Invictus

Some sort of prize for "most egregious appropriation of a literary source" has to go the makers of this 2015 Xbox One advert that just began airing on UK television.

Diamonds in the sky

I don't normally enthuse about adverts, but this current Sony 4K "Ice Bubbles" one, showing soap bubbles freezing in cold air, is very pretty, though I'm not sure quite what to make of it.

The Eyes! The Eyes! and other ads

It goes without saying that ads for scammy products are nothing new, especially in the days before the Advertising Standards Authority, but these (among many) caught my eye while I was browsing the Isle of Wight Observer for April 05, 1879.

The Iron Thorn

Science Fiction Book Club edition

I just had the pleasure of re-reading an SF novel 40 years on: The Iron Thorn (Algis Budrys, Science Fiction Book Club, 1967, reprinted in paperback as The Amsirs and the Iron Thorn).

The book opens with a tribal hunter, Honor White Jackson, pursuing a winged reptilian alien across a desert. His prey - an 'Amsir' - is not stupid: it's leading him further and further from the Iron Thorn, a landmark structure that powers the 'honning cap' that enables Jackson to breathe. Eventually the Amsir leads Jackson out of sight of the Thorn, and he collapses, choking. The Amsir attacks, saying, "Yield, wet devil!", but Jackson overpowers and kills it, recovering his breath by sucking on an oxygen-generating organ from its corpse.

Jackson returns to the Thorn, the kill having gained him the title Honor Black Jackson, and we find more about his culture: a hunting-farming community clustered around the Iron Thorn (which we now understand to be some kind of local terraforming machine). Now a full Honor, he gets initiated into the society's secrets: that Honors are an elite presiding over a precariously-maintained ecosystem, a completely static society held together by taboo and a Darwinian belief that everything that happens makes things better. Jackson has been spotted by the elders as unusual (he has, for instance, artistic talents) and has every chance of rising to the top. But he finds the picture bleak, and is more interested in the mystery of what lies beyond the Thorn, evidenced by a particular thing the elders don't understand: that Amsirs speak, and why they ask Honors to surrender.

paperback edition

Pondering this, Jackson goes to the desert again, where he's ambushed by a rival Honor, who badly wounds him in the elbow with a hunting dart. Jackson is about to be killed, but the surprise arrival of an Amsir enables him to kill his attacker (thus becoming Honor Red Jackson) - and he decides to surrender to the Amsir.

The Amsir leads him across the desert to its own enclave, an Amsir village with its own Iron Thorn, where he's taken to see the crippled Eld Amsir. Within the limits of seeing him as a devil, the Eld Amsir treats him kindly and gives him a task: to open a door in a smaller Thorn before he starves to death. It has been preoccupying the Amsirs for centuries, and they've been capturing a long succession of Honors to try to do this on the basis of an observation: that the door kills Amsirs, but not humans (they know this because occasional more humanoid mutants among them are unharmed by the door). Jackson is given a minder in the form of one such mutant, the powerful but stupid Ahmuls, to keep him under control if he gets the door open.

 After a deal of contemplation, Jackson (by now very hungry, his arm badly infected) finally opens the door; it's voice-activated to admit only humans, and finally responds to "open up, you dumb bastard". He finds himself in a spacecraft. The ship's computer accepts him as commander and obeys his first order, to trap Ahmuls in the airlock. Jackson gets fed, his arm repaired by the robot doctor, and then receives an implanted education ...

you are now an Honors graduate in Liberal Arts from Ohio State University. You have a special Masters in Command Psychology from the University of Chicago and three semester hours in military journalism from the Air Force Academy.

 ... which qualifies him to command the ship. It also teaches him the martial arts necessary to defeat Ahmuls. He attempts to communicate with the Amsirs, but the ship won't let him, telling him he's contaminating an experiment (we, along with Jackson, now know that the Amsirs and his own tribe are experimental colonies on Mars). He, along with the hospitalized Ahmuls, returns to Earth.

On Earth, Jackson finds himself to be an anachronism. The ship being centuries old, Earth culture and civilisation have completely changed to a post-technological leisure society, with every physical need catered for bee-like ' exteroaffectors', the mobile agents of Comp, a benign world computer intelligence.

Alluding to the introduction of Tarzan to society, he introduces himself as Jackson Greystoke. He and Ahmuls are received cordially enough, but Jackson soon finds that jealousy and bullying are still fixtures of the human condition. Kringle, the nominal leader, is angry about the woman Durstine's interest in the newcomer, and also starts antagonizing Ahmuls, who has the sense to leave the group. Nevertheless, their chief interest is in novelty, and their mood perks up when Jackson agrees to participate in an 'actuality' - the live performance of his hunting an Amsir, recreated and controlled by Comp.

This he does, to great acclaim, but he's underwhelmed by the experience - the mock Amsir was a deliberately weak opponent - and doesn't understand the media conventions of the edited replay.  Neither does he relate to the ensuing enthusiasm to recycle his experiences into aesthetic forms. Comp creates a 'party Thorn' for a gathering, where the Earth people produce attempts (sincere, but to Jackson, naff) at artistic interpretation of his experience: the women mime the role of women of his tribe; one man writes a poem supposed to represent Jackson's feelings about the Thorn; and another dedicates a crassly-done painting to him:

You could tell it was a Honor because it was wearing something on its head that looked like a cross between the German helmets of World War II and the Franco-Prussian War. It was intended to be a honning cap, Jackson supposed.

Jackson puts a downer on the whole event by not praising the painting as he's expected to, and by drawing in charcoal a riposte to it, showing his world as he saw it. He walks out on the party.

He talks to Comp, asking if he can have a spaceship, but the answer is no. It seems Jackson is stuck with Earth and a future of having no-one to talk to "except them and things like them" (Comp has ensured that Ahmuls is content enough, running with the buffalo in a game park). But one of the women, Pall, follows Jackson, and assures him that he'll eventually fit into society, and that she understands him.

And then he thought, To me I am the only sane man conceivable. And she's just cookoo enough to go along with it if I take her. "Oh, come on," he said, turning away from the tent, holding her wrist.

They walk off into the fields, with no particular destination in mind, as Jackson tells her what it was really like on Mars:

The floor of the world is rippled like the bottom of the ocean, running out to the edges. Those edges are high and they're cruel. At sunset the eastern horizon is the far wall of the crater. It's black. Blue-black..."

His words, meanwhile, are already being recorded by Comp as another 'actuality' for public consumption.

"Great stuff! Marvelous!" Comp whispered admiringly in his ear. "Forgive me. I thought all you were going to produce was some sort of cliché. Any cliché from you would be admirably dramatic, of course, with great and wide appeal. But I do not want you to think for a moment that I can't appreciate the raw, honest ring of visceral truth. The audience for it isn't as big, of course, but that's all right—it's good for them. Don't compromise. Don't soften it up just because you want to please her. Make it ring, boy! Tell it like it was!"

The gap of 40 years makes some interesting changes in how you perceive a novel. When I first read The Iron Thorn, I remember enjoying it as SF - a conceptual breakthrough story - up to the point of Jackson's reaching Earth; the rest seemed rather dull. Now I find it's all of a piece, an extended examination of the treatment of misfits, as the driving characters are (Jackson, the Eld Amsir, and Ahmuls) - although let down a trifle by the lead character, presented as a thinker through most of the story, coming across as a culturally inflexible macho twit at the end. The Earth-based section has now, however, acquired an applicability that didn't exist when the book was written, as a sharp satire on reality TV. The ending made me think of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror episode 15 Million Merits, in which a man outraged with a media-driven culture breaks on to a reality show to make an impassioned protest, but when that protest is acclaimed as authentic experience, sells out and becomes a celebrity with that protest as a trademark act.

(Note: The Iron Thorn is not to be confused with the 2011 novel of the same name by Caitlin Kittredge. The latter does look of possible interest, as young-adult steampunk with HP Lovecraft borrowings).

- Ray

In the dark

In 2009 (see Echoes of SF) I mentioned Daniel F Galouye's SF novel Dark Universe, in post-apocalypse survivors live in a cave system in total darkness, finding their way by echolocation using "clickstones".  At the time, I'd only just encountered the reality that human echolocators exist in the real world. At the time, a Times article - Blind taught to ‘see’ like a bat - mentioned that no scientific research had been done on the technique. However, Felix Grant just sent me the 2011 paper "Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Expert" 1, which reports functional brain scan results on blind users of the technique, showing that they actually use the primary visual cortex to process the sound data. As the work of Daniel Kish shows, the method is teachable, but it appears unclear if it's generally learnable or if you need a innate aptitude to excel at it.

Addendum: PLoSBLOGs has a very good overview of the subject: Getting around by sound: Human echolocation, by Greg Downey.

This brings me to an Exeter connection: James Holman FRS, aka "The Blind Traveller". An Exeter-born naval officer, he went blind at 25. Kicking against the restrictions of being pensioned-off to a ghastly ritual posting at Windsor Castle that involved twice-daily church attendance, he instead went to university, then on a Grand Tour of Europe, and then on extensive and intrepid world travels. He's the historical poster boy for human echolocation, and is said to have accomplished this using a tapped cane or ambient sounds such as the hoofbeats of horses.

I say "said to" because while his echolocation methods are mentioned in many modern books and articles, I can't find mention of them in any of Holman's travelogues, nor in other contemporary accounts of him; William Jerdan's 1866 Men I Have Known, for instance, just talks of his other senses being intensified in a general way, and Holman's own preface to his 1834 The narrative of a journey, undertaken in ... 1819, 1820 & 1821, through France, Italy, Savoy, Switzerland, parts of Germany bordering on the Rhine, Holland, and the Netherlands says

... it must, however, not be forgotten, that the loss of one sense, is uniformly compensated by superior powers of those that remain unimpaired, in consequence of their being more called into action; and it is well known, that the sense of touch, in particular, acquires so great a delicacy, as to afford degrees of information, which under ordinary states it is incapable of: besides this advantage, he acquired an undefinable power, almost resembling instinct, which he believes in a lively manner gives him ideas of whatever may be going forward externally.

But however he did it, the achievement is remarkable. His travel works are online at the Internet Archive.

Such extensive travel journals require notes, and a point of of interest is how Holman made them.  Mostly, as you'd expect, by dictation, but described in A Voyage round the World: Volume 1, pages 6-7, he also used a device he called the "Nocto via Polygraph", shown in the frontispiece of the fifth edition of The Narrative of a Journey (here). Invented and sold by Ralph Wedgwood of London, the device - variously called a Noctograph or Noctopolygraph ("nocto" for night, "poly" because it produced duplicates) comprised a rectangular frame crossed by parallel brass wires, that held two sheets of plain paper with carbon paper sandwiched between. The user wrote with a stylus, guided by the wires, the carbon creating the prints (one original, one reversed copy) on the plain paper. The top-of-range modes had stretchy spring grids so that you could write proper descenders on letters. There's an detailed account of the device , and its advantages and difficulties, on pages 117-118 of George Ticknor's 1864 Life of William Hickling Prescott.

Although Wedgwood's device was a well-known, and patented, one, the idea wasn't wildly original. The Catholic Encyclopedia's section Education of the Blind has a good historical overview of the many similar devices assisting the blind in writing:

... the tablets of Généresse (1807) and of Bruno, the typhlograph of Passard, Dr. Nord's skotograph, Dr. Woizechowsky's amaurograph, Count de Beaufort's stylograph, Wedgewood's noctograph, and the writing-frames of the Elliot brothers, of Thursfield, Dooley, and Levitte.
...
line-cell frames or tablets, the best known are those devised by the Rev. Joseph Engelmann of Linz (1825), James Gall of Edinburgh, Mercier-Capette, Hebold, Dr. Llorens of Barcelona, by C. E. Guldberg of Copenhagen (1858), Galimberti of Milan, Martuscelli of Naples, Moon of Brighton, England, Kemps of Grave, Holland, Ballu, Brother Isidore of Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, Belgium, and Mlle Mulot of Angers, France.

These gadgets weren't solely for blind users. One with a literary connection is the Nyctograph, a fairly low-tech version devised by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) for making notes in the night. This constrained the writing even more into a shorthand, each letter written in a square pigeonhole in a card grid.

Any one who has tried, as I have often done, the process of getting out of bed at 2 a.m. in a winter night, lighting a candle, and recording some happy thought which would probably be otherwise forgotten, will agree with me it entails much discomfort. All I have now to do, if I wake and think of something I wish to record, is to draw from under the pillow a small memorandum book containing my Nyctograph
- Lewis Carroll, letter to The Lady magazine, October 29, 1891

It's an odd thought that over a century later, I'm still using a very similar setup; the Graffiti input system on my Palm M100 organiser, which uses a cut-down shorthand alphabet written with a stylus in a square area, doesn't seem conceptually far different.

- Ray

1. Thaler L, Arnott SR, Goodale MA (2011) Neural Correlates of Natural Human Echolocation in Early and Late Blind Echolocation Experts. PLoS ONE 6(5): e20162. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020162.

I cite the songs?

Not about books, but I suppose linguistic/musical: various newspapers yesterday (such as the Independent's's Marksman 'put song titles in Mark Saunders evidence') covered the rather peculiar story about allegations that a police marksman referred to as 'AZ8' inserted song titles into his testimony at the inquest over the shooting of a barrister.

If true, it would be a matter of contempt of court, and the exact details are presumably sub judice, but this hasn't stopped newspapers trying to brain it out themselves. For instance, in the Independent:

Possible song titles in the officer's evidence?

Quiet Moments, Chris de Burgh
Q: "Can you help us please with what you remember seeing?
A: "... it's not something I think about all the time, but in quiet moments I think about how we could have done it different."

Line of Fire, Journey
Q: "Did you know that anyone placing those lights would be exposed to danger unnecessarily?"
A: "To quote a recent programme about this, sometimes we have to put ourselves in the line of fire."

No More Tears (Enough is Enough), Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand
Q: "Action beats reaction means what exactly in simple words?"
A: "I thought: no, enough's enough."

Point of No Return, Duran Duran
Q: "What was it the second time that...made you decide it was absolutely necessary for you to fire?"
A: "It just got past the point of no return."

Faith, George Michael
Q: "Were you aware that there were other armed officers in Bywater Street?"
A: "... you have got to have faith that they are going to be covering the threat as well."

I'm Kicking Myself, As Tall as Lions
(Same question)
A: "I mean, like I said, I've seen the film and I'm sort of kicking myself because I now feel I left it too late..."

Chain of Command, XTC
Q: "Who ordered you to put the lights in?"
A: "Sergeant SE...There is a chain of command and you don't question your superiors."

Daylight, Coldplay
Q: "Can you give us an idea of what time you got there?"
A: It was daylight."

Get a Bloomin' Move On (The Self Preservation Society), Theme from 'The Italian Job'
Q: "Were you actually concentrating or paying any attention to what AZ9 was doing or were you focused on your own job?"
A: No, you know, self preservation."

This analysis strikes me as deeply silly. Song titles frequently use commonplace words and idiom (and even coin idioms that get into the language), and with such a large data space to choose from,  I think the language of most speakers will contain words and phrases that match song titles. If there turns out to be evidence of intent, that's another matter; but without a control experiment - similarly analysing other texts to see if they produce a similar density of matches - the newspapers' speculations on this topic can hardly be treated as confirmation of the theory.

Update, 9th November:  I'm pleased to see Language Log is on the case, so to speak: see The charge: cliché use under oath and Buried song titles everywhere. So far I haven't seen any such critical analysis in mainstream print newspapers, which are continuing to add to the story, such as this fatuous analysis from The Sun story Song title 'gags' by two more gun cops has especially fatuous examples:

Transcripts show two others may have used up to 14 song titles.

One marksman, codenamed AZ12, described himself as "the barrier between the public and the bad man". Bad Man is a song by The Coral.

He also mentions "chasing car", similar to Snow Patrol hit Chasing Cars.

Colleague AZ14's evidence included calling the siege's end "a cacophony of noise". Cacophony is a Simple Minds hit. He also mentions "night and day", a Cole Porter song.

The only rational critique I've seen anywhere near mainstream is David Allen Green's piece A killing joke? in the New Statesman blog. It actually links to the transcript of AZ8's testimony, raising the particular point that the newspapers are making stuff up.  One memorable and distinctive phrase cited wasn't even said.

- Ray

Pure bosh: a media scare

We have a cafe bar in Topsham, Route 2, that serves a very nice toffee-chocolate ice cream called "Topsham Mud".

While Googling it for a shop visitor who asked if it was available elsewhere, I ran into something thematically connected but decidely not nice: the Times Archive Blog report The most disgusting Times article ever?, which reports on Times coverage of what appears to be a 19th century urban myth.

The yarn originally kicked off early in March 1870, when a number of publications reprinted a scare story from the South London Press reporting that fat was being extracted from mud at Battersea, to be processed and sold as butter.

Butter From Mud.
A fortnight ago we (South London Press) mentioned the fact that the butter of South London was adulterated with tallow, starch, manganese, salt, and water. We thought then that we had reached the Ultima Thule of adulteration, but an ingenious individual has since added another sophisticating agent. A friend has in his possession a specimen of a pure white fat, tasteless and perfectly inodorous which has been obtained by a clever analytical chemist from — what do our readers suppose? Simply from a portion of the Thames mud, taken from the river at Battersea! And we are afraid that this new discovery of science is no longer a secret, for the owner of a small wharf on the banks of the Thames had an offer this week from a person desirous of becoming the tenant, and on asking the purpose for which the wharf was required he was told it was to be used for manufacturing butter, to be sold to the poor at a shilling per pound! No doubt it was the intention of this philanthropic individual to have supplied the public with dairy butter fresh from the bosom of old Father Thames.
- reprint in Littell's Living Age, Volume 105, page 720

Punch, March 12 1870, took up the story:

OUR OWN MUD IN OUR OWN MOUTHS

Our candle manufacturers complain that they can't live because their raw material has ran up to such a figure. And their raw material has risen in price because it is wanted for making butter. It is a sober fact. It was but the other day that chemistry taught our manufacturers to consolidate and refine all sorts of oils and greases into the raw material of candles. And now science has gone a step farther, and taught us how to turn that, which has but just been made to take form and pressure as dips and moulds, into "prime Irish" and " best Dorset ! " No wonder stearine is going up: fatty matters rising to the surface. Everything with grease in it is worth putting under process. Science will compel its precious oils, and extort its fatness, ut the last discovery, in this direction, is the grandest. It beats what we had hitherto regarded as the triumph of industrial chemistry— the extraction of Champagne out of petroleum. They have actually found out how to turn Thames mud from Battersea reach into butter! And so the whirligig of time brings about its revenges ! We refused to transmute our London sewage into milk on the Maplin sands, through the purifying stages of rye-grass and mangold, and, lo, our sewage, in payment of our stupidity, is coming back to us, via the Thames, in all its naked nastiness, as butter !

It is only fair of Father Thames. We poisoned him, and he means to do his best to poison us ; or, to put it more pleasantly, we turned our fatness into pollution of his bed, and he is giving us back our filth in fatness, whether we will or no !

Here is a triumph for Thwaites, a chance for the Board of Works, a use for the deposits of Barking, a way of turning to account the hundreds of thousands of tons of sewage now poured weekly from the pumps at Abbey Mills. At present they accumulate as Thames mud, and are complained of as a nuisance. You have but to turn that Thames mud into butter, to extract from it a bonus and a blessing ! Write up over the Abbey Mills pumping station "Bazalgette, Butterman to the Board of Works! " and let Thwaites and the Board bind themselves to use their own extract as "the best substitute for butter at breakfast!," And in honour of that reach of Thames where was made the first find of this'choice delicacy for the breakfast table, let Batter-sеа be re-christened and known henceforth as Butter-mere.

The context is rather interesting, making it understandable why such a story could spring up. Victorian London was rather like a modern third-world megalopolis: extremely dirty, with a variety of scavenging trades recycling a variety of waste. Fat from the Thames was in reality collected and recycled to make low-grade grease for lubricating machinery. This fact, however, seems to have become cross-fertilised with a general (and probably justified) paranoia about food adulteration, and public distaste for inferior butter substitutes - prototype margarines - that went under the generic name of "bosh".

The name "Bosh" derived from "Bosch-butter", referring to the Dutch town 's-Hertogenbosch 1, one place where butter-substitute was made, and many descriptions of it are pretty derogatory. For instance, from Samuel Fallows' 1835 The Progressive Dictionary of the English Language:

Bosh-butter - A kind of butter very poor in quality, made in Hamburg, and shipped to England where it is used for adulterating other butters.

This skates around the actual nature of the product. "Bosh" was made from animal fat: one formulation notoriously involved horse fat, collected in England and shipped to Hamburg for processing before coming back to England. Its sale was legal as long as it wasn't labelled as butter, but it frequently was. Nevertheless, not all bosh was poor quality. Whether under the name Butterine, Bosch, Oleomargarine or Artificial Butter, the better varieties were thoroughly palatable. It seems quite significant that the butter-from-mud story virtually coincides with the first commercial impact of margarine proper, patented in 1869 by the French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriés. It was the start of an era of considerable infighting between butter and margarine lobbies that persisted for at least a century. In Britain, the fraudulent sale of margarine/bosh as butter was a constant issue in the late 19th century (see the many references in Hansard to the Margarine Act 1887, whose chief purpose was to kill the term "butterine" in the UK). Looking further afield, you can gauge the hostility toward butter substitutes from this 1886 US book by TL McAlpine, Oleomargarine and Butterine: A Plain Presentation of the Most Gigantic Swindle of Modern Times (Internet Archive oleomargarinean00unkngoog).

Whatever the reason, the butter-from-mud story trundled on for years. After an initial debunking in 1870, it resurfaced in late 1876 in more detailed form with purported proof: observation of the work of "mudlarks" and their process of collecting river grease, allegedly for processing into butter substitute marketed as "mild Dorset" or best Brittany". This led to an investigation by a reporter for the Sanitary Record, who found that the collection and recycling was perfectly real, but only for the production of inedible low-grade fat.

We obtained samples of the materials from the men, and afterwards operated upon them to extract the fat, with a view to determine how far it was practicable to purify the fat so as to render it fit for use in the manufacture of butter as alleged. We subjected it to various purifying processes, but completely failed in rendering the fat bright and free from offensive and disgusting odor, and we can have no hesitation in assuring the public that there need not be the least apprehension of their breakfast table being supplied with ' best Brittany ' manufactured from fat recovered from Thames mud. That the refuse fat from the millions of kitchens in London may in part be recovered and utilized is beyond a question of doubt; but it is equally certain that the fat so recovered can only be purified to such an extent as to fit it for use in the manufacture of the most common kinds of soap and dip candles.
- Sanitary Record, reprinted in the Times, December 16, 1876

A few years later, William Mattieu Williams summed up the story in his 1883 Science in Short Chapters:, pointing out that the whole story didn't even make commercial sense:

Chapter XXXVI
The oleaginous products of Thames mud: where they come from and where they go

introduction snipped

My readers need not be told that there are soapsuds in London as well as in Yorkshire, and they also know that the London soapsuds pass down the drains into the sewers. I may tell them that besides this there are many kinds of acids also passed into London sewers, and that others are generated by the decompositions there abounding. These acids do the Frenchman's work upon the London soapsuds, but the separated fat, instead of rising slowly and undisturbed to form a film upon the surface of the water, is rolled and tumbled among its multifarious companion filth, and it sticks to whatever it may find congenial to itself. Hairs, rags, wool, ravellings of cotton, and fibres of all kinds are especially fraternal to such films of fat : they lick it up and stick it about and amid themselves ; and as they and the fat roll and tumble along the sewers together, they become compounded and shaped into unsavory balls that are finally deposited on the banks of the Thames, and quietly repose in its hospitable mud.

But there is no peace even there, and the gentle rest of the fat nodules is of short duration. The mud-larks are down upon them, in spite of all their burrowing; they are gathered up and melted down. The filthiest of their associated filth is thus removed, and then, and with a very little further preparation, they appear as cakes of dark-colored hard fat, very well suited for lubricating machinery, and indifferently fit for again becoming soap, and once more repeating their former adventures.

Those gentlemen of the British press whose brilliant imagination supplies the public with their intersessional harvests of sensational adulteration panics, have obtained a fertile source of paragraphs by co-operating with the mud-larks in the manufacture of butter from Thames mud.

The origin of these stories is traceable to certain officers of the Thames police, who, having on board some of these gentlemen of the press engaged in hunting up information respecting a body found in the river, supplied their guests with a little supplementary chaff by showing them a mud-lark s gatherings, and telling them that it was raw material from which "fine Dorset" is produced. A communication from "Our Special Correspondent" on the manufacture of butter from Thames mud accordingly appeared in the atrocity column on the following morning, and presently "went the round of the papers."

Although it is perfectly possible by the aid of modern chemical skill to refine even such filth as this, and to churn it into a close resemblance to butter, the cost of doing so would exceed the highest price obtainable for the finest butter that comes ,to the London market. A skilful chemist can convert all the cotton fibres that are associated with this sewage fat into pure sugar or sugar-candy, but the manufacture of sweetmeats from Thames mud would not pay any better than the production of butter from the same source, and for the same reason.

Mutton-suet, shop-parings, and other clean, wholesome fat can be bought wholesale for less than fivepence per pound. It would cost above three times as much as this to bring the fat nodules of the Thames mud to as near an approach to butter as this sort of fat. Therefore the Thames mud-butter material would be three times as costly as that obtainable from the butcher, While the supply of mutton-suet is so far in excess of the butter-making demand that tons of it are annually used in the North for lubricating machinery, We need not fear that anything less objectionable—i.e. more costly to purify—will be used as a butter substitute.

"Bosh" in the sense of nonsense/humbug is, incidentally, etymologically unconnected with "bosh-butter", pre-dating it by decades. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word comes from the Turkish bosh (= empty, worthless) and got into English via the popularity of James Justinian Morier's 1834 novel Ayesha: the Maid of Kars (Internet Archive ayeshamaidkars00morigoog). I'm not entirely sure I believe this. A look in Google Books suggests there to have been a vogue in the 1830s for Orientalist novels, and the word is used in them for local colour: for instance, the 1835 The Pacha of Many Tales by Frederick Marryat, the 1840 The Cashmere Shawl: An Eastern Fiction by Charles White, and the 1839 The Romance of the Harem by Julia S H. Pardoe. I'm sure they all contributed.
- Ray
1. Yes, the one where Hieronymus Bosch came from.

Addendum, 20th April 2010: following up a couple of spinoffs Dr C mentioned in the comments.

You'd have to be subjected to the I Can't Believe Its Not Butter tyranny to have really appreciated Bosh.

In my late teens and a bit after, the big marketing push for margarine was the "Can you tell Stork from butter?" roadshow headed by Lesley Crowther (see YouTube). The whole Margarine Act infighting was still going on - retreaded as the Margarine Regulations, 1967 - and Stork SB fell foul of it for the implication that "SB" stood for "soft butter" and its adverts with visuals of cows , thus getting into the territory of butter impersonation. See this abstract from the British Food Journal Volume 80 Issue 1 1978.

Also:

The name Boche also, of course, refers to the German Army in WWI. This doesn't seem to stem from the village in the Nederlands but it is unclear where it did come from.

General opinion - compiling online references and the OED - is that it comes from French slang alboche: a conflation of Allemand (= German) and caboche (= cabbage).

Fossil squid ink story has whiskers

After 150m years as a fossil, Belemnotheutis antiquus takes up its pen (Simon de Bruxelles, The Times, August 19, 2009) is one of many "fossil squid ink" stories in the papers recently: the nice tale of a Jurassic belemnite fossil found in Wiltshire whose ink was so well preserved that it could be reconstituted and used for a drawing.

But ... this story rang distinct bells from my geology undergrad days, so I backtracked with Google Books.

One may thus draw pictures or write letters with squid "ink" and a squid "pen." Most remarkable of all, this is even possible with the ink and pen of fossil squids which lived millions of years ago.
- Bulletin of the Charleston Museum (1907)

The ink is not readily decomposed; onthe contrary it is occasionally found fossil in the rocks along with the remains of the animal which produced it. So well has it been preserved that in one celebrated instance a naturalist drew the portrait of a fossil squid with the sepia derived from its fossil, but not fossilized ink-bag.
- p363, The standard natural history, Volume 1, John Sterling Kingsley, Friedrich von Hellwald, Elliott Coues, 1884

It was discovered by Dr Buckland that in many specimens of fossil cephalopods, called scientifically Geoteuthis, i.e. Earth Squid, the ink-bag remained in the animal untouched by its long sojourn within the earth, and even retaining its quality of rapid mixture with water. A drawing was actually made by Sir F. Chantrey, with a portion of "sepia" taken from a fossil species, and the substance proved to be such excellent quality that an artist, to whom the sketch was shown, was desirous of learning the name of the colourman who prepared the tint.
- The illustrated natural history, Volume 3, John George Wood, 1863.

This tracks it down to the original account: see Dr Buckland's Bridgewater Treatise, The Monthly Review, Volume 3, 1836, for Buckland's report of the experiment, which was conducted in 1826. He probably got the idea from Elizabeth Philpot - a weathy Lyme Regis fossil collector who befriended the young Mary Anning - who also used the fossil sepia for drawings (see The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin, Christopher McGowan, Da Capo Press, 2002, ISBN 073820673).

A similar drawing, of the head of an ichthyosaur, was done by Henry De la Beche in 1834. See below: it's even captioned "Painted with fossil sepia".

Click to enlarge: image by "Cetae", Photobucket

So, the "sepia drawing" angle on the current news story is less radical than it appears. It's still interesting and a nice homage to the roots of modern palaeontology, but it's a pity that these precursors aren't credited. I've no idea if they were in the original BGS press release.

See The Fossil Treasure Hunt for the real story: the interesting rediscovery near Christian Malford, Wiltshire, of a deposit of fossiliferous clays, where conditions gave rise to remarkable preservation of soft tissue detail. 1 The so-called "Christian Malford Squid Bed" was discovered in the 1840s during the excavation of borrow pits dug for gravel during the construction of the Great Western Railway, and subsequently lost when the pits became flooded. See "Preserving the unpreservable: a lost world rediscovered at Christian Malford", UK, Philip R. Wilby, Keith Duff, Kevin Page & Susan Martin, Geology Today, Volume 24 Issue 3, Pages 95 - 98, Published Online: 6 May 2008.

PS: the fossil sepia drawing meme even turns up in HG Wells' 1895 The Time Machine:

In the universal decay this volatile substance [camphor] had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago.
- Chapter 8 (in which the Traveller explores the Palace of Green Porcelain) - spotting credit to Phil, TONMO.com forum.

Nor is this the only literary reference:

And the sweet milk of the heart's fountain,
Choked and crushed by a heavy mountain,
All curdled, and hardened, and blackened, doth shrink
Into the fossil sepia's ink.
- Geraldine, Martin Farquhar Tupper, 1838

This amazingly mixed metaphor of fossilisation, referring to the effect of jealousy, is discussed here in The Living Age. Geraldine is Tupper's continuation/sequel to Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel.

1. NB: soft tissue detail - a number of creationist sites are enthusing about this find in the mistaken belief that the soft tissues themselves are preserved (implying the fossils to be recent). They're not; their structure is preserved, replaced by mineral - calcium phosphate. At least some of the mechanism for the surprising preservation in three dimensions of the solidified liquid content of the soft ink sac is known: check out the work of Larisa Doguzhaeva et al. It appears that the melanin in cephalopod ink rapidly reacts with water to form a solid under neutral or acidic conditions. See Oldest use of ink.

Addendum I knew the De La Beche ichthyosaur painting reminded me of something. It just surfaced: Salvador Dali's "Sleep".

- Ray

Dead and dying media

Speaking chipmunk, at Unreal Nature, referenced among many other things an article about the Incan knotted-string data storage medium, the khipu: Conversations: String Theorist (Gary Urton interviewed, Archaeology, Volume 58 Number 6, November/December 2005). This is as good a cue as any to recommend The Dead Media Project, set up by the SF author and journalist Bruce Sterling to research and document obsolete forms of data storage (see the Manifesto). Probably the best way into this is the archive of working notes, categorised into areas such as Pre-industrial-age communication, telegraphy, magic lantern systems and writing systems.

While it's easy to marvel at the eccentricity of dead media such as the Flame Organ and "Sound Bites" musical candy, the historical and technological drift in media is a matter for intense practical concern. At this very instant, the VHS videocassette is making a rapid jump toward obsolescence with digital TV transmission; and in the computing field, there are already major difficulties in accessing records stored as little as a decade ago (read A fistful of Rosetta stones, in which Felix Grant tells of the complicated rigmarole necessary to recover 20-year-old epidemiological data backed up on VHS tape).  Looking at Dead Media, nothing much has changed; in fact the majority of now-weird storage and recording methods made perfect technological and practical sense at the time, only to go rapidly out of date.

Languagehat cited another example: shorthand (aka stenography), as described in a Leah Price London Review of Books piece, Diary, 4th December 2008.  It's quite surprising to read that the use of shorthand in secretarial and reportage situations, for which it's best known, was preceded by a rather different early history in a male subculture that used it for writing diaries, communicating with pen-friends, and other uses

clergymen (who used it to rip off each other’s sermons) and theatregoers (who used it the way some filmgoers use a handicam).

It's not generally remembered that Bram Stoker's Dracula (Gutenberg EText-No. 345) makes frequent references to Jonathan Harker's journal and letters to Mina being written in shorthand, partly to conceal their content from the Count.

The variety of competing forms (see The Shorthand Place for a history, list and chronology of such systems as tachygraphy, tachography, zeitography, zeiglography, semigraphy, semography, etc) eventually collapsed into a duopoly of Pitman and Gregg systems, and even these have withered with the introduction of audio-typing and voice recognition, except in areas such as British courtroom reportage, where even official audio recording is still forbidden under the same legal archaicisms that require the bizarre convention of court art.

Nevertheless, there are still fossils of shorthand's geeky heyday to be found on the book circuit.  At Joel Segal Books, we occasionally see the curiosity of Victorian novels in shorthand, like this imprint of Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four - "engraved in the advanced style of Pitman's shorthand" - at the Internet Archive (ID signoffour00doyliala).  Looking at Dead Media and repeated speculations about The Death of the Book, I wonder if a hardcopy book is likely to become a similar curiosity.  Personally I find it unlikely; it might happen with ephemera, but the short lifespan of electronic storage formats would make this a deeply shortsighted move for texts where long-term recovery is needed. But stranger things have happened, and very fast, in media.
- Ray

Addendum (upgraded from Comments as significantly interesting):

Julie Heyward wrote:

Very interesting that you've posted this topic just now. I've been monitoring (and trying to decide whether to post about) a thread, The future of archives over at The American Scene. In particular, the comments which are still (slowly) being added to. This bit in comments, for example:

"There are two tracks to follow here- the value of Information and the intrinsic value of “things” (artifacts is a fancier word, but it used by so many in so many ways, it does not suit here) To be able to see the development of a literary work, if possible, by forensic computing to pull out previous versions is measurable value to patrons and researchers. To have the item used by the literary great is of interest and value as well."

Do we need to save the thing itself (zip disk, CD, tape)? Does that matter when the information in question was generated? electronically?

I'm all for saving the things, for exactly that reason ("forensic computing to pull out previous versions "). You never know what unexpected insights/techniques might come along to extract novel historical material.  Examples: the Archimedes Palimpsest (lost work of ancient Greek maths proto-calculus recovered by multispectral imaging from under the prayer book overwritten on the same vellum); and the various video/photographic recovery projects I mentioned a while back in Re-colouring the past, all of which were dependent on access to the original media.

- Ray

A book story

"Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?"

- Stanislav Lem: His Master's Voice

I borrowed this as one of the favourite quotations of Felix Grant at The Growlery, as it's especially pertinent to an interesting success story that's all over the papers in various forms at the moment: from the Mail on Sunday Author, 93, uses profits from first novel to buy massive house to spare friends misery of care home, or the Telegraph, First time author, 93, saves friends from care homes with book advance. This is the story of Lorna Page, who "has bought a five bedroom house for £310,000 after securing a significant advance for her thriller", A Dangerous Weakness, and plans to use the home to assist friends in getting out of care homes.

This is such a near-perfect news story - human interest, triumph against the odds, altruism in action, right-on social message - that it seems almost crafted to slip under the reality-check radar. It has a payload (a feelgood story) and shielding against critical analysis (only a nasty person would question the facts of a story of an old lady helping others out of unpleasant care homes).

However, I feel less nasty on seeing I'm not the only person to spot that the book is published by AuthorHouse: a print-on-demand self-publishing or author services publisher. Such publishers don't give advances. I suspected this would be the situation the moment I first saw the story in the Aug 9 Western Morning News: local press stories about unlikely first novelists almost invariably boil down to self-publishing in some form. So, to be blunt, it's vanity-published - which would make an advance, especially one significant enough to finance a new house, and becoming (as the Guardian story says) "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" extremely unusual. Elaboration of this point would be of interest; it doesn't appear in the June 26th PR Newswire press release. Somewhere, in the process of the press taking up this story, an exaggeration has crept in, and hardly a trivial one: portraying a self-published book of so far unknown prospects as a successful money-spinner.

The story seems to have spread worldwide; however, analysis of the logistics also has. See discussions of Tales of the Big Advance at Making Light. However, the exaggerated version trundles on, with papers recycling the same factoids, as in the Guardian's Michelle Hanson's If only Mavis had a Lorna Page with a big house to save her from the crushing doom of these homes (Tuesday, Aug 12 2008):

Three cheers for Lorna Page, aged 93, who has just written her first novel, a thriller, and with the proceeds has bought a large house

...This week Michele read Blackmoor, by Edward Hogan ... She watched World at War, UKTV History, day after day in dark glasses, with her new cataract-free eye

Ms Hanson presumably hadn't bothered to read the Web, where aspects of this press coverage have been repeatedly questioned. Same goes also for Ros Coward, whose Guardian Comment is free piece, Lorna Page: the write stuff, also also assumes the truth of this success story.

Wednesday Aug 13: gold star to Christina Patterson of The Independent - Where poetry still has power - for going against the general adulation, and doing the proper journalistic thing of actually fact-checking: "Heart-warming stuff. Except that the book is published by AuthorHouse, a company in which the traditional flow of money for publication, from publisher to author, is reversed".

Skimming blog commentary, a frequent comment in defence of the mistake is that no harm has been done and someone may benefit. However, Issendai's Superhero Training Journal points out the downside: "Meanwhile, the story is suctioning common sense out of novice writers' heads as we speak".

Addendum: another gold star to BBC Radio 4's iPM for The 93 year-old and the big advance.... by Chris Vallance, who contacted Lorna Page's publicist and daughter-in-law, Cate Allen, who confirms that the bloggers were right about there being no advance.

Cate tells me that instead of receiving an advance, they paid a small sum to have the novel published, as is usually the case with self-publishing. They chose AuthorHouse because Cate is herself published there. They are hopeful that the book will make money, and that this will enable Lorna to help her elderly friends, but it is early days ... Cate also told me that some media reports "just made up facts" ... As for what she has been doing to correct errors in coverage, Cate says she now makes it clear to journalists how the story has been misreported, and she's encouraged Lorna to go online herself to set the record straight.

iPM is, unfortunately, just a slightly more official grade of blog, it's hard to say if this will filter through to mainstream news.

August 15: the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column likewise reports:

In common with most other papers we reported that 93-year-old Lorna Page, "suddenly prosperous on the advance and sales" of her novel A Dangerous Weakness (93-year-old novelist gives home to friends from care homes, page 5, August 11), had been able to buy a big detached house for herself and three of her friends. Aspiring writers (and housebuyers) should note that her publisher, AuthorHouse, is a self-publishing company whose website states: "For a modest financial investment you can choose what you want for your book."

This correction, of course, will have no effect on writers who haven't seen it, such as the compiler of the Observer's Quotes of the week, August 17 2008, or the Calcutta Telegraph's Till dreams do us part.

Granted, the whole saga is a storm in a teacup with no major consequences whether the distortion of the story takes root or not. However, I'm interested in it as an example of how mistakes can propagate via the press and blogosphere. The next time, it could just as easily concern something important.

- Ray