reasonable than we often think to accept not only our own evolution from inanimate matter but that the Bible could have arisen in a similar fashion.
Or maybe there's nothing to it.
The 15 Billion Year Old Monkey and "Gasoline Alley"
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2118 Part of the series A History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things Concevons qu’on ait dressé un million de singes à frapper au hasard sur les touches d’une machine à écrire … [translation: Let us imagine a million monkeys typing haphazardly on typewriters …”1 ...
Remarkable response, really. Maybe THAT's the mark of genius--having the equanimity to reply to a questionnaire like this, and to do so eloquently. If I didn't run out of the room at first sight, I might start on the questionnaire, but then after the first question, my vision would darken and narrow, my mind would dissolve into blankness, and my face would settle into a scowl of aversion. I wonder, were I to mimic the characteristics he describes, if I might accomplish some tiny fraction of what he did (although I've already exceeded his life span considerably, so maybe I should just enjoy my tea and read about him).
James Clerk Maxwell, on Himself ("a profession was not necessary to a useful life")
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Around 1870 James Clerk Maxwell--one of the great minds in the history of modern physics--responded to a request by Francis Galton to fill out a questionnaire for Galton's work on the characteristics of people-of-genius, and published as English Men of Science,...
FWIW, you've probably already mentioned Project Orion from the '50s. One more "peaceful" use of nuclear bombs. I just finished an old biography, "The Starship and the Canoe," about Freeman Dyson and his son George. Freeman was on the Orion project conceiving and developing a propulsion system using sequences of nuclear explosions. They did demonstrate the principle with non-nuclear explosions, but fortunately, chemical rockets won out for liftoff from Earth.
Engineering with the A-Bomb, "To Conquer Forever the Dust Bogey", 1945
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2104 1945, Autumn: the question is, now that "we" have the atomic bomb, what can be done with it? One thing is for certain--it could be used not only to make big holes out of little ones, but also make big mounds of dirt where there were none. This stands to rea...
I learned a good word: cooperant. I hadn't run into that one before, but there it is in the OED. Nice. I'll be looking for occasions to use it.
Bad Poetry Yields Good Results in the Celebration of the "Atom-Molecule", 1874
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Browsing the 1874 volume of the London Punch an interesting but truly bad poem slid from the page. The poem certainly suffers from itself, but there are interesting insights, and poetics aside there's some good thinking going on in spite of a probably-very-quic...
Nice find. One wonders which came first: Mondrian or the design on manhole covers? As a child in NYC, I was fascinated by these portals, along with sewer grates and the remarkable upwelling vents over the subways. Now and then, an ancient door into stone or concrete that looked as if it hadn't been opened since the Romans. Even then, the patina and design were from another age, pre-polymer.
Heavy Metal Mondrian--a Sewer Story
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post Walking through the Western North Carolina Mountain Fair last week-end I found a little bit of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) embedded in the sidewalk. (Mondrian helped establish De Stijl (1917 or thereabouts), with a philosophy of using lines to transform artis...
Wait! I copied and pasted too much ...
"A screaming comes across the sky."
Some Great First Lines in Literature
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I put these together a while ago, and then didn't do anything else with them. I'm not sure what I was up to, so I'm posting what I have, simply because it is a niuce read. A Tale of Two Cities is still a stellar entrance. All children, except one, grow up...
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. -- Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.
Some Great First Lines in Literature
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I put these together a while ago, and then didn't do anything else with them. I'm not sure what I was up to, so I'm posting what I have, simply because it is a niuce read. A Tale of Two Cities is still a stellar entrance. All children, except one, grow up...
"Normal may or may not be a desirable thing ..." -- although isn't the "norm" always a positive thing? At least in math?
Also, there's Intercourse, PA, which is twice Halfway, GA.
Finding Normal, USA
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2101 As a part of my semi-developing History of Normalcy, I decided to see if I could find a place in this country that was "normal"--and indeed, I found one. Several--quite a few, actually, Normal and Normals and Normalcies, enough for everyone. Here's one--Nor...
C'mon, these are no worse than a Nascar pit stop. Also, I think you may have posted the wrong picture for the ship and dock. What I see is "Suggested layout for a small filling station at the side of a main road in a rural district." Where I find sharp and absurdly non-intuitive turns are in new suburbs. Even today, after 70 years of building suburbs, we can't do it sensibly.
A Note on Sharp Turns
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post THere is just something very offputting about sharp turns made by unusual things in unnatural settings, a sort of unwanted geometry applied to unneccesary objects found in cringing and chaffing places. For example--this image of a ship steaming in for a roudn...
At some point in my early youth, I was fascinated with the job of cleaning up trash in the park using a stick with a spike on the end. Now, it is becoming ever more appealing to me again.
Unusual Jobs Department: Gum Scrapers of 1916
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post In the long term, there are no unusual jobs-- it is only the labeling of the action that makes it "unusual", especially when it comes to something like a paid occupation, and that the "payment" part is supporting someone's life. (Some jobs are harder than othe...
The two guys in boaters are looking at the cemetery full of other human flies who have tried to scale the building across the street. "Ah, remember Jimmy? So close!"
A Note on the Fullness of Micro-Landscapes
JF Ptak Science Books Here's another in the Looking (Really) Closely at Prints series--actually they're more like a Inner Life of Prints series than anything, each mico-investigation leading to another entirely new world, each a new image, each a new view and vision, an orders-of-magnitude app...
Nice library. I like the introduction to book-keeping thrown in there, plus the art of bookbinding. By the time I got down to the M's, I forgot whose library I was looking at, and I thought, "How many copies of Maxwell's Theory of Heat does this guy need?" Then I remembered.
James Clerk Maxwell's Library
JF Ptak Science Books Reference Tool series I found this fantastic list at the James Clerk Maxwell Foundation and wanted to include this with a list of other Maxwell items but simplycould not get a link to function directly to the most-interesting JCM personal library page. http://www.clerkma...
I agree with Mr. McKay -- bubble canopies are cool. Especially two. Also, what is the proposed propulsion? I presume the vacuum is to precede the train and reduce wind resistance, but something else is needed to get to 400 mph.
The Future of Sucking, Part II--Supersonic Travel Tunnel
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2090 (continuing an earlier post) I found a report by John Prather in 1945 continues a sluggish history of underground high-speed travel. There's a scifi story by Jules Verne's son, Michael, Un Express de l'avenir (An Express of the Future), written in 1888, and a...
The answer to the Buddha's question is ... but wait, it looks as if perhaps it wasn't the Buddha who said that, or at least not Siddhartha. http://www.fakebuddhaquotes.com/whats-the-proper-salutation-between-people-as-they-pass-each-other-in-this-flood/
Of course, it could be a fake fake Buddha quote, part of an NSA plot. Regardless, the proper salutation would be kind, well-wishing, compassionate, equanimous.
Underwhelming the Overwhelming: Nuclear Holocaust and Dental Care, 1956
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2093 "What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?" Siddhartha Guatama Buddha (thanks to P...
Dragons = dinosaurs makes great sense. The ICR likes Mt. St. Helens, too. Still, I prefer Arthur C. Clarke's explanation for gargoyles (see Childhood's End).
A Few More Trees in the Display of Information
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I'd like to add the few images below to a developing thread on the use of trees in diagrammatic displays of information as seen earlier on this blog in the following posts: Trees as Symbols int he Display of Information The Tree of Life and Coal's Phyloge...
I feel more and more Crustacean as I get older. Looking at Haeckel's 1879 tree, this is a long way down. Can Ontogeny De-recapitulate Phylogeny?
A Few More Trees in the Display of Information
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I'd like to add the few images below to a developing thread on the use of trees in diagrammatic displays of information as seen earlier on this blog in the following posts: Trees as Symbols int he Display of Information The Tree of Life and Coal's Phyloge...
It's easy to imagine a cataloger at the end of the day picking up that pamphlet thinking 'I'll do one more.' I can feel the deflation as it sinks in what is in hand. The interior battle to be professional about an unprofessional thing begins. I would have banged my head on the typewriter keys and turned in the catalog card that way. What would the more professional librarian have done -- faithfully typed the entire thing or typed a fraction sufficient to recognize the work (of someone never to be read ... until now).
Enormous Title of Visionary Work Utterly Defeats Library Cataloguer
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2076 Outsider Logic Daily Dose from Dr. Odd There appeared on this blog last week a post regarding a library cataloguer who was not threatened or defeated by a work with an enormous and meandering title. The good librarian got right to it, recorded the deed, ...
I'd like to see the typewriter that could make a carbon copy of a catalog card. Most impressive. Interesting for me to see the name "Frazee," which I've only come upon in local (Salida, CO) history. Steve Frazee was a popular Western author (and author of Westerns) and his books saw some Hollywood action. He also published a book in 1961 called "More Damn Tourists," loosely based on Salida life, which is instructive for locals who moan as if tourism were somehow a new part of our regional economy, supplanting railroads, mining, and ranchin' thanks to more damn Liberals ... Ok, I'll stop. But of course, a check of Superpages.com shows a great many Frazees out there. Only twelve Ptaks in Colorado, though.
A Top 1% Card Catalog Title Entry. Seriously.
JF Ptak Science Books Daily Dose from Dr. Odd Triple-F (Frank Freemnont Frazee) came up with an all-time-great-title entry when he wrote his pamphlet about _____ back in 1947. I have a copy of it, purchased in a 90,000-item collection from the Library of Congress--something called...
A decline in suicide! Enough to make one's heart sink. Thank goodness for the likes of Mr. Chesterton. The problem is that would-be eugenicists are unembarrassible. But then, neither am I for using such a word.
Eugenics, War, and Stupid Stuff
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post This paper, "The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War" by Prof. J.A. Lindsay, published in The Eugenics Review in October 1918, ends with the words that I will begin this post with: "There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distil ...
Amazing photo. I wonder if it isn't a "colored" photo vs. color photo. The far distance looks monochromatic. If it IS a re-touched photo, it's a marvelous job.
Zoomology of the Lower East Side, NYC, 1900
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2038 Part of a Paper Micrscope series, Zoomology Michael Beschloss posted this remarkable photograph of the Lower East Side on Mulberry Street, a rare color photo made around 1900. There is a lot of life going on here--people posing for the photographer (standi...
At first glance, the moon and the light bulb made me think of Flash Gordon.
Unintentional Absurdist and/or Naive-Surreal Photography
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2030 L'Eclairage, published by la Societe pour le Perfectionnement de l'Eclarage, was printed in 1937, and addressed the use and beauty of proper lighting. The photography is the work of Andre Vigneau, French photographer/film-maker/sculptor (1892-1968), w...
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