JF Ptak Science Books
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post I think that this is the first time I've seen E=mc^2 incorrectly written in the same journal article. It occurs in a filler article in a 1950 slug filler piece in the New York Times (sorry I do not have the exact date/page) reporting on a church near Cologne incising its bell with the world's most famous equation but getting it wrong.
Roadtown, Linear Cities, and Living in a Line: Edgar Chambless …
JF Ptak Science Books Post 855 I wonder what our human world would be like if we had evolved living in horizontal linear cities? The idea had never occurred to me before seeing the work of Edgar Chambless, whose Roadtown (the entire 172pp of the 1910 work located here) projected the idea of super long linear road-cities. Actually it was the illustrations that attracted me more than Chambless ...
An Alphabet of the Opening Lines of Charles Dickens' Works
JF Ptak Science Books Post 2532. I was thinking about the opening line from Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, yesterday, one of the author's great books, and probably one of his greatest sentences, period.This longish, single-sentence opener is 115 words long and punctuated with 16 commas, most of which are in the first half of the sentence, and all of which seem to work together like a piece of music.
Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words that Changed Reading Forever
JF Ptak Science Books. I think that it is difficult to overstate the importance and long-term significance of Dr. Seuss' (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991, son and grandson of brewmasters) contribution to childhood. I think that it is impossible to calculate the overall impact of his bringing young people to the joy of reading, and to the familiarization …
JF Ptak Science Books: World War I Photography
JF Ptak Science Books This is a photograph of an aid station somewhere along the Western Front, 1917. Given the amount of digging going on throughout the course of the war, with the construction of hundreds of thousands of miles of trenches, and then the sapper war to tunnel underneath the tunnels and so on, it is quite possible that …
A Long, Low, Massive Circle: Circular Building, 1938
JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 639 Blog Bookstore. This re-surfaced idea for a mega-spa was very wide, very long and very low. Karl Stoldeck and J. Goldmerstein—architects and planners in Berlin—published a broad idea in 1928 called Thermenpalast (Thermal Palace, Spa Space, something like that), and although it seemed to satisfy almost everyone, the idea was consumed in the general ...
JF Ptak Science Books: Art
A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places ...
JF Ptak Science Books: Perspective
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post George J. Romanes 1, “Sense of Humour and Reason in Animals” (from Nature, volume 12, 1875, p 66) [With a few added annotations] "IN the recently published edition of the Descent of Man there is some additional matter concerning the above subjects, and as the following illustrative cases fell under my own observation, I think it is worth while to publish ...
JF Ptak Science Books: 56 entries from March 2012
A Daily History of Holes, Dots, Lines, Science, History, Math, Physics, Art, the Unintentional Absurd, Architecture, Maps, Data Visualization, Blank and Missing Things, and so on. |1.6 million words, 7500 images, 4.9 million hits| Press & appearances in The Times, Le Figaro, Mensa, The Economist, The Guardian, Discovery News, Slate, Le Monde, Sci American Blogs, Le Point, and many other places ...
JF Ptak Science Books: Cross-Sections
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (Overall post 5101) I think that there are several dozen aircraft cutaway and cross section aviation schematics on this website, and tonight's main entry is for the British (Hawker) Hurricane (predominantly by Hawker Aircraft Ltd.) followed by a small inset of an (unnamed though I'd guess the 109) Messerschmidt of the Luftwaffe.