JOST A MON

Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.

Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.

I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.

From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!

Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.

So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!

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How about some pseudoscience? Alchemy has had a bad rap, and yet it provided the foundations for chemistry. Via Thony C., we have Lawrence Principe and the Rehabilitation of Alchemy – another lecture in Utrecht posted at Heterodoxology.

For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.

From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.

She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.

Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.

Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.

While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.

Fossils and da Vinci - who would have thunk it? Via Thony C., we have Brian Switek's Leonardo da Vinci - Palaeontology Pioneer at the Smithsonian Magazine's blog.

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Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.

A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.

John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.

From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).

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Just for variety, here’s something to watch rather than to read. Via Thony C., we have Lens on Leeuwenhoek: Videos about his life, times, and accomplishments posted at Lens on Leeuwenhoek.

This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.

And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.

van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.

If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.

The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]

Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.

From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.

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Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled.  Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.

R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:

Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.

But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.

I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).

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On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.

Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.

In the 19th century, by a gradual process of socialisation, the scientific and professional communities in the USA began to differentiate themselves. Will Thomas posts Paul Lucier on ‘Professionals’ and ‘Scientists’ in 19th century America at the Ether Wave Propaganda blog.

We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.

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[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages  you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]

It’s that time of month again, and I am back with the latest roundup of translated crime fiction consumed in April. So what if taxes are being put up and Britain will soon be as unliveable as Zimbabwe – expensive and no quality of life? We can take heart in the adventures of those folks immeasurably better off than us – characters in books, thoughtful detectives, murderous villains, dangerous damsels, none of whom speak English.

This time I’ve been rather fortunate in my random pick-ups from the library. There’s much in common among them, strangely enough. There are tax dodges, social collapse, sometimes both, sometimes neither. Have I missed out any combinations? Yes. Well, we shall begin with Alain Mabanckou’s African Psycho, a dark, disturbing, frequently funny diatribe against society by a superb villain, a square-headed individual in a country very like Mabanckou’s native Congo. Gregoire is a mass of neuroses, a liar obsessed with the country’s only serial-killer, Angoualima, whose exploits he lovingly recounts, and whose approval he seeks in his own acts of violence. Gregoire is determined to kill his girlfriend, Germaine, and his preparations – both physical and mental – for this are interspersed with accounts of his troubled childhood, and the two murders he has attempted (both of which fail). Although Angoualima is dead, Greg has frequent meetings with him (at the killer’s grave) where he strives for approval from his mentor. These dialogues are blackly humorous, with the spectre frequently exasperated with Greg’s incompetence. Greg has issues with human foibles, he detests intellectuals but is not above spouting quotations, he wants the company of a compliant woman, but he can scarcely stand Germaine who has moved in with him. In the end, his murderous plans collide with forces out of his control, with spectacular results.

Next, we must have a Swedish writer, Åsa Larsson, whose The Savage Altar (or The Sun Storm) is an example of one aspect of Scandinavian life that seems to be attracting quite a bit of attention lately: the effect of fundamentalist Christianity on society. A well-beloved man, active in an evangelist church, is found brutally murdered, with his eyes gouged out. His sister falls under suspicion, the devout and scatterbrained Sanna, who calls her oldest friend Rebecka Martinsson, the heroine of this book, to help her. Rebecka has her own bitter past linked with that church, and is reluctant to return to her roots. At any rate,  she visits Sanna eventually, and uncovers tax dodges, corruption, charismatic and schismatic men, while facing up to her own demons. It is a fairly standard plot complete with the stereotypical finale of the villains closing upon Rebecka in an isolated cabin in a snowdrift, but not before she has solved the crime (she’s no detective, but lawyers are as good, eh?), saved Sanna, and gained some measure of closure. There are moments of superb psychological characterisation here, and Larsson’s detestation for evangelicals is quite clear (or perhaps it was my own dislike being mirrored in what I read), but this is not an exemplar of the best that Scandinavian crime fiction has to offer.

Benjamin Prado is our next author, a Spaniard whose Snow is Silent is a remarkable piece of work. It describes the descent of one innocuous, vacuous soul into murder. Exactly who the murderer is may be clear right from the beginning to the most obtuse amongst us, and his motivations are possibly apparent to the perspicaceous, but I was a bit thrown by the revelation towards the end. What prompts a pathetic example of clerical humanity to get above himself and pretend to be a rich man in search of suitable properties to purchase for his portfolio? Why does a woman who wouldn’t have given him a second look fall in love with him? Why are his two friends, whom he meets regularly at a cafe and to whom he recounts his daily life and criminal plans, showing so much interest in his activities? This is good stuff, a small book packing a nifty punch.

Our (obligatory?) Latin American is Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, a Brazilian known for his ruminative prose, yet another man so keenly observant of the changes in his society that his detective Inspector Espinoza is more of a philosopher-poet than a policeman. In The Silence of the Rain, Espinoza investigates the suicide of a rich executive in a plodding fashion, confused as he is by a series of murders that appear related to the suicide. Just when he appears to get no further, help arrives from convenient quarters (this, as much as the concentration on the upper classes of Rio, means that the book is far from a regular police procedural that prefers to plumb the underbelly of great cities). There’s some sultry sex, a view into the lives of the super-rich, financial scams, feckless men, beautiful women, almost no mention of food, and a detective who prefers to move books from one part of his living room to another, and ponder about life and the two women he is in love with, than seek out the criminals. Rather arbitrary and slow-moving. Not bad, but not the best this month.

For a change from the norm, we have two Russian books this time. Allow me to say, what incredible books. The first, Headcrusher, is by a duo named Garros-Evdokimov. This is almost technopunk, combining an incredibly violent videogame, and yet another gormless individual who suddenly goes berserk and commits a series of murders. Set in the Russia of the early 1990s when limitless money was available to the amoral and the corrupt, this book combines social criticism with dark humour; the plot is scarcely credible, but the murders follow a logical inevitability as the anti-hero, Vadim, knocks off one person after another, launders money on a vast scale, learns all about single malt whisky, and bonks beautiful women. It’s all described in a very laconic style, almost stream-of-consciousness, hilarious to boot. Rush out and grab it ASAP.

This is not really a translated novel, but I’m throwing it in as it has in it every possible stereotype an Englishman holds of the French: oversexed women, gourmets, intellectual dogs, corrupt civil servants. I daresay it is an Englishman with such a view of the French who will most benefit from reading the other books in today’s litany. Anyway. Michael Bond, famous for the Paddington Bear series, has written a bunch of harmless and humorous accounts of the exploits of Monsieur Pamplemousse, a retired policeman and gourmet (see this, e.g.). In Monsieur Pamplemousse Hits The Headlines, a famous TV chef dies while he films a cooking show where Pamplemousse is in attendance, and obviously our man has to get involved. There are horny vamps out to blackmail every male in power, even Pamplemousse who is not really powerful, and sundry colourful characters who have much to say on food, but it’s Pamplemousse’s dog Pommes Frites who guides the detective to the solution. There are a couple of innocuous misdirections to keep the reader’s interest going. A very light book, this, which offers almost nothing to the intellect. General time-pass.

Akashic Books has been in the business of urban fiction for some years, and recently, has published a series of books of short crime fiction set in various cities of the world. I picked up Paris Noir: Capital Crime Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, but this has nothing at all to do with Akashic, heheheh. It is as motley a collection as I can imagine, however. Noir only loosely describes the stories in the book (in what way Elric of Melniboné is involved in crime?) and not all of them are very good. In fact, despite claiming to shed light on little-visited areas of the City of Lights, the tramping grounds of the various characters in the book are Pigalle and environs, known even to one such as I who has scarcely visited the city, as a red-light district. The stories by now have all blended into an amorphous mass in my head, written by American, Canadian, French, and British writers; I can single out a couple that I thought were decent: Jason Starr’s “Bar Fight” with its twist at the end, and Romain Slocombe's “Guy Georges' Final Crime” has a clash between a serial-killer and his last victim that turns unexpectedly.

Next up is the second Russian novel: Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin, an absolute smasher of a book, about a down-and-out wannabe novelist who is hired by a newspaper to write up obituaries to be kept ready when important people die. Viktor is a loner, an introspective hack, with very little to tie him to his compatriots. His only source of comfort and affection is an Emperor Penguin named Misha that he picks up from Kiev zoo, which is too broke to feed its animals. The penguin spends much of the time standing quietly in the bedroom and staring at the wall; occasionally it studies its reflection in the mirror; often it senses its master’s despair and waddles over to put its head on his lap… Various thugs begin to arrive at Viktor’s doorstep, stern but friendly, who ask him which of his obituaries he liked the best.  The next day, the subject is dead; soon others Viktor has written about are dying as well, and the editor of the newspaper admits that he is part of a clique determined to clean out corruption in Kiev. One minor villain (who soon is killed) leaves his daughter in the writer’s care. Viktor now has to take care of two wards, and while he is kind to the girl, his deepest affection is reserved for Misha. Viktor finds out that his obituary has been written, which serves to crystallise his mind and strengthen his spine. Then the penguin falls badly ill. This is a novel of simply wrought impressions, humorous and moving and surreal, a study of social collapse, and the ties that bind the honest and the helpless. Wonderful stuff.

The German writer Petra Hammesfahr has been likened to Patricia Highsmith, and her award-winning novel The Sinner has all the darkness and psychosis of the latter’s oeuvre. A young mother, Cora Bender, seemingly content with her husband and little son, suddenly stabs out at a man in a beach as he makes out with his wife, and kills him brutally. She then admits her crime to the policemen who show up and requests them not to waste time investigating the murder. But the investigating detective is baffled by her statement that she hasn’t seen the man before; when she refuses to explain her motive, he.begins to dig deeper. And once again we see the awful consequences of religious fundamentalism on a growing child, We learn what an awful upbringing Cora had, with her mother suffused with rigorous piety, her father feckless and incapable of supporting her, her younger sister so badly ill that she is in and out of hospitals. As she grows up, she faces the constant contempt of her mother; her sister then begins to live life vicariously through her, even going so far as to attempt to persuade Cora into prostitution. When a flashy boy comes to town, she falls in love with him, and finds herself among a crowd that seeks sex and drugs, which inevitably leads to tragedy. Perhaps it is this tragedy that has coloured her life, and the demons that were driven deep into her psyche suddenly emerged on that beach that sunny day and caused her to kill? This is a top-notch study of psychological trauma and faith, revealing that just as blind faith can destroy, faith in the fundamental goodness in people can save.

Speaking of psychological studies, the Swiss writer Friedrich Glauser spent much of his life at one or the other mental institution in Switzerland. Amidst his treatments, he wrote four novels that were to become classics in European crime fiction. In Matto’s Realm is one of them, and it is rather good. Matto, in Italian, is the spirit of madness, and it appears to rule in an asylum in Bern, whence a child-murderer escapes and the director is found with a broken neck. When the sympathetic sergeant Studer is brought in to cover up the case (with the approval, strangely enough, of his superiors), he finds that there are castes and hatreds and religious maniacs and sexual rivalries galore within the institution. The blurb says that Studer finds it hard to resist Matto himself, finding himself drawn into the ‘no-man’s land between reason and madness’, but this is an exaggeration. Studer remains warmly analytical throughout, even if some of his efforts at resolving the mysteries go awry and an innocent man ends up dead. He is shaken by the consequences of his actions, but he is too good a man and detective to ignore the truth. This is a slow-burning novel of humour and understanding, written with intimate knowledge of the world of the insane. Glauser has certainly put to good use his own unfortunate experiences.

Finally, we have Czech-born French writer Pavek Hak’s Sniper, a violent and awful description of war and the greatest crimes of all – those sanctioned by governments on their own hapless populations. This is a thin book, describing the points of view of three characters in a Balkan country: the sniper, an amoral stooge of the government who is convinced that he is serving the greater good by annihilating everyone who comes into the scopes of his rifle – children, mothers, old men and women, postmen – he kills them all indiscriminately; a young man who is determined to exhume and bury his parents with honour, fighting with every ounce of sinew the tough ice that covers them, reliving over and over again the brutal slaughter of his father, his mother and his little brothers; and a commandant who embodies the criminal decision of the oppressors to wage brutality in every possible way against the civilians, including degradation and rape and torture and bestiality. The three viewpoints are interlinked, with the horror escalating with every page. As anti-war novels go, this is right up there with the best.

And that’s all for April, folks.