Words Divide, Pictures Unite

Here are details of a new exhibition on the work of Marie Neurath - co-founder of Isotype graphic language. A nice write-up on Neurath and the exhibition HERE.

Version Galore

In 1978, I bought an album of Rocksteady songs that had been recorded in 1970 at the Treasure Isle Studios in Kingston Jamaica. This album, Version Galore, was by a legendary performer known as U-Roy, who used a mix of singing and chanting over existing musical tracks to raise the interest of the people attending the huge open air Sound System parties that are a core part of Jamaican city life. To me this music was almost literally from another planet.

Later, in the mid 1980s, I attended St Pauls Carnival in Bristol, and Notting Hill Carnival in West London. A core part of the experience is to be shaken by the massive custom built sound systems speaker stacks (which are called House of Joy).

Here, is a celebration in The Guardian of the role that sound systems play in Notting Hill Carnival - and a map of where to find them. 

 

The Earth Rotating Beneath a Stationary Milky Way

 

A timelapse video that shows the Earth rotating beneath a stationary Milky Way from HERE.

Your letter was most welcome! — loaded with friendliness and with no requests or demands.

A brilliant form letter created by Robert Heinlein. From Craig Mod's Roden newsletter (Subscribe Here).

New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji (1857)

New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji by Utagawa Hiroshige. From the Met Museum (HERE).

Vorticity 2 (2019)

The American photographer Mike Olbinski chases storms. Here is a fantastic compilation of his time lapse videos of wild stormy weather from spring 2018 and 2019.

On the Humanities (1978)

At their most vivid, the [humanities] are like the arts as well as the sciences. The humanities are that form of knowledge in which the knower is revealed. All knowledge becomes humanistic when this effect takes place, when we are asked to contemplate not only a proposition but the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said. 

Charles Frankel, speech in Austin, Texas, December 1978.

The one and only master of train station packing-tape calligraphy (2016)

The tale of the Japanese underground rail employee, Mr Shuetso Sato, who is an expert at creating beautifully finished signs for use in the train stations using as his major material a range of packing tapes of different colours (HERE).

African Shores (2019)

The latest album from the 70 year old Jamaican trombonist Vin Gordon is out now (HERE).

Ease and Cheer (1927)

I have been reading A Primer for Forgetting by Lewis Hyde. It is superb. It is structured in four Notebooks, each of which is a collection of pieces by others that Hyde has found, or autobiographical sequences, or connecting prose. Here, is one of them:

"EASE AND CHEER." Emanuel Lasker was one of the greatest chess players of all time, holding the world championship for a full twenty-eight years beginning in 1894. His classic Manual of Chess, published in 1927, ends with some "final reflections on education in chess" that include this remark: "Chess must not be memorized. ... Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I have learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without."

Copyright Lewis Hyde 2019.

10 Reading Revolutions (2010)

A superb piece by Tim Carmody in The Atlantic on 10 reading revolutions, covering the evolution of the alphabet, the Codex, moveable type and computers (HERE).

The enduring fascination with Sherlock Holmes (2019)

A great round-up by Michael Dirda of recent books about, or sending-up, the great Sherlock Holmes - the most famous man who never lived. HERE.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22 (1961)

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to, but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

A good piece in today's Guardian on the new adaptation of Catch-22 and the novel. HERE.

Engraved Pilgrim Badge Mould (Late Medieval)

More HERE.

Have Fun with God (2014)

I have never heard anything by Bill Callahan, but based on vague suggestions that he had created a "Dub" album I went and listened to it. Released in 2014, Have Fun with God is first rate. 

Meta-Research: A comprehensive review of randomized clinical trials in three medical journals reveals 396 medical reversals (2019)

An incredible piece of meta analysis on 3,000 Randomised Control Trials (HERE)

Abstract

The ability to identify medical reversals and other low-value medical practices is an essential prerequisite for efforts to reduce spending on such practices. Through an analysis of more than 3000 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published in three leading medical journals (the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine), we have identified 396 medical reversals. Most of the studies (92%) were conducted on populations in high-income counties, cardiovascular disease was the most common medical category (20%), and medication was the most common type of intervention (33%).

Craft beautiful equations in Word with LaTeX (2019)

A nice piece in Nature on the power of LaTeX for typesetting equations and some tools that are available for people to use - whilst not having to abandon Word or other word processing software. (HERE). 

On Effort and Letting Go (2019)

A short essay in the Paris Review on the trials and tribulations of writing and piano playing by  Salvatore Scibona (HERE).

Every writer has a carburetor, unique to herself, that measures out a mist of fuel for the volume of flowing air in the cylinder of her imagination. A plug provides the spark, the fuel ignites, and off she goes.

The spark is an idea; the fuel is effort; the air is grace. She needs them all, and all in balance. If the cylinder contains too much fuel, it won’t ignite. She sits in an old car on a winter morning and twists the key while she pumps the pedal: the engine makes a cranking wheeze, not the whoosh of ignition. She pumps the pedal again, adding still more fuel, to no avail. She has flooded the cylinder. She has tried too hard.

Abercromby Square, Liverpool

Image from HERE.

On the High Wire (1982)

A really great piece by Paul Auster about the high-wire walker Philippe Petit. HERE.

Flight deconstructed (2014)

Part of a superb collection of animated infographics by Eleanor Lutz a PhD candidate in the University of Washington Biology Department who uses behavior experiments and computer simulations to study how mosquitos navigate through the environment. Many, many more superb at her blog HERE.

The Glorious Boredom of a long walk in Japan (2019)

A great piece in WIRED by Craig Mod on a long walk he has just finished in Japan (HERE). 

De Divina Proportione (1498)

An illustration from De Divina Proportione, a mathematical treatise by the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli (1445-1517). The Italian text is followed by sixty polyhedra, drawn filled or empty, and influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Of the three copies written during the author’s lifetime, only two remain. The copy held by the Bibliothèque de Genève is the presentation copy of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, whose coat of arms and motto adorn the manuscript.

The whole volume in a high-resolution scan is HERE.

Don Letts' Record Box

From the excellent John Peel archives, a record box put together by the British film director, DJ and musician,  Don Letts.

HERE.

Paul Rand Archive

The Letterform Archive has just received a significant accession of material from the personal archive of the American graphic designer Paul Rand. Above from an advert for Westinghouse. Archive HERE.  

MV GAZANA (May 24th 1971)

On 24th May 1971, when I was 9 1/2, I went with my class from St Saviours primary school in Great Sutton to see a ship being launched at Cammell Lairds ship yard in Birkenhead. It was the single biggest man-made object I had ever seen close up. 

Neither the launch, nor the vessel, was particularly noteworthy. But to me this was a day I have never forgotten. 

IMAGE FROM HERE

Dimensioned (2019)

Dimensions.Guide is a reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of everyday objects. It is a public research project founded by the architect Bryan Maddock. HERE.

Here Grows New York City (1609 - 2019)

A fantastic time lapse visualisation of the development of New York City, from 1609 to the present day. By Myles Zhang. The video is HERE.

Hand with Book (1506)

By the incomparable Albrecht Dürer (Nürnberg 1471 - 1528 Nürnberg), a study from 1506 of a hand gently holding open a thick book. Copyright the Albertina Museum Vienna: HERE.  

A woven web of guesses

The gods did not reveal, from the beginning,

All things to us; but in the course of time,

Through seeking we may learn, and know things better

This, as we well may conjecture, resembles the truth.

But as for certain truth, no man has known it,

Nor will he know it; neither of the gods

Nor yet of all things of which I speak.

And even if perchance he were to utter

The perfect truth, he would himself not know it;

For all is but a woven web of guesses.

A translation by Karl Popper of one of his favourite quotations from the pre-socratic philosopher Xenophanes. In The World of Parmenides: Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment.

Popper by Bryan Magee (1973)

I first read about Karl Popper in about 1979 or 1980. I read about him in this superb slim overview by Bryan Magee, which had been published in 1973 or 1974. The book was one of the volumes in the Fontana Modern Masters series. The cover art was part of a bigger concept - and the particular example on the Popper book was a kinetic painting by Oliver Bevan.

The book is still easy to get from Abe or eBay. The story behind the cover art is HERE. 

Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning (2018)

Here is a short piece by Stewart Brand on pace layers - an idea he developed in his book How Buildings Learn. He proposes six layers - all of which have a distinctive tick rate. The image above is a re-drawn illustration of the six layers and their relationships. His summary;

Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

HERE. 

Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees are slow... (1986)

Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees are slow, and whole redwood forests are even slower. 

Most interaction is within the same pace level  - hummingbirds and flowers pay attention to each other, oblivious to redwoods, who are oblivious to them.

A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems (1986).


Robert V. O'Neill, Donald Lee Deangelis, J. B. Waide & Timothy F. H. Allen

So It Goes (1969)

It is fifty years since Kurt Vonnegut Jr wrote Slaughterhouse Five. It is one of the most outstanding books I have ever read. Part novel, part memoir, part Science Fiction. It is unique. 

HERE is an exceptional essay by Kevin Powers in the New York Times on the 'Moral Clarity' of Slaughterhouse Five. 

Staying Awake. Notes on the alleged decline of reading (2002)

Happy World Book Day!

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

From Staying Awake Notes on the alleged decline of reading - an essay by Ursula Le Guin from Harpers (HERE).

Image from Alphabet by Benjamin Rabier (HERE).

Orbis Typographicus (1970)

Orbis Typographicus is a set of twenty-nine letterpress broadsides, designed by Hermann Zapf and printed by Philip Metzger. The texts chosen by Zapf feature quotations on art, science, nature, and faith. It is an example of the highest of typographic arts.

Joshua Langman created a high-quality digital facsimile of Orbis Typographicus in 2013. It is excellent and includes a number of good explanatory essays. HERE. 

3 Feet High and Rising (1989)

De La Soul is one of the most lyrically and musically creative hip-hop groups ever. The formed in 1987, and launched their debut studio album, 3 Feet High and Rising, 30 years ago today. Macy Gray likened them to the Beatles of hip-hop. 

The samples were mixed with simple technology, and great creativity. On the track Me Myself and I were samples from the following:

Funkadelic: (Not Just) Knee Deep (1979)

Ohio Players: Funky Worm (1972)

Edwin Birdsong: Rapper Dapper Snapper (1980)

Loose Ends: Gonna Make You Mine (1986)

Doug E. Fresh: The Original Human Beat Box (1984)

HERE is how they made it, and a full track listing can be found HERE on Discogs. 

Book of Kells (c. 800 AD)

The Book of Kells is a masterpiece of western calligraphy. It is written in a beautiful insular majuscule script, and is the work of at least three different scribes. The lettering is written in iron gall ink, and the colours used for the illumination use a wide range of substances, many of which were imported into Ireland.

The book has been scanned in its entirety and has been made available online by Trinity College Dublin. HERE. 

New York City Tree Alphabet (2019)

Katie Holten has created a New York City Tree Alphabet HERE.

The greatest song ever written (1984)

The brilliant Liverpool band Echo and the Bunnymen made their best album, Ocean Rain, in 1984. One of the singles off the album was Killing Moon. The lead singer Ian McCullock described this as the greatest song ever written. From the Guardian in 2015:

I love it all the more because I didn’t pore over it for days on end. One morning, I just sat bolt upright in bed with this line in my head: “Fate up against your will. Through the thick and thin. He will wait until you give yourself to him.” You don’t dream things like that and remember them. That’s why I’ve always half credited the lyric to God. It’s never happened before or since. I got up and started working the chords out. I played David Bowie’s Space Oddity backwards, then started messing around with the chords. By the time I’d finished, it sounded nothing like Space Oddity. 

More HERE.

i have nothing to say (2019)

Copyright Stanley Donwood - HERE.

Why we should build Software like we build houses (2015)

By the legendary Leslie Lamport:

Architects draw detailed plans before a brick is laid or a nail is hammered. Programmers and software engineers don't. Can this be why houses seldom collapse and programs often crash?

Blueprints help architects ensure that what they are planning to build will work. "Working" means more than not collapsing; it means serving the required purpose. Architects and their clients use blueprints to understand what they are going to build before they start building it.

But few programmers write even a rough sketch of what their programs will do before they start coding.

HERE.

You’re probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)

This is a wonderful celebration by James Somers, of how stimulating a Dictionary can be. It takes as a starting point some of the writing advice of John McPhee, but also reminds me of the fact that aimlessly leafing through encyclopaedias and dictionaries is a surprisingly good way to find things out, and also perhaps as a way to directly catalyse a new idea or a new line of enquiry. 

The brilliant American sociologist Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) was casually flicking through a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary in the early 1940’s when he stumbled upon the word serendipity.  This word had been coined in 1754, when the English gentleman Horace Walpole (1717 - 1797), wrote the following in a letter to his friend Horace Mann; 

This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called the three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of...

Walpole describes serendipity as accidental sagacity, and points out that ‘... you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description’. Robert Merton’s discovery of the word serendipity led him to write a deeply insightful book on the role that serendipity plays in scientific discovery, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Modern familiarity with the concept can probably be traced back to Merton’s (serendipitous) re-discovery of the word in the 1940s.  

Essay HERE.

The Force that Drives the Flower (1973)

Thanks to a tip from a recent Craig Mod essay - HERE is a superb essay by Annie Dillard from The Atlantic magazine.

A short excerpt:

Down at the root end of things, blind growth reaches astonishing proportions. So far as I know, only one real experiment has ever been performed to determine the extent and rate of root growth, and when you read the figures, you see why. I have run into various accounts of this experiment, and the only thing they don't reveal is how many lab assistants were blinded for life.

The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil—under microscopes, I imagine—and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots—that's about three miles a day—in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little things placed end to end just about wouldn't quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6000 miles.

  

Stealth Research: Lack of peer-reviewed evidence from healthcare unicorns (2019)

A stimulating paper for anyone who works in, or works with, a bio-medical start-up company. The author's summary of their paper is as follows:

• Start-ups are widely accepted as key vehicles of innovation and disruption in healthcare, positioned to make revolutionary discoveries.
• Most of the highest valued start-ups in healthcare have a limited or non-existent participation and impact in the publicly available scientific literature.
• The system of peer-reviewed publishing, while imperfect, is indispensable for validating innovative products and technologies in biomedicine.
• Healthcare products not subjected to peer-review but rather based on internal data generation alone may be problematic and non-trustworthy.

HERE.

Turn every goddam page (2019)

What is the humanities equivalent of the dedicated type of nit-picking, meticulous measurement and data analysis that is at the heart of every really profound scientific discovery? 

In a superb piece by the American journalist Robert Caro in the New Yorker, we find out that the equivalent for archive based investigative work is the rule that you must turn every goddam page.

This is what one of Caro's first editors told him at an early stage in his career:

He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.”

I responded with my usual savoir faire: “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.”

 Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.

 HERE.

Early sketches of PMN Caecilia (1983)

A short but interesting piece HERE on the early development of the beautiful and very readable slab-serif text face PMN Caecilia, which was designed by Peter Matthias Noordzij, and published by Linotype in 1991 .

A Story of Ink & Steel (2015)

A Story of Ink & Steel is a beautiful short film by Fritz Schumann about a small collotype printing studio in Kyoto, which is the last in the world to specialise in this fine art printing technique. 

HERE.

Mathematical Typography (1979)

From a lecture by Donald E. Knuth dedicated to George Pólya on his 90th birthday. This is one of the first explanations by Knuth of the TEX and METAFONT software tools which have over the last 40 years completely transformed how scientific papers with heavy mathematical content are composed and typeset. 

In his paper he explains how he hoped that TEX would one day be used:

Perhaps some day a typesetting language will become standardized to the point where papers can be submitted to the American Mathematical Society from computer to computer via telephone lines. Galley proofs will not be necessary, but referees and/or copy editors could send suggested changes to the author, and he could insert these into the manuscript, again via telephone.

HERE 

Knowledge which is stored in our libraries rather than in our heads (1971)

Putting your ideas into words, or better, writing them down makes an important difference. For in this way they become criticisable, Before this, they were part of ourselves. We may have had doubts. But we could not criticize them in the way in which we criticize a linguistically formulated proposition or, better still, a written report. Thus there is at least one important sense of "knowledge"—the sense of "linguistically formulated theories submitted to criticism." It is what I call "knowledge in the objective sense". Scientific knowledge belongs to it. It is knowledge which is stored in our libraries rather than in our heads.

From Bryan Magee (1971). Modern British Philosophy. Dialogues with A.J. Ayers, Stuart Hampshire, Alisdair MacIntyre, Alan Montefiore, David Pears, Karl Popper, Anthony Quinton, Gilbert Ryle, Ninian Smart, Peter Strawson, Geoffrey Warnock, Bernard Williams, Richard Wollheim.