Why the focus on Wisconsin for Climate Change?

map source https://wgnhs.uwex.edu/wisconsin-geology/ice-age/

This is the question that bothered me when I first learned of the Wisconsin Glacier that is considered responsible for the natural formation of New York, including the the large boulders that remain in Central Park. On a NYC Park tour at Alley Pond, our guide (whose last name is actually Park -- an aptronym if ever there was one) explained that there was a time when the entire area was covered by ice a mile thick.

I found it somewhat confusing that the ice over New York should be named for Wisconsin and discoverd the answer in the online Britannica : "Wisconsin Glacial Stage, most recent major division of Pleistocene time and deposits in North America (from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). It was named for rock deposits studied in the state of Wisconsin."



Mystery solved, at least as far as that goes. The entry does point out the correlation of the end of that period with the extinction of certain species, including the mammoth and sabre-toothed cats. But it's says it's not necessarily accurate to say that their demise was simply the result of overhunting because a lot of factors go into climate and even more into species survival.


There's more information about Wisconsin geology herehttps://wgnhs.uwex.edu/wisconsin-geology/ice-age/. That's the source of the map pictured above.


Obviously, the climate policy censors have not yet gotten around to that site yet, as it says, "Changes in climate have followed a regular pattern for the past 700,000 years. Each cycle lasted about 100,000 years and consisted of a long period of generally cooling climate during which glaciers grew, followed by shorter periods of conditions similar to or warmer than those of today."

Related post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2015/10/what-brontosaurus-skull-can-teach-us.html

Seeing the whole picture

Perhaps you've seen some of these pictures in the past. Generally, at first glance you'll be sure of what you're seeing. But if you take a close second look, you may not be so sure.  Is it a duck or a rabbit? The answer is that it is drawn so that it could represent either, depending on your perspective.

Here's another one that is old enough to have been rendered into an 1888 German postcard. The old/young woman illusion is sometimes titled "My wife and my mother-in-law." 

I find if I look at these types of pictures for too long, I start to feel a bit dizzy, as my perspective keeps slanting to see it first one way and then the other. Perhaps that's what Calvin's cubism experience is meant to represent -- that feeling of dizziness -- one can experience when shifting perspectives.

Calving opts to drop the dizziness in favor of dogmatic certainty. In that way he reminds me of the figure of Dilke in the matter in which he is immortalized in John Keats' famous "Negative Capability" letter: "I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

In truth, most people go through life with a Dilke-like attitude that averse to being at all uncertain. There is great satisfaction in finding certainty due to the mental relief it brings. However, there are many things that are really not all fixed as either old or young, duck or rabbit. Forcing only one designation on them actually distorts the truth of the image by telling only half the story. But that is exactly what many people do in their adoption of dogmas: at a particular point in their lives, they chose the equivalent of "Team Duck," and will forever vehemently oppose "Team Rabbit" as evil incarnate for pushing a false agenda. Any reasoned approach to point out that the picture has elements of both will be ignored or refuted by repetition of the assertion, "This is a duck; everyone who has any sense agrees it's a duck. You have to be really stupid or possibly insane to claim it can be a rabbit."

That's my view of political affiliations and self-affixed labels; they lock people into only one way of seeing things. While insisting they have the answers that settles everything, they have not even begun to comprehend the questions. 

Context for common content

This is a reworking of a post I wrote this past August 6th, Andy Warhol's birthday, and the same week of my visit to the Whitney Museum in its new location. I had been to the old one a few times,
including once for a special Hopper exhibit.

The MoMA houses some of his most iconic works, which includes the Campbell's soup cans. But what Whitney has is his Green Coca-Cola Bottles pictured here. The museum's description begins as follows:

Green Coca-Cola Bottles was created the year that Andy Warhol developed his pioneering silkscreen technique, which allowed him to produce his paintings through a mechanical process that paralleled his use of mass culture subjects. Here, the image of a single Coca-Cola bottle is repeated in regular rows, seven high by sixteen across, above the company’s logo.

. Instead of stressing the monotony inherent in repetition and mass production of consumer goods, Warhol stressed that there was a great equalizing effect in offering everyone the same Coke, no matter how rich or poor they may be: “'A Coke is a Coke,' he explained, 'and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.'”

In the card next to the work in the  museum the description actually was even more positive, as it also included this statement, "All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." I looked up the quote and found that it's part of a full paragraph from  The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again). Here it is:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Objectively, we know that the  sugar-loaded, caramel-colored drink is not a really good choice for nutrition or dental health. But there is something reassuring in the sameness and the fact that the exact same quality of the product is within everyone's reach. Coke puts consumers all on equal footing.

This becomes even more fascinating in light of  Horace M. Kallen's "Democracy Versus the Melting Pot" published in the Nation on February 25, 1915. Contrary to the general spirit of the age that promoted the assimilation of immigrants into a more uniform American culture, he defended the differentiation of ethnic identities what only came into vogue many decades later. Nevertheless, he maintained that a certain amount of assimilation is inevitable.

A certain uniformity occurs with no conscious agenda through fashion or what he calls, the "process of leveling up through imitation" that is promoted through "'standardization' of externals." This was the age in which people came to be more alike in terms of consumption:  "In these days of ready-made clothes, factory-made goods, refrigerating plants, it is almost impossible that the mass of the inhabitants of this country should wear other than uniform clothes, use other than uniform furniture or utensils, or eat anything but the same kind of food."  Certainly, Coke fits into that category.

What the Brontosaurus skull can teach us about science

I enjoy visiting science museums as much as I enjoy art museums. Just as you don't have to be an artist to appreciate art, you don't have to be a scientist to appreciate science and how discoveries are made and new theories formed. The latter is one of the things that tends to strike me about exhibits that admit to having set things up incorrectly based on mistaken assumptions about, say how the dinosaur was likely to have stood,  on two feet or all four (as was the case for a star dinosaur at the Museum of Natural History in New York).

In the case of the Peabody Museums's Brontosaurus, the exhibitors actually lost their head. That is, to say, they now realize that the skull they put on it doesn't belong to the species at all. Unfortunately, they do not have the right skull to complete the skeleton, so the one on view is admittedly wrong, as you can see from the explanations posted here:

But, wait, there's more!  What you thought of a Brontosaurus might, in fact, be an Apatosaurus. With respect to the identification, what had been proposed back in the 1870s proved to be more correct than what was said in 1903, as was proven by a study as late as 2015!

Fascinating, isn't it, that  even something based on truly ancient and fixed evidence -- the fossils of long-extinct dinosaurs -- can be subject to changing theories that have to be revised?  Scientific advancement requires some measure of humility, the ability to say, "we were wrong" and accept the better explanation rather than force the contrary evidence to fit into the pre-established paradigm.

This what I believe Richard Feynman meant in his often quoted, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." Science can only advance if people do not accept previously established theories as axiomatic but continue to test and experiment. The job of  the true scientist is not to make the data fit the theory that corresponds to a particular agenda but to make the theory fit the data.

Related post: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2017/09/missingness-at-museum.html

What do you expect?

Today I heard someone say what crystallized for me what exactly irks me about the popularization of the meme pictured at right. 

The initials after the quote stand for Erin Hanson, a twenty-year-old Australian who penned these lines while still in her teens:

There is freedom waiting for you,

On the breezes of the sky,

And you ask "What if I fall?"

Oh but my darling,

What if you fly?

On that site, the picture used to illustrate the poem shows a drawing of a girl sitting with her legs dangling over a cliff and a pair of colorful wings on her back. 

The theme is a twist on "nothing ventured, nothing gained." You have to assume some risk to gain the potential benefit of advancing and changing. That's quite true, but I'm still bothered by the way this is set up because we all know what will happen to anyone who tries to jump off a cliff with just a pair of costume wings. 

A life devoid of hope and dreams is pretty gloomy. However, a life based on false hope and irrational expectations is pathetic and sad. So what do you do? You keep your expectations within the realm of possibility and keep the risks within check.

Perhaps that's my own parental bias, but I see it this way. You don't do your children any favors by encouraging them to try things that are not only beyond them but would cause them injury. In other words, you don't tell your kid to go ahead and climb a mountain until s/he has completed training for such a feat. 

What you can do is tell a kid to try to ride a bicycle even if there is a risk of falling and injury (I broke my ankle twice by falling off a bike) because it is a rational expectation that the kid will pick up on the balancing skills and the risk of a broken limb along the way is a manageable one. 

Aspiration is a good thing, but an expectation that one will achieve actual flight is dangeorusly delusional. Before anyone says I'm being too literal, I assure you, I'm very adept at abstract thinking. My point is  not just about defying the laws of physics but about the larger idea of setting up expectations.  

What's attainable, and what's worth the risk? That's something that everyone has to answer for him/herself. Would I venture into woods near dark? No. But I would venture on trails with plenty of hours of sunlight and adequate water. 

From my perspective, venturing out, say to go for an interview, meet friends, or see a new place is worth the risk of hitting traffic or getting somewhat lost, so long as you have a way to get back on track without getting into seriously dangerous areas.  But if I wanted to fly, I'd take a plane. 

Related post: http://kallahmagazine.blogspot.com/2015/03/modeling-behavior-for-child.html

  

The Secret Life of Ghosts, Or Whatever Happened to Aunt Gertrude?

Image from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Mystery.png

You may never have heard of Leslie McFarlane, but odds are good that you've come across at least some of his work, if not the plays, short stories, and articles, then the children's books that have outsold any other title series for boys.

In 1976 (a year before his death) McFarlane  published an autobiographical book, Ghost of the Hardy Boys. The ghost here is the the author himself who depicted the first volumes of the Hardy Boys under the name Franklin W. Dixon. Unlike authors, like George Eliot or Mark Twin,who selected pen names for themselves the writers who churned out popular children's books for the Stratemeyer Syndicate were assigned names, which often carried on to other ghost writers as no author was considered irreplaceable.

The irony of this book is that he devotes many pages protesting that he is far more than the writer who first breathed life into the pair of boy detectives and their formidable Aunt Gertrude only to be forced to both begin and end with the series that he did not own the rights to. The 20 Hardy Boys books he wrote served as his bread-and-butter and kept his family afloat when the Depression hit and other publishers had little or no money for authors.

Work from the Stratemeyer Syndicate served as the artist's equivalent of a day job while he wrote what he considered more serious literary work, which, he did succeed in publishing after a number of false starts. The false starts are as entertaining as they are educational.

McFarlane, who is Canadian by the way, embarks on his writing career by working for newspapers, including J. Jonah Jameson, who discourages his literary ambitions because he views as pulling a potential journalist in the opposite direction needed for a newspaperman. But McFarlane doesn't give up and continues sending out manuscripts to magazines, often, not with any real understanding of what truly fits the publications. But he is not forced to simply learn by trial-and-error, as some editors take the time to give him really valuable feedback and direction.


That is one of the reasons why this book is of particular interest to people who write; it gives quite a bit of insights into the literary world. McFarlane learns to distinguish between what's popular and what's good and how to churn out what's popular for the sake of making money. But here's the rub: though he presents his Hardy Boys work as just for the sake of money, he takes particular pride in his craft, particularly in his infusion of humor and the memorable creation of the boys' Aunt Gertrude.

I put Aunt Gertrude into the title because her treatment in the reworked versions of the books issued in the later part of the 20th Century belie the fact that he does feel connected to his creation, for all his protests that it's all the property of the the syndicate. He is horrified to discover that her dramatic entrance into the series was completely cut in the new editions of the books, as demonstrated to him by a staff writer for a magazine named Bob Stall.

When Stall first approaches McFarlane to talk about the Hardy Boys series, he says he's not interested in discussing that work. After all, he feels he should be recognized for the four novels, 100 novelettes, 200 short stories, 75 television scripts, and 50 films he wrote. But Stall manages to get his attention when he shows him how the books have been eviscerated in the new editions:

They haven't just been streamlined. They've been gutted from beginning to end. Those old books were well written. They had words you could roll around in your mouth and taste. They had funny scenes. They had scenes you could wallow in. These new ones move faster all right, but too fast. There's never a place to stop and linger. That's why the old were so great for a kid. They had flavor. And now the flavor is all gone. 

Stall adds:

The books were written for a literate generation ... But not these new ones. And they'll engender an even less literate generation. 

Remember, this was reported back in 1976.  By today's standards, attention spans were long then; just look at the pacing in movies and television shows of the era compared to today's. Yet, people who remembered the previous generation noticed a difference and saw it as the sign of a trend.  Certainly, kids' books today move at an even faster pace than those that were read in the late 20th Century.

You don't have to be a Hardy Boys fan, and I assure you, I never was, to appreciate McFarlane's reaction or to accompany him on his always entertaining journey to becoming a better writer and laughing with him at his youthful pretensions, which may just remind you of your own.

How many times did Edison fail in attempting to invent the lightbulb?

The answer is not around number like 1,000 or 10,000 times that some people like to claim. It took 2,774 attempts to arrive at the bamboo filament that made Edison's lightbulb a commercial success, though he was not the one who invented the electric light.

Electric lights  in England

Various inventors dabbled in channeling electricity for light many decades before Edison did. Credit for the first electric light goes to the British chemist Humphry Davy who invented the Electric Arc lamp in the first decade of the 19th century,  though is more famous for the lamp that bears his name invented in 1815.

Another English chemist, Warren de la Rue offered a design in 1840 that relied on a coiled platinum filament in a vacuum tube. Thought it worked quite well, the high cost of platinum rendered the bulb too expensive for mass production.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan used carbonized paper filaments for his bulb design.  It took yet another decade to make a working prototype, though it was still  not viable as a commercial product. It took him until 1878 to developed a bulb  that relied on treated cotton thread, which both increased longevity and removed the problem of early bulb blackening.

A light across the Atlantic 

In the interim, on the other side of the Atlantic, a patent for the Woodward and Evan’s Light was filed in Canada on July 28, 1874.They used carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. While the product worked, Canada is not really recognized as the cradle of electric bulbs. 

That's because even though Woodward obtained an American patent in 1876, he wasn't able to launch his bulbs in the U.S.  In 1879 Thomas Edison bought out the patents from Woodward and his Canadian partners. Then in 1885 Woodward sold a share of his Canadian patent to Edison, as well. But that doesn't mean that Edison merely capitalized on the work of others. 

Edison's own advancement

Edison did make a significant advance in lightbulb design in developing a filament was made from carbonized bamboo, which allowed it to burn for over 1200 hours. It was that design that was put into mass production.

Remember Swan over in England? According to "Who Invented the Light Bulb?"  Edison's own lightbulb design was to close too that of Joseph Swan's to be  awarded its own patent. But in the spirit of "if you can't lick 'em join 'em," Swan and Edison partnered up in 1880 to develop a viable lightbulb. Edison's patent was awarded on January 27, 1880.

 Exactly how many attempts did it take to get the right filament for  Edison lightbulb?

While we there was no actual tabulation of all the steps along the way, there is a very precise number connected to the experiments surrounding the bamboo filament -- 2,774. 

It's cited in a Rutgers newsletter on the Thomas Edison papers here:

No one, including Edison, ever counted the number of experimental lamps that they made. There were hundreds of experiments before he developed the bamboo lamp. And many additional experiments before the lamps were adequate for commercial production. In a letter to Edison in spring 1884, Francis Upton noted that the lamp factory had conducted 2,774 experiments (presumably since it had started operations in October 1881).

The link in the paragraph above take you to a digital image of a handwritten note on the bamboo lamp. 

What about the inspiration of not giving through thousands of failures? 

What to make of the famous quote about Edison claiming not to have failed 10,000 times but to have

Inside Edison's lab. Photo by Ariella Brown

 found 10,000 ways that did not work?

There's no record of that quote with respect to the electric bulb, though he did say something like that about  his experience with the battery. The Rutgers newsletter dug up a quote that comes pretty closed in Edison: His Life and Inventions. an authorized biography by Frank Dyer and T. C. Martin, first published in 1910. Edison's friend and associate, Walter S. Mallory, offers this account:

This [the research] had been going on more than five months, seven days a week, when I was called down to the laboratory to see him [Edison]. I found him at a bench about three feet wide and twelve feet long, on which there were hundreds of little test cells that had been made up by his corps of chemists and experimenters. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: 'Isn't it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven't been able to get any results?' Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: 'Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won't work!'

There you have it, not exactly in the words you find on quotes sites, but the same idea. The point is that Edison had to go through a great deal of trial-and-error to discover what would make the bulb work well. That required more persistence than flashes of insight, which is why Edison is associated with another quote: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration" Spoken statement c. 1903 that was published in Harper's Monthly in September 1932.

[Note: this blog has been updated multiple times since it was first published with references to events that occurred after 2015. I talk about that in this What Edison Can Teach Us About SEO.]

Shedding some light on Latimer

I'm adding in another note on the development of the lightbulb to clarify some confusion stirred up by Joe Biden's declaration in Kenosha on September 3, 2020, "A black man invented the light bulb. not a white guy named Edison. Okay?"

One thing Biden got right is that a black man named Lewis Howard Latimer did advance light bulb

designs. Latimer was a remarkable inventor, electrical engineer, and patent expert who advanced light bulb design. He did work for Hiram Maxim, as well as Edison.

Lewis Howard Latimer

While  working as a draftsman for Hiram Maxim, founder of the U.S. Electric Lighting Company, he along with Joseph Nichols, registered a patent for a light bulb with a carbon filament that burned better than than the bamboo one in 1881. He also got the patent on or ‘the process of manufacturing carbons’ which was an improvement on the method for the production of the carbon filaments in light bulbs.

Latimer only started working for the Edison Electric Light Company in 1884 and remained at that New York City location until 1896; he never worked alongside Edison as a "mucker" in the Menlo Park Lab.  As chief draftsman and patent expert in the legal department of Edison Electric Light Company. Among his duties was conducting patent searches (not so easy in the days when everything was on paper files)  and testifying on Edison’s behalf in court cases surrounding patents. Latimer was also the author of Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System, which was published in 1890.

 The researchers for the historical authenticity messed up on this in their attempt to reference Latimer's contribution to the lightbulb  in the seventh episode of  the HBO period drama The Gilded Age. As the events of the first season take place in 1882 -- whenLatimer was still working for his competitor -- the playful suggestion that Edison would invite Latimer to take credit could not have been made.   

In person and virtual option to learn more

Photo by Ariella Brown

If you're interested in learning more about Edison and his experiments, including the invention he did consider a failure (talking dolls),  take the time to visit Edison's lab in Menlo Park, NJ (pictured above).  It's held by the National Park Service. Find information on exhibits, hours, fees, etc., here. 

If you time it right, you can go over to see Edison's home, Glenmont, pictured here on the same day. You can also take a virtual tour.

The Lewis Latimer house is located at 34-41 137th St. Flushing, NY 11354. It, is open to the public (pay what you wish) Fridays and Saturdays 11-5.

Related:

What Edison can teach us about SEO
Have desk, will travel
A grand vision of Victorian architecture and engineering

Favorite books from the children's section

My daughter recently finished reading The Orphan Train and declared it to be her favorite book. It certainly is good and worth reading. I'm not sure I would call it my favorite. But I'm not sure I can pin down any single book as my favorite. Among all the books I've read, I'd find it too difficult to select one or even a handful for that distinction. I can, however, give a listing of favorites among children's books that  have much to offer adults as well.

To start, there's  a picture book geared toward the very young: Leo Lionni's Frederick. This fable really encapsulates what's behind capturing and representing experience in literature without getting all theoretical.

Another book  that touches on a similar theme in a more extended narrative set in the past in a Jewish community  is Pheobe Gilman's Something from Nothing.

While those two works are not as well-known as they should be, my next few selections are likely among the books you have read. They include:
Amelia Bedelia
The Snowy Day (wonderful illustrations)
Madeline
Alice in Wonderland
The Little Prince
A Wrinkle in Time
The Chronicles of Narnia
Matilda (I prefer it to Ronald Dahl's better known and more often adapted Charlie and the Chocolate Factory)
Anne of Green Gables

Not quite as famous, though still classic works include:
All of a Kind Family
The Borrowers
Five Children and It

A few of my favorites have been written relatively recently. They include
Wonder
Frindle
Holes
Everything on a Waffle

The View from Saturday
Note:I tried to keep to books aimed at children 12 and under to limit the list. It would grow a lot longer if I were to include the books marketed to tweens and young adults. Also I may add on more books as I discover or rediscover them.






Related post http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2014/02/notes-on-amazons-100-books.html

Chocolate variations

Mark Miodownik devotes nearly 20 pages of Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World to chococolate. Yes, chocolate. Though the cocoa beans are a natural product, it takes quite a lot of processing to turn them into the confection popular around the globe. Miodownik warns readers that the bean in its natural state tastes nothing like the chocolate he loves to eat; he's tried eating right off the plant and regretted it.

He then goes through the history of chocolate consumption. It started out as drink made by the Olmecs and then the  Mayans. That brew did not have the sweet taste we associate with hot chocolate today, though. It was rather bitter, which after explorers introduced the drink to Europe in the 17th Century, it proved less popular than coffee or tea.  Adding sugar wasn't enough to make it wholly palatable as the 50% cocoa fat rendered the drink "gritty, oily, and heavy" (83).

It took two centuries for a Dutch chocolate company called Van Houten to come up with a way  of applying  a press to the to remove the cocoa butter from the roasted, fermented beans. The yielded  the cocoa powder that serves as the basis of today's cocoa drinks, as well as the ingredient that goes into chocolate cakes.

Arriving at the solid chocolate made into bars was actually the real of what Miodownik calls "counter intuitive genius: having removed and purified the cocoa fat, and having pulverized the cocoa powder separately, why not mix them back together again, add in some sugar, to create an ideal cocoa bean" (83).  And solid chocolate was born.

He says credit for the first chocolate bars does not go to the Dutch or the Swiss but to an English firm called Fry and Sons. However, the Swiss are credited as the first producers of milk chocolate. With an abundance of milk powder from the Nestle company, they combined two products with long shelf lives to achieve a milder, sweeter chocolate than ever before (84).

 It's the differences in milk that produce different tastes in and for chocolate around the world. Sounding a rather Britishly biased, Miodwonik describes  American chocolate as having a "cheesy, almost rancid flavor." That results from incorporating milk in which enzymes reduce fat.  In contrast, the chocolate in the UK gains a "milder caramel flavor" from the sugar added to liquid milk that is reduced to a concentrate before being added to the chocolate. Europeans still opt for powdered milk, which he says provides a "fresh dairy flavor with a powdery texture" (85).

Generally, one prefers the taste of chocolate of one's native country, and the differences in ingredients do explain the outrage some British ex-pats felt at being denied their Cadbury chocolate in the US, as per the recent Financial Times article "British tastebuds caught in crossfire of chocolate war." It all due to the uncommon content of chocolate on different sides of the Atlantic.