The Art & Practice of Typography (1917)

The frontispiece of The art & practice of typography: a manual of American printing, including a brief history up to the twentieth century, with reproductions of the work of early masters of the craft, and a practical discussion and an extensive demonstration of the modern use of type-faces and methods of arrangement by Edmund Gress.

The title of this image is given as:The Scribe at Work. Representing a secretary to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and patron of learning. He is copying a manuscript at the Hague about the time typography was invented.

In fact this is a coloured close copy of a famous image of Jean Miélot, translator, compiler and copyist in the service of Philip the Good (more on this scribe, this iconic image and his master HERE).


 From HERE.

Kokatsujihan no kenkyu (A brief history of early Japanese typography 1937)

  

Kokatsujihan no kenkyu (A brief history of early Japanese typography 1937) By Kazuma Kawase (1906–1999).

Kawase was an authority on rare Japanese books and manuscripts. A bibliographer and scholar of Japanese literature. At the time of writing, this volume, Kawase worked at the Yasuda-bunko, a private library amassed by the finacier Yasuda Zenjiro (1879-1936). The field he was writing on was relatively under researched and Kawase concentrated in this book on collecting and arranging facts of the history. The result of Kawase's systematic study was a two volume work, the main volume running to 800 pages. This volume is volume two, which is illustrated with specimen pages of the books that were analysed by Kawase.

Kawase split the history of Japanese typography into three periods: Old Period (710-1183), Medieval Period (1183-1569) and Modern Period (1569-1868). It was during the third period that movable type, as opposed to carved glyphs, was introduced to Japan. Two influences drove this adoption: a Korean influence and the Jesuit Mission Press. In 1590 Father Alessandro Valignani brought presses and other printing materials to Japan. He went on to produce 24 Jesuit Mission Press volumes. More importantly was the introduction of Korean katsuji (moveable type) printing, a technique that had originated in Korea in 1225.   

Later in his career, Kawase was Professor of Japanese Literature at Aoyama Gakuin University.

From HERE

String figures : a study of cat's-cradle in many lands (1906)

Chance seems to be only a term, by which we express our ignorance of the cause of any thing

[Page 2 of A Humument. Left: Original. Middle: First Version 1973. Right: Second Version 2013 From HERE.]

Chance plays an important part in many of the processes of nature and in human lives. But our common - sense notion of chance is not usually explicitly related to the mathematical concept of randomness and for many people chance is merely shorthand for unpredictability; we all know that we will die one day, but have no real way of predicting when, where, or how we will die - it will be a matter of chance. The use of the specific word chance as a way of signifying ignorance or unpredictability is longstanding - for example in The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722) the English writer and cleric William Wollaston (1659--1724) concludes that;

Chance seems to be only a term, by which we express our ignorance of the cause of any thing.

Chance is also vital in the sciences, where a more formal concept of randomness is an essential part of physics, probability theory and statistics. On further reflection the common-sense notion of chance leads to interesting philosophical and mathematical issues that relate to predictability, randomness, statistics and the computer science problem of generating random numbers from a well defined and deterministic computer programme.

Given the pervasive role that chance plays in nature, life and science it would be surprising if it did not also play an important role in the creative process. In fact a probabilistic, or aleatoric, approach to generating art - using chance as an agent for creating artistic novelty, is a surprisingly old idea. In order to give a framework in which probability can be used, it is generally useful to define a set of items that are then subjected to the laws of chance. For example, the six sides of a dice are subjected to random shaking and rolling before one side shows up. A classic example in art is the infinite monkey theorem; one version of this states that a single immortal monkey typing randomly on a typewriter keyboard will eventually reproduce the script of Shakespeare's Hamlet. This motif was first used  by the French mathematician Émile Borel to illustrate the abstract idea of a random process running for infinity (Borel, É. Mécanique Statistique et Irréversibilité, J. Phys. 5e série, vol. 3, pp.189-196.) The main idea here is that the monkey will exert no conscious direction to the stream of characters that are spewing from the typewriter - and that over an infinite length of time, and purely by chance, the Hamlet script will appear.

    

This is a fascinating and provocative thought experiment. There are many logical and artistic consequences that result from the completely random permutation, combination and re-combination of a small set of alphabetic symbols. These consequences were of particular interest to the Argentinian writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), in an essay and several short stories, written and published between 1939 and 1941, he explored this idea; a book, or a library of books, created by combinatorial or random processes.

In his essay, The Total Library (1939), Borges traces the origin of random text generation back to the discussion of the atomism of Leucippus in the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The thread extends through Cicero's explicit use of the metaphor of random text generation to refute atomism in his book De Natura Deorum. Borges follows the history of the idea through Blaise Pascal to a celebrated example of random text generation in Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). 

Borges concedes in The Total Library that theoretically a random process could create a meaningful text if it ran for an infinite length of time, but he also describes the nightmarish side effect of this process - an astronomical number of volumes of text, the overwhelming majority of which will be absolute rubbish. Borges describes the output;

Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: ...the proof of Pierre Fermat's theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, ... the paradoxes Berkeley invented concerning Time but didn't publish, ... Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves - shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies - ever reward them with a tolerable page.

Borges moved from non-fiction to fiction to further explore this theme, and he revisits it, in even more extreme form, in a short story called The Library of Babel published in 1941. The story begins with a quotation from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton;  By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters.

This quotation serves to outline the theme of the story and subliminally refers to how different cultures have used the chance permutation of letters, or pictographic symbols, as a way of trying to explain and understand infinity and the unpredictability of the future.

The Library of Babel describes a complete universe in the form of a vast library, arranged on a hexagonal floor plan, that contains all possible variations of a 410-page book of a certain format. The books contain every possible ordering, or permutation, of a basic set of letters, white spaces and punctuation. There is no known plan for the library and the order of the books appears to be random. This is a labyrinthine and nightmarish form of infinity, generated by endless permutations and combinations of a small set of symbols. The number of volumes that are possible with this scheme is incredibly large, the mathematician William Goldbloom Bloch estimates it is 2 x 10^1,834,097, a number that is so far beyond astronomical that Bloch calls it unimaginable.

Borges hit upon a key aspect of random text generation and he describes it brilliantly. A mathematician can play with the theoretical idea of creating random permutations of symbols over an infinite length of time and be oblivious to its side-effects. In the end the process will deliver the prize they seek - a given coherent text. But a writer and librarian like Borges cannot accept the price that needs to be paid for this prize. The overwhelming feeling we get when reading Borges words is his horror at a universe full of books of rubbish. Completely random generation of text leads inevitably to unimaginable volumes of output, which contain a vanishingly small number of coherent texts embedded in a universe of rubbish. This is clearly an obtuse way to create works of literature, but perhaps a little chance can go a long way - the addition of a small element of randomness or chance is a useful way to help an artist create real and useful novelty. 

In 1965 the Paris Review published an interview with the writer William S. Burroughs. In this interview Burroughs described the experiments that he had been undertaking with random text collage, or  cut-up, techniques for creating new literature; Cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands.

As Burroughs noted at the time these literary collage techniques had antecedents in earlier work; the original cut-ups of Brion Gysin (1916--1986), the Dada poetry of Tristan Tzara (1896--1963) and the fractured prose Camera Eye sequences of John Dos Passos (1896--1970). The cut--up method relies on a dynamic tension between chance and the conscious (or sub-conscious) creativity of the artist. Burroughs describes this well in the Paris Review article;

Interviewer: Instead of going to the trouble of working with scissors and all those pieces of paper, couldn't you obtain the same effect by simply free-associating at the typewriter?

Burroughs: One's mind can't cover it that way. Now, for example, if I wanted to make a cut-up of this [picking up a copy of The Nation], there are many ways I could do it. I could read cross-column ... you find it often makes quite as much sense as the original. You learn to leave out words and to make connections. Suppose I should cut this down the middle here, and put this up here. Your mind simply could not manage it. It's like trying to keep so many chess moves in mind, you just couldn't do it. The mental mechanisms of repression and selection are also operating against you. 

Burroughs' experiments with cut-up clearly have chance at their heart. But they use chance as  away of generating novel juxtapositions of chunks of already coherent text. They are random shufflings of elements that already exist and they add a touch of chance.

In 1965 the prolific British artist Tom Phillips, a painter, poet, printmaker, writer and composer, read the William Burroughs interview in the Paris Review. As a result of reading the interview, Tom Phillips began experimenting with the cut-up technique himself. After he had played with the technique and made his own experiments, in the form of column-edge poems from copies of the New Statesman, Phillips decided to pursue the technique more seriously and he made himself a rule that the first coherent book he could find for threepence would be used for an extended art work based on the cut-up approach.

One saturday morning in 1966, whilst on a shopping trip with his friend Ron Kitaj in Peckham, East London, Tom Phillips spent threepence buying a copy of a single volume reprint of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. This book had originally been published as a three volume work in 1892 by Cassells in New York but then in a one volume edition by Chapman & Hall in London. Fortuitously, for what Phillips wanted to do with it, the novel pretends to be a discovered journal.

Phillips took A Human Document and began modifying it; the title was edited by extracting the central letters an Doc, to leave A Humument. The pages of the book were also edited. However, instead of physically cutting the book up, in the way that William Burroughs might of, Tom Phillips drew, painted and defaced the pages of the book. This is not artistic cut-up but an artistic cover-up; the book is a magical collection of incredible pages made of a combination of a few of the original words from Mallocks page and the visual imagination of Tom Phillips. This modified book was published by the Tetrad private press in 1970 and it has been continually modified and re-published ever since. Recently Phillips has released an iPad application based on A Humument, and he believes that this is perhaps the best version yet. 

However, A Humument didn't exhaust Tom Phillips' interest in A Human Document, he has produced a libretto for an opera, Irma, from the book along with numerous other works. In fact this single book, over the past 45 years, has been very thoroughly explored by Tom Phillips. As Phillips explains, the book has provided an unbelievably rich basis for his work;

... for what were to become my purposes, his book is a feast. I have never come across its equal in later and more conscious searchings. Its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over one thousand texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot be adapted to cover.

Another example of Phillips' mining of the Mallock source material is the illustrated edition of his translation of Dante's Inferno. For this Phillips required 100 parallel texts, which he generated from the original Mallock book. For example;

My story of a soul's surprise, a soul
which crossed a chasm in whose depths I find

I found myself and nothing more than that.

A single, rather outdated and idiosyncratic, book has given Phillips an unbelievable canvas on which to create. Phillips has used a range of cover--up and randomisation methods, for example, he describes taking page 99 of A Human Document and dividing it into half. Then by tossing coins, every word except one per side was eliminated by chance. Just how much can be obtained from a single book with collage is shown by A Humument, an inspired and determined exponent of intense seeing has created from a single book, of finite and rather modest volume, a nearly infinite universe of variations.
 

A diagram is a picture, in which one is intended to perform inference about the thing pictured...

HERE is a very nice paper,  about the Mathematical Revolution that immediately preceded the Scientific Revolution. It is by the Australian philosopher James Franklin, who writes about the history and philosophy of science, inference and probability (among other things). 

In this paper Franklin digs into the development of the diagram as a discrete type of image or picture: His definition of a diagram is "a picture, in which one is intended to perform inference about the thing pictured", which is pretty good.

ABSTRACT

The first successes of the Scientific Revolution were exclusively geometrical, if geometry is taken in a wide sense.
They were possible because Europe had had several centuries of training with reasoning with diagrams — not only the Euclidean ones labelled "geometry", but anything from simple family trees to complicated perspective constructions to gridded maps. The Scientific Revolution could exist because it inherited a medieval Mathematical (mostly Geometrical) Revolution. The evidence includes not only the surviving pictures themselves, but descriptions of what those pictures produced in the astonishingly vivid medieval visual imagination. The imagination was regarded as literally full of pictures, and so a medium for scientific visualisation. It was the medium Galileo used successfully for his thought experiments.

The article begins:

Tartaglia’s Italian Euclid of 1543 is geometry in the narrow sense. But the big two books of 1543, Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus and Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica are also geometry, if a slightly wider sense of the term is allowed. Though Copernicus writes on physics, he does not speak of forces, energies, masses or the like: there are only the appearances of the heavens from certain points of view. Though Vesalius is biology, there is no physiology, or mechanical analogy, or discussion of causes: there is only how parts of the body look from suitable points of view. But the three books share more than just pictures, and it is this extra element that is the focus of this article. Euclid’s Elements is not a picture book of shapes. The point of Euclid is to reason about the diagrams, and expose the necessary interrelations of the spatial parts. So it is with Copernicus and Vesalius.

Thomas Harriott's Lunar Map (1609)

From Wikimedia (HERE).

Chronology of the Pen Knife

A chronological small multiple showing the evolution of the Pen Knife. From Michael Finlay (1990). Western Writing Implements in the Age of the Quill Pen. Carlisle, Cumbria: Plains Books. 

 

Libro di M. Giovambattista Palatino (1550)

Libro di M. Giovambattista Palatino cittadino romano was published in 1550 by Antonio Blado Asolano in Rome. It contains complete alphabets of chancery italic scripts, blackletter, Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Syrian and Arabic.

The woodcut image shown here lays out the tools of the trade for a scribe or calligrapher.

Full book HERE.

Pascal (1960)

Pascal by Jose Mendoza y Almeida. Published in Amsterdam 1960. (Images from HERE).

NewYork; a Series of Wood Engravings in Colour (1915)

I keep playing around with the design of my book on the Internet Archive. Here is the latest iteration - a two page spread about Rudolph Ruzicka's book on New York from 1915. 

One-Stop Stereology: the estimation of 3D parameters using Isotropic Rulers (2009)

I have pretty much given up writing scientific research papers. Much as I enjoyed it whilst I was doing it, the nitpicking and finalizing required to get a paper accepted and published has worn me out. I would now rather try and write books.

The paper below, One-Stop Stereology: the estimation of 3D parameters using Isotropic Rulers, was published in 2009 in the Journal of Microscopy. The paper was the culmination of about 5 or 6 years of trying really hard to simplify the concepts around and data collection for estimating statistical functions of the 3D structure of microscopic anatomical features. A field known as second-order stereology.

ABSTRACT

The stereological estimation of second-order descriptors of spatial architecture appears to be inherently more time-consuming and labour-intensive than the estimation of first-order quantities (total quantities or ratios). Therefore, far fewer researchers tend to make use of second-order approaches in their stereological research projects. In this paper, we use a tutorial approach to illustrate how a desire for practical simplicity has provided us with a data collection method that can be used to simultaneously estimate both first-order and second-order properties of the microstructure of a defined anatomical feature of an organ. The approach does not rely on new results from theory, but nevertheless allows either isotropic uniform random or vertical uniform random sections to be used to make estimates of a comprehensive list of 10 microstructural parameters using relationships that are well known in the literature. The probe used in all cases is an isotropically distributed Ruler and the data collection protocol is easy to learn and apply. We illustrate the method on brain tissue but emphasize that the approach can also be applied to non-biological material.

========

The Journal of Microscopy was a great journal to publish in.  It was inherently multi-disciplinary and was interested in high quality papers and high quality production values. The font used was very clear - José Mendoza y Almeida's Photina (issued by Monotype for Photo composition in 1972. Bringhurst says of it, "one of the first and one of the finest postmodern text faces.").

As a microscopy journal, it always understood the high value of incorporating colour micrographs and was able to incorporate them and produce them at high quality. 

Below are a couple of two page spreads from the One-Stop Stereology paper. The full paper is HERE. 

 

Impressions of Ukiyo-ye, the school of the Japanese colour-print artists (1908)

From HERE. A two page spread of the signatures of famous Ukiyo-e artists.

Tales of Ise (1500's)

From an unbelievable collection of free to use digitisations of Japanese art, a portion of Scroll II of Ise Monogatari Emaki (Tales of Ise). From the Spencer Collection of the The New York Public Library (HERE).

Gustave Baumann. Frijoles Canyon Pictographs (1939)

From Frijoles Canyon Pictographs. 
Gustave Baumann. Santa Fe, New Mexico 1939.
 
HERE

 

Joel Hedgepath. Oral History Transcript 1996

Under the Heading of Marine bioligist and environmentalist : oral history transcript : pycnogonids, progress, and preserving bays, salmon, and other living things. HERE is a terrific set of transcripts and articles about Joel Hedgepath, collaborator of Ed Ricketts.

Tweet from ET

The Boat Appeared to be Hanging, As if by Magic...

From HERE

Bijutsukai (1902)

From HERE

Butterfly

 
High Quality Images from HERE.

Principal High Buildings of the World (1886)

  
From a high-quality scan of Cram's Unrivalled Family Atlas of the World 1886.
Original Image from HERE

A. Paxton Chadwick (1903-1961)

By the little known Mancunian artist Paxton Chadwick.

From the Incredible Bibliodyssey site, HERE.

Tala Matrix (2000)

Tala Matrix is a superb, multi-layered album by Tabla Beat Science, a group pulled together by Bill Laswell and his chums. They recorded many of these tracks live at Sterns in San Francisco and the live versions are, if anything, even better than the studio versions on Tala Matrix.

The Tabla is a fiendishly difficult instrument to play. Many years ago I dug out a book from the local library on percussion (it was when I still thought I may become a decent drummer) by James Blades - Percussion Instruments and Their History (1971). This book is often considered a standard reference work on the subject. In the book I read the following passage about tabla music.

Even with a tape recorder at speeds from 7 1/2 to 1 7/8 inches per second little light is thrown on the remarkable technique of the tabla and mrdanga players: the rhythms and timbre remain incalculable. (With due deference to the vina - generally considered to be the most perfect and the most national of Hindu instruments, its antiquity proved by the frequent mention made of it in a  great number of Hindu poems - it is possible that no higher expression is experienced in Indian music, indeed in percussion playing anywhere, than in a skilled performance on the mrdanga or tabla). 

More on Tabla Beat Science HERE.

The album on YouTube HERE.

Cover Art Work Copyright Table Beat Science.

John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3

A superb piece HERE on the factual writer John McPhee in the Paris Review.

Happy New Year

FROM: The zoological miscellany : being descriptions of new, or interesting animals. W.E. Leach. London 1814.



Left: Voluta Zebra
Ovate-Fusiform, volute, white inclined to yellowish; with longituidinal brown lines; pillar with five folds, the upper one obscure.

This shell, which is aptly named from its resemblance to the zebra horse, is a native of the New-Holland seas, where it seems to be not uncommon.

POMONA HEREFORDIENSIS (1811)

The Orange Pippin

The Orange Pippin is cultivated in different parts of the County of Hereford under different names, and has been not unfrequently confounded with the Loan Pearmain, which it somewhat resembles in form and colour; but it is a larger and a much more sweet apple. The name does not seem perfectly appropriate, for the colour of the apple is very different from that of an orange : but when the crop of fruit is perfectly ripe, and seen at such a distance that the red and yellow colour are mingled and blended together, the effect on the eye may be conceived to be not very widely different from that which a similar crop of very ripe Seville Oranges would produce ; and from this circumstance the Orange Pippin possibly derived its name. It is not apparently a very old variety ; for young trees of it still grow freely and bear well : but I have seen trees of it, which were at least eighty years old : and therefore the variety can now scarcely deserve culture, though it is certainly an excellent cider apple, and its yellow pulp communicates a beautiful golden tinge to the juices of other varieties. The specific gravity of its juice is about 1074. I am ignorant of its native country, and of its history previously to the last thirty years. 

From Pomona Herefordiensis  (1811) by Thomas Andrew Knight, Esq. FRS.

More on Thomas Knight HERE.

Oldest known time-series

FROM HERE

Britannia depicta, or Ogilby improv`d; being a correct coppy of Mr. Ogilby`s Actual survey of all ye direct & principal cross roads in England and Wales (1720)

From 1720, the road from Lempster (now spelt Leominster) to Ludlow.

 Image from HERE.

A very high resoultion scan of this book is available HERE.

The Story of the Season

Some excellent Data visualisations HERE by Anna Powell-Smith.

Below an interactive of the UK Football season, game by game and season by season  1993-2013.

Image copyright Anna Powell-Smith

Henry Ospovat

Farewell sweet lass,Thy like ne'er was. For a sweet content, the cause of all my moan: Poor Corydon must live alone; Other help for him I see that there is none.

 

The artist and illustrator Henry Ospovat (1877-1909) was born to orthodox Jewish parents in Dvinsk, Russia (Daugavpils, Latvia), one of the most important centres of Jewish commerce and culture in the Russian Empire. The family moved to Manchester when Henry was 14 and he was apprenticed to a local commercial lithographer.  A wealthy member of the local Jewish community paid for Henry to attend evening classes in design and figure drawing at the Manchester Municipal School of Art.

With extreme enthusiasm he supplemented his class work with sketching in the street, tram and elsewhere, filling book after book with character studies, and making astonishing progress. Being of a retiring disposition, he mingled but little with his fellow students.

During the six years he studied in Manchester, Ospovat gained a local reputation for his book-plate and certificate designs. After completing his art exams with honours, he won a scholarship in 1897 to continue his studies at the National Art Training Schools (now the Royal College of Art) at South Kensington. At the Art Training School, Ospovat was `... subjected to unpleasant treatment by his fellow students'.

After about a year at the Art Training School, Ospovat left to work on a number of illustration commissions for publishers such as John Lane and J.M. Dent. Over the course of a few years he provided illustrations for volumes of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1899), Poems by Matthew Arnold (1900), Shakespeare's Songs (1901) and Robert Browning's  Men and Women (1903).  Later Ospovat became known in London for his caricatures of celebrities, including: Enrico Caruso; Harry Lauder; Kier Hardie and the strongman Georg Hackenschmidt. Ospovat also worked with Robert P. Gossop (1890-1922) who was studio manager for the publisher W.H. Smith. 

Henry Ospovat died of stomach cancer in 1909. On his death the writer Arnold Bennett wrote:

The death of that distinguished draughtsman and painter, Henry Ospovat, who was among the few who can illustrate a serious author without insulting him, ought not to pass unnoticed ... I never met Ospovat, but I was intimate with some of his friends while he was at South Kensington. In those days I used to hear `what Ospovat thought' about everything.

In 1911, a handsome limited edition portfolio of Ospovat's illustrations, caricatures, sketches and portraits were published with an appreciation written by his friend, the novelist Oliver Onions (1873-1961).  The volume included reproductions of many of his well known book illustrations and previously unpublished portraits and studies for portraits. This volume is the only substantial collection of Ospovat's work that is widely available. It is unburdened with even the most basic of Ospovat's biographical details. Onions wrote that:

There is no formal `Life' of him to be written. Any other record than this contemplated projection would be largely a record of inessentials, and a page would suffice for the unnecessary facts of his life.

Ospovat worked mainly in black & white, but Onions recounts that Ospovat;

... did, apparently miraculously, one day take a brush into the hand that cannot have been familiar with the feel of it, and produce a portrait that was an astonishment to those who had considered him to be a worker only in another medium.

A striking colour reproduction of this work, Portrait of a Musician, is included in the 1911 portfolio.



References

Bennett, A. (1917). Books and persons: being comments on a past epoch. 1908-1911 Chatto & Windus,  London.
Cadness, H. (1922). Some Modern Local Book Illustrations. Paper of The Manchester Literary Club. Vol. XLVIII. pp 154-155.
Onions, O. (1911). The Work of Henry Ospovat. Saint Catherine Press, London.
Rubinstein, W.D., Jolles, M.A. & Rubinstein, H.L. (Eds.) (2011) The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History.  London.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

Why is it that mathematics, which is a human construct in the form of theorems and equations, can possibly be so successful at describing in a quantitative manner the physical world?

Here are a couple of attempts at answering this:

Eugene Wigner: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

Richard Hamming: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics.

and more recently.

Kevin H Knuth: The Deeper Roles of Mathematics in Physical Laws.

Time reflects the fact that everything does not happen at once. Space reflects the fact that everything does not happen to you.

At the far outer edges of my own knowledge, based on work that I did decades ago, I occasionally check out what the Information Physics community are up to. 

HERE is a presentation by Kevin H. Knuth (Information-Based Physics: An Intelligent Embedded Agent's Guide to the Universe) from a few years ago which shows you how deeply this community think about the foundations of physics, how we know about the world, why physical law is so closely connected to maths, how to make logical inferences about the world based on information. I will not pretend that I understand this, much less try and explain it. But somehow somewhere the principles that Knuth enunciates in English (before he goes on to explain in maths) appeal to my view of science.

INFLUENCE

I know about the universe because it influences me.
In fact, everything I know about the universe is conveyed via such influences.
Moreover, I cannot come to know about what does not influence me.

AGENT-CENTRIC VIEW

Everything I can know is completely describable in terms of how it influences me .

INFORMATION

Information acts to constrain our beliefs You can believe anything you want… until you obtain information.

PHYSICAL LAWS ARE SHAPED BY THREE FACTORS

The nature of influence.
Constraints on the quantification of such influences.

Inferences that can be made from the information obtained via influences.

I know about the Universe, because it influences me.

The Social Life of Animals (1938) - Warder Clyde Allee

On the west coast of Mexico, between the mainland and the Baja peninsula, is a long narrow body of water known variously as the Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez, Mar de Cortés and the Vermilion Sea. This narrow sea has a coastline of about 2,500 miles and a number of major rivers run into it, including the Colorado river that runs through the Grand Canyon. It is home to a unique marine ecosystem with an incredible variety of species.

Although there were earlier expeditions, the first thorough ecological study of this sea was a trip made in 1940 by a famous author and his marine biologist friend;

... modern marine biology in the Gulf of California had its birth with the remarkable pioneering expedition of Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck aboard the Western Flyer.

Ricketts and Steinbeck began their six week trip from Monterey and passed key points at San Diego,    Point San Lazaro, Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Refugio. During the trip, Ricketts, Steinbeck and the crew collected from 24 sites and catalogued more than 400 species. A year after their trip they published their findings in Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. One expert on the marine biology of the area says; 

For more than thirty years, their expedition report was the only place anyone could turn for a synoptic view of invertebrate life in the Sea of Cortez.

Ed Ricketts (1897--1948) was born and brought up in Chicago. In 1917, towards the   of the first world war, he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps. After the war he was discharged and then attended a wide range of classes at the University of Chicago including zoology, philosophy, Spanish and German. However, it was the ecology lectures of Warder Clyde Allee that had the most profound impact on him. The last formal college class that Ricketts  took was Allee's course in animal ecology in 1922. Soon after, Ricketts left Chicago for the Monterey peninsula on the California coast.

Warder Clyde Allee (1885--1955) was a pioneering ecologist who made a number of detailed studies of the causes and types of animal aggregation and cooperation.  One of his seminal observations in the late 1920's was that goldfish grew faster in water that had previously held goldfish than in fresh water. This observation and later experiments became known as the    Allee Effect , a counter intuitive effect in which there is a positive correlation between population density and individual fitness.

In a recent monograph dedicated to the Allee Effect, it is defined as the idea that `the more individuals there are (up to a point), the better they fare'. The authors of the monograph explain that;  

The Allee effect is an ecological concept with roots that go back at least to the 1920s, and fifty years have elapsed since the last edition of a book by W.C. Allee, the `father' of this process. Throughout this period, hardly a single mention of this process could be found in ecological textbooks ... The situation has appeared to change dramatically in the last decade or so, however, and we now find an ever-increasing number of studies from an ever-increasing range of disciplines devoted to or at least considering the Allee effect.

This volume is a transcription of a series of lectures that Allee gave at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1937. It is an attempt by this pioneering ecologist to present in plain language the results of his long term research project on animal co-operation, social behaviour and aggregation.  
 

References   

The Social Life of Animals (1938) - Warder Clyde Allee

Brusca, R. C. (2007). Invertebrate Biodiversity in the Northern Gulf of California.  pp.  418-504, in, R. S. Felger  & W. Broyles (Eds.), Dry Borders. Great Natural Reserves of the Sonoran Desert. University of Utah Press. 

Courchamp, F., Berec, L.  & Gascoigne, J. (2009). Allee Effects in Ecology and Conservation. Oxford University Press.

Rodger, K.A. (2006). Breaking Through. Essays, Journals and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts.  University of California Press, Berkeley.  

The Stagnation of Digital Books

Craig Mod has been writing and publishing thoughtful essays on books and digital books for years now. Recently, he has published an essay on Aeon on his personal experience of trying to read books exclusively on Kindle for a number of years. The short answer is he has given up and gone back to real books. The long answer is here.

private_i

HERE

Obata's Yosemite

More on Chiura Obata HERE.

Scientific Fraud - Peter Medawar

A great piece HERE - an old one - by Peter Medawar on scientific fraud.

"The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of ‘tips of icebergs’ they have not been so numerous as to prevent science’s having become the most successful enterprise (in terms of the fulfillment of declared ambitions) that human beings have ever engaged upon."

 

Edward Tufte Graphics in R

R is one of the worlds most widely used statistical analysis and visualisation packages.
It is flexible and robust.
It is also freely available and has a broad and generous user community.
There are now a number of IDE's for working with the program (e.g. HERE).

Lukasz Piwek has just written some R code to implement the graphic layouts and design of Edward Tufte. HERE.

 

Sunset August 2015

Bardsey Island 2015

Hells Mouth

Panorama from Rhiw, Llyn July 2015

 CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

 Image Copyright M.G. Reed 2015

Chinese philosophy by Paul Carus (1902)

A comparison of the binary numbers of Liebniz and those of the Chinese Sage Zhou Dunyi  [in older romanisations also known as Cheu-tsz'] who lived in the Song dynasty 1017-1073.

Further insights in The History of Binary by Anton Glaser  HERE.

From Chinese philosophy. An exposition of the main characteristic features of Chinese thought by Paul Carus (HERE).