Lesson: Fun With Fonts Part 1

As you’ve probably figured out, I like words. Not just for the way they allow us to communicate and learn, but even how they look. So Simon Garfield’s Just My Type was exactly my kind of book. Here’s some fun things I learned from it.

 

~Claude Garamond was a type designer in the first half of 16th century Paris. He made a highly legible font that was better (easier to read, easier to look at) than those that came before which were very much influenced by the involved German letters. Later, William Caslon in England adapted it for the printing of the Declaration of Independence. More ways we are an international people. Both Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter books use Garamond for their covers.

 

~ The font used for President Obama’s campaign is called ‘Gotham.’ I’m not making that up and you think it’s awesome, don’t lie.

 

~ Two of the most famous fonts, Verdana and Georgia were both made by a man named Mathew Carter, one of the demigods of typography. He also created Snell Roundhand, Bell Centennial, TC Galliard and Tahoma (a gateway font if ever there was one).

 

~Of course, you can’t talk about fonts without talking about Comic Sans. In 1994, a Microsoft employee named Vincent Connare thought Times New Roman was a bad choice for user friendly Microsoft Bob. That’s the program that was supposed to help old people not feel overwhelmed with these newfangled computer things. Times New Roman is the definition of professional, but it is also cold and brusque, and he felt something warmer and friendlier, maybe more laid back would be less threatening. Times New Roman had already been around for a long time, having been designed in the early 1930’s by Stanley Morison (‘long time’ here is relative. After all, Clarendon dates back to 1845). Connare was very much a man after my own heart. He had a copy of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns on his desk and he had read and reread Alan Moore’s Watchmen. With comic books as an inspiration, he made Comic Sans. Microsoft didn’t use it for the Bob program, which failed anyway (maybe because of Times New Roman? Maybe it was just dumb), but they did use it for Windows Movie Maker and after Windows 95 came out, it was everywhere. Thus began its descent into corporate mainstream and eventual evolution to the most hated font. Truthfully, people are fine with it on candy wrappers and toys, but not so much on say, tombstones. Connare handles his infamy quite well. It helps that he has other accomplishments and it is worth pointing out that both Comic Sans and Trebuchet (Another one of his works) are extremely helpful for teaching dyslexic children to read.

 

~The font Electra was meant to represent The Machine of the industrial revolution, with the spits of the furnace and the clanking of metal. It was made in 1935 by William Addison Dwigging who coined the phrase ‘graphic design.’

 

~The reason we refer to them as ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ cases is because they were physically kept in cases above or below the press.

 

~Most Jane Austen book covers use Didot, which was quite popular when she was around.

 

~The most popular font for book texts is called Bembo and has been around since the 1490’s.

 

~The oldest sans serif type is Calson Egyptian, from 1816.

 

~The blank space below a raised letter is called a beard.

 

~Eric Gill, another typographical demigod, created the shockingly named Gill Sans, a fine type and probably the most used sans serif. He had a passion for lettering. He also had a passion for sexual escapades, which wouldn’t raise much of a fuss except they usually involved his daughters, his sister and/or his dog. And that’s not a smear campaign by jealous competitors either, that all came from his own diary.

Gill Sans first appeared in 1928 as a sign for a store. Eric also created Perpetua, Joanna, Felicity, Solus, Golden Cockerel, Aries, Jubilee and Bunyan. The first PEnguin book used Gill Sans. Also, he looked like a young John Hurt.

Told you.

~The font used for London’s street signs is called Albertus and was totally created by an American.

 

~Type is the form of letters, typography is concerned with how it looks on page, sign, screen, etc.

 

~Aldus Manutius created the semi-colon in the mid 1400’s. Along with Francesco Griffo and Niccolo Niccoli (a good friend of my old buddy Poggio Bracciolini), Marutius all contributed towards the creation and use of italics.

 

~Thomas Cobden-Sanderson didn’t want his beautiful Doves typeface to be used for ‘unworthy subject matter’ so he threw all the matrices, block letters…everything needed to make it, into the River Thames.

 

~An ampersand is an E and T put together and is a conflation of et, per se and.

 

~The Nazis insisted everyone use German fonts instead of ‘Roman’ ones, which is what pretty much the rest of the world was doing. They developed Fraktur as the ‘jackboot gothic’ type. One designer was arrested for pointing out how stupid this was. Then in 1941, they did a total about face, calling Gothic script ‘Schwabacher-Jewish,’ because everyone knows renaming totally changes the history of everything. They alleged the script was associated with Jewish bankers and printing presses, but the reality was far more mundane. 1) The occupied territories (of which they now had a few) couldn’t read their stupid font and 2) there was a shortage of type materials and Gothic is quite elaborate. Finally, 3) now they had an excuse to use Trajan style inscriptions on their already Roman inspired buildings and columns.  Nazis, amirite?

 

~You know that plaque that’s on the Moon? It’s written in Futura.

 

I have more, so stay tuned. 😀

Lesson: Quick Fire Science Round

Another recent read was Science Secrets by Alberto Martinez. I had somewhat mixed feelings for this book. The scholarship is top notch, but while a fine academic, I don’t think Mr. Martinez is a great historiographer. I think he is one of these ‘there is only one history, everything else is conjecture,’ types that kind of went out with post-modernism. His tone and overall argument in the introduction has two main issues (for me). First of all, while of course there is one history, there is not one interpretation. Different people interpret the same data differently. Historians do not conjecture or speculate, they make arguments, they have to provide evidence and show reasonable causality. The second problem is evidence itself. I didn’t see a lot of analysis of sources, at least not consistently. Sometimes he showed weaknesses, sometimes not, and he failed to account for what we should do with gaps of evidence. If you don’t have all the picture, SOME level of approximation is necessary. It should be a last resort, and your other evidence should back it up, but there is simply no way to try to tell the story with the amount of evidence we usually have. As for tone, take how pretentious I am having a blog like this and make it a ‘I work at a university and am a published author’ level. Still, it was well-written, if a bit dry, and as I said, his scholarship is pretty awesome. Here’s some quickies I thought you might find interesting.

 

1) There’s no evidence Galileo actually dropped things off the Tower of Pisa in order to disprove Aristotle. He HAD experiments like that, but they were done in his house. He did give a thought experiment of dropping things offatower, and he was in Pisa, but he never claimed to do himself. Actually, it had been done before he even got there, and later historians just conflated a variety of events.

2) No one in Ptolemaic astronomy used more than one epicycle per planet, and they CERTAINLY didn’t need 40 to 60. You usually hear this when people are explaining Copernicus. ‘Oh, he could tell there was something wrong with a geocentric system, because the Ptolemaic system needed to add more and more epicycles, and it had gotten so unweildy as to be unworkable.’ No, actually the Ptolemaic system(which I remind the class, accurately described the movement of the heavens (to the extent they could be seen without, you know, proper telescopes) for thousands of years) was not clumsier than Copernicus’ system (which was also inaccurate, though obviously got us closer to reality). The reason this particular myth (seen in every science textbook I’ve ever come across) is so frustrating is I have no idea where it comes from. We actually have dozens and dozens of astronomical treatises from all the centuries using Ptolemy’s astronomy and none of them do this ‘just throw more epicycles at it’ thing, yet everyone seems to think that was the case. I think the reason we hold on to it is we like Eureka moments. For centuries, backwards ancients used a flawed system that they needed to constantly update in order to conform to reality, but THEN! Here comes the hero scientist, shining the like of reason into the darkness and lo, we were saved. This, of course, is nonsense. There had been heliocentric philososcientists for centuries, the reason it hadn’t gained the same traction is, dundunDUN, their arguments didn’t match up with reality! Or at least, observed reality. TL; DR version: Don’t look down on those that came before, even if they were wrong. Someday, people will laugh at the nonsense we are absolutely positive about now.

3) It is highly unlikely Pythagoras, Aristotle or Copernicus thought the planets were held in crystal orbs. While this is a beautiful mental image (at least to me), the only reason anyone thinks this is Tycho Brahe was a terrible historian. He didn’t translate things well and he constantly mixed up his sources.

4) J.J Thomson never formulated a plum-pudding model for the atom. It was there way before him, even before Lord Kelvin. Never heard of Thomson before? Don’t worry, I hadn’t either.

5) Darwin time!

a) Darwin didn’t discover evolution by looking at the beaks of finches. Before he even got to the Galapagos, he’d been pondering overpopulation (he had recently read Thomas Malthus) and how resources would be allocated. When he got to the islands, he realized that all the animals there were colonists, that is, their ancestors had come from somewhere else. This debunked the popular ‘scientific’ notion at the time that God found empty spaces in the world and spontaneously spawned life there. Considering that he thought the islands were ‘hellish,’ he wondered how the animals (who remember, came from elsewhere originally) managed to survive and concluded they adapted to their environment. Because resources were so scarce, not all the young would make it, therefore certain traits would be more advantageous than others.

The whole ‘finches’ thing came from a thought experiment he added to the second edition of the book, EIGHT YEARS after he had already formulated his theory (which he never called evolution). Incidentally, he also never based anything on the analysis of giant tortoises. He didn’t measure or analyze their shells. They just at them and then threw the shells overboard, which is pretty tragic considering they are now extinct (not kidding, they basically ate them to death).

b) Captain Fitzroy asked Darwin along because he was afraid he would go bonkers and, like an uncle of his, commit suicide. He deeply regretted that Darwin’s theory had been a byproduct of the Beagle’s journey (he was very religious). Later, and due to other factors as well, he became disturbed and cut his own throat. So…yeah, that happened.

c) And finally! Marx never offered to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. It just didn’t happen.

Quotables: Yay for Math

I can’t believe I have not have put any Galileo up, shame on me, because he has so many great passages.

 

“Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze, but the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which, it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.”

Lesson: Toxicon

I have a slew of lessons for you today, though I’m afraid they will be mostly surface level trivia. Still, that can be fun as well, and what better way to kick it off than with excruciating death?

“In times of peace, individuals and states follow higher standards…But war is a stern teacher.”–Thucydides

A few months ago, I read a book by Adrienne Mayor called Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs. It was a fun read, didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know but for the everyday person interested in chemobiological weaponry of the ancient times, I would certainly recommend it.

First some etymological knowledge. The Greek word ‘toxicon’ or ‘poison’ comes from toxon, which means arrow. The Latin toxica comes from taxus, which means ‘yew,’ the tree used to make bows and arrows. Yew was frequently planted in graveyards, though whether because it was associated with death because of that or because of the poisoned arrows, I’m not sure. It makes sense that poison would be associated with archery in the ancient world. The first tale of its use comes from the ever entertaining (whether animated or Kevin Sorbo) Herakles.  Remember that after slaying (as much as possible) the Hydra and crushing its head with a boulder, he dipped his arrows in the hydra’s blood. After this, his magic quiver was never without the double deadly shafts.

While at a centaur party (you know those had to be wild), Hercules had to repel a group of uninvited violent (as if there are many other kinds) centaurs. He chased them back to his good friend Chiron’s cave. Without thinking (his modus operandi), Hercules let loose a barrage of arrows, one of which, surprising no one, struck Chiron in the knee. The pain was so agonizing, Chiron begged the gods to let him die. In sympathy, they took his immortality and gave it to Prometheus (I’m sure that will end well for him).

These two tales actually indicate a lot about the understanding of the ancients regarding weaponry of this kind.

1) A hydra is a snake. Most poison arrows were dipped in the venom of poisonous snakes. Not only was Herakles kind of the father of chemobiological warfare, he was also the father of one of the most feared tribe of users. Herodotus said the Scythians had quivers made of human arms with the hands still attached. According to his understanding of their mythology (and enough salt should be taken with this to kill a family of slugs, but it makes a nice story), Herakles once encountered a monstrous viper woman and fathered 3 sons with her. When he departed, he left his bow, arrows and belt with the youngest son, named Scythes, who founded the Scythians.

2) Depending on the source, the description of the kind of pain Chiron was in (and later, in a twist of karma, the kind of pain Hercules was in after putting on a poisoned cloak) is consistent with many kinds of snake bites and poison tipped arrows. It’s likely the original tellers, or later embellishers had actually witnessed wounds of this sort and relayed the actual effects, especially if…

3) The ‘friendly fire’ motif was very important. Potentially cutting yourself on your own arrows, or accidentally hitting a comrade was a very real danger. Poison is not a cat you can get back in the bag, so on some level, this could have served as lesson in caution.

4) In our cynical, modern times, we like to look to the ancients and claim they were more honorable than us. And it’s true, on paper, in rhetoric, poisoned arrows, damaging a water supply and so on, was said to be dishonorable or cowardly. But then, we say such things now. It doesn’t stop us and it didn’t stop them. When I read the story of Hercules and the centaurs, it seemed to me there was more judgement of him hunting them down after they had fled (which meant, shooting them in the back and well beyond just defending himself and his friends, which would have been far more justifiable) than the use of poison. However, the point remains that the issue of questionable morality in regards to ‘invisible weaponry,’ existed as much then as it does now. This comes up again with Herodotus and Thucydides. What you do defending yourself, your family, your city has more moral flexibility than what you do to others when YOU are the aggressor. Unless they’re barbarians, because screw those guys.

Speaking of legendary heroes coating their arrows, the ever cunning Odysseus was said to coat his with a plant that came from Epirus, in a place that served as one of the door to the underworld located between the rivers Styx and Acheron. The flower, called monkshood, aconite, or (my favorite) wolfsbane, had, according to legend, once been generic grass, but the drool of Cerberus had turned it poisonous. Likewise, hellebore and nightshade (or belladonna) were said to only grow near the noxious vapors of the Underworld.  In reality, it was true that many of these plants only grew specific places and if you didn’t have a wide grasp of climatology, geology, herbalism and a dozen other things, and if you knew no good came of these flora, a hellish explanation was as good as any.

Well, not quite no good. Belladona was called strychnose by the Romans (hence, our strychnine) or doryenion, which meant ‘spear drug.’ It was given to berserkers as the ‘herb of courage.’

Not quite related to poison itself, but remember when Odysseus used Ephyra at Epirus to go into the Underworld? Archeologists have actually found an underground labyrinth there at accurately matches Homer’s Hall of Hades. HOLY HELL!

 

These are the things I didn’t know before reading this book. There were many other great stories, such as Hannibal hurling jars of snakes onto ships, making them crash into each other, or how flaming pigs were used to repel his elephants and who can say no to tossing plague corpses over walls? So go check it out and let me know what sticks out to you.

Quotables: Faraday Was Prescient

To the Prime Minister of England, asking what purpose his new technology would serve (spoiler alert: The entire Electronic Revolution is based on it):

“Sir, I know not what these machines will be used for, but I am sure that one day, you will tax them.”

Occupy the Stax: Terribad Covers

This week I was asked to do something very much against my morals. As we prepare for the end of the school year, I was tasked with finding the Lexile of all the books in our classroom. (Lexile is a reading level indicator going from Below Level Reader to 1700. We use it to help kids find books that challenge them without being frustratingly impossible and Scholastic uses it for their Reading Counts Program, which we also utilize. Find out more here.) That was not what bothered me, in fact, it was rathe pleasant to do nothing but sit and punch in book titles, looking to see what books are considered harder than others. What bothered me was writing said information on stickers and placing them on the books.

I do not like stickers on books.

And as if to punish my sin, the stickers really hating…well, sticking. But that’s another story.

My boss, the head of the Special Education Department, has been teachign for 36 years, which is a decade longer than I’ve been alive. She’s been in this specific room for 16 years. This has many fantastic side effects, but the one I discovered most recently is she has some very old books, or old editions of books. And many of them have terrible, terrible covers.

 

I present to you some of my favorites.

 

I’m not sure why this kid is running as clearly NO ONE LIVES IN THIS CITY.

I honestly have no idea where to begin. The insane stare? The crooked eyes? THE CAT HEAD?!

I really wanted a bigger version of this picture but alas, it just wasn’t coming up on Google and I’m too lazy to take a picture. The young lady (Emily) is so deprived of mental stimulation due to the lack of a library, she has apparently taken to seducing cows. At least, that’s what you would get from this cover.

Don’t panic, anyone! If this squirrel is anything like the skaters I see, he’ll be too high most of the time to finish the revolution.

Of all the book covers I saw, this one probably demanded the most attention. Look at that. There is no way anything legit is going on here. The sketchy looking principal smirking at the camera, the promise of candy or the TERRIFIED expression on these children’s faces gurantee a windowless van is parked around the corner.

There seemed to be this common theme in old books of kids with their mouth open. In this case, I think the girl is screaming over the back she’s clearly about to fall over.

The kid on his bed with his cats, in the pink shirt, what may in fact be lip gloss, in that pose with that smile, with a list of what foods are okay?

…I’m just saying.

Maybe this book is actually about a non-English speaker having trouble in class who doesn’t understand why she doesn’t ‘get’ it as quick as the only other minority in this class (I suppose that kid in the back could be not-white, and of course, all the ginges coudl count, but still), but still…weird.

First of all, no one in this picture is having a good time. Second of all…the author’s name is McPhail?! That sounds like someone wants to be fabulous about his suckiness.

I’m so glad that in our progressive society, sailors and dragons can express their love without fear of persecution, bonding over their mutual love of stripes.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but that rabbit’s feet seem to be the only bit that’s chocolate and none of it bodes well.

The only thing I’m going to say is look at that kid’s left arm. Now look how far his right arm has stretched to go around that snowman. PROPORTIONS!

The story of the Trojan Horse is many things. The ‘World’s Greatest Adventure’ is not one of them.

Obviously whoever is performing these experiments has no supervision. Raw food right on the microscope lens? Some strange urine-colored liquid oozing all over the wooden table? That’s not science, that’s a prank you pull on a hated chem teacher.

And finally, to prove I’m not a total ogre:

I actually find this one quite lovely. I don’t know what it is about the princess there in front, but her eyes are very green and I was quite drawn to the book.

Believe it or not, I actually have far more I could put in, but I will save them for another day. Thanks, and I hope this provided some giggle to your day.

 

~Shard Out~

Occupy the Stax: Because I Needed Yet Another Section

As I know you’ve picked up by now, I like books. I like finding them, buying them and cataloging them. I would love to have my own library someday, which I’m fairly certain is legal, though it’ be even more awesome if the government gave me money to run it. At any one time, I’m reading two to seven books (not simultaneously, though that would also be nifty, if confusing.) So the other day, when I found the ‘At the Libraries’ section of MentalFloss, several hours suspiciously disappeared. There are countless blogs and sites about books, authors, libraries, book awards,  librarians and all sorts of craziness. There’s ideas for indoor books and outdoor books and book-related food, cool art and products I could never hope to afford. There was also several collections of bookspine poetry. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I have over a thousand books on a wide range of topics. I bet I could do that.” I pulled down every title that sounded like it could work in a sentence and I got to work. Here are some of the ones I’ve done so far and some lessons I learned from the process.

Are You Sure?

So this would read:

“Do you really think what you think you think?

The good, the bad and the mad (?)

Tricks of the mind,

Nightmares and dreamscapes…

Flim-flam!”

Protip #1: Being level with the books really help, otherwise, the angles are nightmares. I specifically used a downward angle on this because I was trying to hide the author of Tricks of the Mind (the fabulous Derren Brown, by the way), but then of course, I left Mr. King’s name in there boldly, which leads us too…

The Historian

Ignore that Casanova book back there…oh wait…

“The Historian always in our hearts,

The book of lost tales on war,

The books of the wars,

The Battle for History.”

Protip #2: Unless you’ve got a lot of Chuck Palanuik books, most will not be verb-tastic. So it goes.

And Never Let Her Go

“When night falls

I hate myself and want to die.

Anyone you want me to be changes

First and only: Thinner.

Soulless lamentation.

Go to hell.”

Protip #3: Since this one was stacked pretty high, I used a different book to prop it up. I couldn’t work it into the poem itself (pronouns are another tricky thing to work around) but I thought it worked fine this way.

I’ll probably be doing more of these later, so stay tuned for that. As something of a PS, while I was working on this, I found another Magic the Gathering card in ‘When Night Falls.’ Dear whoever who donated all those DnD books to the library: I don’t know who you are, but I bet we’d have been friends.

No, I did not purposely put it down on Diablo III and The Killing Joke for geek cred…which means you should give me extra.

So expect to see more of these. I will also be commenting on some truly terrible book covers in our classroom library. Stay thirsty for words, friends!

Mystical Numbers: Part Tan

Here’s one of the cooler things you will see today.

Sexy.

 

 

The above is called The Curta, and it is the only mechanical calculator ever invented. Not only that, it came into the world in a very unlikely place. An Austrian with a Jewish father named Curt Herzstark designed the prototype while a prisoner in the Buchenwald Concentration camp. The guards were aware of it but allowed him to continue because he was known as an engineering genius. He was even told that if he got it to work, it would be presented to Hitler as a present, he (Herzstark) would be declared an Aryan and everything would be champagne and caviar. Luckily for all of us, the war ended and Herzstark was set free. He shopped around, finally getting the Prince of Lichtenstein to invest in his project and the first Curta was made in 1948. 

 

 Now he’s another present for the math nerd in your life. 

And by ‘math nerd,’ I mean me. Get me one of these.

That sleek and rather ominous looking thing is called a super egg. No matter how you set it down, it will always stand up. It was designed by a Danish artist/scientist who wanted to make a three dimensional model of a hyperbolic shape. John Lennon gave one to Uri Geller with the words: “Keep it. It’s too weird for me. If it’s my ticket to another planet, I don’t wanna go there.”

 It’s too weird for you?! Have you SEEN your wife? Moving on. 

 

Now the subject I have been looking forward to getting to. A saga that goes from 4000 years ago to this afternoon’s lunchbreak.

 According to legend, in 2000 BC, the Chinese Emperor Yu saw a divine turtle coming out of the Yellow River. It ahd black and white dots on its underbelly that if you replaced the dots with Arabic numerals would look like:

 

 That is the lo shu or Magic Circle. Every row and column adds up to fifteen. Magic Circles were something of a craze for centuries. When Benjamin Franklin was bored, he would draw various Magic cirlces of diverse configurations. 

No doubt, already the wheels in your head are turning, making connections. Hold on to your pencils.

In 1979, a puzzle enthusiast who was also an architect introduced a game called Number Place. His name was Howard Garns. The story may have ended there, except that Maki Kaji, the editor of a Japanese puzzle magazine absolutely loved it, made Garns’ designs (at the time called Latin Squares) more symmetrical and called it Sudoku, Japanese for ‘the number must appear only once.” So if you thought you were part of an ancient East Asian tradition, you’re kind of right. But you’re also playing a game made forty years ago by some white dude in Indiana.  

 

While Sudoku is intensely popular, the undisputed champion of the mathlete has got to be Erno Rubik’s attempt at making a 3D 15Puzzle (Those grids where you have to move pieces around to try to get the picture right). Since Rubik introduced his cube in 1974, records have been made, broken and made again.

The current record for solving a regular Cube is held by a 23 year old Dutch student, who did it when he was 19. It took Erik Akkersjiij just 7.08 seconds. There are also records for doing it with feet, solving it one handed, blindfolded, on a roller coaster, underwater, with chopsticks, idling on a unicycle and in free fall (not all at the same time of course). Bit of a factoid here: There are 43000000000000000000 possible Rubik’s Cube positions. 

 

That’s a large number. Speaking of large numbers, the largest prime number is 2, raised to the power of 43112609 minus 1. 

 

Remember that Hungarian aristocrat who used radiation to prove his landlady was recycling his meat? Apparently scientists are very picky about their food. A French mathematician named Poincare believed he was being scammed by his bakery. Every day for a year, he weighed his 1 kilogram loaf of bread. The weight distribution follow a normal bell curve (which had only recently been discovered), but proved that on average, his ‘one kilo’ bread was really 950 grams, skimping him out on 50 grams worth of bread. He duly alerted Parisian authorities and the baker was ‘sternly warned.’

 

 The French weren’t the only ones using scientific means in strange ways. In 1874, Francis Galton, walked all over Britain measuring…not kidding here, female attractiveness. His methodology was this: Everytime he saw a woman, he poked a piece of paper in his pocket, putting her on a scale of pretty to testicle-receeding. He concluded by this ‘rigorous’ study that London had the highest quantity of beautiful women, while Aberdeen, Scotland, had the ugliest. Incidentally, Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin and coined the word ‘eugenics,’ which, unfortunately now means we assume him to be a crazy supremacist, but all he was arguing was that some traits are inherited and we should encourage those. 

 

I realize that was a short post, and I hope you enjoyed this foray into math. Have some good history stuff coming your way soon.  Until then, enjoy this nonsense about mermaids.

 http://z6mag.com/featured/animal-planet-mermaids-show-bodies-found-that-create-nightmares-pictures-videos-169794.html

Mystical Numbers (Part Yan)

Not quite halfway through my latest book, Here’s Looking At Euclid, by Alex Bellos, but had to share some of these gems. I really appreciate you guys continuing to check in, even without the promise of my terrible art.

 

Looking up at the post title, you may have thought I was speaking another language, perhaps a far eastern one like Mandarin. But no, the above is not Chinese for one (that would be yi), but from the exotic world of England. It is a shepherds’ number system created in Lincolnshire. You’ve probably actually heard it with the next two numbers and didn’t know what it was. ‘Yan, tan, tethera.’ There’s something surprisingly lovely about the progression of words. It’s a base 20 system and the complete list goes:

1: Yan
2: Tan
3: Tethera
4: Pethera
5: Pimp
6: Sethera
7: Lethera
8: Hovera
9: Covera
10: Dik
11: Yan-a-dik
12: Tan-a-dik
13: Therea-dik
14: Pethera-dik
15: Bumfit
16: Yan-a-bumfit
17: Tan-a-bumfit
18: Tethera-bumfit
19: Pethera-bumfit
20: Piggot

 

Odd, yeah? But it has worked for counting sheep (theoretically without dozing) for years and years. The names of numbers and the interaction between numbers and letters, language and math is one that provides endless fascination and frustration. Humans seem to like counting by fives, tens and twenties, probably because that’s how many fingers and toes we have. Which explains the double meaning of the term ‘digit’ and why numbers ten and up are ‘double digits.’ It isn’t just English either. In Russian, piat means 5 while piast means ‘outstretched hand.’ In Sanskrit, pantch is 5 while pentcha is hand.

 

The links between writing and math are probably closer than you think. After all, literature is a byproduct of numerical notation. Originally, around 8000BC clay pieces were used to represent and record numbers of objects that weren’t physically there. You were handed tokens that represented sheep and you handed over tokens that represented grain. Four thousand years later, in Sumer, the tokens evolved into a script using a pointed reed and soft clay. 2700 BC saw the reed with a flat edge and made the markings look like bird prints. Today, we call such markings ‘cuneiform.’ The only symbols in cuneiform were for 1, 10, 60 and 3600. This seems like an odd set up, but we still use it on some level today. The Babylonians took the base60 system from the Sumerians and then the Greeks took it from them. The fossilized remnants of the oldest number system is seen in the fact that we still have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.  During the French Revolution, they tried to change it to more of a metric system, but the people were baffled by it and it was dropped pretty quickly.

I was going to talk about Pythagoras and all of his awesome and crazy, but I think the man deserves a lesson of his own, so stay tuned there.

 

Polygons are cool. Some people are admittedly, more into them than others. For example, there is a regular polygon with 65, 537 sides (that is 2 to the power of 16 plus one) which took a German mathematician named Johann Gustav Hermes ten years to finish.

If the sides are equal, we call them regular polygons. There are 530 of those. Plato was particularly fond of five, the ideal polygons, that represented the elements and the enclosure they were held in…that is, all of creation.

The tetrahedron was equated with fire; the cube with earth; the octahedron with air; the icosahedron with water and the dodecahedron with the encompassing dome. When I think of polygons, I usually go with this:

And before you ask, ‘icosahedron’ is a D20.

Many religions are really into polygons, but Islam takes the cake. Or in this case, the Cube. The Ka’ba or Cube is the most sacred object in Islam. It’s a block of black palladium (you know, that stuff Iron Man was always pulling out of his chest) at the center of Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and it is what worshippers turn to pray towards.

Triangles are also pretty nifty. Did you know there are four centers a triangle can have? They’re called: orthocenter, circumcenter, centroid an midcircle. Not only that, if you were to mark these all on the same triangle, they would all line up. It’s called hte Euler line after a Swiss mathematician and it’s pretty crazy.The language of math is surprisingly diverse. The word ‘calculate’ was derived from calculus, which is Latin for ‘pebble.’ Remember yan, tan, tethera? If a shepherd had more than twenty sheep, he could put a pebble in his pocket and start again, then just count the pebbles when he was done.

‘Hypotenuse’ comes from the Greek for ‘stretched against,’ since they made triangles by stretching ropes around strong beams.

Heck, even our numbers are cosmopoliton. We call them Arabic numberals, but actually they are Indian. They were simply adopted in the Arab world before the Western one and became associated with it. ‘Arabic’ numerals were first brought to predominant attention by a man named Leonardo Fibonacci who wrote a book called Liber Abaci. This was kind of bad timing what with Crusades going on (it was 1202). According to Mr. Bellos: “Some people considered the new arithmetic  the devil’s workbecauseit was so ingenius” (My emphasis.) Proof of that can be found in the greatest contribution to Western math, one that had been basically ignored or missed for millenia: 0. Zero was derived from ‘zephyr’ which is also where the Portuguese wordchifreor ‘Devil’s horns’ comes from, as well as our own word ‘cipher,’ which means ‘nothing’ or ‘code.’ This may be because using numbers with a zephyr had to be done in secret, away from the Inquisitive (pun intended) eyes of the Church. Europe reacted so much to the non-Roman-numeral numerals that in 1299, Florence actually banned the use of Arabic numbers.

For the record, there is no Indian word for ‘millionare’ so over there, it was called Slumdog Crococere which basically means ‘Slumdog That Has Ten Sets of Ten Thousand.’

In medieval Spain, barbers sometimes had signs that said Algebrista y Sangrador or ‘Bonesetter & Bloodletter’ which sounds like the greatest metal song ever. I imagine you noticed the familiar math base word in there. ‘Algebra’ comes from al-jabr, which means either ‘crude surgical techniques’ or ‘restoration/reunion.’ In 9th century Baghdad, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi wrote a math textbook called Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala or ‘Calculation by Restoration and Reduction.’ In it, he basically laid out that whatever you do to one side of an equation, you must do to the other. Which…is algebra. He was not actually the first to discover this. That honor goes to Diophantus, a Greek that lived between 100 to 300 years after Christ. But al-Khwarizmi presented the process the best, and for that he was honored with having his named morphed into Alchaorismi, to Algorismi and finally to algorithm.

Incidentally, the reason we use ‘x’ most of the time in algebraic expression is not for any crazy esoteric reason. When Descartes was publishing La Geometrie, the printer came to him to explain they were running out of letters.  He wondered if it mattered what letter was used for the variables. Descartes said no, so the printer focused on X because it isn’t used that much in usual language. That is what gave X the ‘unknown quantity’ connotation, leading to X-Rays and X-Files. I also read an interesting little poem about Descartes.

“What Luca Pacioli in 1494 would have expressed as
   4 Census p 3de 5 rebus ae 0
and Viete would have written in 1591 as
    4 in A squad-5 in A planot 3 aequator 0
in 1637 Descartes had nailed as
   4x^2-5x+3=0.”

That sounds much less scary.

Of all math concepts, none is more popular than pi. They say you can tell a mathemetician because he can tell you why pi is an irrational number and a math nerd because he can recite pi to the 19th decimal. It’s true that in reality, mathematicians don’t need to calculate pi much farther than the three or four places we already know, even for precision instruments. Which means people do it for funzies. The fatherst pi was ever calculated by hand was 620 places. This happened in 1946 by a man named DF Fergeson. The current record, as far as I know, of course, belongs to a computer. It was programmed by a Frenchman named Fabrice Bellard in 2009 and it went up to 2. 7 trillion. We could build a paper ladder to the moon with that.

Moving on from pi to logariths. The man who invented them, a Scotsman named John Napier, was actually much better known at the time for his theological work. He had a best seller claiming the Pope was the Antichrist and Judgement Day was going to be between 1688 and 1700. Yes, those people have always existed.  He liked to wear a long robe in the evening and pace around his tower chamber, which contributed to folks thinking he was a necromancer. I think having a TOWER CHAMBER probably helped too. He designed and wrote about all sorts of ideas for military hardware including precursors to the tank and submarine. To be fair, Napier’s logs were actually quite complicated. The base10 logs we use now are called Briggsian logs after Henry Briggs.

 

Tune in next time for THE ONLY MECHANICAL CALCULATOR EVER INVENTED. Also, what did John Lennon give Uri Geller? And finally, was Sudoku actually invented in Indiana? Be sure to return!

Fun With Chemicals Part 4-The End (Or is it?)

Thanks for going on this trip with me. I really enjoyed relaying stories as I was reading and will probably continue this trend. That doesn’t mean all the other books I’ve read have gone to waste. No doubt there will be slow days, dry periods and I will rock your world with some Paracelsusian goodness. Going to switch from science to math next and then pop back over to history before circling around to science again.

For now, we’re going to talk about sushi. Deadly, deadly sushi.

Remember last time I mentioned Marie Curie named a newly discovered element ‘polonium’ after her native Poland? That ended up not being an awesome choice, mostly because polonium is not only basically useless ni most cases, but actually downright deadly for humans. It was a great favor of the Kremlin, so when ex-KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko ate sushi laced with polonium, there wasn’t a lot of ambiguity over who had called the hit.

The final ironic and tragic blow came from Marie’s own child. Irene Joliot-Curie was a great scientist in her own right (in fact, she almost discovered nuclear fission, but didn’t trust herself enough to follow through on it, leaving it to another female scientist named Meitner). She died, slowly, though without the public humiliation Litvinenko went through, after a capsule of polonium blew up in her lab and she breathed in the toxic fumes. Lukemia claimed her just as it had her mother, broughto n the wings of her mother’s precious element.

Not all stories regarding radioactive elements have sad engings. There was once a Hungarian aristocrat named Gyorg Hevesy who was studying radioactivity. Unused as he was to English food, he was pretty sure his landlady was ‘recycling’ old meat in his meals, instead of getting it fresh daily as she promised.  In order to test this hypothesis, and at the same time, learn a bit more about radioactivity itself, he waited until her back was turned and then sprinkled ‘hot’ (that is, radioactive) lead over it. When she took the leftovers away, he just had to wait. Borrowing a piece of lab equipment from his lab buddy Hans Geiger, the next day he checked his food. Sure enough, it was chalk full of clickclickclick inducing lead. When he confronted his landlady over this, she wasn’t so much upset as tickled over being caught using THE FUTURE.

Because we can’t leave this subject without talking about the Nazis one more time:

There was concern that the Nazis would plunder Nobel prizes in Germany. Because Hitler didn’t like or approve of the Nobel committee (what with their unforgivable sins or giving Nobel prizes to journalists that criticize the Nazi government and even worse JEWISH SCIENTISTS), he actually made it illegal for a German to accept a Nobel prize. The concern was strong enough that a German Jew and a Jewish sympathizer (Franch and Laue) sent their medals to Niels Bohr for safekeeping. However, Hitler had also made it illegal to export gold. He was like that. So there was serious danger when the Nazis came knocking on Niels’ institute in Denmark. Like, ‘head cut off’/’firing range’ danger if the medals were found. Quick thinking Niels suggested they dissolve the medals with aqua regia. When the Nazis tore through the institute, they left the beakers with the strange orange liquid on the shelf, and it was still there when the scientists came back. They pulled the gold back out and the Swedish Academy recast them into their medallions.

Bohr had all sorts of clever ideas and a quick wit. After Einstein made his famous I-don’t-like-quantam-physics line about God not playing dice, Bohr responded with, “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do!” 

Now we move on to a slightly touchier subject.

Have you ever known an artist? Maybe (in fact, probably) not a professional one per se, but an artistic person? A painter, a musician, etc. Were they kind of crazy? Flaky, not great at practical matters but you forgave them a lot because they seemed to tap into a part of the brain you just didn’t have access to? I figure we all know those people. Or are those people.

Robert Lowell was definitely one of those people. He was a poet in the 1960’s and 70’s. When he was at prep school, mates called him Cal, short for Caliban (a la The Tempest although ‘Caligula’ is also possible). He was an artist like Van Gogh or Edgar Allan Poe. By that, I mean, he was bonkers.

Like…turn up at a friend’s house convinced he was the Virgin Mary bonkers. Or think he could stop traffic by holding his arms out like Jesus bonkers. Or my personal favorite: Leave a fiance to spontaneously drive from Boston to Tennessee in order to ask a poet there to mentor him. With the assumption the man would just put him up. Cuz. So when the poet joked that he could stay camped on the lawn, Robert nodded and promptly went to Sears to buy a tent.

Though for a long time (and continuing to this day) bipolar or manic-depressive disorder is/was a fashionable dysfunction to claim, which undermined its credibility as a phenomenon, it is a very real thing.  And Robert Lowell could have been its poster child. He would write amazing stuff on the upper and utterly ruin himself on the way down. His swings were so bad that at one point, while committed to a psychiatric facility where he wasn’t allowed belts or shoelaces, he was offered a still-not-awesomely-understood drug based on a rocky sounding element called ‘lithium.’ Anything seemed better than how he was, so he agreed. Despite not coming to the US until 1967, scientists had at least been aware of the effects of lithium since at least 1886, they just didn’t understand the chemical causes. They knew it could stabilize mood-swings but couldn’t tell you how. As with most things, the interaction is nuanced, varied and multifaceted, but much of it has to do with what is called the ‘circadian rhythm.’ That’s that thing that makes you get sleepy after the sun goes down (or if you’re a nightowl, makes you conk out at 3pm). In individuals with manic-depressive disorder, this rhythm isn’t on a 24 hour cycle like most people. The average person’s cycle is influenced by ambient/environmental factors like whether the sun is up. That sunlight encourages neurostimulants. People with MD have a cycle independent of such factors. It’s like it is daytime all the time, which makes them feel bouyant and confident. Lithium regulates the proteins which regulate the internal clock, turning off the ‘inner sun,’ when the actual sun goes down.

In Lowell’s case, in a pattern which would be repeated many times, the medication made him healthier and steadier. It cost his art though because he seemed less able to tap into that part of his brain where genius and madness dwell.  He began to do things like quote other people’s letters to him in his poems without citing them. At the time, he was described as looking like an animal locked in a zoo. Now, we usually use the term ‘zombie.’

Our last stop for this trip, the last individual we will be checking in with is one Ernest Rutheford. An ogre and a genius, he was the guy who was so enamored of physics that he said that was all there was, everything else (specifically chemistry) was stamp-collecting. I imagine that soured somewhat when he accepted the Nobel prize for Chemistry. He used crazy euphemisms, being a religious man, but sometimes, you just can’t hold back. To balance out his blue-streaking tirades, he woudl also sing ‘Onward Christian Soldier’ a lot…and loudly…and offkey.

Oh and he looked like this.

That’s a mustache made for swears.

He tutored 11 future Nobel prize winners, making him the Genghis Khan of science. He discovered radon. Among his many (many) accomplishments was working out with Frederick Soddy that elements sometimes turn into each other. 

 Soddy: Rutheford, this is transmutation!

Rutheford: For Mike’s sakes, Soddy, don’t call it transmutation. They’ll have our heads off as alchemists!  

That conversation actually happened, including ‘For Mike’s sakes.’  He also worked out a better way of working out the age of the earth.

 For decades, the accepted number had come from Lord Kelvin, a mental giant in his day, but during Rutheford’s time, a tired, crabby old man whose mind was getting foggy but who still weilded a great deal of political power within the university.  Like old people everywhere, he had difficulty ‘getting’ or accepting new ideas. Like radioactivity. Marie Curie had a fondness for pulling men into her closet to see her glow in the dark elements as evidence of such phenomenon (which, given her reputation made their wives quite nervous) and Lord Kelvin was one of the ones she had tried to convert. 

 So here was Rutheford, about to present evidence about the age of the world, utterly demolishing Kelvin’s theory…with Kelvin right there in the first row. Ernest was panicking until he remembered a throw away line in one of the Lord’s papers about how his calculations were correct unless there were other heat sources within the earth (which of course, we now know there are). So on some level, Rutheford argued, Lord Kelvin had actually predicted these findings! Kelvin thought it was all bollocks, but he wasn’t going to turn down a compliment to argue.  

That’s all I have for today. Thanks again for being awesome. ~Shard out