dodona and di-oscuri

In one of its latest acquisition released for all, the Public Domain Review presents the 1898 illustrated ethnographical exposition on bird-watching in the Bird Gods by Charles de Kay with decorations by George Wharton Edwards.  The book opens with a strong injunction against those who’d seek to preen their own image with furs, skins, plumage and big-game trophies, written at a time just after the herds of buffalo were wiped out in North America and about a decade before the passenger pigeon went extinct and goes on to address the cultural and religious connotations attributed to auguries in action and in their natural habitat.

Pigeon-fanciers might already be in the know when it comes to the extensive catalogue of metaphorical associations (a truce) connected with this breed of bird, but the notion that dovecotes are allegorically thought to represent the treasury of souls in-waiting (a containment unit) was new to me, as well as the personified traits given to all the fowls of field and forest—like woodpeckers as locksmiths and by extension, SWAT teams, crows as tailors, the cuckoos as manifestations of foundlings (Young Arthur being nicknamed Egg), or that placing an oath upon a swan (compare the old-timey expression I swanny or the German saying, “es schwanet mir”—it makes me shudder, like saying someone’s walking on my grave carries an obligation to be true to one’s word, since the graceful birds are known for being discrete and mute, except for the occasional hiss and honk, they’ll confess all during their swan song, its final dirge. Be sure to check out the Public Domain Review’s extensive archives and well-curated collections for more forgotten treasures.

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.

e at delphi or the power is yours

According to legend, the location of panhellenic oracle at Delphi—sacred specifically Apollo but also the whole panoply of the gods—was fixed when Zeus dispatched two eagles in opposite directions to find the geographic centre of the Earth (the navel, ομφος of Gaia, Mother Earth—the name Delphi too is a near homonym for the Greek word for womb). Having circumnavigated the globe, the eagles collided above the slopes of Mount Parnassus and so by this unfortunate augury it was decided. The midair crash makes me think about the silly exchange between the uncatchable Teumessian Fox and the magical hound Laelaps who was destined to capture anything it chased—paradoxical nonsense that Zeus put to a stop by turning both beasts into stone, and setting them among the stars—Canæ Major and Minor. The sanctuary played host to sibilant soothsayers for centuries and attracted the patronage of the rich and powerful, whom for a donation, could entreat the Pythia for a suggested donation amount—all tributes and treasure artefacts of the wealthy trying to outdo one another.
Such gifts were left in hopes of currying favour with the gods and to gain some purchase on their prophesy—one which promised to be duplicitous and if the question was not framed careful, they risked an ironic demise. Not every donation was precious in the traditional or artistic sense, however, and probably the most enigmatic token was a simple letter E carved into a wall of a temple. No one really knows its meaning but Plutarch—a contemporary and friend of the high priestess, a retainer of the oracle—speculates in a rather in depth dialogue about what it could signify. Called E at Delphi (which always made me think of some diner, Eat at Delphi’s), Plutarch’s work underscores the singular nature of this inscription, which appears alongside two other famous dictums—Know Thy Self and Everything in Moderation. The intent already unknown and a bit of a mystery for visitors to guess about, Plutarch’s characters debate suggestions that the E could be the Greek numeral five—maybe a station of the tour and ritual, the verb form Thou Art, declined as an exclamation, or a hale and hearty greeting (pronounced like “aye”) from the god himself.
Despite the elite nature of the site—certainly not open to all seekers and the opening hours were rather restrictive, requiring a Delphic sponsor, a citizen of the settlement that grew up around the oracle, and sessions were only held on the seventh day of the month, Apollo’s day, and during long Greek summer—the nine months out of the year when snowbird Apollo dwelt in Greece before retiring to live among the Hyperborei (maybe the Britons) and Dionysus wintered in Greece—the panhellenic nature of the spot that opposed local patriotism and cults that was otherwise politically pervasive for the Greek people was really novel and Delphi and its traditions functioned in a sense like a central bank, a repository of wealth that was universally recognised. Those walls no longer stand, but other relics from that treasury have survived, scattered, like the bronze serpent column now in the hippodrome of Istanbul, brought from Delphi (in probably a bad choice of war trophies, in a karmic sense) to commemorate an ancient victory of the Greeks over the Persians. Perhaps, though, the E is enduring as well, abiding in a mystery that is as cryptic as the advice of the Sibyl.