dogsbody

The circulation desk at Public Domain Review recommends the seminal work of short-fiction by satirist and philosopher Voltaire (the nom de plume of François-Marie Arouet adopted after his release from the Bastille in 1718) called Micromégas (1752), which enjoins a common trope of scrutinising human foibles allegorically with the eyes of outsiders but the other worldly titans of this story also comprise one of the first instances of science-fiction in the Age of Enlightenment.
The eponymous Micromégas, a thirty-seven-kilometre (eight leagues) tall individual from a giant planet orbiting the star Sirius, finds himself at the receiving end of a heresy complaint for advocating that the “insects” of his home word need to be studied—though impossibly small and inconsequential—probably something parallel to the early proponents of the “germ theory” of diseases (first suggested in 1546 but not widely accepted until the 1850s) and is banished for a spell—though generations in human terms, an instance given the lifespan of Sirians that stretches into the millions of Earth years. During his exile, Micromégas decides to explore neighbouring constellations and comes to our solar system, first meeting an interlocutor on Saturn—a pocket sized one, relatively, at less than two kilometres in stature. The two take a pleasant stroll around the Earth but find the miniscule planet unremarkable until the discovery of a beached whale leads to a second find of a stranded boat—carrying a retinue of philosophers. Amazed but doubtful that anything so imaginably tiny could be intelligent, the alien visitors fashion an ear trumpet to amplify the words of the shipwrecked crew. With equal incredulity and nearly reaffirming the Sirians initial dismissal of the Earthlings, they announce that the Cosmos was created for men—sort of like modern-day views of the Anthropic Principle and our seeming privileged place in the Universe. Taking pity on humanity, Micromégas promises to give them a book with all the answers but once it is unrevealed back at the Academy, the pages are blank. Read the short story in its entirety at the link up top and discover more treasure from art and literature at Public Domain Review.

itsy, bitsy or swimsuit edition

Over at Weird Universe, they’ve posted a pair of newspaper clipping from 1939 and 1940 that show models sporting a sun dress and hula skirt (respectively as the term bikini was not coined until 1946 as a rather dark reference to the Bikini Atoll, a captured Nazi Pacific outpost—in German it was known formally as the Eschholtzinseln whereas bikini meant the place of coconuts in Marshallese—where the US, in Operation Cross-Roads, carried out its first peace-time nuclear test) that celebrate the bounty of the harvest and local vegetation.
The prickly cactus two-piece swimwear model apparently in fact made it into the annuls of contemporary German propaganda as an indictment against America for its lack of good taste and sophistication, although those associated with the shoot were more upset that the dateline was wrongly attributed to Florida rather than the desert southwest of Arizona where members of the sponsoring Sunshine Club gathered.

polyglotinous or said no one ever

A linguistic curiosity plucked from the vast archives of Futility Closet comes in the form grammarian and instructor Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff whom, following the cues of education reformer Jean Manesca who believed that the classic scholastics that taught moribund languages like Latin and Ancient Greek was not the best approach for imparting fluency in pupils of a living one, refined his methods and published his grammars and foreign study guides in the 1840s that contain the familiarly stilted and strange sounding scenarios that one is unlikely to encounter outside of a foreign language class or ever utter verbatim.

One wonders if bi-lingualism was not frowned upon prior to Ollendorff, borne in part out of personal frustrations while travelling.  Sort of like a googlewhack—inputting a search-query that yields exactly one or zero results or a hapax legomenon, those practise sentences (you know the sort) that are well-intended and for Ollendorff’s students at least accurate and possibly memorable for their strangeness—and not like those one might find in that infamous Portuguese primer, “English as she is Spoke.” His signature, repetitive syntax earned him an immortal literary epithet in HG Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (a bit like something out of Dick and Jane but far more arch)—“Yesterday he bled and wept,” said the Satyr (presumable ESL). “You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleep or weep.” “Ollendorffian beggar!” said Montgomery, “you’ll bleed and weep if you don’t look out!”

post-modern prometheus

Over the coming year ahead of the bicentennial anniversary of its publication, we learn courtesy of BCC’s Inside Science, that Arizona State University in collaboration with many other thinkers are releasing a special annotated, transmedia edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus to encourage the vital political dialogue that is corollary to ethics and literacy in the sciences as well as celebrating all its influences and derivative works. The prescience of this cautionary tale has yet to be fully unpacked and its resonance and currency in today’s scientific milieu when one can without asking permission but perhaps forgiveness seemingly easily de-extinct not only woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers but also Neanderthals is certainly to be heeded.

doxbin of history

With predictable irony, the White House’s election integrity commission charged with the prevention of voter fraud that it intends to fulfil by doing away with the right to a secret ballot allayed fears of the public that the registry would disclose personally identifiable information of private citizens by revealing the details (to include full names, emails and phone numbers in some cases as the on-line form to lodge a complaint asked for this information) to the public in raw form, not bothering to mask any of the personal information. While it’s unclear whether the commission’s webmaster was careless or vindictive towards those who wrote in to express their dissenting opinions of this initiative (and actively encourage a bit of vigilantism), it seems to definitely reaffirm the fact that government ought not to be trusted with this scope and breadth of data—which they surely already are in possession of, but contempt for domestic intelligence agencies has made this regime thankfully far from omniscient.

dunkle materie

In the 1930s Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky (building upon some significant antecedents with Lord Kelvin measurements and Henri Poincaré’s matiére obscure) accounted for the exponentially different observed velocity of the galactic clusters he was watching due to the presence of some “dunkle Materie.” Consistent but predictable discrepancies in similar measurements over the intervening decades had persuaded science that there was there was a mysterious form of matter that comprised most of the substance of the Cosmos, which was conveniently allusive and unobservable was necessarily for how we understood the Universe to work—which does sound a bit forced.
Justin Khoury, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Pennsylvania, proffers a new way of understanding dark matter that while not substituting it for the classic idea of æther, a pervading continuum, does invite us to imagine dark matter as not particular or cloud-like (exclusively, at least) but something more fluid in nature. Specifically, we’re to think of dark matter like something called a Bose Einstein Condensate, an exotic state of matter that takes on the quantum property of superfludity. Some particles (and we can only create it in the laboratory under temporary, microscopic conditions) that make up the matrix take on the properties of losing all viscosity—like a super-conductor having no resistance to current—and at the same time other particles retain the sort of fluid dynamics that we are used to. Though we are most comfortable with witnessing or being baffled by quantum weirdness on very small scales, perhaps dark matter and dark energy are macroscopic manifestations of quantum effects at close-range—say just beyond the limits of human reach—and frictionless and virtually undetectable but stretching across vast distances of time and space, dark matter forms pools on galactic-scales that can be seen to influence the way clusters of galaxies and super-structures interact and hold stable. Some hold that dark matter is no better than superstitious preserving appearances—but to abandon it would mean modifying General Relativity—which like the quantum question of scale, has been demonstrated to work very well in our own solar system but remains not so rigorously tested in grander schemes.