Mapping the Nation

Professor Susan Schulten of the University of Denver History department has just published a book with University of Chicago Press called Mapping the Nation (HERE). This describes the origins of thematic mapping and graphic knowledge. 


There is a website also to support the book, where you can quickly access all 100+ maps in high-resolution and color (HERE). 

Chart Showing the locations in which all the cases of Cholera at the Hospital and all the fatal cases elsewhere originated. Report on cholera in Boston, 1849. Map Creator Williams, Henry W. (Henry Willard), 1821-1895

The blurb from the publishers site;

In the nineteenth century, Americans began to use maps in radically new ways. For the first time, medical men mapped diseases to understand and prevent epidemics, natural scientists mapped climate and rainfall to uncover weather patterns, educators mapped the past to foster national loyalty among students, and Northerners mapped slavery to assess the power of the South. After the Civil War, federal agencies embraced statistical and thematic mapping in order to profile the ethnic, racial, economic, moral, and physical attributes of a reunified nation. By the end of the century, Congress had authorized a national archive of maps, an explicit recognition that old maps were not relics to be discarded but unique records of the nation’s past.

All of these experiments involved the realization that maps were not just illustrations of data, but visual tools that were uniquely equipped to convey complex ideas and information. InMapping the Nation, Susan Schulten charts how maps of epidemic disease, slavery, census statistics, the environment, and the past demonstrated the analytical potential of cartography, and in the process transformed the very meaning of a map.

Today, statistical and thematic maps are so ubiquitous that we take for granted that data will be arranged cartographically. Whether for urban planning, public health, marketing, or political strategy, maps have become everyday tools of social organization, governance, and economics. The world we inhabit—saturated with maps and graphic information—grew out of this sea change in spatial thought and representation in the nineteenth century, when Americans learned to see themselves and their nation in new dimensions.

The Razor (of Occam?)

There is an ancient reasoning principle, which is usually credited to the English Franciscan friar and philosopher William of Ockham (1288--1348), that offers the following advice; 

entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. 

That is, when competing explanations for a situation are equal in other respects, we should prefer the one that uses the fewest assumptions and entities. 

This principle is almost universally known as Occam's razor, though there is no evidence that William of Ockham was it's author. The phrase Occam's razor did appear in 1852 in the work of the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton (1788--1856) [1], but William Thorburn in 1918 showed that the wording of the classic formulation of Occam's Razor, as given here, was not medieval at all but a `modern myth'. In fact this formulation was originated in 1639 by John Ponce of Cork, a follower of the medideval philosopher Duns Scotus.[2]

This principle is referred to as a razor because it stresses the need to shave away unnecessary assumptions to get to the simplest explanation. In science, Occam's razor has long been referred to as a heuristic minimal principle, or law of parsimony. It is still used by scientists as a rule of thumb in the development of models, but rarely used to make a qualitative or quantitative choice between alternative models. 

A later expansion and clarification of the principle comes from Albert Einstein, who notes that we should seek models that have a balance between simplicity and veracity;

make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.  

References

[1] Sir William Hamilton (1852). Discusions on Philosophy and Literature. p580. HERE 

[2] Thorburn, W.M. (1918). The myth of Occam's Razor. Mind. 27 (107) pp 345-353.

Full text of the paper and an introduction HERE. 

[3] The image of a razor blades edge is from Robert Hookes Micrographia published 1665. Robert Hooke (1635--1703) was a polymath scientist, an early member of the Royal Society and it's Curator by Office, responsible for putting on regular experiments for the fellows of the society. Hooke also wrote and illustrated the Royal Society's first book, Micrographia, which was published in September 1665. 

Hooke, R. (1665). Micrographia: Or some pysiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and enquiries thereupon. The famous diarist Samuel Pepys described Micrographia as, `the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life'. This was the world's first comprehensive illustrated book on scientific microscopy, it was full of beautifully rendered engravings of everyday objects and insects that Hooke had observed at low power through his microscope, including an engraving of the edge of his razor 

Black Locust Woodcut.

Much of my technical work over the past 20 years has been concerned with trying to infer what is happening in a 3-dimensional space from inspection of images of cross-sectional cuts through the 3D space (a field known as stereology).

Perhaps that's why I appreciate the work in Woodcut (HERE) - a book by the Connecticut-based artist Bryan Nash Gill. He takes cross sections of trees, telegraph poles, branches, planks and laminates and creates relief prints from them by inking the cross-section.  

The image below is a Black Locust with bark, 87 years old when printed. 

Just enough is more

As everyone knows Less is more is an aphorism that is associated with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. 

But the motto appears to go back a lot further than that. In 1855 Robert Browning published a poem Andrea del Sarto which used the phrase.

Even earlier the same motto in German;  Und minder ist oft mehr was used by Christoph Martin Wieland in his literary review series Der Teutsche Merkur, published on page 4 of the January 1774 edition.

The graphic designer Milton Glaser has his own take on it;

Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless... However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. `Just enough is more.'

M. Glaser (2001). Ten Things I Have Learned. Part of AIGA Talk in London November 22, 2001.

Uncertainty exists in the map, not in the territory.

Many years ago, when I was using Maximum Entropy data processing methods on a tricky problem in gas dispersion, I spent a lot of time trying to understand Bayesian inference. This was mainly for very practical reasons - so I could understand what the MaxEnt programmes were doing - but I did spend quite a bit of time reading up on the work of American physicist Ed Jaynes (a short bio HERE) - who I already referenced in an earlier blog post.[1]

Jaynes had a hang up about what he called the "mind projection fallacy", which is when we assume that the way we see the world reflects the way the world really is. Jaynes also describes another form of the fallacy - when we assume our own lack of knowledge about how things really are, somehow means that they are indeterminate.

Jaynes illustrates this by discussing randomness when we shake a dice;

Shaking does not make the result “random,” because that term is basically meaningless as an attribute of the real world; it has no clear definition applicable in the real world.  The belief that “randomness” is some kind of real property existing in Nature is a form of the Mind Projection Fallacy which says, in effect, “I don’t know the detailed causes—therefore—Nature does not know them.”  What shaking accomplishes is very different.  It does not affect Nature’s workings in any way; it only ensures that no human is able to exert any willful influence on the result.  Therefore nobody can be charged with “fixing” the outcome.

This is a tricky concept. Recently I have come across a good analogy that brings this to life a bit. We all know that a map is only a representation of the territory it purports to describe, the map is not reality and we rarely mistake the two; the map is not the territory. [2] 

Furthermore, if there is any mismatch between the map and the territory, the uncertainty must exist in the map, that is our man made representation of the territory must by definition have uncertainties and errors - it cannot represent reality as it is a piece of coloured paper (or a coloured computer display screen). Furthermore, if we change the map, for example by scribbling on it, these changes in the map cannot in and of themselves change the territory. Changing our representations of the world (or our beliefs is another way of putting this)  cannot change the real world. [3]

Which gets me on to computer models used in science. They are, like a map, not reality. They are a mathematically tractable way of making estimates of what might happen when a particular phenomena unfolds.

In effect a computer based scientific model is a complicated black box, into which is fed a number of input parameters and from which is delivered a “result”. But these results must be treated with care as they are quite unlike the results that scientists obtain from experiments. In an experiment in physical science, in which we know that the laws of physics act always and everywhere the same, when we ask a question of nature, in the form of an experiment, the answer we get tells us something about the question we asked and the laws of nature. In the case of a computer model this is not true. 

The computer based model has been created by scientists who have had to find a way of writing a computer program that runs in a reasonable length of time on an available computer. In order to do this they inevitably make a long series of assumptions and approximations that allow them to make progress. Sometimes these assumptions are good and other times they are bad. 

But once a model has become a de facto industry standard many of the original assumptions and caveats become forgotten, or deliberately ignored, and the model in some sense begins to take the place of reality in the minds of the many scientists and engineers who use the model on a daily basis. In other words it is an example of the mind projection fallacy - they begin to treat the map as if it were the territory.

To use such a model it will inevitably require a set of assumptions to be made by the practitioner about the input parameters to be used in the black box. In complex models there may be dozens or even hundreds of input parameters. Someone has to make a choice of what these are and those choices will be based in some cases on very firm physical insights and experimentally derived data and in other cases on assumptions, approximation, estimates and guesses. 

It is not morally reprehensible to make assumptions, estimates and guesses in science but it is behoven on scientists who do so to be absolutely transparent about what they have done – in order that other scientists can challenge them. Best practice requires that the scientist who uses such a model explicitly explores how sensitive the output of the black box is to different choices they have made about the input parameters.    

The minimum that an informed public could expect of scientists who run computer models is transparency. Instead of talking about these models as if they were reality or as if they were based on fundamental physical laws, they should openly say; 

These computer models are based on our informed assumptions, approximations and in some cases guesses. They will inevitably have errors in them due to our programming methods. In addition, and in common with ordinary lab based or field based experiments, they are prone to uncertainty and error. We indicate this by always reporting the outputs of our black box model runs with error bars or confidence intervals. Over the past 400 years these have been the accepted way of reporting to readers how much confidence they can have in the results and we use the same conventions.

Long may maps (and computer models) exist, they are a brilliant example of how humans can create new and useful means to represent reality. But let us not mistake the map for the territory, lest we get lost.  

References

[1] Ed Jaynes major book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science was published posthumously by Cambridge University Press. A PDF copy of the first three chapters of the book is HERE.

[2] Korzybski, A.(1931). A non-Aristotelian system and its necessity for rigour in mathematics and physics. Read at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December 28, 1931.

[3]  http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_map_is_not_the_territory.

The art of scientific investigation (1957)

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge (1908-2006) was an Australian animal pathologist. He should not be confused with William Beveridge (1879-1963) British economist and social reformer. He was professor of Animal Pathology and Director of the Institute of Animal Pathology at Cambridge University, England, from 1947 until he retired in 1975. 

It is tricky to find out much about him on the internet. But there is THIS fabulous book by Beveridge - a fascinating personal description of what Beveridge thought was important to scientific researchers in biology, based on his own experience of experimental work.

Here is an example of Beveridge's thoughts;

The role of hypothesis in research can be discussed more effectively if we consider first some examples of discoveries which originated from hypotheses. One of the best illustrations of such a discovery is provided by the story of Christopher Columbus' voyage; it has many of the features of a classic discovery in science. (a) He was obsessed with an idea—that since the world is round he could reach the Orient by sailing West, (b) the idea was by no means original, but evidently he had obtained some additional evidence from a sailor blown off his course who claimed to have reached land in the west and returned, (c) he met great difficulties in getting someone to provide the money to enable him to test his idea as well as in the actual carrying out of the experimental voyage, (d) when finally he succeeded he did not find the expected new route, but instead found a whole new world, (e) despite all evidence to the contrary he clung to the bitter end to his hypothesis and believed that he had found the route to the Orient, (f) he got little credit or reward during his lifetime and neither he nor others realised the full implications of his discovery, (g) since his time evidence has been brought forward showing that he was by no means the first European to reach America. 

W.I. Beveridge was born in Junee Australia and he attended the University of Sydney to study veterinary science, he graduated with a Bachelor of Veterinary science in 1931 and a as a Doctor of Veterinary science  in 1941. h elater received a Master of Arts degree from Cambridge University in 1947 and later was awarded an honorary degree as Doctor of veterinary medicine from Hannover Veterinary University, Germany in 1963.

Beveridge also served as a reserach bacteriologist at McMaster Animal Health Lab Sydney, a Commonwealth Fund service fellow at Rockefeller Institute Princeton NJ and at the Bureau of Animal Industry in Washington DC. 

In 1972 Beveridge published a book, Frontiers in Comparative Medicine, outlining his views in this area of science.

A full obituary of Beveridge that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2006 is HERE.

 

The evolution (of evolution) on Wikipedia

Here is an interesting timeseries visualisation of the development of a Wikipedia entry for a controversial subject (evolution).   

HERE

3 x 3 Marble Table

For those who used to play marbles a post by John Foster HERE and a 3 x 3 table collection below.

Original individual images copyright Morphys Auction house.

The great Liverpool shell find of 1855

Liverpool has been a crossroads for international trade for hundreds of years. But one of the strangest true stories I have found that illustrates this is the story of Philip Pearsall Carpenter's discovery of millions of sea-shells that had originally been collected in a remote region of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and shipped back to Liverpool.  

The story begins with the Belgian naturalist Frederick Reigen who lived in the Mazatlán region of Mexico (close to the Sea of Cortez) between 1848 and 1850. Reigen started collecting sea shells and ended up amassing tons of shells - probably one of the biggest collections ever made. Somehow the bulk of this vast collection was sent to Liverpool in 1851 for sale. There the shells were spotted by a British minster and eccentric Philip Pearsall Carpenter;

He had been  instructed  in  natural  science  when  a  boy, had made a collection of shells, and had always had a taste for natural history. One day, in 1855, while  walking  down  a  street  in  Liverpool,  Carpenter  caught  sight  of  some  strange  shells  in  a dealer’s window.  He went in, and found that the specimens were part of a vast collection made by a Belgian naturalist named Reigen at Mazatlan in California.  The collector had died, leaving his shells unsorted and unnamed.  Carpenter bought them for 50l.  There were fourteen tons of shells, each ton occupying forty cubic feet.  The examination, description, naming, and  classification of these shells was the chief work of the rest of Carpenter’s life.  By the comparison of hundreds of examples, 104 previous species were shown to be mere varieties, while 222 new species were added to the catalogue of the mollusca. Thenceforward, though  he  sometimes  preached,  made  speeches, and wrote pamphlets,  most of Carpenter’s time was given to shells,  and even when he received calls or paid visits he would wash and pack up shells during conversation. Their pecuniary value when named and arranged in series was great, but he never tried to grow rich by them, and his whole endeavour was to spread the knowledge of them and to supply as many public institutions as possible with complete collections of Mazatlan mollusca.  A full report on them occupies 209 pages of the ‘British Association Reports’ for 1856, and further  details  are  to  be  found  in  the  same  reports for 1863, and in the ‘Smithsonian Reports’ for 1860.

CARPENTER, PHILIP PEARSALL (1819-1877). Excerpt from the Dictionary of National Biography (Stephen and Lee 1921–22)

Carpenters collection was catalogued by Katherine van Winkle Palmer in 1958 - the book is HERE and below is a plate from it. 

The intimate study of lenses and tidepools

There was invariably pinned to his shirt pocket a twenty-power Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass on a little roller chain.  He used the glass constantly.  It was a very close part of him - one of his techniques of seeing. 


About Ed Ricketts. In Log from the Sea of Cortez. J. Steinbeck. Viking Press, New York. 1951

In 1951 John Steinbeck published The Log from the Sea of Cortez. This book was the narrative portion of a much longer book that had been written and published by Ricketts and Steinbeck in 1941; Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. The shorter book did not have the extensive phylogenetic catalogue that Ricketts had written but it did include a eulogy to Ricketts, About Ed Ricketts, written by Steinbeck. This was a highly personal account by Steinbeck about the life and premature death of Ricketts, written with the aim of `laying to rest the ghost' of his close friend. This piece describes the life and works of Ricketts and his approach to science, poetry, art and life. It is in this essay that Steinbeck specifically mentions the way that Ricketts habitually used his magnifier as a way of seeing. But there is other evidence - the photographer Fred Strong took a picture of Ricketts in 1935 that shows him in a dark tweed jacket and softly tailored shirt. On his right lapel at chest height is pinned a small roller chain holder connected to the polished nickel case of his twenty-power Bausch & Lomb.

Ricketts was a highly skilled field naturalist and would have chosen a hand magnifier that met his particular needs as a marine biologist. He chose this distinctive technique of seeing carefully. From other evidence it is clear that when it came to scientific apparatus Ricketts was known to be precise. In fact he was even precise in his selection of non-scientific apparatus -- he equipped his typewriter with umlauts, accents and cedillas so that he could correctly incorporate German, French and Spanish quotations and extracts into his numerous letters. Steinbeck specifically noticed the make of magnifier that Ed Ricketts habitually used -- a Bausch & Lomb. It is not surprising that Ricketts would have chosen a Bausch & Lomb lens, they are a famous American optical manufacturer who had been making high quality optical lenses in Rochester, New York state, since 1853.  


Optics is a surpringly conservative technology, in the sense that once invented a really good optical design has surprising longevity. For example, the 1929 Bausch & Lomb catalogue that Ed Ricketts would have been familiar with, lists three types of twenty-power magnifier; a Hastings Aplanatic Triplet, a Triple Aplanatic and a Coddington. All three of these designs had their origins in the 1800's. The original idea behind the Coddington lens was from 1812, the Steinheil Triple Aplanatic from 1866 and the Hastings triplet was invented in 1879. Furthermore, in spite of the 80 years of optical science innovation that separates 1929 and the present, Bausch & Lomb still manufacture and sell Coddington and Hasting triplet twenty power lenses today.  


All three of the 20X lens designs sold by Bausch & Lomb in 1929 were of good quality and established optical design. They are all constrained by the same fundamental physics of how light interacts with glass, but each represents a different technological approach for obtaining high magnification with minimal spherical aberration. As the name suggests, the triplet designs are made by bonding three separate pieces of glass together to create a single magnifier. Traditionally, and until the late 1940's, the optical cement used for this type of bonding was Canada Balsam, a filtered preparation of the resin of the balsam fir tree Abies balsamea. The refractive index of solidified Canada Balsam is similar to many common optical glasses and it can be used as an optical cement because it dries without crystallising (Mills, A. (1991). Canada Balsam. Annals of Science, 48, 173-185.) The Coddington design lens doesn't use multiple glass elements --  it reduces aberration by cleverly shaping a single piece of optical glass.


The best corrected magnifier available to Ed Ricketts for his marine biology work was the Hasting Aplanatic Triplet, named after its inventor, the American optical physicist Charles Sheldon Hastings (1848--1932). The relative quality of Hastings triplet design versus other available hand magnifiers can be gauged from their retail prices; in 1908 a Coddington retailed for $1.25; a Triple Aplanat was $3.25 and a Hasting Triplet was $6.25.

Charles Sheldon Hastings was born into a professional family at Clinton, New York, in 1848. He was according to one obituary; `...  descended on both sides from a long line of New England ancestry, among whom were an unusual number of professional men: ministers, educators, and especially physicians'.  Hastings' father was a prominent physician who gave lectures on anatomy and physiology in New England schools and hospitals. He had a good relationship with his son Charles, in particular supporting his son's scientific interests.

Charles Hastings studied at Hartford High school, Connecticut and then enrolled to study physics at the Sheffield Scientific school of Yale University. He graduated from Yale with a bachelors degree in physics in 1870 and then received a doctorate in 1873. After a period working at Yale as a demonstrator Hastings then spent three years on a scientific  grand tour of European universities; attending courses on physics and advanced mathematics with Helmholtz in Berlin, Kirchoff and Konigsberger in Heidelberg and Steinheil in Munich. Hastings then travelled from Germany to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne during 1875, funded by a Tyndall Scholarship.

There were very few American science students of the 1870's who enjoyed the advantages that Hastings had. Studying with such brilliant physicists as Helmholtz and Kirchoff made a big impact on his learning and his approach to physics. Helmholtz in particular had a deep appreciation of the connection between the physiological optics of the eye and man-made optical instruments.

When Hastings returned to the USA  in 1876, it was to a newly created post in a new University. At the age of 27 he joined the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as one of seven `associates' who joined six newly appointed professors. This was a vibrant team; not one of the associates was thirty when they were appointed. Eight years later Hasting returned to Yale to become director of the physics lab in the Sheffield Scientific School, a post he held until 1915.

Hastings spent much of his professional life on the difficult problem of designing optics and lenses for lab usage and for use in the larger and larger telescopes that astronomers were demanding for their observational work. The standard formulas used at the time for calculating how a given lens system would work in practice were extremely complicated. In addition, for many practically useful lens systems, they were almost impossible to use to the accuracy required for a lens grinding workshop. Hastings developed his own methods to make these calculations, using only four figure logarithm tables instead of offices full of `computers'; meaning at that time human beings calculating longhand. Hasting also developed his own spectrometer for making very accurate measurements of the refractive index of optical glasses. This instrument was used by him over a forty year period and with a combination of his mathematical methods and experimental data, he developed an unrivalled knowledge of how to design lenses.

Although Hastings was an outstanding academic physicist and a brilliant lecturer and teacher he was not divorced from the real world. After having trouble finding skilled lens grinders he educated himself in the practical skills needed to grind lenses of particular curvatures, visiting lens makers in the USA, England, Germany and France to really learn this trade. Even more significantly, from the late 1880's onwards, Hasting developed a very fruitful collaboration with an optical instrument company in Pittsburg run by John A. Brashear and his son-in-law James B. McDowell. Although both Brashear and McDowell were gifted opticians, they had realised that the very large and high quality optics need in astronomy and astrophysics required a much more profound theoretical understanding than either of them had. Hastings rapidly became a vital part of the Brashear company;     

On the one hand, it gave Brashear and McDowell the technical advice without which they could hardly have developed as they did; and on the other, it gave Hastings precisely the clinic he needed to put to use his unrivalled skill and knowledge in matters optical.

Hastings, Brashear and McDowell were a remarkably succesful team. Many of the largest and highest quality astronomical telescopes made in the USA  during the early years of the 20th century were created by them. Telescopes made using the formulas and knowledge of Hastings had lenses that ranged from 16-inches in diameter, up to a 30-inch photograpic objective at the Alleheny Observatory. A number of these lenses and telescopes are still in use today.

The  technical basis for the Hastings Triplet was created by Charles Hastings in the late 1870's, and in 1879 he summarised his experimental work and insights in a set of formulae that could be used to design a triplet lens that was intrinsically colour corrected (C.S Hastings (1879). Triple Objectives with complete Color Correction, The American Journal of Science and Arts, 3rd series, vol. 18, pp. 429-435).  By the late 1890's these formulae had been used by a number of optical instrument manufacturers in the USA. By 1897 the Hastings Triplet was being described in Edward Bausch's handbook on microscopy and the Bausch & Lomb catalogue for 1901 lists Hastings Aplanatic Triplets for sale, with an explicit reference to the formulae of Prof. Chas. S. Hastings of Yale University . They describe them as follows;

These lenses offer advantages found in no other hand magnifiers, the improved construction being possible through the recent improvements in optical glass. The field embraces a very wide angle, and the working distance is almost equal to that of a simple lens of the same power. The defining power is such as to show structures not visible with other magnifiers of equal power.

To this day, Bausch & Lomb still make and sell Hastings Triplet hand magnifiers. They remain as they were described in 1901, offering  advantages found in no other hand magnifiers . There are very few technologies that were invented in the 1880's and are still in routine use today, virtually unchanged and unimproved 130 years later. They are a testament to the outstanding lens making skills of Charles Sheldon Hastings.      

It is interesting to reflect on the role that a single, seemingly modest,  instrument, the Hastings Triplet magnifier, allowed Ed Ricketts' to use intense seeing in his ambitious program of discovery in marine biology. The brilliance of Charles Sheldon Hastings was bequeathed to Ed Ricketts, via the agency of the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, as a means to obtain more discrimination from his already incredible observational ability. No matter how passionately Ricketts wanted to see the tiny creatures of the tide pool, and this passion was evident and seemingly inexhaustible, without the Hasting triplet his eyes simply couldn't have seen the detail. Ricketts needed a particular artefact, created from the work and insights of Hastings, to increase the power of his eyesight. Within this delicate dance of sublime optical physics and a drive for ecological insight on the Pacific littoral, we can see many of the general issues that arise when we set ourselves the task of intense seeing.

The Hastings Triplet lens illustrates the fact that human faculties can be readily extended by technological means, and thereby allow us to increase our intensity of seeing. For Ed Ricketts this technological extension was the outwardly humble twenty-power Bausch & Lomb magnifying glass . Without exception these technological means  must  have limitations that are dictated by the fundamental laws of physics;  laws that operate everywhere and at all times . For glass lenses in air, the laws governing refraction and the wave nature of light dictate the focal volume of a lens.  These physical laws set the limits on the volume of the world that can, at any one time, be enlarged and thus subjected to a higher intensity of scrutiny than that of the unaided human eye. But in addition to the  fundamental  physical limits on these lens technologies, there are also much more prosaic constraints. For example, the Hastings lens design relies on finding a suitable optical cement and the Coddington does not. Luckily, the optical cement used in the construction of the Hastings triplet is sufficiently waterproof that Ricketts could use it in his beloved tidepools. If it hadn't have been waterproof, he would have had to rely on the Coddington lens which is ground from a single block of glass and is therefore inherently waterproof. You cannot see detail as clearly through a Coddington lens as you can through a Hastings triplet. 

Great  insights are often built on the foundation of a visceral need to see. They are realised by years of deliberate practice and a repeated striving for insight. For Ed Ricketts this need to see drove him again and again to get out and observe the marine ecology he saw everywhere in his adopted homestead on the Monterey peninsula. He was driven by the need for `breaking through' in his understanding of the Pacific littoral. Ricketts role in marine biology and species discovery is reflected in the fact that about twenty marine organisms have species names of  rickettsi  or  steinbecki , in honor of Ricketts and Steinbeck. For example, these include  Eubranchus steinbecki , a nudibranch named in 1987;  Catriona rickettsi  a nudibranch named in 1984;  Pycnogonum rickettsi  a sea spider named in 1934 and  Polydora rickettsi  a spionid polychaete named in 1961. 

All observations made at high magnification are in some sense artificial, they need to be conciously linked back to the macroscopic world. It is fascinating to find out that the insights dervived by Ed Ricketts from his high magnification observations of tiny invertebrates in the tidepools of California had a significant impact on John Steinbeck. Although  Cannery Row  is seen as one of John Steinbeck's more lightweight books, for example compared with the social themes in  Grapes of Wrath , in fact it is a book composed at multiple levels and was conciously built by Steinbeck on the ecological principles that he learnt from his own and Ed Ricketts' observations of microscopic life in the tide-pools. Ed Ricketts showed that  intense seeing  pays dividends. He built a lasting legacy of marine biology exploration and ecological thinking on the back of his dedicated and energetic engagement with the world; macroscopic and microscopic.

References:

Charles Sheldon Hastings is almost completely invisible as a scientist. There are, to my knowledge, no biographies of him and his archives at Yale University appear to be sitting quietly in the corner of an archive room without being actively bothered by anyone. The information in this post about Hastings has been derived from the following obituaries and memoirs.

Beach, F.E. (1932). Charles Shedldon Hastings. Science. New Series Vol 75, No 1947, pp 428-430.

Schlesinger, F. (1932). Charles Sheldon Hastings. The Astrophysics Journal. Vol 76, No(3), pp 149-155.

Uhler, H.S. (1938). Biographical memoir of Charles Sheldon Hastings 1848-1932. Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol 20. pp273-291.

The proper way of using a magnifier

Since at least 1897 the Bausch & Lomb 20x Hastings Aplanatic Triplet has been the best hand held high power lens that is generally available for field use. 

Here is a handbook written by  Edward Bausch from 1901 that describes the lens and its correct use. From the days when a field scientist was expected to wear a suit, hat and moutsache.

Cathedral of Pavia

Here is a beautiful elevation of the Cathedral of Pavia drawn in the early 1300's by Opicinus. It is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2009 exhibition - Pen & Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages (http://blog.metmuseum.org/penandparchment/).

The write up;

"The now-destroyed double cathedral of Pavia, Opicinus's hometown, is the subject of this drawing. The two churches and the campanile are all sketched in three-quarter view, allowing the maximum representation of the facades, naves, transepts and towers. Though he was not trained as an architect, his experiences as a manuscript illuminator and cartographer would have taught him many of many of the geometric strategies necessary to create such a view of the buildings. The only work in his portfolio that does not contain a diagram, this drawing attests to his skills as draftsman and his interest in local landmarks and sites."

Opicinus de Canistris (1296-ca. 1354) Cathedral of Pavia Avignon, France; 1335-50 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City, Pal. Lat. 1993

Good, Fast and Cheap

Here is a detailed drawing of a nonsense measurement device of an analog nature - and a photo of the device as it is in reality - both from Rhys Newman (http://rhysnewman.com/).

 

Asimov on Evidence

"Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in telepathy? - in ancient astronauts? - in the Bermuda triangle? - in life after death?

No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.

One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out `Don't you believe in anything?'

`Yes,' I said. `I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be."

Isaac Asimov, The Roving Mind (1997), 43 

Selfridges to Claridges

NEED: You're lost in London, but you can see Selfridges, and you need to be at Claridges for afternoon tea.

INSTRUCTION AT POINT OF NEED: A very comprehensive set of regular maps, indexes and newly drawn maps with axonometric projections of landmark buildings.

A great piece on Slate about the Legible London program now in full swing.

An example 'instruction at the point of need' for the Claridges appointment is below.

 

Utamaro print in steps.

It appears that there is quite a range of very nice books available that show, in step-by-step format, the process of creating a Japanese woodblock print HERE - for example ().

I took another set of very nicely illustrated steps and created a small multiple that shows them with the finished article. From Process of Printing Wood Engraving (Mokuhan Suritate Junjo), Kyoto, distributed The Red lantern Shop, Kyoto, 8vo (6 7/8 x 9 3/4 in - 17.5 x 24.7 cm), not dated but believed to be ca 1956. (HERE)

FIGURE

The ten small image pairs to the left show the ten steps required to make the finished print on the right. Each small panel shows a pair of images for each additional colour that has been added (the one to the left of the pair shows the blobs of colour, the one to the right the cumulative effect).

Japanese wood-cut printing

I have been reading up on Japanese wood-cut printing and found an e-book version of a 1926 book The Technique of the Color Wood-cut by Walter J. Phillips which was published August 1, 1926, by Brown-Robertson Co. Inc. (New York).

This book, and the website , includes an image of a finished color wood-cut by the author and images of impressions from the wood blocks used for the separate colours. I have used these images to make the following small multiple showing the technique.

The book is interesting as it indicates the amount of work that is required after the artist has decided how to make the color separation. Each separate block is a carving job in blocks of Canadian cherry wood and then inking and printing.

English South Coast Harbours from 1698

Here is a fantastic set of very beautifully drawn maps of English South Coast Harbours from 1698, by Edmund Dummer and Thomas Wiltshaw.

The image below is a low-resolution version of Falmouth and surrounding harbours;

"Of Dartmouth Fowey Falmouth & Helford how & what circumstances they differ from all ye rest and our opinion of them. Dartmouth, Fowey, Falmouth & Helford are places of resort upon some occasions, And there are some particulars at Dartmouth improveable for the Services of the Navy, But in other Circumstances all these seem much more Subject to Hazards for the intercourse of Shipping than those Places do that are already in Use upon this Coast of England to which our Order Confines us, ..."

Frames, Grids & Quadrats

At the heart of modern physics is the surprisingly simple notion that the universe is fundamentally granular; all things are made of atoms.
 
Although this notion has been remarkably robust to repeated experimental tests, and is a basic tenet of physics, our sensual experience of the world tells us the exact opposite. We experience a world that is smooth and continuous in the three dimensions of space and one of time that we move through as humans. In addition, this smooth universe seems to us to be effectively infinite - we could explore it for millions of lifetimes and still not find the edges. What we see with our unaided vision and senses is a world that is smooth and of unbounded extent.

Within this observed reality, what design principles can we use to improve the limited discriminatory power of the human eye? 
 
A surprisingly useful approach is to segment the universe into one or more well defined regions of interest, which can then be subjected to deep scrutiny. The simplest case is to create a binary division of the universe into just two regions. The first region is a standalone frame; the spatial and temporal region of our particular interest, which by any measure is an infinitesimal piece of the universe. The second regions is everything that is outside of the frame, the exterior, which is the whole of the universe except our frame. In word algebra, the Universe = frame + exterior.

Even with this minimal structure, the simple addition of the frame has helped us practically to increase discrimination within the frame. Our focus is now on the frame and its contents alone. What is in it? How many objects? What colour? What details? How does it change over the time period we are interested in? For the time being let us ignore the exterior, what is found outside the frame, we can pretend or assume that it has no bearing on our study, we can perhaps consider it later.

The simple concept of an exactly reciprocal frame and exterior is suprisingly useful. In one form or another it has underpinned Western art since the 1400's and much of modern  science either explicitly or implicty uses a frame as a way of focusing attention on a particular length scale or phenomena.

The simplest frames that humans made were probably with their hands or natural objects that they found lying around. We still use a two-hand frame for the stereotypical framing of a scene, still used to give us an idea of how a photographic still or movie scene would look. The exterior is thrown away, we know that things of interest are happening there, but we have made a choice to exclude them from our frame and our concentrated study. The choice of what is in the frame and it's exact composition is one of the core creative tasks in art. Similarly, choosing what aspect of the universe will be the subject of intense scrutiny is a core task in science. 

Note that the segmentation of the universe into frame and exterior always introduces an issue, that can cause real problems if it isn't dealt with properly; the so-called edge effect. The extent of a frame is defined by the transition from frame to exterior and this edge throws up the need for each frame to have an associated set of rules for deciding what is in the frame and what is exterior to it. These rules can be arbitrary in general, but for quantitation they have to be logically robust.  

The advantages that accrue from using a frame to divide space or time can be multiplied by creating a structured multiplex of frames, or a grid, which can be used as a formal means of dividing space or time. The grid is a basic and versatile design principle, that we can use to get improved discrimination and quantification, with multiple examples in the applied arts and sciences. Note that grids can be composed of frames of different sizes and shapes and be overlapped, though in practice regular grids composed of and non-overlapping frames are of particular use. A ruler is an example of a grid -- it can be thought of as a linear array of frames. 

Over the past hundred years, one of the most widely used field techniques in ecology and geography has been quadrat sampling. A quadrat is a simple square frame, often with a unit side of 1 metre, that is used to isolate a sample from the larger world. Quadrats are used in ecology and geography for sampling plants, slow-moving animals  and some aquatic organisms. It is a simple example of how a grid can be used to increase the discriminatory power of a study. 

The earliest reference I can find to the use of a quadrat in ecology is from 1898 - by F.E. Clements and R. Pound. The quadrat is explained and illustrated in Research Methods in Ecology by F.E. Clements from 1905. A full copy can be downloaded at the internet archive HERE. 

An example of a 1 metre square quadrat mapped by Clements and shown on page 169 of his book is shown below.

Hand drawn tree rings

This is a hand drawn tree cross section - by Tony Hong

The Hand of God

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was an outstanding German painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was also very good at drawing hands. 

Here is one of his sketchs for the Heller Altarpiece -Hand of God the Father (Hände Gottvaters)

 

Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.

Great piece on the distrortion of scientific publishing and increase in number of retractions of scientific papers HERE. 

Original paper HERE.

Their Figure shows that there is a correlation between journal impact factor and number of retractions; people are prepared to cheat more for bigger personal kudos.

The Camera Lucida

The camera lucida was invented by Dr William Wollaston and patented in 1806. They are less commonly seen and used these days but still play an important role in some observational sciences. 

For example, they are commonly used in palaeontology; Professor Harry Whittington, one of the lead academics on the Burgess Shale work of the three past decades, reflected on the methods he used on the occasion of the award of the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal to him in 2001;

I soon realised, in my work on Burgess Shale fossils, that explanatory drawings would be needed as well as photographs, to describe these fossils. This is where Dr Wollaston enters the scene -- a late 18th to early 19th Century physician, who practiced in London for many years, and made valuable contributions to chemistry and optics. He had a cracked shaving mirror, but instead of throwing it away he puzzled over the refractions and reflections of light caused by the cracks.

This led to his realising that by inserting a prism into a microscope tube, the image could be directed laterally, then down on to paper beside the microscope, and provide a way to draw an accurate picture. In much refined form this is his invention, the camera lucida, which I used to make my drawings.

Below is an artists using a camera lucida.

Artist Sketching With a Wollaston Style Camera Lucida. In: Dollond. George: The Camera Lucida. An Instrument for Drawing in True Perspective, and for Copying, Reducing, or Enlarging other Drawings. London 1830, frontispiece. Drawn by C. Varley for G. Dollond with the Camera Lucida. 

 

The Wasp

Wallchart from HERE