fordlândia

Lensing the past giants of business and industry through the ephemera of the 1932 World’s Fair held in Chicago, JF Ptak’s Science Book Store captures the bombast and the scale of the pavilions’ instructive nature, especially for the apprentice public on the worshipful subjects of consuming and manufacture.
Before this grand showing, however, I learnt that there was another Fordlândia that predated the theme park by only a few years. Moralising industrialist and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, wanting to avoid market volatility with the chief suppliers of natural rubber for his car tyres (the British Malay Peninsula enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the resource) purchased a huge tract of land from the Brazilian government in the Amazon Rainforest to develop a rubber tree plantation and tyre factory. True to his cult of personality, Ford provided amenable American style dormitory housing for his workers but forbade any loose behaviour, no wine, women or song, on the campus. The native workforce were not drinking the Kool-Aid however and snuck away to the Island of the Donkey Boys in the evenings. Over the years too there were several strikes and all out revolts over poor working conditions and values that the Amazon Indians did not ascribe to. Fordlândia floundered for years, plagued with dissatisfied workers and early hints at the impact of deforestation and mono-cultures that made the yield less than expected, but was finally abandoned and returned to Brazil in 1945 with the advent of cheap synthetic rubber in circa 1945 (by competitor Benjamin Franklin Goodrich under contract with General Motors) spurred by the escalation of US involvement in World War II.

geoid projection

Via the media maven and Internet Caretaker, Joanne Casey, comes this brilliant little invention to keep in one’s back pocket—a street map printed on a stress ball, which magnifies the area one squeezes. It’s certainly more fun as a memento of one’s travels than some ephemera that one has to carefully fold or winds up tossing away, and interesting to think how the distortions that haunt the globe projected onto a flat surface are harnessed in this reversal of grid on a round surface. Follow the links to purchase one of these Egg Maps, available only for Budapest for now but sure to soon cover a city near you.

5x5

camouflage: beautiful landscapes with human figures painted in

midnight oil: astronomers find a pair of super-massive black-holes fueling a very luminous quasar

vitrification: a demonstration of 3-dimensional printing with molten glass

elementary: twelve occasions where Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes crossed-over

not from concentrate: a fascinating look at the Prohibition era wine-brick that saved the vineyards, via Nag on the Lake

social studies or regression to the mean

The brilliant Mind Hacks covers the landmark project that explores the reproducibility of classical experiments in cognitive science and psychology. The credence of the discipline, especially for some of the more dogmatic factions of academics and the public, is now hanging—not without controversy, on whether some of the foundational trials can be replicated with the same assuring results.

 The outcome is looking mixed—and for better or worse, no one can say, it does not seem as if the hallmarks of psychology and behavioural health practises are based on robust principles and may be driven more by publication-bias or the environment of care, coddling and what’s normative as a whole. This sort of peer-review and consistency is of course what makes or breaks research in other fields, and fraud should be weeded-out. Interestingly, much of Sigmund Freud’s archived sessions are still secret and not accessible to anyone some two centuries on—which is pretty ironic, I think, since Freud chiefly argued that repression will always out—mostly in strange and destructive ways. What do you think? This project does not necessarily invalidate what we not about psychology by highlighting the weaker argument but rather points to those areas which we can investigate with greater assurance. I am just afraid that these results will be communicated to the public in a way that sews distrust and rejection.