January 28, 2004
Utopiae
In 1516, Sir Thomas More introduced a new land to his English readership, an obscure corner of the New World: Utopia. More, then an up-and-coming lawyer and politician, put forth Utopia as the tale of his encounter with Raphael Hythloday, a widely-traveled sailor, while on a diplomatic mission. Hythloday recounts his encounter with More's real-life mentor, Cardinal John Morton, lays out his view of Utopia as an ideal state, and attacks England's excesses:
"The increase of pasture," said I, "by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the dobots! not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good.
People had been writing treatises for a long time -- Plato did it first -- but Utopia paved the way for the utopian novel in English and perhaps shaped more tangible efforts. Would More have been pleased with the little utopias that followed him? It's hard to say for sure. "Utopia", after all, means "no place", and Hythloday, the name of the man who describes the wonders of Utopia, "master of nonsense".
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January 22, 2004
Chewing and chewing all day long
Within the jungle of Central America, chicleros still practice their art: tapping the chicle tree every other day, then boiling the sticky white sap to make chewing gum for Yuppies. When an exiled Santa Ana introduced chicle to the United States, hoping to sell it for use as artificial rubber and thus fund an army to lead him triumphantly back to Mexico City, one of his contacts, Thomas Adams, saw him chewing the stuff and decided to see if it would go over with his neighbors. The chewing gum available at the time was made of flavored paraffin; unsurprisingly, people preferred Adams' version. He soon added sassafras and licorice flavorings, creating Black Jack, and Adams, later the American Chicle Company, was on its way. Competitors sprang up, many of which (including the maker of Chiclets) were purchased by Adams; William Wrigley founded his eponymous company in 1891; Walter Diemer of the Fleer Chewing Gum company invented Dubble Bubble, the first bubble gum, in 1928. Other innovations came later; Topps' Bazooka bubble gum, with their desperately unfunny comics, didn't come out until after World War II, and Jim Bouton, the Yankees pitcher and Ball Four author, didn't get the idea for Big League Chew until 1977. Today, a dozen or more varities of gum, many with classic "bubblegum flavor are available at any supermarket or gas station, but in the waning years of the nineteenth century and the first few of the twentieth, gum was an advertising gimmick, a huge moneymaker, a cultural phenomenon. People patented holders for already-been-chewed gum. Dr. Edwin Beeman rode his gum fortune to the Cleveland city council; William White, a gum salesman whose Yucatan brand was the first peppermint gum, rode his to a term in Congress. But it wasn't until 1924 that "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?" was written and became a huge hit. Other novelty foods -- breakfast cereal comes to mind -- have leapt from being fads to being staples. (Veggie burgers may be walking that path today.) Bananas were a huge fad food, partially because they were available in the winter, and today they represent the most popular fruit in America. Bananas even inspired a competing music-hall hit. But only bubble gum returned to the charts, surfacing as a top-ten as a novelty "skiffle" hit by Lonnie Donegan in 1961, bubblegum pop indeed.
January 21, 2004
Obscura
The camera obscura is based on a simple principle. If you go into a dark room (thus the name, the Latin camera, "room", and obscura, "dark") and punch a small hole in the wall, the image outside will be projected inside. Francis Bacon understood the apparatus; Da Vinci described them in his notebooks; Frisius and Kepler used camera obscura projections to help perform their observations of the sun. The camera obscura became a staple of Victorian seaside resorts; one built in the 1940s at Cliff House in San Francisco provides a pleasant view of the elephant seal rocks. Recently, one controversial book suggested that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer may have used the camera obscura in his art. Certain hints of the perspective Vermeer used, the physical evidence suggesting that Vermeer was able to very accurately render objects' proportionally without measuring them, the apparent finding that many of Vermeer's paintings were made in the same room, and a tantalizing question of whether one object in a painting represents Vermeer's darkened booth all piqued architecht Philip Steadman's interest. The question isn't settled, and it may never be. For one thing, why wasn't Vermeer's lens, which would have been a rare and quite valuable item, recorded in his effects when he died? Vermeer, though a master painter and member of Delft's painters' guild, was primarily an art dealer, and could quite likely have afforded it, but would it have vanished out of history? But Steadman's thesis is nothing compared to that of painter and photographer David Hockney.
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January 17, 2004
False premises and hungry crocodiles
When technology pundit Clay Shirky wanted to attack the idea of the Semantic Web, he didn't do it the way Cory Doctorow did. Doctorow pointed out that "metadata", information about information, is created by fallable people, people who make mistakes, misjudge what's important about their work, and have incentives to lie. Shirky went after the underlying technology instead; the Semantic Web, he said, was nothing but a syllogism processing engine. The designer Paul Ford, whose Harper's Magazine design is one of the first commercial endeavors to be built around Semantic Web principles, strongly disagreed. Ford didn't mention, however, that Shirky's examples were very bad syllogisms. Were Shirky playing Lewis Carroll's "Game of Logic" (its rules proposed in an 1887 pamphlet), he'd be in trouble. It requires proving or disproving statements such as:
18. All hungry crocodiles are unamiable.
19. No crocodiles are amiable when hungry.
20. Some crocodiles, when not hungry, are amiable; but some are not.
21. No crocodiles are amiable, and some are hungry.
22. All crocodiles, when not hungry, are amiable; and all unamiable crocodiles are hungry.
23. Some hungry crocodiles are amiable, and some that are not hungry are unamiable.
And who wants to argue with an unamiable crocodile? Lewis' effort to make syllogisms fun was part of a long tradition. Ever since Aristotle invented them, people have been trying to come up with better ways of representing, manipulating, and teaching syllogisms. Carroll loved logical conundrums, entertaining children, and creating games, so his game was a natural progression. Still, he was (unsurprisingly) aware of the ridiculousness of Aristotelian logic shorn of any context ("Conclusion: Guinea-pigs never really appreciate Beethoven. TRUE or FALSE?"), and Shirky is certainly right that there are limits to what you can do with syllogisms. Classical rhetoric eschews syllogisms in favor of the enthymeme (which lets audiences fill in the middle), natural language (and some artificial ones) introduce ambiguities in meaning, and there are some subjects where the simple attempt to follow premises to their conclusion almost always runs ashore on unstated assumptions. Ask no less a philosopher than Dobie Gillis.
January 14, 2004
The hallucinatory encyclopedia
If there's a real analog to the History of the Land Called Uqbar, it's the Codex Seraphinus, that remarkable traveller's sketchbook of an alien world. However, it was created by Italian designer Luigi Serafini in 1981; for a hallucinatory encyclopedia of more uncertain province, cast an eye on the Voynich manuscript. It is full of strange drawings: of bathing women, zodiac figures, astrological diagrams, and curiously half-recognizable plants. (The fact that human figures are naked makes something as simple as dating the document difficult, as no costumes are depicted.) The alphabet it is written in only vaguely resembles anything ever known in Europe. Is it nonsense carefully designed to look halfway legible, a sort of sixteenth-century book from the sky? Investigators "lack decisive tests for distinguishing between nonsense babble, crafty cipher, and language," but the manuscript seems not to be simply random characters. Statistical analysis, the domain of computational linguists and information theorists, shows it to more closely resemble language, albeit a strangely curtailed one. The "words" of the Voynich manuscript are highly repetitive, and its vocabulary is much smaller than that of a typical English or Latin text of the same size. Is it perhaps an encoded religious text of the Cathars, the heretical Catholic sect, written in a synthetic alphabet? Manipulated Latin? The shorthand notes of the great philosopher of science Roger Bacon, recordings of his experiments with telescopes? Or perhaps something even less likely?
In 1978 John Stojko argued that it was an account of an ancient civil war written in an ancient, vowelless form of Ukrainian. In 1986 Michael Barlow suggested that [the man who donated it to Yale, the twentieth century book collector Wilfrid] Voynich himself had written the manuscript as a hoax. In 1987 Leo Levitor theorized that it was an ancient prayer-book, offering repetitive meditations on the themes of pain and death. More recently, Jacques Guy has wondered whether it might not represent an ancient attempt to transcribe an east-Asian language, say Chinese or Vietnamese, into alphabetic form.
Alas, a compelling answer has emerged (link via Graham). The Voynich manuscript is a fraud, if a storied one. Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist at Keele University in England, has come up with a way of creating a nonsense text very similar to that of the Voynich manuscript, using a few simple techniques that would have been known to Elizabethans. He pins the creation on Edward Kelly, the Elizabethan alchemist, crystal-gazer, and compatriot of John Dee. Like many literary fraudsters (and most great forgers), Kelly had a simple motive: money. The manuscript is documented to have been sold to Rudolph II of Bohemia, a rabid collector and patron of the sciences, for 600 ducats, approximately three and a half pounds of gold. But the people that James Randi beats on have a shred of a point; Rugg may be able to show that he personally could fake the Voynich manuscript, but that doesn't prove that the Voynich manuscript is fake. After all, the thing could still turn out to be evidence of medieval extraterrestrial contact. In the meantime, the Yale library's description will continue to be about the only things we can say for sure about the Voynich manuscript: "Scientific or magical text in an unidentified language, in cipher, apparently based on Roman minuscule characters."
Romance is not dead.
January 12, 2004
Ring in the new year
Once upon a time in the West, spring marked the New Year. The original Roman calendar ended the year with Februarius, a month of repentance and restoration before the Ides of March marked the New Year. But the Republic's civil calendar began in January when newly elected consuls assumed office, so in 153 BC, officials simply rewrote things so that popular life matched with the bureaucracy. There were still problems, however. The lunar cycle seemed to suggest periods of roughly twenty-nine or thirty days, as in the Egyptian calendar, probably the world's first. The period of earth's rotation, however, was ever so slightly off, and lunar calendars slowly crept out of true with the actual cycle of the seasons. The Romans dealt with it by occasionally intercalating an extra month, but the process was complicated. The pontiffs who set the calendar were persuadable; a well-rewarded nudge here or there could affect the results of an election or keep an incumbent in office a while longer. When Julius Caesar seized control, he decided that enough was enough and converted to the Julian calendar. Caesar added 90 days to the year to get the seasons back in true; his system then relied on set sequence of 31- and 30-day months, with a short February expanded by a day every four years to adjust for the the fact that the year is a little more than 365 days long. Caesar did not renumber the years in his honor; the month of July was presumably enough reward.
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January 05, 2004
Potterville
It's hard to make a Christmas movie. No film adaption of A Christmas Carol has quite lived up to Lionel Barrymore's magnificently hammy renditions for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. The Bishop's Wife has a stellar cast -- Loretta Young as a neglected woman, Cary Grant as an angel just this side of seductive -- but it's been largely forgotten. The film for the season should be Miracle on 34th Street, the movie that cemented a New York Christmas in the popular imagination. (If Barbara Stanwyk's boss in the wonderful comedy Christmas in Connecticut had appreciated Manhattan in the snow, there wouldn't have been any movie.) It features a prepubescent Natalie Wood, far less annoying than she should be, as she learns the true meaning of Christmas, and veteran character actor Edmund Gwynn just nails Saint Nick, doing his part to cement the image. But really, it's 90 minutes spent demonstrating that yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus (and also that New Yorkers are magnificently tolerant of crazy people who are clean and don't bother anyone). The movie that seems to have run away with the season is a rather strange choice, all things considered. People love to hate It's a Wonderful Life.
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