JF Ptak Science Books

Time 2020-09-22 11:03:50

Web Name: JF Ptak Science Books

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JF Ptak Science Books A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places... 4,750+ total posts since 2008.. JF Ptak Science Books Post 2897In the earliest periods of the history of bombing it seems as though the among the first generations of bombs dropped from flying machines were light or light sources, as we can see in this pair of illustrations from the Illustrated London News for 30 August 1913. These weapons appeared almost two years after Lt. Giulio Gavotti dropped an actual explosive from his plane on 1 November 1911 in a battle of the Italo-Turkish War1. Not that the exploding bombs weren t heavy (they weren t) but that the feature of the weapon dropped in the 1913 case was capable of generating a penetrating or at least illuminating light. We are told in the legend of the print that the light-bomb dropped from the dirigible was attached to a parachute which opened immediately, and from the height of 1500 at release the writer states that it would take the weapon three minutes to descend to the ground. (Of course the illuminated area would get together an tighter in descent, though it seems like there would be a good minute of so where there was some intelligence gathering possibilities.)Even though this package wasn t exploding, it did provide the observers from above time to gather information on the position of the enemy and relay that data so it could be employed in tactical or strategic manners. Notes:1. Lt. Gavotti (1882-1939) actually dropped four four-pound grenades from a height of 600 from his Etrich Taube monoplane in action against the Ottoman Turks in Libya. This was the first instance of bombing from a heavier-than-air aircraft, bombs being dropped from balloons for several decades already by the turn of the century. Dropping bombs from balloons was deemed an illegal act of war and outlawed in the Hague Convention of 1899--but as the Wright flight was still a few years away at that point there was no provision established for bombing from aircraft that didn t yet exist. There were other instances of bombing from aircraft before the start of WWI, with the first instance during the Great War occurring when German Zeppelins bombed the city center of Antwerp a few weeks after the war began on 24 August 1914. The Brits launched an aeroplane attack against two Zep bases in Cologne and Dusseldorf in response, and, well, and so on, raids and bombs becoming more sophisticated, cities becoming targets, and the race to destruction became developed. Images are expandable. JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post[Image source: Illustrated London News, 11 May, 1912.]I ve made dozens of posts on this site on cross sections, exploded views, and cutaways--today s installment is another of the high-artistic variety and depicts the first (of fourteen?) of the HMS Revenge ships, laid down in 1577. [Detail below.]“On July 20 the day on which the London Devonians celebrated the 324th anniversary the defeat of the Spanish Armada the King and Queen paid a visit to the England Exhibition at Earl s Court. Amongst other things they inspected the model of the Revenge famous not only as the one of the one and the fifty three whose great fight Tennyson tells so dramatically in The Revenge, A Ballad of the Fleet but as the flag ship of Drake beyond doubt the greatest man who ever set foot aboard her. The ship as reconstructed at Earl s Court is 104 feet long from stem to stern with a height of 127 feet from water line to top of mainmast and a breadth of beam of 28 feet...” Illustrated London News, 10 August 1912. JF Ptak Science Books Quick PostHow could you see an article heading of An Educated Fly and not share the secret? I don t know, and so I am performing a bit of due diligence, sharing the story from Scientific American from 3 September 1898. There really isn t that much to tell, and the title is probably better than the story: the large tablet is placed on a stage in front of an audience, with a pitchman telling some sort of warm-up story to create interest among the crowd; a fly of some sort (whether a model or a real fly pinned or tied to something, I don t know) and placed on a little shelf beneath the board. The ringmaster would ask a question, and the fly move around and alight or somehow make it known as to its selection of the numbers/letters on the grid. The trick is revealed in the image below--after the blackboard on its pedestal is shown to the audience front-and-back, it is positioned over a trap door on the stage, where a confederate would rise up and position themselves inside the pedestal and operate the device holding the live/inanimate fly. That s it. After the tricks were performed, the inside man would escape through the trap door, the pedestal would be wheeled out to display that it was empty, and that was that. Old trick, new fly. JF Ptak Science Books Quick PostHere are two renderings of what Nazis envisioned to be the structure of the Communist Party, the first being for Germany, and the second for found orchestrated Communism worldwide. They are located in a half-grubby if not heavy book by the propagandist Adolf Ehrt s called Die Weltbolshewismus, which was published in 1936. Key for the first diagram: IAH=Internationzle Arbeiter Hilfe; Vpf=Verband Prolestarischer Freidenker Deutschlands; KPO= Kommunist Partei Deutschlands; ZK= Zentral Kommintern; KJVD=Kommunistischen Jugendverband Deutschlands. I don t know what the EpS is yet. Continue reading "Complicating and Simplifying the Threat of Communism: Nazi Propaganda, 1936" JF Ptak Science Books Quick PostThe resistance of France to Nazi domination and rule and to the French collaborationists in Vichy began with the fall of France. Following the 10 May-21 June 1940 Battle of France, and the 22 June 1940 Armistice which effectively gave Marshal Petain control of the southern regions of France (the Nazis keeping all of northern and western France that bordered the Channel and the Atlantic) the battle for retaking France began. One of the large moments in this struggle came on 27 November 1942 when much of the remaining French/Vichy fleet was scuttled at Toulon (east of Marseilles). Rather than have the navy be taken by the Germans, 77 vessels were destroyed at anchor. This graphic is found in the Illustrated London News for 14 November 1942 and depicts the Vichy fleet just two weeks before the scuttling action. The great majority of what is depicted here in silhouette (excepting those shown to not be at Toulon) were destroyed--silhouettes against their immediate future, the shadows of a ghost fleet. JF Ptak Science Books Post 2896I recently uncovered a scarce and unusual pamphlet printed in 1939 in Chicago that addressed Hitler s threat to Europe, his designs on action in the United States, and his general threat to the world. The pamphlet under discussion here is Leo Kaul s Is Hitler Planning to Conquer the United States?, which was published by the author in Chicago in 1939 as part of a planned monthly series of pamphlets called the Library of Liberal Endeavor . This was volume two, following Why is the Jew Persecuted Today as volume one; there was a third volume planned called Hitler and Father Coughlin though it seems never to have been published. I think that Mr. Kaul--who was writing as early as 1912 and as late as 1950 and who had a business in Chicago manufacturing small bottles and porcelains--self-published these tracts hoping to establish a journal or monthly, though it appears that the existing works didn t reach a wide audience and barely survive in libraries. One part of this pamphlet that I d like to mention here is a three-page discussion on concentration camps which I think is remarkable not for exposing them but for recording the remarks that (in 1938/9) there have been many books written about life in concentration camps, about the liquidation of the Jewish people, and about the persecution of everyone not in sympathy with Hitler. The German concentration camp system began with Dachau in 1933 and expanded to over 1000 (including the main and sub-camps) before the end in 1945 (this is exclusive of ghettos and other controlled environments), and there was certainly a good-sized literature on the camps--I am less certain though about the phrase liquidation of the Jewish people which does seem jarring to me for 1939.Most of the discussion of the concentration camps in this pamphlet are quotes from a work by Martha Dodd and William Dodd jr., Through Embassy Eyes, which was published in 1938. I don t have a copy of this though from what I could find this work is based on the collected experiences of the Dodd family, with William Dodd (sr.) being the U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933-1937, and Martha and William being the children, each named for their parents. The daughter Marsha was later accused of being a Soviet spy, while the son William was destroyed by the Dies Commission and in spite of his accomplished past and connections was a sales clerk at a department store in San Francisco when he died in 1952. I ve reproduced the pages on the KL below: JF Ptak Science Books Quick PostI ve just found this delightful little publication beautifully extolling the possible advertising advantages of the Interborough Subway and Elevated Lines of New York City, Artemas Ward s New York s Rapid Transit Traffic in the Graphic, from 1923. It really does present the numbers and highlights them with some unusual and bright maps of the subway system. This was the IRT (the Interborough Rapid Transit system), which was a private concern that operated from 1903 until 1940, when it was purchased by NYC. This subway system in general was, well, entirely different from the one that I traveled 1968-1974 or so, back when you could barely see through the car windows because they were so heavily coated with graffiti...Anyway, I ve reproduced most of it below as there are no copies of the pamphlet in any library according to WorldCat. The design of the first one--with the giant Broadway --is terrific. Continue reading "Delightful Maps of the IRT, NYC, 1923." JF Ptak Science Books Post 2895I ve written many times on the technical and political end of the creation and deployment of the atomic bomb, along with some posts on the use and manipulation of language in controlling the sense impressions of nuclear war and survivability. What I have found so extraordinary about this second part is the creation of ordinariness, or mechanization, or acceptance, of the aftermath of nuclear warfare--and what we re talking about here is the exchange of not just a few 20 kiloton Hiroshima-type weapons, but thousands of megatons of explosives and massive amounts of radiation. But this is the function of familiarity, I guess--given the situation it was essential to plan for eventualities A-Z, and for that you need structure, and vocabulary. All things being equal, such things as an Terrestrial Afterlife in the United States needed to be contemplated because that is what we do--we make the situation possible for end-of-the-world stuff to happen, and so we have to plan for building things up again with radioactive detritus once all of the keys get turned and buttons pushed, as it is just a natural course of that historical river. That the bomb would be built was a given; that the Soviets would develop the a bomb and delivery capacities was just a matter of time, and that they would be our sworn death-enemies was also a fait accompli. To develop a way to somehow survive a nuclear war may have been a major deterrent to not launching an attack, especially when linked with a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) arms build up (where everyone and everything would be obliterated if there was a nuclear war, or at least so by 1965 (and probably earlier than that). All this insane stuff may have worked, and somehow we managed not to ignite the world, because (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) there would be no real estate left.On the other hand, building all of these weapon systems and planning for attack and the post attack world could have pushed us into a final confrontation, making all of this sound winnable , doable somehow, that once the bombs had all exploded and nothing worked anymore, that there would be enough to pull together of our civilization to declare that we had indeed won . And the only way to declare a winner was to have something to stand on besides pieces of green glass and Earth, and so plans for communications and a military, police force, fire brigades, medical care, food distribution, banking, and all the rest--the pieces of a recognizable backbone of American society--would have to be undertaken. All of this could very well accomplish the creation of an illusion in the mind of the adversary that you are capable of surviving a nuclear war, and so there would be no great gain in attacking; or it could send the message that by doing this preparation that you were preparing a first strike scenario, and so the adversary would attack while the odds were still not horribly out of balance. And on and--it all looks like a lose-lose endgame to me, which is hardly a game at all when all players are losers.But still there was a need to staff the thousands of positions that went into the theoretical end of figuring out the non-weapon-end world after nuclear war, and the above position description is an example of that, a necessarily pro forma form, just another job in a ea of jobs. This one s job descriptions read like any other, except of course that the content was much different. Form the same, sentence structure the same, vocabulary basically invariable. One aspect of this planning for the Afterlife was the planning part itself, planning to plan, how to make sense of the answers and the questions, a form into which the parts of a process are poured before they become the process itself.This all came up this morning because of a document that surfaced here—it is a working proposal to establish one such agency/group studying post-nuclear war scenarios. Its title is Proposed Organization and Staffing, National Damage Assessment Center, 1 June 1956 , and comes from the estate of Dr. Joseph Coker, who helped form this center and who did become an assistant director when it became engaged.This position description was for Chief, Damage Assessment Division , was was the part of the Office of Emergency Preparedness (which operated under the auspices of the Executive Office of the President, and then under the Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), and then under the Production Area, and then, finally, the Damage Assessment Division DMA). The job of the DMA was to identify what would happen to the essential production facilities that would keep the country going--industrial, technical, medical, biological, and so on--how they would be targeted, and how they might survive an attack. This also applied to the people who would be required to be in charge of all of this. Damage assessment.It was also the job of this person to coordinate the estimation of damage and assessment business post-attack.So, one perk of this job was that they would be expected to survive a nuclear attack, which means that the added benefits to this employment would be a special trip to a safe place to wait out the destruction of the world. I assume that this person would have a leverage like the one I wrote about in my Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Card post (pictured just here, and clickable to 250%).The position description clearly makes distinctions between pre- and post-attack responsibilities of the Chief of the Damage Assessment Division: under Nature of Purpose of Work , part 1, section A (1) it reads a pre-attack capability for translating likely patterns of attacks into losses of manpower, industrial capacity, and weapon systems output . In Section A (2) we see a post-attack capability for assessing actual losses, for alternating alternate levels of output consistent with surviving resources and for testing feasibility of proposed new mobilization programs . Or in other words, sifting the rubble to see who and what was left and to see where they could be actually plugged into whatever scenarios had already been planned, and alter as necessary. And also on page two, part (3) development and maintenance of capabilities for both rapid and deliberate damage assessments in event of actual attack... Continuing on page two, the Damage Assessment Division would create damage estimates, disseminate ...estimates of indirect effects including effects...on government, financial and credit systems, and production... which of course is, well, everything. Except overall assessments of total numbers of people killed, which isn t a necessary statistic for most of the stuff we re talking about here.There was much else in this job description, which is five pages long. It is quite fascinating, seeing all of this spelled out so clearly, written on the end pages of our national book of life.On the other hand, I m not exactly sure what else everybody else could ve done, all other things being equal.The rest of the document: JF Ptak Science Books Quick PostThis is a short Sherlockian episode found in the pages of the 1877 volume of Scientific American. It seems that people were becoming ill for unknown reasons (and not further specified in the short note) that soon was found to be: the color green. Green pigment. Green pigment in the fabric of the patients bedroom curtains.It was found that once the curtains were removed, the patients recovered.The green in this case was called Scheele s Green, named for its inventor, the German/Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who brought it into the world in 1775. Unfortunately it was found that this green was particularly toxic, as it employed a large quantity of arsenic, which proved to be unstable and became a noxious chemical pollutant.It was replaced in the late 19th century by other greens (such as cobalt green), though it did have a short rebirth in the 1930 s when it was used as an insecticide. This was in marked contrast to its earlier use as a food dye for candies. JF Ptak Science Books Post 2894 The Fate of the Last Man”is an interesting and unsigned romp into the deep future of the ending of the human species from the 31 May 1877 issue of Scientific American. It is very exceptionally long-term, looking into the future of up to a billion years hence--which is a captivating thing all on its own, using that kind of a number in the late 19th century. (Also it is interesting to note that even after all that time the author doesn t have humans flung to one place or another in the galaxy--after all, deep space flight had already been established in fiction for hundreds of years by this point...not commonly so in literature, but definitely there.) In any event the author works their way into the first of ten examples of Last Man scenarios describing that after epochs the mountains will get worn down with the solid matter flowing into the oceans, which fill the oceans, causing the continents to become islands, the islands to shrink, and so on until there is nothing there but water and a bit of the world s tallest peak with some guy sitting there on it, until even that is consumed, and our Last Man drowns. As it turns out, the ten scenarios include the last man [sic] dying and the species becoming extinct by drowning, being gassed, gassed and/or blown up, sunstruck , suffocated, burned up , frozen, crushed, killed by the crash of orbs , and then, finally, at #10, we are surprised that there will be no last man . Its a nice piece of thinking, and pretty creative; recognizing that I ve quoted some of the descriptives for how the end will come. The surprise ending part is this: almost everyone dies, though there is a self-replicating survivor that will be a BugMan of some sort and start the whole human thing all over again.[The image above and left has nothing to do with the article, but I had to include it because it is so fabulous and it appears in the same year of the SciAm as this article...and it comes close to being some sort of BugMan, or Lobster-something.]

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