Earth Noir

Quick thought: colors, a seemingly fundamental aspect of the Earth, elemental, saturating every micron of the planet in a magnificently complex array (existing even before there were eyes to behold them) evolved over vast expanses of geologic time, from a more visually uniform substratum, in the same way multicellular life evolved out of simpler forms. Way back in the mysterious Hadean eon, the Earth would have appeared essentially colorless, or more specifically grey. Browns, yellows, oranges, and reds are all results of the oxidization of iron. At this time the iron which had not sunk toward the core was mostly dissolved in water and the atmosphere was not yet oxygen rich. The sky did not yet appear blue and so neither did the proto-oceans. Purples and greens were the result of cyanobacteria converting sunlight to sugars. A process which didn’t begin until a couple billion years later. At this point, chromatically, the Earth would have looked a whole lot like our moon looks today.

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This would point then to in-between periods as well, when cumulative chemical reactions allowed colors to begin making their entrance en masse, when the Earth might have appeared in very tight, limited color palettes.

Perhaps from a vantage point in space it would have appeared grey and black and ivory with some smatterings of super-saturated volcanic orange? (A bit like a certain much-beloved website now that I think of it.)

Or maybe the entire surface appeared as a sort of liver colored mixture of grey and brown and purple which, as if moving a slider in a photoshop effects panel, smoothly brightened and became more saturated?

Maybe the coloring of the earth proceeded outward from relatively distinct areas, some green, some yellow and ochre and copper with a few bursts of wild vermillion? Maybe these grew and blended at their edges like a watercolor on grey paper?

Maybe for a million years or so, when viewed, from say the distance of Mars, Earth might have appeared as a pointalist-like body with small “dots” of color creating the illusion of a smooth continuous shift?

Maybe the color was built up like layer after layer of semi-transparency, deepening and becoming more rich, until distinctly colored shapes emerged that looked, from afar, like moo cows or Victorian courtesans or 1973 Dodge Charger’s with their hoods popped- life forms and objects that wouldn’t exist for a few billion years yet?

Perhaps for a million years or so, when looked at from just the right angle, the entire surface looked like the face of an unshaven tramp clown, with sad dark grey eye sockets, a down turned ashen-grey mouth, and a giant red volcano nose?

Could have been any damn thing.

Over time, obviously, with the evolution of bacteria and algae and parrots and gay pride parades down 5th Avenue the Earth transformed into the spectacularly rich and varied Technicolor extravaganza we love so well today.

Which brings me to my final thought-

If there were indeed Creators, (or alternately, infinitely patient alien entities looking on, waiting for a life form to evolve advanced enough to invent pitless mangos and a cure for herpes) they might very well think back to that grey Earth of yore in the exact same way we moderns look back on our black and white movies, just a bit mournfully, sentimentally, with an aching nostalgia for a “simpler” time.

(Chromatically at least.)

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09.29. filed under: observations. 2

Truth of words, larkless, here the possibility of greatness ever a page existing. Crazy pulchritude with incomprehension. Each vision a riddle with silent smilings! The mystery is additive to all, however, with production of private head tales, tongueless! like Pinker in Chomsky’s night pillow. No memory, even as childish, these wonders. Smurfs? The Terrific Space Coaster? Kangaroo Commander? Bah! The sadness does hover at missing the most great entertainments young eyes might glance on screens, it’s certain. Old eyes now and glancing at screens. Different but approaching what was. Together our tongueless eyes! We, all of us, glance at screens!

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09.27. filed under: film. play. 1

Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

His name was Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle and his book, Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) is a fascinating, though I suspect largely forgotten, bit of science history. Published in 1686, the book is remarkable, not so much for its literary merits as for the ultimate function its publication served. Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds holds the admirable distinction of being one of the first books of “popularized science” ever published, which is to say, a book of scientific ideas aimed directly at “the average reader” rather than natural philosophers. It became quite fashionable and in as much might be considered the Brief History of Time or Cosmos of it’s day.

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From the University of Hong Kong’s fascinating (but seemingly now defunct) search for extraterrestrial intelligence page:

“The book was unusual in that it was the first time that scientific knowledge had been written for the public in a common language and in a manner to encourage the reader to enjoy the process of learning. Hitherto, all scientific knowledge had been written only for other scientists and usually in some classical language. Newton, for example, was at that time busy composing his monumental work Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) - in latin, of course.”

And what scientific ideas was Fontenelle’s book offering up to the public exactly? The answer to that question represents the second reason the book is remarkable.

Owing a great deal to the previous work of Copernicus (the heliocentric theory of the solar system) and Descartes (particularly his theory of vortex motion of the planets meant to counteract Newton’s idea of gravity), his work rebutted the idea of a centre to the universe and speculated in great detail on the habitation and multitudes of other planets.

Now take that in for a second… this book was published in 1686 as I’ve said. That’s less than a century after Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for “desacrilizing” the Earth by suggesting the possibility of multiple inhabited worlds. It’s only 50 years after Galileo had lost his freedom and had been placed under permanent house arrest for writing “daring astronomical theories.”

As Nina Rattner Gelbart puts it in the introduction to the 1990 edition of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds:

“While much of Fontenelle sounds matter-of-fact to us—his talk of boundless universe, his speculation on intelligent and extragalactic life, his discussion of space travel—we have to remember that publishing his book three centuries ago was risky business. The ideas he was bandying about were bold, controversial, even forbidden. As they had been scarcely known to the average reader before he explained and disseminated them, these astonishing ideas suddenly became all the rage.”

Fontenelle himself seemed aware of the dangers and tried to pre-empt negative judgment from the religious quarters with a few choice words in his own preface to the book:

“It only remains for me to speak to the one group of people, who will perhaps be the most difficult to satisfy; Not that I haven’t given them very good arguments, but rather that they may, if they wish, refuse any good arguments. These are the scrupulous people who think there is a danger in respect to religion in placing inhabitants elsewhere than on Earth. I respect even the most excessive sensibilities people have on the matter of Religion, and I would have respected Religion to the point of wishing not to offend it in a public work, even if it were contrary to my own opinion. But what may be surprising to you is that Religion simply has nothing to do with this system, in which an infinity of worlds with inhabitants exist. It’s only necessary to sort out a little error of imagination.

When I say to you that that the moon is inhabited, you picture to yourself men made like us, and if you’re a bit of a theologian, you’re instanatly full of qualms. The descendants of Adam have not spread to the moon, nor sent colonies there. Therefore the men in the moon are not sons of Adam. Well, it would be embarassing to theology if there were men anywhere not descended from him, it’s not necessary to say any more about it; All imaginable difficulties boil down to that, and the terms that must be employed in any longer explication are too serious and dignified to be placed in a book as unserious as this. Perhaps I could respond soundly enough if I undertook it, but certainly I have no need to respond. It rests entirely upon the men in the moon, but it’s you who are putting men on the moon. I put no men there at all: I put inhabitants there who are not like men in any way.”

Fontenelle not only managed to avoid the usual persecution but in fact his book became an instant best seller of the day, and went on to be translated into no less than 10 languages. Perhaps it was the way he structured the book which helped it avoid censor (the book takes the form of a succession of casual evening conversations) or perhaps it was the the intentionally abstract and theoretical tone of the ideas themselves.

As Sylvia Engdahl puts it in the wonderful New Mythology of the Space Age:

“The ideas had less impact on culture than they have today. In the first place, they were abstract beliefs, a matter of principle rather than speculation about the future. It did not occur to anyone that travel between solar systems might become possible. It was assumed that mortals from one solar system could never have knowledge of the others, except perhaps in an afterlife. In the second place, although plurality of worlds was discussed by “natural philosophers”—they weren’t called “scientists” until the 19th century, when Whewell coined the word—it was not expected that science could ever learn anything about the subject, nor, for that matter, offer evidence for it.”

The reason for the volume’s wild popularity is less a mystery and accounts for yet another remarkable aspect of the book. The “casual evening conversations” are not had in a study between stuffy learned men, but between a charming philosopher and his hostess, a Marquise, in the evenings as they stroll through her moonlit gardens.

Paula Findlen, of Stanford University describes this change from the norm in her essay Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in 18th c. Italy:

“No longer a man of the university, a scholastic master surrounded by male disciples, Fontenelle’s philosopher was a charming seducer of women, a wit who made science comprehensible by cultural analogy. His knowledge was no social liability that removed him from ordinary conversation, but the very reason that he held the attention of an aristocratic Marquise for several days and nights, as he educated her in the mysteries of the post-Copernican, cartesian universe.” In short, just exactly the kind of thing high society was likely to eat up. But Fontenelle took this arrangement a step further-

In a time when women were not expected to know much of anything “scientific” Fontenelle’s society lady was not strolling in the moonlight to be seduced, as might be expected, but to genuinely learn. He hoped to “encourage women through the example of a woman.” This was no small thing at the time and Fontenelle was quick to tell his female readers that the abilities of his imaginary woman philosopher did not exceed their own capacity to learn. Quite the opposite.

Again from his preface:

“I’ve placed a woman in these conversations who is being instructed, one who has never heard a syllable of such things. I thought this fiction would serve to make the work more enticing, and to encourage women through the example of a woman who, having nothing of an extraordinary character, without ever exceeding the limitations of a person who has no knowledge of science, never fails to understand what’s said to her, and arranges in her mind, without confusion, vortices and worlds. Why would any woman accept inferiority to this imaginary marquise, who only conceives of those things of which she can’t help but conceive.”

He goes on in that vein for a while. So whether it was clever recognition of an untapped market, a sincere desire to educate women and give them a fictional role model in the sciences, or to goad the men who would surely read the book into a more careful consideration we can not know. The effect, however, was to achieve all three. This book helped to popularize the ideas of a “plurality of worlds” (which we have recently firmly established as truth), extraterrestrials, and space travel, in a time when such ideas were totally revolutionary, and thus primed the public in some degree for ideas which would follow (like those put forth in Christiaan Huygens posthumously published Cosmotheoros for example.)

In any case Conversations on the Plurailty of Worlds made such a big impression on people’s imagination that, according to one source, “Not long after, at the time of the death of Newton, vast amounts of sentimental poetry about other solar systems appeared in literary magazines, much of it by women and some based on the theme of Newton’s soul viewing other solar systems on the way to heaven. People were as eager to visit them as we are today, but could imagine only one potential opportunity, a time after death when the soul…

Unbounded in its ken, from prison free
will clearly view what here we darkly see
those planetary worlds, and thousands more
now veil’d from human sight, it shall explore.
-Robert Gambol, Beauties of the Universe, 1732.

According to others these same ideas heavily influenced what we now call the Baroque in Art and Theater.

These are no small accomplishments to be connected with for a man who was lampooned by Voltaire and to this day is considered only moderately noteworthy.

Wikipedia says as much in an entry:

“He has no claim to be regarded as a genius; but, as Sainte-Beuve has said, he well deserves a place ‘dans la classe des esprits infiniment distiugués’—distinguished, however, it ought to be added by intelligence rather than by intellect, and less by the power of saying much than by the power of saying a little well.”

Popularizing science is a task which 300 years later, in our age of stunning technology, liberal attitudes, and torrents of information, continues to be necessary. If only Fontenelle were around today to apply his particular talent to the task of re-popularizing evolution or pounding the importance of stem cell research into people’s skulls.

Hope you enjoyed.

For a bit of related reading-

A full Google book scan of Conversations…
Oeuvred de Fontenelle. (in French)
Some Fontenelle quotes.
An Essay on Fontenelle from Dramatic Essays of the Neoclassic Age.
Wikipedia entry.
French Tales of Infinity from Astrobiology magazine.
The Discovery of a World in the Moone at Giornale Nuovo.
To the Moon, Alice at Varieties of Unreligious Experience.

And lastly check out Extraterrestrial Life and Our World View at the Turn of the Millennium by Steven J. Dick which is a nice recap of ideas and trends which have lead to our current views on the same subjects.

Note: This post was the first in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The links have all been updated, the text has been edited slightly, and the images are all new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

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09.25. filed under: history. people. science. theory. 8

Mary Neumuth Mito, Murky Water 60 x 88.

Transmutation of the Mundane

When I came upon the images which I’m about to share with you, I was a bit slack-jawed, standing there in the book store. They were of dead leaves, pond-bottoms, sticks in snow, the edges of lakes, and other such humble subjects. Those of you who are at all familiar with my photographs will know that these are just the subjects I’m drawn to myself. Turning through the pages of the book, a catalog from an exhibit, I was agape because these photos were so very in line with my own; Creepily so. After taking a moment to read some of the accompanying text I was handily slapped around and had any egoistic notions of similarity dispelled- they were not photographs. They were paintings.

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Whenever I was obliged to say something, in the past, about the photographs I’d been taking, I always tried to explain that my aim was essentially to capture the quality of an abstract painting, something mysterious and decontextualized but ultimately about itself. When I printed the shots I did so as large as I could afford to and presented them without frames. Looking at them on the wall I thought of them almost as canvases. I’d been painting abstracts before I started shooting film but I realized at some point that in the puddles and garbage heaps and mud piles and gutters I could find little odd and overlooked tableaus more beautiful and complex and affecting in some way than anything I was likely to put down with paint. All I needed to do was frame them.

Coming upon Mary Mito’s paintings was a bit unsettling (and more than a bit humbling) because here was someone who saw what I saw, but then took the trouble to recreate it all, in paint, with her own hands. Initially, when I thought her images were photographs, I could, to some degree, compare and contrast her decisions to what my own might have been. By the internal ranking system I employ to judge the relative value of artworks, however, the fact that they were paintings made such comparisons moot.

Flooded Meadow 52 x 74. (larger version)

Raindrops 65 x 95. (larger version)

My one problem with the kind of photography I was doing was always its ease. I never felt as though I’d really done much. Completing a painting, regardless of its success, always leaves you feeling as though you’ve accomplished something. It’s true that Art is, at base, a way of communicating aspects of an individual consciousness to others incommunicable any other way. This is true for poetry and painting and music as well. In that my photographs were a record of my way of seeing they fulfilled this imperative, and so I’d never argue over their value as Art. Their value as experience, however, was always at issue for me.

Mito’s paintings please me aesthetically because they are of subjects I’m sympathetic to, subjects which interest me and which I find beautiful. (In the same way people are sometimes heard to say that they feel a song is being sung “just for them,” because of the way it resonated with their own feelings, I might say that Mito’s paintings resonate for me because they so accurately reflect back at me my own way of seeing.) Her work impresses me though, rather than simply pleasing me, because they exhibit such a high level of skill. This is something I require of Art, and goes a long way in explaining why so much work, lauded and applauded, does not necessarily impress me. It’s important for me to see an artist display a skill beyond my own. That, not cleverness, wins my respect. Mito has certainly done that.

Pebbles With Three Lines 23 x 30.

Detail of Hillside Cornstalks 80 x 54.

Ocean 65 x 95. (larger version)

A bit about her work-

“Dirt. Grass. Dried leaves. Muddy water. Mary Neumuth’s paintings and drawings elevate what is underfoot and unnoticed to the walls of elegant rooms. They accomplish this transmutation of the mundane into the magnificent with paint and canvas via The long tradition of The “big important painting.” While Neumuth’s canvases are often large in size and pristine in execution, they are not concerned with theatrical BIGNESS. These paintings do not grab you by the lapel and shout in your face, as does so much art of our era. Neumuth’s canvases never insist, are never bombastic. Think of that discreet person who stands aside in a crowded room: such a person can create a pool of calm on a bustling public street, or in the middle of a raucous art opening. However, to really engage such quietude needs time alone… together. Mary Neumuth’s paintings make such a proposal. They invite an extended one-on-one conversation that promises to get more subtle as familiarity increases.” -MaLin Wilson, July 1998. From the essay beginning the catalog for the show “No On Spoke” at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe New Mexico.

1 panel of Four Panel Water Piece 27 x 39.

1 panel of Leaf Painting 65 x 95. (larger version)

I wont include any more of Wilson’s lengthy essay because frankly I think too many descriptors and historical counterpoints and metaphors actually detract from work like this. It requires no explanation. Perhaps that’s simply me projecting my own goals and biases, but I could hardly do anything else in this particular case, could I?

Hope you enjoyed.

(To avoid any confusion for anyone attempting to search out more info on the artist: The work pictured here is actually credited to “Mary Neumuth” I refer to her instead as “Mary Mito” because her name has between then and now changed. To confuse matters further there seems to be a Pedigree horse by the name Mary Mito, who dominates google searches, as well.)

Mito’s most recent show was “Passage to China” which opened this past July at Gerald Peters Gallery.

For a bit more “descriptors, historical counterpoints and metaphors” concerning Her work see this Art in America piece by Michael Amy.

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09.25. filed under: art. personal. 4

The Jimsonweed Junkies

Across the Americas, during the twilight hours of the summer, a poisonous perennial weed unfurls its ingeniously folded conical wildflower and offers itself to all comers. Every bit of the weed is toxic, and its nectar is held deep within it’s corolla tube, so there are few takers. One family of moth, however, happens to have just the tools for the job; Its proboscis is long (longer in most cases that the rest of its entire body) and its proclivities… well… let’s just say this moth likes to get high baby.

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The weed is Datura wrightii, known variously as Sacred Datura, Jimsonweed⊕, Nightshade, Angel’s Trumpet, Moonflower, Thorn Apple, and Devil’s Weed. It’s classified as a “deliriant” which Wikipedia describes as follows:

“The deliriants (or anticholinergics) are a special class of acetylcholine-inhibitor dissociatives. The name comes from their primary effect of inducing a medical state of frank delirium, characterized by stupor, utter confusion, confabulation, and regression to ‘phantom’ behaviors such as disrobing and plucking. Other commonly reported behaviors include holding full and lifelike conversations with imagined people, finishing a complex, multi-stage action and then suddenly discovering you had not even begun yet, and being unable to recognize one’s own reflection in a mirror (and thus becoming angry with the ‘stranger’s’ acts of mimicry). The effects have been likened to sleepwalking, a fugue state or a psychotic episode.”

These effects are caused by the alkaloids present throughout the plant.

Quote: “The leaves, stem, root and fruits of Datura contain a battery of tropane alkaloids, the most potent of which are atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine. These alkaloids affect the central nervous system, including nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord which control many direct body functions and the behavior of men and women. They may also affect the autonomic nervous system, which includes the regulation of internal organs, heartbeat, circulation and breathing. One autonomic response of atropine is the dilation of pupils, once considered to be a beautiful and mysterious look in Italian women. In fact, belladonna means ‘beautiful lady,’ so named because sap from the closely related belladonna plant (Atropa belladonna) was used as eye drops to dilate the pupils.”

Californian settlers called it “Indian Whiskey” because it was used ritually by soaking and steeping the leaves into a tea or by chewing the seeds or roots. It was used mainly in rites of passage and as a means of “seeing the future” though wikipedia also mentions that “during a frightening situation, such as when seeing a coyote walk like a man, a leaf was sucked to help keep the soul in the body.” And who couldn’t use a little help in that regard?

Elsewhere in the world, and throughout history, Datura has been used for varying purposes, all of which seemed to call for just a pinch of that special poison. Some examples-

Quote: In the East Indies, women fed Datura leaves to beetles, and then fed the poisonous dung to faithless lovers.

Prostitutes in India added the seeds to their patron’s drinks to induce sexual excitement. In fact, the use of Datura as an aphrodisiac spread throughout India, the Far East and Europe, and was an important ingredient in love potions and witches’ brews.

Specially prepared salves and ointments were also applied to various parts of the body. The famous seventeenth century Dutch artist, David Teniers the Younger, made several paintings of witches preparing for their demonic orgy or sabbat. The scenes frequently depicted a nude witch being anointed while she straddled a broom. According to M.J. Harner, writing in Hallucinogens and Shamanism (1973), the use of a broom or staff was undoubtedly more than a symbolic Freudian act, for it served to apply the salves to sensitive vaginal membranes.

Greek and Roman physicians used Datura mixed with opium as a sedative and general anesthetic during surgery.

Some aboriginal Indians in South America gave a Datura-alcohol beverage to wives and slaves of dead warriors and chieftains. The powerful brew induced stupor before they were buried alive to accompany their dead husbands and masters on the long journey to heaven.”

Whew! So enterprising and imaginative we humans are. In any case…

Though panic, blindness, convulsions, stupors, and respiratory depression are delightful prospects, and might seem a perfectly acceptable risk in trade for some people in order to achieve outlandish hallucinatory states, Datura can be lethal, and in as much has rarely been considered a substance to be taken recreationally.

Except by the moths of course.

The moths in question are the family Sphingidae called variously hawk moths, sphinx moths and hornworms. They are one of only three nectar feeders who have evolved the ability to hover (the others being the hummingbird and certain bats) and are very often mistaken by onlookers for hummingbirds. They are among the fastest flying insects on the planet, able to reach 30 mph, and as mentioned previously, they like to get high. Lucky for them, in return for a stint of pollination duty, Datura wrightii is all too happy to oblige.

Quote: “Several intoxicating alkaloids are known to occur in Datura, but heretofore have not been correlated with pollination. Apparently Datura nectar is ‘spiked’ with alkaloids and the hawk moths seem to like it and come back for more. Sometimes they arrive early and hover around the flowers, impatiently waiting for the blossoms to pop open. We have observed what appear to be intoxicated moths flying erratically around D. wrightii, clumsily landing on blossoms and crashing into leaves or falling upon the ground.”

Arriving early? Waiting impatiently? Sounds like Mr. Sphingid needs it bad.

Further: “Although the potent alkaloids of Datura have produced untold suffering and psychedelic binges among people through countless generations, they may also be an ingenious strategy to insure repeat visits by long-tongued hawk moths through the medium of drug addiction. When the moths sober up they come straight back for more nectar.”

So enterprising and imaginative these plants are, ay?

In our weakling 21st century brains, browbeaten into hypersensitivity over anything habitual, and so very quick to pull the “addiction” trigger, many people will involuntarily view this symbiosis as a dealer/junkie relationship and be tempted, against their own good sense, to heap moral scorn on a flower⊕. It’s useful to remember, however, that pollination can be a brutal business-

Quote: “In truth, pollination often involves abuse, a range of violence and deceit. Some orchids imprison their pollinators in a carnival fun-house of chutes and cages. Sometimes these flowers eject their pollinium (a disk of pollen with a stem attached) into a sphinx moth’s eye, an experience akin to having a hockey stick attached to your face. Eventually, the vision-impaired insect may starve if it cannot feed itself. In the meantime, it might pollinate a few more flowers. Flowers pretend to have nectar when they don’t, or they exaggerate the richness of their pollen with bright yellow coloring. In the common milkweed, pollen can stick so persistently to a visiting bumblebee that, as the bee flies away, its legs tear off. By comparison, the interaction between a sacred datura and a moth almost seems romantic. At least no one is getting hurt.”

Indeed. The flower gets laid and the moth gets high. It’s a victimless crime baby.

To the adults- Hope you ejoyed.
To the kids- Just say no to deliriant flowers… and stay in school.

The information for this post was drawn from the following:
Wayne’s Word: Plants That Make You Loco
One Earth: Sex in the Garden
Wikipedia: Detura Wrightii
Wikipedia: Sphingidae

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09.23. filed under: science. 6

Her name is The Humanities

There has been a lively discussion going on over at Varieties of Unreligious Experience touched off by Conrad’s post Humanism and the virtue of anxiety. My mind, degenerate and poorly oiled as it is, could not help but take a particularly delightful exchange to its ultimate conclusion (pictured above through the miracle of photoshop). Rather than catastrophically lower the level of discourse there, I thought I’d post my addition where it could do no such harm- here.

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09.20. filed under: ideas. misc. play. 3

Etude pour Cottos

The Hundred-Handed Giants, Hecatoncheires to the Greeks, and later Centimani to the Romans, were the first beings born through procreation. Their father was Uranus, the Sky and their mother Gaia, the Earth. They were three in number, named Briareus, Cottus, and Gyges, and each was a gargantuan having fifty heads and a hundred arms. They were of vast proportions, stronger and more fierce than anything before them. In a manner befitting the species whose world they governed these first procreative births lead directly to marital conflict, conspiratorial plotting, attempted patricide, successful castration, all out war, and ultimately the downfall of the Titans and the rise of Zeus. “Out with the old and in with the new.” The more blood and guts and rumbling thunder the better, ay?

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Ancient Mythologies represent the ultimate expression of the game telephone. The stories, the names and places and outcomes, shift endlessly from source to source and from age to age. In as much I will make no attempt to recount the myth of the The Hundred-Handed Giants here. I’ll supply some links and leave the neat knot tying to you, if you’re interested. I mention the Myth only because I recently came across a group of paintings which I wanted to share that are related.

I picked up a slim volume containing some work by the French painter Lionel Guibout. Being woefully unilingual I could not read any of the accompanying text. The paintings were quite handsome, each depicting this crazy cluster of writhing bodies. They seemed to be angry and fearful and accusing and lunatic all at once. I had no idea what they represented, only that their frantic discomposure seemed meaningful somehow, and true. It wasn’t until I did a bit of research that I figured out that they were essentially portraits of the three Hecatoncheires.

Cottos feuilles d’or et huile sur toile, 1989-92. (larger version)

Also known as Cottys, Cottus, or Kotos. Sometimes appended “The Striker” or “The Furious.”

Briarée feuilles d’argent et huile sur toile, 1989-92. (larger version)

Also known as Briareus, Ægæon, or Egeon. Sometimes appended “The Vigorous” or “The Strong.”

Gygés feuilles d’or et huile sur toile, 1989-92. (larger version)

Also known as Gyes. Sometimes appended “The Big-Limbed” or “The Vaulter” or “The Crippler.”

Unfortunately, as with the book these were taken from, pretty much all the information on Lionel Guibout I was able to find is in French, or at very least a language other than English.Biographical info
Galleria Delleone
Vid of an exhibition in which the paintings above are are seen among other work.

More on the Hecatoncheires-
Wikipedia entry
Theoi Greek Mythology
Greek Mythology Link
Clash of the Titans at Infoplease
Encyclopedia Mythica entry
Orpheus, Myths of the World
The Age of Fable
Giants, Monsters, and Dragons
Classical Gods and heros

Postscript-
Dante actually encounters one of the Hecatoncheires, Briareus, in Pergatory (12:28-30). After seeing Briareus Dante concludes his monstrosity was his lack of intellect rather than his gigantic stature, which he declared was quite in proportion. Zing!

I knew there was something inherently “true” about those paintings.

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09.20. filed under: art. belief. history. 1

Description: A late 19th Century quarter repeating Swiss lever in a gold full hunter case. Gilt three quarter plate keyless movement with going barrel, four armed cam above the plate to actuate the automaton. Plain cock with polished steel regulator, compensation balance with blue steel overcoil hairspring. Club foot lever escapement. Slide quarter repeating on two gongs. Engine turned 18 carat gold full hunter case, slide in the band, etcetera.

Wow. Pretty fancy! And what is all that high presision Swiss mechanical dodaddery in the service of? What does it all lead to?

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09.19. filed under: history. humanity. play. wtf. 4

Scorched rock floating through empty space beholden to cold dispassionate forces for near eternity.

Observations of the star “V 391 Pegasi b” have revealed that a planet circling close to its star, like say, Earth, is not necessarily doomed to being swallowed whole when its star expands and goes “red-giant” in old age.

Quote: “Stars such as our own expand into red giants in their old age, engulfing nearby planets.⊕ Now a planet has been sighted circling close to V 391 Pegasi, a star that has gone through the red-giant phase to become what is known as a hot B-type subdwarf. The planet, it seems, survived this process.”

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That last part is what’s interesting. In finding a planet around a star so old and far along its path to red-gianthood, a first, the implication is a glimmer of hope for our own planet’s survival, 5 billion years or so from now when we will shake hands with our own red giant, Sol 2.0. Of course, “survival” in this context is a silly sort of word because though the actual ground beneath our feet might not be vaporized and molecularly mingled with our sun, there won’t be any feet at that point to appreciate the solid footing. Which is simply to say there wont be any “survivors” in terms of life as we know it.

I can hear you asking- “If our civilization is headed for a nasty and ultimately fatal sunburn regardless then why exactly are the implications so interesting? Scorched rock floating through empty space beholden to cold dispassionate forces for near eternity is interesting? Further more,” You continue, a bit snarkily for my liking, “If there is no mind left to be interested then surely the term ‘interesting’ ceases to apply?”

True enough that we won’t be around to see how it shakes out, but honestly… do you think we’ll be around 5 billion years from now, red-giant or no? Hahaha. Fat chance. In any case it’s not the prospect of human survival on a scorched Earth which interests me… quite the opposite. These observations essentially hint at a possible second option for our eternal rest. Previously cremation was the only game in town, now we have the prospect of burial as well.

Personally, in terms of my own meat-sack, I will opt for, nay, insist on, cremation. But for the remains of human civilization at large I think the prospect of burial is a happy one, and for a couple of reasons-

1) “Life” does not equal “humanity.” Extremophiles may yet survive on a scorched Earth, and perhaps long enough even to evolve convertibles and ray-bans and sun-block.

2) It would be a damn shame if another race of sentient beings, blind to their own origins and terrified at the apparent lifelessness of space, caught some lingering radio signals and came looking for the source, only to find a big fat nothing. They might be tempted to attribute C-span broadcasts and Who’s the Boss re-runs to the lips of Gods. That at least, I’d like to spare them.

The truth is attaching significance to a mortal life is difficult enough, to your own tiny place in a mortal civilization even more so. But finding a way to soldier on when you know every last scrap of evidence that humanity ever existed will be vaporized? Well that’s just fucking unreasonable.

P.S. the image which accompanies this post was adapted from the first plate of The Outline of Science, A Plain Story Simply Told from 1922, which is available at Gutenberg.org

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09.18. filed under: humanity. observations. space. 1

Boom Computing

He kept his homemade, oversized, “nuclear weapon effects computer” in a room packed floor to ceiling with puzzles.⊕ To me, smugly distanced from the fearful zeitgeist of the atomic age (and its pragmatic preparations) this choice seems perfectly fitting. I can think of none better in fact. Circular slide rules manufactured to calculate the various effects and time lengths of a post nuclear landscape were once fairly common items. If you handed me one today and expected an important calculation in return you might as well hand me a icosahedron-shaped rubik’s and expect in return a nice slice of strawberry pie.

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Detail of the homemade slide rule showing just a few of it’s charming variables.

Let’s do a visualization exercise.

Try to let go of your movie-induced visions of post-apocalyptic struggle, centered on flesh eating irradiated men, broken eyeglasses, and thunderdomes, and focus instead on standing in a dark, rubble-strewn bunker trying to make heads or tail out of a (greek to me) number-laden slide rule… do you see what I see?

Now that’s horror!

(Why, oh why, am I so unprepared? And why did I take so many gad damned Humanities courses anyway? Fucking art school!)

Personally I don’t remember ever even seeing one of these items first hand. That seems to have as much to do with the timing of my birth (1974) as with my decidedly hippy-leaning parentage. Let’s look to John Walker (maintainer of fourmilab.ch and co-author of AutoCAD) for some firsthand accounting-

Quote: “Anyway, when some champion of human liberty in a Che Guevara T-shirt and Mao jacket was haranguing his audience with claims like “A single Hiroshima bomb set off downtown would annihilate this university and all of us in the blink of an eye”, what better way to burnish one’s Strangelovian credentials than to whip out a handy-dandy nuclear bomb computer slide rule, whip—slip—slide, and interrupt, “Naaah . . . fifteen kilotons at five miles? Surface burst? Why, that’s only a quarter to a third of a pound per square inch overpressure—it’ll probably break some window glass but that’s about it.” Flipping the slide rule over, “The flash isn’t even enough to cause sunburn, and the immediate radiation is next to nothing.” For some unfathomable reason, this never seemed to either carry the argument or suitably impress chicks.

Back in those psychedelic days of yore, you could order your own fantastic pastel plastic nuclear bomb effects computer directly from the U.S. Government Printing Office for a single green dollar, and for three dollars more, obtain the authoritative 730 page book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, upon which it was based. With the winding down of the nuclear arms race and eventual end of the Cold War, interest in the actual consequences of setting off nuclear weapons waned. The book and computer were last updated in 1977, and subsequently went out of print.”

Indeed.

Well that explains why when I look at one of these circular slide rules all I see is some nifty looking, though totally opaque, information design and why rather than envisioning all sorts of weighty cause and effect scenarios my first thoughts are instead, “mmmm pretty” and “I bet Tufte would approve of those.” Have a look at some for yourself and see what you think.

The Commander’s Radiation Guide, ca. 1960’s. Also described as the “Fission Fragment Fallout Decay and Dose Guide.”

Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer by EG&G ca. 1960. Quoting the Instructions: “As a convenience to those interested in the effects of nuclear weapons, this circular computer was designed to make data easily available on various weapon effects.”

The Radiation Dosage Calculator was developed in 1950 or 1951 by William Orr at the University of Connecticut for the Connecticut State Office of Civil Defense. They were sold to the general public for one dollar each.

The RADIAC Calculator No. 2 ca. late 1950’s. It works as follows: if the exposure rate (roentgens/hr) is known at a given time after a nuclear explosion, the calculator predicts the exposure rate at any other time. It also estimates the dose to personnel who are in the area at specified periods of time after the explosion.

The RADIAC Calculator No. 1 ca 1952-1956. A somewhat unique feature of this slide rule is the fact that the central two circles have two sides: a blue side for calculations involving contamination generated at sea, and a pink side for contamination generated by detonations over land.

Isotope Handling Calculator Mk. III ca. 1960s.

The ABC-M1A1 RADIAC Calculator, used by the US Army to determine the dose rates and doses to personnel after a nuclear explosion.

Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer, Revised Edition ca. 1960s. Distributed in a pocket on the inside back cover of the Atomic Energy Commission publication “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”

I must admit the very thought of some determined engineer brandishing one of these after a bomb blast, to calmly draw even a smidgeon of rational data out of the situation, is a heartening thought. Where as most of us would immediately set about trying to cobble together flying machines out of lawnmower parts or riot down at the sporting-goods store in covetous search of hockey masks and shoulder pads some among us might yet be able to do something useful.

Obviously the slide rule in general has largely become a outmoded technology with the coming of the scientific calculator and more recently, these, how-you-say, computronics. But as with all technological corpses there remains a fervent underground of admirers and collectors who keep a fire burning in the tomb. Which in the case of slide rules, nuclear themed specimens especially, is a blessing. After all with a few well placed electromagnetic pulses -care of some lovely nuclear explosions- they could very quickly return to state of the art, technophile coveted, status.

If you’re a true technology junky and want to get a jump on the apocalyptic gadget frenzy (sure to be kicked off in the pages of the mimeographed editions of endgadget and gizmodo) or would simply like to feel less stupid when all hell breaks loose, Fourmilab offers the Build Your Own Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer page as a public service.

Happy computing!

The images in this post were adapted from the following:
ORAU’s page on Nuclear Slide Rules
Cyberheritage.org’s Pounds House, Plymoth

For a bit more-

Micro-history of the slide-rule
Wiki history of the slide rule
Curious Lee

Lastly, I ought to mention that the slide rules pictured here were chosen not for their visual niftiness but strictly for their function. There are MANY handsome looking slide rules to be seen out there which would surely prove inspirational to purveyors of information graphics and retro-design lovers alike. I can recommend the following-

Rekeninstrumenten’s slide rule catalog
Sphere’s circular slide rules page and slide rule universe
Greg’s slide rules
Slide rule museum

Hope you enjoyed.

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09.16. filed under: design. history. humanity. science. 12

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