JSBlog topic indexes

For your reading and reference convenience, I've compiled post listings for two of the major topic areas on JSBlog:

• Isle of Wight: index (some 140 posts to date)
• Devon history: index (some 110 posts to date)

I chose them as areas where, over the years, I've produced the articles on historical and topographical subjects that I'm most pleased with. You'll find permanent links in the left-hand sidebar.

It ain't that kind: 18 months on

As some readers will know, in September 2012 I was diagnosed with cancer of unknown primary. A progress report:

Slightly different shaped buttons

I just encountered - thanks, Vickie - an article I somehow missed in the Guardian's Occam's Corner series, Why I'm feeling so crabby about cancer conspiracy theories. It'd be worth reading just for one memorable analogy:

Briefly, killing cancer cells while leaving normal cells unharmed is like trying to win an old fashioned infantry battle in which both sides are wearing the same uniform, except some of the enemy have slightly different shaped buttons, others have slightly longer bootlaces, others have slightly lacier underwear, and all have the ability to suddenly change clothes halfway through the fight.
- Why I'm feeling so crabby about cancer conspiracy theories, Cath Ennis, The Guardian, 7 December 2012

- Ray

Apothecary's Drawer: merged and purged

As part of a project to rationalise my web presence, for a while I've been merging here, backdated, anything significant from my other blog The Apothecary's Drawer. The process is now complete.

 You might want to check out the last few posts that I moved today:

• On pseudohistories (minor local controversy over a satirical web page)
• Unreal instruments (on a hoax e-mail connected with a beautiful musical animation)
• Crab collars (preserving a nice Wikipedia hoax page)
• Ships and sexism (on a piece of casual sexism legitimised by passing off as humour)
• Knots ... or not? (on bizarre made-up knot names on faux-nautical merchandise)
• Rural photography - the shaping of aesthetics (review of a Ten.8 special on the social politics of rural photography)
• Mendal Johnson (a three-article series investigating the background of a controversial horror novel somewhat implausibly claimed by its author to be intended purely as political allegory).

- Ray

Vie Hebdomadaires again

"Me and my bayan" from the Accord post at Vie Hebdomadaires: "a contrived image – a pastiche of the kind of grainy monochrome pictures you see in photojournalism pieces on people who’ve returned to their villages in the Chernobyl exclusion zone"

I recently mentioned Varun Kothamachu's collaborative weblog, Vie Hebdomadaires, which is devoted to a year of week-in-the-life slots from guest writers.

Clare contributed from June 25th to July 1st (intro / Ratatouille / Clare versus the literary world / Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours / Writing competitions / Mamma Mia! / Vissi d’arte / The last post).

But in mid-July there was a bit of a hiatus due to the scheduled writer dropping out, so I volunteered for July 23rd to July 29th to give a bit more time to find the next one. It turned out to be a condensation / retread of regular topics from JSBlog (intro / In the heart of England / Exeter memories / Accord / Perambulation / Getting ink / Returning / The other woman).

The setup is that each contributor nominates the next, and I'm pleased to report that Felix Grant will write for the forthcoming week.

- Ray

Vie Hebdomadaires

Vie Hebdomadaires is a collaborative Wordpress weblog run by Varun Kothamachu, a PhD student at the University of Exeter. From the description:

“Vie hebdomadaires” started as a concept from an early morning dream about writing a weekly log book and sending it via post to a friend who writes for another week and then in turn sends it to another one of his friends’ to continue the chain. This idea has been growing in increasing measures with an exciting opportunity to come across amazing stories of the lives of people from across the planet.

The project is currently up to the 42nd week, and contributors have so far included bloggers from - of the locations identifiable - Amsterdam, Valparaíso, Paris, Bangalore, Vancouver, London, Michigan, Tennessee, St Petersburg, Poland, Peru, Pittsburgh, California, New York, Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Oxford, Surrey, Scotland, Goa, Texas, Oregon, Bolivia, Devon ... well, you get the picture. I'd briefly sum up the mix as strongly representing artists and writers, more female than male; and there are a lot of Anglophone ex-pats overseas, and overseas students working in the UK/US. Within that systemic bias - toward international media people - the mix of perspectives is varied.

As it happens, Clare (my wife) is this week's contributor (from June 25th to July 1st), so check out Vie Hebdomadaires - but I highly recommend also looking at the previous weeks.

PS: I'd never encountered the word "hebdomadaire" (I didn't do French at school) - it's a French adjective meaning "weekly".

Addendum: see update, Vie Hebdomadaires again.

- Ray

Chores ... and blogspam

I've just spent a deal of Sunday evening doing the weblog equivalent of scraping barnacles off the hull of a boat. The necessary change of address in November 2011 (from segalbooks.blogspot.com to jsbookreader.blogspot.com) meant exporting and reimporting the whole site within Blogger, and the process doesn't preserve internal hyperlinks. Mending them systematically is a chore I've been putting off, but I've just started by repairing all the pages up to December 2008 (along with any images that broke due to the change of hosting). I hope to get the remainder done over the next few days.

Meanwhile, I found something a little nasty. I found that all the defunct internal URLs went to a fake blog segalbooks.blogspot.com. Looking at the owner profile finds that it belongs to a "splogger", who has a portfolio of similar blogs, either empty or with bogus content (some with malware links), that have clearly been created to leech the residual traffic from discontinued blogs previously at those addresses. I've reported the segalbooks.blogspot.com as spam, but I don't know if it's sufficiently overt to come under Blogger's definition of spam; furthermore, the Blogger report system has no mechanism for explaining the precise circumstances.

- Ray

Fitting designs (continued)

Further to Fitting designs - which looked at the history of the classic puzzle of making an object that will fit three holes of different shapes: square, circular, and triangular - Emily from the largely mathematics/nature blog Ephemeral Curios commented:

These might also be the inspiration for Douglas Hofstadter's "trip-lets"-- the blocks on the cover of Godel, Escher, Bach that cast three different letter shadows.

Thanks! Yes, the GEB "trip-let" (left) is identical in concept to the object with three orthogonal letter shapes objects spelling "PSM" in Popular Science Monthly for July 1927 (see Arthur L Smith's A Square Peg in a Round Hole).

But I'm not clear if (as is quite possible) it was independently conceived; Hofstadter wrote in the intro to GEB:

The trip-let idea came to me in a flash one evening as I was trying to think how best to symbolize the unity of Gödel, Escher, and Bach by somehow fusing their names in a striking design. The two trip-lets shown on the cover were designed and made by me, using mainly a band saw, with an end mill for the holes; they are redwood, and are just under 4 inches on a side.

Does "idea came to me" mean the whole trip-let concept, or just the idea of using it for the cover?

There are plenty of interesting spin-offs. Googling found a nice page by Humberto José Bortolossi of the Mathematics Department, Universidade Federal Fluminense - Triplets - which has rotatable models, along with an intriguing reference to the generalisation of the idea. Objects can exist with an arbitrary number of specified shadows when illuminated from different directions. This is not merely theoretical, but has actually been applied to the creation of the "digital sundial" designed by Scharstein, Scharstein and Krotz-Vogel: see U.S. patent 5,590,093 and Digital Sundials International.

Another good page is The magic of trip-lets at mariano tomatis blog, which shows the design (not trivial to achieve) of an "EMC" triplet for the Eseential Magic Conference. It also raises the possibility of trip-let type objects in the past - that is, objects designed to look different from different directions - via the example of a 17th century carved crucifix by the Franciscan monk Fra Innocenzo da Petralia, deemed miraculous for its ability to show different expressions on the face of Christ (suffering, dying and dead) according to viewing angle. This looks to me an equivalent of the "Noh Mask Effect": the ability of masked actors to convey expression change in Noh drama by tilting the head to give different viewpoints of their rigid masks. See Michael J Lyons, Noh Masks & Facial Expression Perception, which has several research papers. The concept seems to be pretty widespread: see, for example, Perceiving faces of Buddha statues, Same miraculous statue; different expressions, and How Moving Light Changes Expression on Face of Small Statue.

- Ray

Clare blogs

I've been discussing for a while with my wife Clare the possibility of her starting a weblog, as she has views I've managed to find of continuing interest over 23 years (and in fact many of the topics on JSBlog arose from our conversations or places we've visited together). The idea has finally gone ahead.

The first two posts are How to run a writing competition and keep the competitors happy (a heartfelt but informative peeve, with which I thoroughly agree) about common forms of incompetency in the running of competitions); and Figuration Féminine, an appreciation of a website that highlights centuries of great women artists whose work has been criminally airbrushed out of art history.

- Ray

Weblog findings

I just added two weblogs to the blogroll (see left column).

Classical Journey, run by "Luch Càise-Dearg" (a pseudonym meaning "red cheese mouse"), is the companion blog to the Phonic FM radio show Classical Journey, and is largely on topics relating to classical music and arts events in the Exeter area, Handily, it reminded me to mention the Topsham-based Exeter Alternative Theatre's forthcoming production of Quills at the Barnfield Theatre.

And Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog (kindly recommended by "Leon" at MetaFilter): "The outlandish, the anomalous and the curious from the last 5000 years". Among wide-ranging topics, it has a number of regional and literary posts, such as: Mary Anning and the Fire from Heaven (about a family belief that the Lyme Regis fossil-hunter was vitalized by a lightning strike); Missing Holmes (about Sherlock Holmes cases, such as the Giant Rat of Sumatra, that Conan Doyle only alludes to); a series on 'Invisible Libraries' (books that exist only as allusions or fake titles); a series on 'Burning Libraries' (in reality and fiction); and a 'Bizarre Bibliography'.

- Ray

Ephemeral Curios

Just found via a comment: Ephemeral Curios, a moderately new weblog, by "Emily", that features our kind of topic.

Enjoy: Robot penguins of the air (graceful helium-filled automata); HYPOZOIC KAVASS ILLITERAL STOP (Victorian telegraph codewords); Galileo and the collapse of Dante's Inferno (Galileo debunks Hell on engineering grounds); The Infant's Grammar or a Pic-nic Party of the Parts of Speech (a grammar instruction text personifying parts of speech); Latinglish poetry ("O, see, Willie, see 'er go!"); "Illustrations of Madness... Embellished with a Curious Plate" (the "Air Loom" that Victorian paranoid James Tilly Matthews thought was being used to torment him remotely); Ramon Llull's theological sentence generator (an early algorithmic device); Glass harmonica (an elaborated version of that annoying thing some people do with a wine-glass); God the geometer (a classic picture of God measuring a cosmos that looks a lot like a Mandelbrot set); A recording from Edison's phonograph (a scarcely audible choral recording from 1888); and Burning Ship Fractal (click through to the enlarged version of the 3D - it's like a dizzying alien city). And lot of very nice photography.

- Ray

Mark Twain: good blogging advice

This is completely lifted from Mark Liberman's post at Language Log - From Mark Twain's autobiography - but it's such good advice that I can't resist quoting it:

Finally, in Florence in 1904, I hit upon the right way to do an Autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; talk only about the thing which intrests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.

Also, make the narrative a combined Diary and Autobiography. In this way you have the vivid things of the present to make a contrast with memories of like things in the past, and these contrasts have a charm which is all their own. No talent is required to make a combined Diary and Autobiography interesting.

And so, I have found the right plan. It makes my labor amusement — mere amusement, play, pastime, and wholly effortless. It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon.

- page 220, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1, Mark Twain, ed. Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, University of California Press, 2010 - originally "Author's Note" in Mark Twain's autobiography, Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine, 1924

Mark Liberman comments, "This is also the right plan for successful blogging, in my experience".

I couldn't agree more, particularly if you extend the concept to the balance between "personal" (day-to-day authorial experience) and "external" (topic material encountered or uncovered). It's an approach that has kept me interested in JSBlog for four years - despite an initial dread of running out of ideas -  and it's the one used by the weblogs that I read most regularly, as well as pre-weblog diary accounts such as Cecil Torr's Small Talk at Wreyland (a diary of an antiquarian landowner).  A similar format can be very successful in fiction, as with WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn (which combines the narrator's walking tour of East Anglia with meditations on the history of places visited).

- Ray

BibliOdyssey: 1000 today

Via Ptak Science Books, I see that the gorgeous weblog of beautiful and/or eccentric illustration, BibliOdyssey has reached its thousandth post. "Peacay" a.k.a. Paul K, its unsung Sydney-based curator, is celebrating with a best-of list, such as Zoomorphic Calligraphy, Industrial Anatomy, The Visual Context of Music, Secret Rosicrucian Symbols and Dogs of War.

For general description and praise, see The Phantom of the Optical: An Online Illustration Trove ("BibliOdyssey gives entrée to a gorgeous and idiosyncratic gallery of rare art"), Damien B.M. English, Edutopia. There's also a book, BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet.
- Ray

Science news

From the Guardian: Royal Society announces six contenders for £10,000 science book prize, a worthy line-up of books shortlisted for this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books. They are:

• What the nose knows: The science of scent in everyday life, by Avery Gilbert. See official site.
  
• Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre. See our review and official site.
  
• The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science, by Richard Holmes. See Guardian review.
  
• Decoding the heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer, by Jo Marchant. This is about the Antikythera Mechanism: see official site.
  
• The drunkard's walk: How randomness rules our lives, by Leonard Mlodinow. See official site.
  
• Your inner fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor, by Neil Shubin. See official site.
  

And also a link recommendation today: Ptak Science Books. Like JSBlog, it's a bookshop blog with eclectic and cross-genre interests, but it focuses on science:

The History of Ideas -- unusual connections in the history of science, math, art and social history

Picked at random:

• Odd Images Department: Submerged, Miniature, 19th Century People;
• The Shotgun in the Service of Natural History--Shooting Flowers;
• Curious, Impracticable and Useless Inventions: Gun Hats and Steel Fish, 1920;
• Crazy-Insane Eyes Selling Mercedes, 1924. Bad Ideas #22;
• Institutionalized Racism and the Sale of Toys and Music and Frivolities;
• Nazi Propaganda and the Battle for Europe, 1941: the War at Sea;
• and so on.

Check it out; it won't disappoint. The main bookstore site - John F Ptak Science Books - is interesting in itself: for instance, for its gallery of historical panoramic photos.
- Ray

Tulips

While it's not quite the Vernal Equinox (which is March 21st) this week has been pretty close to Spring - we just took the very nice round walk from Exmouth to Sandy Bay - along the beach and back along the cliffs via Orcombe Point (which is the official western start point of the Jurassic Coast heritage site).

The tulips are already out at Exmouth's Manor Gardens, which is excuse enough to blog about tulips, in part to draw attention to Tulip Press in Vancouver. Its proprietor Senka Kovacevic sent us a very kind e-mail and comment, and I've added a permanent link to the Tulip Press weblog; it's very worth following for its nice mix of literature, art, book illustration, photography and video. Also check out the Flash flipbook of her poetry anthology Where the Sun Reposes, which is accompanied by photographs of her family in 1960s Yugoslavia (Senka is another of those annoyingly talented people, who has managed to combine being a good poet and photographer with being a champion gymnast).

The tulip is a flower with a particular history in episodes of cultural obsession. The tulpenmanie ("tulip mania") in 1600s Holland is well-known, largely via Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Gutenberg EText-No. 24518) - though the view nowadays is that Mackay may well have exaggerated the impact of this early speculative bubble. Less-known is the Tulip period of the early 1700s, during which the elite of the Ottoman Empire became fairly tulip-obsessed; as Tulips of Turkey describes, tulips are actually native to central Asia and Turkey, and the name itself derives from tuliband, the Turkish proununciation of the Persian dulband (= turban, which the flower resembles).

It's easy to list a long string of tulip-related novels since then: Dumas' 1850 adventure The Black Tulip (Gutenberg EText-No. 965) has espionage elements that are echoed in Lauren Willig's The Masque of the Black Tulip (one in a series of botanically-titled Regency romance/espionage novels by the same author) and Milt Bearden's The Black Tulip: A Novel of War in Afghanistan (the Great Game updated to the 1980s). Just a few others include Deborah Moggach's 2000 Tulip Fever ("A novel of art and illusion, doomed love and a tulip bulb"); The Tulip touch (a children's novel about peer pressure and dealing with evil) by Anne Fine, best known as the author of Madame Doubtfire; and Richard Lourie’s A Hatred for Tulips (see Wartime Lies, Elena Lappin, NYT, August 12, 2007), which is about an old man who fills in the historical lacuna of who betrayed Anne Frank's family. Perhaps the tulip's real-world history makes it appealing as a title and motif for novels that seem, in their different ways, to focus on scheming and obsessions?

Of a rather different flavour, there's Tulip by Dashiell Hammett: an unfinished novel, it broke away from his normal hardboiled detective fiction and would have been enlightening as the nearest thing to a Hammett autobiography. The narrator is "Pop", a white-haired thin man whose eventful life - exactly resembling Hammett's - has led him to the point where he has nothing left but to write about it.

I'm just out of jail ... The last of my radio shows went off the air while I was doing my time, and the state and federal people slapped heavy income tax liens on me. Hollywood's out during this red scare. So he [Pop's friend Swede Tulip] figures I'll have to do another book - which doesn't take much figuring.

The existing fragment begins with Pop living at the house of Gus and Paulie Irongate, whose estate is not unlike Lillian Hellman's Hardscrabble Farm. His Hemingwayesque reminiscences begin with his time as a young soldier in World War I and subsequent spell in a tuberculosis ward. I read it a while back: it's not bad. You can find it in the collection The Big Knockover: and Other Stories.
- Ray

Book Rant

Ooh ... another bookshop-based weblog! Check out The Book Rant .... Comments from a Bookshop Dog, coming from "a medium sized antiquarian bookshop in a cathedral town in the south of England". As it focuses, in Bookworm Droppings style, on the vagaries of customers, it's understandably anonymous. But I feel their pain, as many of the scenarios are not unfamiliar.
- Ray

LOL Manuscripts!

Recommended weekend humour: LOL Manuscripts! in which Sarah Redmond, a a PhD student in Renaissance studies, annotates early woodcut illustrations, often using Kitty Pidgin, and also provides intelligent satirical critique of the generally weird content and original context ("LOL Manuscripts is how I amuse myself as I scour EEBO for research"). Thrill to the 1643 Popemobile; Wound Man (the picture - here's another variant - that led to Hannibal Lecter's capture, as mentioned in Red Dragon); English monarchs annotated; sheep exacting their revenge; rude and amusing typography; and more (language and cultural references possibly offensive). The site has a number of good links out to online historical texts.
- Ray. Thanks to Liz at I Speak of Dreams.

LabLit.com: breaking the stereotype

In the previous post I briefly mentioned LabLit.com: "the culture of science in fiction and fact". Edited by edited by scientist and science writer Dr. Jennifer Rohn, it's "dedicated to real laboratory culture and to the portrayal and perceptions of that culture – science, scientists and labs – in fiction, the media and across popular culture. The site is intended for non-scientists as well as scientists, and the goal is to inform, entertain and surprise".

It's an interesting mix. Some of it is polemical and actively targeting the stereotypes, as in What is Lab Lit (the genre)? ("Boffins are so last century - let's see some real scientists for a change"). But as the launch editorial explains, its scope includes essays, reviews, fiction and poetry - anything about the culture of real science, whether realistic science in fiction, analysis of unrealistic science in fiction, or and science fiction.

There's plenty here for literature enthusiasts: a quick look in the archives finds Science at sea, looking at Stephen Maturin in the novels of Patrick O'Brian; a very nice three-episode feature, Flights of Fancy, arguing how early novelists set the scene for space exploration; A culture of curiosity, concerning George Eliot, little known to be a keen botanist; and Thomas Hardy, Richard Proctor and the dialogue of the deaf, how two 19th century writers exemplified a cultural split that still persists.
-Ray

Bookshelves galore

Via MetaFilter: Bookshelf, a niche weblog devoted entirely to documenting creative and often bizarre bookshelf designs, along with trompe l'oeil decor, wallpapers and other imitations of bookshelves.
- Ray

Bookshelves by colour

This one might especially interest Lily (whose colour-coordinated window displays are a popular and regularly-changing feature of the shop). At COLORlovers, there's a very nice blog post, Organizing bookshelves by color, on just this subject. It cites the Rainbow of Books Flickr group, which has further pretty examples. Perhaps the most ambitious example, though, was in 2004 when the artist Chris Cobb persuaded Adobe Bookshop, San Francisco, to let him reclassify its used book section (some 20,000 books) on this basis as a public installation called "There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World". Here are some pictures.

- Ray