Delanceyplace

delanceyplace.com 5/17/13 - the founding of apple computer

Fri, 17 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- by 1970, Americans who thought deeply about technology did so with anxiety, since it was associated with the cold-war military industrial complex, large corporations, and "big brother." Then technology gurus like Ted Nelson began to see computers as having the potential to "recast politics, society, and culture" and viewed it as "up to the people to wrest control of this transformation from the corporate, militarized, technical priesthood." It was against this background that the Homebrew Computer Club was founded, and Apple Computer was formed. And, since computers could actually do very little, what reason did the founders of Apple give to people for buying its products? Well ... so "that you and your family increase familiarity with the computer itself":

"[Apple Computer came out of the milieu created by the] Homebrew Computer Club, the famous electronics and computer hobbyists club in the San Francisco Bay Area during the middle 1970s. ...

"The center of attention in Homebrew meetings during the middle years of the 1970s was the MITS Altair 8800, first released in 1975 and available by mail order from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Generally regarded as the first personal computer (PC), the Altair is completely unrecognizable as a usable machine today. In addition to its internal electronics, the entire system consisted of a case and a series of toggle switches and light bulbs on the front panel -- no keyboard, no screen, no disk drive. Programs had to be entered as individual binary numbers by flipping the switches on the front; the only evidence that the program had done its job was a change in which bulbs were lit. And best of all, after it arrived in the mail, you had to break out your screwdriver, pliers -- and, more than likely, your ohm meter and soldering iron -- and put it together yourself. ...

"Personal computing would have remained a hobbyist's passion were it not for the gradual infusion of computer-liberation culture. It was an easy match. As a group, Homebrewers had a generally antiestablishment streak. Steve Wozniak, one half of the founding duo of Apple Computer, initially became widely known within Homebrew as a maker of 'blue boxes' -- small electronic devices that emitted push-button telephone tones and permitted making free phone calls, breaking into existing conversations, and other phone phreaking." ...

"It is no surprise, therefore, that the computer partnership between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began at Homebrew. Although they had met through a mutual friend a few years earlier, their interest in making computers together stemmed from Homebrew meetings in early 1975, the height of Altair mania. Wozniak, a hobbyist at heart, was transfixed by the possibilities of owning his own computer. Jobs, four years younger than Wozniak and impatient with the 'nit-picking technical debates' among Homebrewers, was a devotee of suburban Bay Area Marxism and disciple of computer liberation. With visions of putting computing power into individual hands and living rooms, and confident (mistakenly, at least at first) that there was a latent market that could put it there, Jobs cajoled Wozniak into marketing a computer kit that would rival the Altair. They marketed the kit under the name Apple Computer in 1976. ...

"After studying the European-styled toasters and mixers in the kitchen department at Macy's in San Francisco, Jobs decided that he wanted a smooth, curved, plastic case for the [next iteration,] Apple II. The result was an elegant and inviting design that would thereafter become the artifactual signature of Apple computers.

"[Young venture capitalist Mike] Markkula and Jobs were the principal choreographers of the Apple II's debut in 1977 at the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The now-storied Faire, which was organized largely by Homebrew members, had an atmosphere that was a cross between a trade show and a Star Trek convention; the silent 'e' in 'Faire' was instantly familiar to the techie aficionados of 'Dungeons & Dragons' and the Bay Area Renaissance Faire. ... The machine's debut print ad was a two-page spread depicting a husband sitting at the kitchen table with his Apple II and a cup of coffee, his wife chopping vegetables in the background and looking over her shoulder at him with a smile. The text on the opposite page opened with the banner, 'The home computer that's ready to work, play and grow with you.' The copy promised, 'You don't even need to know a RAM from a ROM to use and enjoy Apple II .... You can begin running your Apple II the first evening, entering your own instructions and watching them work, even if you've had no previous computer experience.'

"But why own one? You could, according to the ad, use it to help your children do schoolwork, organize household finances or recipes, or 'chart your biorhythms.' But the ad proclaimed that 'the biggest benefit -- no matter how you use Apple II -- is that you and your family increase familiarity with the computer itself.' The computer-enhanced future was here, and you needed to be part of it."

delanceyplace.com 5/16/13 - "employees are stupid"

Thu, 16 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- mass production. To build cars cheaply enough for the average person to buy, Henry Ford had to redesign the assembly line according to the dictates of Frederick Taylor, breaking down each task into its simplest components so that each worker was responsible for a single task that could be repeated all day with a minimum of wasted motion and time. This proved so dehumanizing that turnover skyrocketed to 350 percent. To counteract this, Ford doubled his wages. This paradox of rote work and high wages ushered in the beginnings of the great American urban middle class:

"The central challenge confronting the automobile industry was economic as well as technological: how to build an automobile inexpensive enough so that people other than the wealthy could buy it. The man who most successfully tackled this problem was Henry Ford, a former machinist and mechanical engineer from Michigan, who built his first automobile in 1896 and in 1903 founded the Ford Motor Company. ...

"Ford achieved this success by improving the techniques of mass production, putting into practice what he called 'the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity, and speed.' Particularly in the pioneering plant he opened in Highland Park, Michigan, in 1910, he invested heavily in highly specialized machinery while simultaneously subdividing labor on the shop floor. To further the goals of continuity and speed, Ford in 1913 adopted the moving assembly line, a network of conveyor belts and overhead chains that carried all pieces of the automobile from one worker to the next. 'Every piece of work in the shop moves,' Ford observed a few years later. 'There is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials.' The moving assembly line produced substantial savings, in part because employees were compelled to work more intensively, at a pre-set rhythm. Within a decade, the moving assembly line was adopted throughout the industry, hastening the disappearance of small manufacturers who could not afford to retool their plants.

1928 Ford Rouge Complex Model A assembly line negative from the Ford Motor Company archives.

"Ford's assembly line and his production techniques in general were exemplars of 'scientific management,' a phrase and approach made popular by Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor was one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management, and his short book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor believed that workplaces could be made more efficient by training, inducing, and compelling workers to labor more steadily and intensively. He conducted time and motion studies to analyze the tasks workers were expected to perform and then encouraged employers to reorganize the work process to minimize wasted motion and time. He also favored piece-rate payment schemes to compel employees, many of whom he described as 'stupid,' to work more quickly. 'Faster work can be assured,' wrote Taylor, 'only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements ... and enforced cooperation.'

"Not surprisingly, most industrial workers resisted such schemes. One worker at the Ford Motor Company complained that 'when the whistle blows he starts to jerk and when the whistle blows again he stops jerking.' At Ford and elsewhere, a common response to the brutal intensification of work was absenteeism and high quit rates: in 1913, Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees, to five dollars a day. This strategy was successful in stabilizing the labor force and reducing operating costs."

delanceyplace.com 5/15/13 - an homage to the humble pencil

Wed, 15 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- with the pencil increasingly marginalized by technology, we reflect on its relatively recent origin in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. At least by the reckoning of one scientist, a single pencil can draw a line 731 miles (1178 kilometers) long:

"The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. The magic material that was so appropriate for the purpose was the form of pure carbon that we call graphite. It was first discovered in Europe, in Bavaria at the start of the fifteenth century; although the Aztecs had used it as a marker several hundred years earlier. Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called 'plumbago' or black lead (hence the 'plumbers' who mend our lead water-carrying pipes), a misnomer that still echoes in our talk of pencil 'leads'. It was called graphite only in 1789, using the Greek word 'graphein' meaning 'to write'. Pencil is an older word, derived from the Latin 'pencillus', meaning 'little tail', to describe the small ink brushes used for writing in the Middle Ages.

NICHOLAS-JACQUES CONTÉ

"The purest deposits of lump graphite were found in Borrowdale near Keswick [England] in the Lake District in 1564 and spawned quite a smuggling industry and associated black economy in the area. During the nineteenth century a major pencil manufacturing industry developed around Keswick in order to exploit the high quality of the graphite. The first factory opened in 1832, and the Cumberland Pencil Company has just celebrated its 175th anniversary; although the local mines have long been closed and supplies of the graphite used now come from Sri Lanka and other far away places. Cumberland pencils were those of the highest quality because the graphite used shed no dust and marked the paper very well. Conte's original process for manufacturing pencils involved roasting a mixture of water, clay and graphite in a kiln at 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit before encasing the resulting soft solid in a wooden surround. The shape of that surround can be square, polygonal or round, depending on the pencil's intended use -- carpenters don't want round pencils that are going to roll off the workbench. The hardness or softness of the final pencil 'lead' can be determined by adjusting the relative fractions of clay and graphite in the roasting mixture. Commercial pencil manufacturers typically market 20 grades of pencil, from the softest, 9B, to the hardest 9H, with the most popular intermediate value, HB, lying midway between H and B. 'H' means hard and 'B' means black. The higher the B number, the more graphite gets left on the paper. There is also an 'F', or Fine point, which is a hard pencil for writing rather than drawing.

"The strange thing about graphite is that it is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

"An interesting question is to ask how long a straight line could be drawn with a typical HB pencil before the lead was exhausted. The thickness of graphite left on a sheet of paper by a soft 2B pencil is about 20 nanometres and a carbon atom has a diameter of 0.14 nanometres, so the pencil line is only about 143 atoms thick. The pencil lead is about 1 mm in radius and therefore π square mm in area. If the length of the pencil is 15 cm, then the volume of graphite to be spread out on a straight line is 150π cubic mm. If we draw a line of thickness 20 nanometres and width 2 mm, then there will be enough lead to continue for a distance L = 150π / 4 X 10-7 mm = 1,178 kilometres. But I haven't tested this prediction!"

delanceyplace.com 5/14/13 - the unbearable pressure of modern china

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- contemporary China has established a blistering pace of economic development that has vaulted it past Japan to become the world's second largest economy. Some analysts project that it will surpass the U.S. as the world's largest economy within a generation. But all rapid change leaves a path of destruction and distress and China's success has left in its wake uneasiness and stress, which has been memorably articulated by award-winning author and commentator Yu Hua. Any comparison of China's current situation with any part of America's history is, of course, problematic and flawed, and the differences outweigh the similarities. However, in some respects, China's current stress faintly reflects the angst and dissatisfaction that resonated through American society in the late 1800s, the so-called Gilded Age, a period of unmatched economic achievement in America during which it vaulted past Britain to become the world's largest economy:

"In the thirty-odd years since Mao's death China has fashioned an astonishing economic miracle, but the price it has paid is even more astounding. When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010 World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburg's airport was selling vuvuzelas -- Chinese-made plastic horns -- for the equivalent of 100 yuan each, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6 yuan apiece. One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelas but ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan.

"This example gives a sense of China's lopsided development: year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China's GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. An authority I respect has put it this way: China's model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption -- all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society. More and more we hear of mass protests in which hundreds or even thousands of people will burst into a government compound, smashing up cars and setting fire to buildings.

"Many Chinese have begun to pine for the era of Mao Zedong, but I think the majority of them don't really want to go back in time and probably just feel nostalgic. Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive, just empty class struggle, for actually there were no classes to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn't stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully.

"China today is a completely different story. So intense is the competition and so unbearable the pressure that, for many Chinese, survival is like war itself. In this social environment the strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish. Changes in moral outlook and the reallocation of wealth have created a two-tiered society, and this in turn generates social tensions. So in China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict.

"After Mao, Deng Xiaoping drew on his own personal prestige to implement reforms and pursue an open-door policy, but in his final years he came to reflect on the paradox that even more problems had emerged after development than existed before it. Perhaps this is precisely why Mao keeps being brought back to life. Not long ago a public opinion poll asked people to anticipate their reaction if Mao were to wake up today. Ten percent thought it would be a bad thing, 5 percent thought it would have no impact on China or the world, and 85 percent thought it would be a good thing. I am unclear about the sample's demographics, but since the respondents were all Internet users, I suspect they were mostly young people. Chinese youth today know very little about Mao Zedong, so their embracing the idea of Mao's resurrection tells us something about the mood of the age. Gripped by the zeitgeist, people of diverse backgrounds and disparate opinions find a common channel for their discontent and -- half in earnest, half in jest -- act out a ritual of restoring the dead to life."

delanceyplace.com 5/13/13 - how to be a successful psychic

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:05:00 -0400

In today's selection -- if you want to become a psychic, which is a $2 billion industry in the U.S. alone, there is perhaps no better instruction book than Ian Rowland's The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading. Rowland, a highly successful practitioner, freely admits the tricks involved, and meticulously catalogues them for his readers. A good part of the book explains how the psychic can convince the client of his or her psychic abilities (e.g., "The Fuzzy Fact") and achieve a successful reading, but the book also explains how to handle situations where the client rejects the psychic's statements as incorrect. Two of the ten methods outlined in the book for dealing with this rejection -- focus and awareness -- are excerpted below:

"There are going to be times when the psychic offers a statement that the client rejects. Now and again the client will say that a statement is incorrect or just doesn't mean anything to her. This isn't a problem for the psychic. There are many ways in which she can still be right, or at the very least partially right. In the world of psychic readings, if the client accepts a statement then the psychic wins and if she rejects a statement the psychic wins anyway!

"There are two main ways for psychics to deal with a negative response: revisions and codas. I will deal with the revisions first, because I think they are more interesting and useful. Later we will look at the two commonest codas. There are numerous revisions, but here are the eight that I think are most useful.

"Focus: This revision applies when at least part of a statement is right, even if it's just one word or one idea. The psychic places all the focus and attention on the part of the statement that is right and allows the rest to fade away, forgotten and unmentioned:

'I'm sensing the name Jane or Jenna in connection with your place of work. Someone you don't necessarily know very well but you see her often. Can you place this person?'

"If the client happens to work with anyone called Jane or Jenna, or anyone with a name that sounds similar, this is a hit. However, suppose the client says:

'No, not really. I know a Joanne, but she's nothing to do with work. She's a friend from my school days.'

'Yes, that must be who I was getting. I was sensing a female name starting with J, you know, Jane or Joanne or something like that, and I knew it had to be someone you have known for quite a long time. And you have known her a long time, haven't you?'

"The psychic places all the focus and emphasis on the bits that are right, and simply forgets about the rest. A slight refinement is for the psychic to hint that she only got something wrong because she did not trust her psychic powers:

'Oh, she's called Joanne is she? Well that'll teach me! I wanted to say Joanne but then I got this impression about Jane or that kind of sound. I should learn to trust my first instincts, shouldn't I? Okay, but nonetheless I knew that there was someone in your life with this name that you've known a long time. That's right isn't it?'

"When using the Focus revision, the psychic's delivery and tone of voice can help to make the error seem a trivial distraction of no consequence. Example:

'And this house you lived in at the time, I see a number 2 on the door. That's right isn't it?'

"If yes, this is a hit. If not, the psychic says:

'Well, all right, I'm obviously confused about the exact number but not to worry, it doesn't matter. This house that I'm seeing is the important thing, and the reason I want to mention this house is that ...'

"The psychic goes on to talk about something completely different, forgetting about the problematic numeral as if it had never been mentioned. The client can generally be relied upon to also forget about it. A happy conspiracy of forgetfulness adds greatly to the impressive nature of many psychic readings.

"Awareness: The psychic suggests that her statement is correct, but the client may not realize this as she isn't aware of all the facts:

'I'm sensing the name Jane or Jenna in connection with your place of work. Someone you don't necessarily know very well but you see her often. Can you place this person?'

'Not really, no, I don't think I know anyone with either of those names.'

'Actually, there's a good chance this might not be your place of work. It might be someone your husband or a friend of yours works with, at some office or something like that, and you might not know them personally.'

"The psychic is basically saying she is right, but the client isn't in a position to know that she is right. A useful variation is to suggest that nobody is aware of the crucial information:

'Actually, this might be someone whose first name is actually Jane, but she always uses her middle name for some reason. Even people who have known her for a very long time aren't aware that in fact she regularly uses her middle name, which I sense is quite different.'

"Another variation is to suggest that there's a reason why a given piece of information might not be available to the client, such as embarrassment:

'I'm sensing this name Jane or Jenna, and she's recently had a medical issue to deal with, yes?'

"If yes, this is a hit. If not, the psychic says:

'Actually, she may have kept rather quiet about it. I sense it's perhaps not something she would talk about much. I don't think it was anything particularly serious so we don't need to dwell on it.'

"Yet another variation is the suggestion that the client's memory may be at fault, or that she was never fully aware of the situation in the first place. This can be made to sound entirely forgivable:

'And when you were younger, I see an accident involving water. Does this make sense to you?'

"If yes, this is a hit. If not, the psychic says:

'I sense it's going back some time, perhaps when you were very young. You may not remember much about it now.'

"The Awareness revision is never used in such a way as to make the client feel stupid or ignorant. The psychic always makes it clear that the lack of awareness is entirely understandable and blameless."

delanceyplace.com 5/10/13 - charlie chaplin and his mother

Fri, 10 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- Charlie Chaplin reached unimaginable heights of wealth and fame as the brightest comic star of the silent movies. But he started his career in the depths of poverty, the child of music hall performers in England in the late 1800s. His father died of alcoholism at the age of thirty eight, and his mother was committed to an asylum after having three children -- each with a different man -- and supporting her children through music hall singing and prostitution. It was the Victorian era, an age in which the veneer of propriety covered over a world of dislocation, poverty and crime -- not the least of which was rampant child prostitution -- and which all seared itself into Chaplin's young soul and later informed his movies. In his movies, Chaplin often rescued the damsel in distress -- and his own first rescue happened when he saved the act of his own mother at the age of four:

"[Charlie Chaplin's mother] Hannah appears to have had very few singing engagements during the period [when Charlie was young]. Sometime in 1893 or '94, however, she managed to obtain a booking at one of the 'Canteen' music halls situated in the garrison town of Aldershot, in Hampshire. It is probable that she secured the engagement by responding to an advert in the theatrical press. Several appeared in The Era during the period, with a Canteen agent Fred Williams inviting 'Lady Serios' to wire him with their lowest terms for employment commencing the following week.

Young Chaplin while performing
with "The Eight Lancashire Lads",
c. 1899

"Hannah's willingness to travel 30 miles to appear for minimum salary in a rough establishment patronized by soldiers gives some idea of how desperate her situation had become. Aldershot audiences were notoriously unruly. In 1893 trooper Lee of the 20th Hussars was so savagely beaten by men of the Scottish Rifles at the Red, White and Blue Music Hall that his regiment took up arms and attacked their rival's barracks. Performers booked for the Canteen and other Aldershot halls would have recognized that they were little more than theatrical cannon fodder.

"Hannah was subjected to a psychological rather than a physical assault when her voice broke down at the Canteen. She was given 'the bird', with the audience unleashing a barrage of mocking catcalls and abusive language. In an attempt to defuse the situation the manager led young Charlie onto the stage, announcing that he would sing in place of his mother. Charlie had clearly been well trained. He launched into a version of Gus Elen's current hit ' 'E Dunno Where 'E Are', the story of a costermonger whose small inheritance had caused him to put on 'airs and graces' ...

Chaplin in A Dog's Life (1918)

"Perhaps the [song's] reference to 'Tommy Dodd', a gambling game which involved tossing coins, struck a chord with the audience, for they started to throw loose change onto the stage. Chaplin halted mid-song and announced that he would stop to collect the money and then continue. Having deposited a handkerchief filled with coins with his mother, the young singer returned to his act.

"[Chaplin recalled that] 'I talked to the audience, danced and did several imitations including one of Mother singing her Irish march song. ... And in repeating the chorus, in all innocence I imitated Mother's voice cracking and was surprised at the impact it had on the audience. There was laughter and cheers, then more money-throwing; and when Mother came on to the stage to carry me off, her presence evoked tremendous applause.'

"Charlie had rescued his first distressed damsel, a scenario that was re-enacted many times in his films.

delanceyplace.com 5/9/13 - america bans the theater

Thu, 09 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- in the 1880's, L. Frank Baum, a young man who later gained fame and fortune as the author of The Wizard of Oz, was trying to establish himself as a playwright, actor, and theater manager in the small oil patch towns of western New York and Pennsylvania. He had been born to a family of means, and his new profession was held in such low regard that he used assumed names to avoid bringing shame to the family name:

"As a profession, the business of acting and staging plays was not something that would win him much admiration in polite society, as theater was not then considered respectable. Theater on Broadway was a movable feast, relocating over the years from seedy downtown districts up to Herald Square. There had been various forms of theater in America going back to the 1750s, but the outcome of the Revolutionary War had given the Puritans the chance to rise up and start closing theaters. Church leaders saw theaters as competition with the kind of indoctrination they provided. Laws were passed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island banning the performance of plays. Preachers spoke of theaters as 'the Devil's Synagogues,' places where fabricated human emotions were on display. The contempt continued into the nineteenth century, a time in which many religious leaders forbade dancing in public. Acting was considered an even viler form of expression, one step down from public drunkenness.

"Most anti-theater ordinances were gradually relaxed, but events didn't help the cause. In 1849, during a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House in New York, a dispute between rival actors may have instigated tensions between different classes of people in the audience. Gunfire erupted and the militia was called in to quell what became known as the Astor Place Riot, pure bedlam that resulted in twenty-five deaths and injuries to more than a hundred other audience members. Worse, President Lincoln was shot in a theater, by an actor no less. The most popular forms of theater in the decades after the war were minstrel shows, burlesque, and vaudeville, all considered among the lowest forms of entertainment. Clergy continued to warn against 'hotbeds of hedonism.' In 1873 a theater in Brooklyn burned down, killing three hundred, prompting a preacher to proclaim that this was evidence of 'God punishing them for being in an evil place.' In the eyes of many churchgoers, actors were con men, and actresses were prostitutes. In this light it isn't so surprising to learn that Frank Baum would have been deemed undesirable for marriage. He probably took on the pen name Louis E. Baum for this very reason. Sometimes he performed under the name George Brooks, to avoid bringing shame to the Baum family name."

delanceyplace.com 5/8/13 - gutenberg loses his printing business

Wed, 08 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- when Johannes Gutenberg printed his 290 Bibles, they were an immediate sensation. But printing was a highly capital intensive business, so despite an invention with consequences as profound as any in history, Gutenberg lost his business to his financier Johann Fust and his career "sputtered out":

Gutenberg Bible of the New York Public Library. Bought by James
Lenox in 1847, it was the first copy to come to the United States.

"Neither Gutenberg nor any of his immediate followers could conceive of the streamlined mechanical print-like font appearance so familiar in the modem world. They strove, rather, to produce volumes identical to those the scribes had copied and illuminated for a millennium. Therefore, Gutenberg designed and manufactured 290 different, and, to the modem eye, ornate, typefaces of varying sizes for his Bible.

"Historians have determined from legal documents that by about 1454 he had manufactured six presses. Since each page contained approximately 2,750 characters, and at least two sides of a folio had to be set at anyone point, Gutenberg needed approximately 100,000 bits of cast type to keep the day-to-day process running smoothly. Further, to keep the six presses in operation, he had to hire at least two dozen typesetters and pressmen to finish the 230,760 impressions required to make 180 of the 1,282-page Bibles. Historians estimate that each press could make not much more than a dozen page impressions per hour, so this would take, allowing for some wastage, about two years. The 40 vellum copies consumed about 3,200 calf hides, and the 140 paper Bibles required the purchase of approximately 70,000 folio sheets, a massive expenditure in those days. ...

"Printing thus required a huge capital investment, magnified by the long time period separating the initial purchase of labor and material and the subsequent cash flows; this regularly led to litigation between the printer and his creditors. That Gutenberg had particular problems in this area is suggested by an earlier venture in the year 1438 or 1439, when he produced 32,000 mirrors for a pilgrimage to Aachen. As far as we know, these were of exemplary quality, the only problem being that the pilgrimage did not start until 1440. Gutenberg would need help with funding, and to his misfortune he turned to Johann Fust, a brilliant, ruthless financier. Fust knew that the Bibles' production would tie up his money for two years, but the selling prices of the Bibles -- fifty gulden for a vellum copy and twenty for a paper copy, at a time when a skilled craftsman earned about twenty-five per year -- meant that they would sell slowly and thus send Gutenberg into bankruptcy.

"Fust consequently demanded draconian terms for the project's financing: Immediately upon publication in 1455, he demanded that Gutenberg repay his loan, and when Gutenberg defaulted, the courts awarded Fust the presses and [letter] punches. Perhaps even more valuable to Fust was Peter Schoeffer, Gutenberg's chief pressman and punch cutter, who brought with him a set of his most advanced punches and counterpunches. Schoeffer eventually married Fust's daughter Christine and inherited the business. The courts allowed Gutenberg to keep an older set of punches, but from this point on he was lacking his own presses, his best technician, and his most advanced punches, and his career sputtered out. (Nor did it help that a decade later Mainz, where he had returned after the catastrophic judgment, was sacked.)"

"Even viewed from more than five centuries later, Gutenberg's press represented a quantum leap in the ability of humankind to communicate, on a par with the invention of writing by the Sumerians and Egyptians, the invention of a workable alphabet by the early Semites and Phoenicians, and later the development of the telegraph, radio, television, and Internet. A few bits of historical data suffice: in 1480, the Florentine Ripoli Press could produce a print run of 1,025 quinternos (five sheets, usually of octavo, which would yield a document of eighty pages) for three florins; a scribe charged one florin for a single quinterno. Thus, even the first primitive presses cut the price of document production by an amazing 97 percent.

"Gutenberg's Bibles were a sensation, not so much because of the method of manufacture as because of their near-absolute mechanical perfection and the readability of the design, with its large type, forty-two-line page, and wide margins. One priest, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who later became Pope Pius II, wrote to a colleague in Rome that he had met a 'remarkable man' who had shown him a section of a Gutenberg Bible that could be easily read without spectacles. These volumes soon became so treasured that an amazing 49 of the original 180 survive today, four of which are complete vellum copies. ...

"The sensation print caused and the increasing knowledge of its methods triggered a pell-mell rush that left a trail of financial ruin, particularly among those who did not fully appreciate the full extent of the start-up costs of machinery, labor, and paper. ... as with the crazes for railroad, radio, and Internet companies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, initial enthusiasm over the new presses, and the resulting production overcapacity, swamped the demand of a largely illiterate continent. Within several years of the introduction of print into Venice, eight of its twelve presses closed. Many small towns, which never should have seen print shops in the first place, lost theirs.

"Like all revolutionary technologies, the printing press outraged practitioners of the crafts it displaced -- in this case, scribes whose hopelessly uneconomical manuscripts suddenly became expensive curiosities. One scribal victim, Filippo de Strata, a Benedictine monk living on the Venetian island of Murano, implored the doge to punish the printers, for:

" 'They shamelessly print, at negligible cost, material which may, alas, inflame impressionable youths, while a true writer dies of hunger [and] a young girl reads Ovid to learn sinfulness ... Writing indeed, which brings gold for us, should be respected and held to be nobler than all goods, unless she has suffered degradation in the brothel of the printing presses.' "

delanceyplace.com 5/7/13 - how expert are wine experts?

Tue, 07 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- expertise in evaluating wines may be more elusive than wine experts would have us believe:

"Because it's hard for people to gauge quality by flavor, they tend to gauge it by price. That's a mistake. [Industry consultant Sue] Langstaff has evaluated wine professionally for twenty years. In her opinion, the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30 is largely hype. 'Wineries that sell their wines for $500 a bottle have the same problems as wineries that sell their wine for $10 a bottle. You can't make the statement that if it's low-cost it's not well made.' Most of the time, people don't even prefer the expensive bottle -- provided they can't see the label. Paul Wagner, a top wine judge and founding contributor to the industry blog Through the Bung-hole, plays a game with his wine-marketing classes at Napa Valley College. The students, most of whom have several years' experience in the industry, are asked to rank six wines, their labels hidden by -- a nice touch here -- brown paper bags. All are wines Wagner himself enjoys. At least one is under $10 and two are over $50. 'Over the past eighteen years, every time,' he told me, 'the least expensive wine averages the highest ranking, and the most expensive two finish at the bottom.' In 2011, a Gallo cabernet scored the highest average rating, and a Chateau Gruaud Larose (which retails from between $60 and $70) took the bottom slot.

"Unscrupulous vendors turn the situation to their advantage. In China, nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small fortunes on counterfeit Bordeaux. (from Mary Roach)

"Marc Dornan, of the Beverage Testing Institute, for instance, says to anyone who asks him that rating wines on a hundred-point scale, which is now common practice, is 'utterly pseudoscientific.' Tim Hanni, a Master of Wine, believes that most commentary about wines fails to take into account the biological individuality of consumers; he claims that he can predict what sort of wine appeals to you according to such factors as how heavily you salt your food and whether your mother suffered a lot from morning sickness while carrying you. Hanni has said for years that the matching of a particular wine with a particular food is a scam, there being 'absolutely no premise historically, culturally, or biologically for drinking red wine with meat.' As a way of illustrating the role played by anticipation in taste, Frédéric Brochet, who is a researcher with the enology faculty of the University of Bordeaux, recently asked some experts to describe two wines that appeared by their labels to be a distinguished grand-cru classe and a cheap table wine -- actually, Brochet had refilled both bottles with a third, mid-level wine -- and found his subjects mightily impressed by the supposed grand cru and dismissive of the same wine when it was in the vin ordinaire bottle.

"An urge to refute the notion of expertise certainly seemed to be reflected in the headline of an article from the Times of London about the research Brochet has been carrying on -- 'CHEEKY LITTLE TEST EXPOSES WINE 'EXPERTS' AS WEAK AND FLAT.' The headline caught the tone of the article, by Adam Sage, which began, 'Drinkers have long suspected it, but now French researchers have finally proved it: wine 'experts' know no more than the rest of us.' The test of Brochet's that caught my eye consisted partly of asking wine drinkers to describe what appeared to be a white wine and a red wine. They were in fact two glasses of the same white wine, one of which had been colored red with flavorless and odorless dye. The comments about the 'red' wine used what people in the trade call red-wine descriptors. 'It is a well known psychological phenomenon -- you taste what you're expecting to taste,' Brochet said in the Times. 'They were expecting to taste a red wine and so they did. . . . About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.' " (from Calvin Trillin)

author:	Calvin Trillin
title:	"The Red and the White"
publisher:	The New Yorker
date:	August 19, 2002

delanceyplace.com 5/6/13 - the invention of the alphabet

Mon, 06 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- the invention of the first alphabet -- a much simpler system of writing using only 20 to 30 characters as compared to the thousands required in a hieroglyphic system -- unleashed an era in which broad literacy and abstract ideas were possible to an unprecedented degree. Though it is popularly believed the alphabet came from the Phoenicians, this invention pre-dated them and may have come from the Egyptians:

"In February, 1905, after exploring the Middle East for more than two decades, [British archeologist Flinders] Petrie and his wife arrived at an old turquoise formation in the western Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim, which had been mined as recently as fifty years before by a retired English major and his family. There, although he and others did not realize it for years, Petrie made the most important discovery of his career.

"At the mine the Petries came upon a large collection of statues and inscriptions. Most were expertly carved and bore standard hieroglyphic or hieratic writing, almost certainly produced by the mine's Egyptian overseers.

"His observant wife Hilda also found some rocks bearing cruder inscriptions. On closer inspection, they noted that this writing included only about thirty or so different symbols that were not recognizably hieroglyphic or hieratic -- both hieroglyphic and hieratic writing used about a thousand symbols. Further, these simpler inscriptions always coincided with primitive, non-Egyptian statues; the writing appeared to flow from left to right, also unlike the well-known hieroglyphic, hieratic, or later Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets.

"Petrie dated the inscriptions to approximately 1400 BC. He clearly recognized them as an alphabet, and one that preceded by about five hundred years the earliest known Phoenician writing, heretofore felt to be the first alphabet. ...

"It fell to an Egyptologist, Alan Gardiner, to realize that the Petries had actually stumbled across the origin of the alphabet, or something very close to it. Linguists had long known that Latin script -- the everyday alphabet of today's Western world -- evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew. ...

"Over the millennium following the alphabet's invention around 1500 BC, the simple phonemic lettering system Petrie discovered made possible the first stirrings of mass literacy that would unleash much of the subsequent political and social ferment of human history.

"On the basis of archaeological and linguistic evidence, most authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing. While the precise origin of the proto-Semitic alphabet will never be known, the Serabit inscriptions suggest that it was probably invented somewhere in the Sinai or Canaan by non-Egyptian Semites who had come there from somewhere in the Levant to work as miners for the Egyptians.

"Did the first simplified alphabetic script really originate in the mines at Serabit? After Flinders' excavations there, archaeologists uncovered, at several other sites in Palestine, more primitive inscriptions that look alphabetic and possibly predate the Serabit inscriptions by as much as a century or two. More recently, an American research team has uncovered proto-Semitic inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol, several hundred miles south of Serabit el-Khadim, on the Nile; they suggest that the Egyptians may have in fact invented the script to better communicate with their Semitic workers/slaves.

one of two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

"Another intriguing candidate for 'inventor of the alphabet' is the Midianites, a Sinai people who mined copper and who could have derived it from the writing of their Egyptian overseers in the same way as did the miners of Serabit. ...

"[The rise of monotheism was during the same period and] the temporal and geographic connection between the alphabet and monotheism in Egypt-Palestine during the middle of the second millennium may be more than coincidence. What might tie them together? The notion of a disembodied, formless, all-seeing, and ever-present supreme being requires a far more abstract frame of mind than that needed for the older plethora of anthropomorphized beings who oversaw the heavenly bodies, the crops, fertility, and the seas. Alphabetic writing requires the same high degree of abstraction and may have provided a literate priestly caste with the intellectual tools necessary to imagine a belief system overseen by a single disembodied deity. Whatever the reason, Judaism and the West acquired their God and their Book."

delanceyplace.com 5/3/13 - the odd origin of cinco de mayo

Fri, 03 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- the odd origin of Cinco de Mayo. In 1861, México was an independent but highly fragile country unable to pay its creditor nations, with the largest of its debts owed to France. The French, encouraged by the Pope, seized upon the situation as an opportunity to expand their colonial empire and to install Maximilian as the emperor of México. The French first took the Mexican port of Veracruz as collateral, then began a march of conquest. It was a victorious invasion with only one defeat along the way when on May 5, 1862, soldiers of the elite French Foreign Legion succumbed to Mexican troops in the small town of Puebla. This Mexican victory, though futile, is still celebrated as Cinco de Mayo:

"[To collect its overdue loan from México], France proposed taking over [the Mexican port of] Veracruz and collecting customs receipts until the debt was repaid. This was the standard 19th-century way of dealing with debtor nations -- creditor nations would simply occupy the debtor country's ports and pay themselves out of tax receipts. The Mexican government offered to negotiate with its European creditors, but the Europeans expected some kind of security while payment terms were worked out. Reluctantly, Mexican forces were withdrawn from Veracruz. The port was basically turned over as collateral on the outstanding loans and a joint force of the creditor nations landed in December 1861. ...

"France had less business in México [than England and Spain], but claimed much larger debts. ... Napoleon III, like his uncle [Napoleon Bonaparte], wanted to expand France, and Europe was out of the question. France had conquered a large part of North Africa and was establishing colonies in Indochina and Africa. México was a tempting target for several reasons. ... Mexican silver mines and farms appeared to be a good investment; the United States, in the middle of its own civil war, was in no position to interfere and the French government listened to the exiles who still believed in a king. ...

"There was Napoleon III's wife, the Empress Eugenia. ... Eugenia -- with her less than royal background -- was a strange woman for a Bonaparte. She was ultra-aristocratic [sic] and Catholic. For her, monarchy was the only proper form of government and the older the Catholic aristocratic family, the better. She knew there was a member of the oldest, most aristocratic and Catholic family in Europe who needed a job. Who better for Emperor of México than Maximilian von Hapsburg? ...

Photo of young Archduke Maximilian and Archduchess Charlotte

"His older brother, Franz Josef, was Emperor of Austria, but no one had found a suitable job for Max. ... Maximilian was viceroy of the Austrian territories in northern Italy, but it wasn't working out. ... [Maximilian's wife] Charlotte, for her part, was a king's daughter. The daughter of the king of Belgium, granddaughter of the queen of France and Queen Victoria of England's first cousin, was not happy being only the sister-in-law of the Emperor of Austria. She believed she should be at least a queen. An empress would be even better.

"There was one more European player: Pope Pius IX. The Pope was fighting his own war against Italian guerrillas, and the once important Papal States were protected only by French soldiers. His entire kingdom would be reduced to a few acres in Rome within a few years. Pius saw monarchy as the Church's best defense against republics [which he viewed as a threat to the Church]. The French revolution had nearly destroyed the Church, and only the first Emperor Napoleon had saved it. France, and another Napoleon had to come to the Pope's rescue when the short-lived Roman Republic ran Pius out of his own kingdom. The Mexican Republic [was yet another threat to the power of the Church]. A republic was bad enough, but these reformers had attacked the Church and even separated it from the State.

"The Mexican conservatives [whose power had been diminished by the rise of the Mexican Republic] wanted a strong central government that would restore them to power. The Pope and Eugenia wanted to strengthen the Church. Charlotte wanted a crown. Franz Josef wanted his younger brother eased out of Italy and out of a possible future as ruler of Austria. Napoleon III wanted to make money out of his occupation of México. Maximilian wanted an election!

"The French occupation was much more expensive than Napoleon expected. Winfield Scott had invaded with ten thousand men, and the United States Army of the 1840s was considered one of the world's worst by the standards of the time. The French Army in the 1860s was the world's best, and four thousand soldiers should have been more than enough. The army bogged down attempting to capture Puebla, which Archbishop Labastida had assured Napoleon was overwhelmingly conservative and would welcome the French without a fight. On 5 May 1862, Mexican troops, led by Ignacio Zaragoza surprised themselves and beat the best army in the world. [Mexican President Benito] Juarez declared 5 May a national holiday -- Cinco de Mayo, although he knew ... that this was only a temporary victory. The French replaced their commander and sent thirty thousand reinforcements. ...

"With still more troops, the French were finally able to claim control. ... Once more, President Juarez had to ask for emergency power, and once more, Congress had fled the Capital. With the foreigners in control of most of the major cities, the French organized Maximilian's election, and not surprisingly, Maximilian was elected Emperor of México."

delanceyplace.com 5/2/13 - we should have 9,380 congressmen instead of 435

Thu, 02 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore excerpt - if we were strictly following both the letter of the U.S. Constitution and the intentions of those who wrote it, we would now have 9,380 members of the House of Representatives. That is because the Constitution speaks of one representative for every thirty thousand citizens to insure a direct and personal connection between congressmen and their constituents—in order to achieve truly democratic involvement. This point was so important to George Washington that he required a change from forty thousand down to thirty thousand on the last day of the Constitutional Convention:

"The minimal size of a House district was reduced from 40,000 to 30,000 on the very last day of the Convention, and only then with an unprecedented direct endorsement from George Washington, speaking from the chair, who rightly foresaw that many Americans would be disturbed by the large number of constituents each member of the House would represent. No constitutional requirement limits the size of the House to 435 representatives (as set in 1911), which makes it a smaller body than the British House of Commons. (Rakove) ...

"Based on the count in 2000 of America's population, 9,380 is the number of representatives Congress would be permitted to create. The apportionment following the 2000 census left each House member representing an average of 646,952 people. The current size of the House, 435 seats, dates to a 1911 law that authorized 433 representatives, with room for two more when Arizona and New Mexico were admitted as states. The House eventually swelled to 437 seats with the additions of Alaska and Hawaii, but was adjusted back to 435. ...

"The first House of Representatives was to include as many as sixty-five members. Madison urged that the number be doubled, as it 'was too small a number to represent the whole inhabitants of the U. States; They would not possess enough of the confidence of the people, and wd. be too sparsely taken from the people, to bring with them all the local information which would be frequently wanted.' Others called for fewer members, with Roger Sherman of Connecticut urging fifty on the grounds that 'the great distance they will have to travel will render their attendance precarious and will make it difficult to prevail on a sufficient number of fit men to undertake the service.' After the first apportionment, which followed the 1790 census, the House was expanded to 105 seats, with each seat representing about 33,000 inhabitants as counted for apportionment purposes. (Lipsky)"

author:	Seth Lipsky
title:	The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide
publisher:	2009, 2011 by Seth Lipsky
date:	Basic Books
pages:	11

delanceyplace.com 5/1/13 - a new but suspect education technology

Wed, 01 May 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- with the internet, new education technologies are arriving at a quickening pace, such as the free online courses known as MOOCs (for massively open online courses). These have sparked intense debate about the role of the classroom and the long term fate of traditional learning institutions. Yet new technologies have long spurred such debate. With the advent of the printing press and textbooks in the late 1400s and 1500s, some predicted that classroom teaching would no longer be needed. In Plato's era (429-347 B.C.E.), writing had begun to spread beyond the elite scribes to a broader segment of the population after the introduction of a true alphabet by the Phoenicians to the Greeks. Famously, in his book Phaedrus, Plato decried that more widely spread use of writing as detrimental to the attainment of wisdom. In it, he used the character of Socrates to proclaim that writing "is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." The passage from Phaedrus where this quote appears is shown below:

"SOCRATES: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art of speaking.

"PHAEDRUS: Certainly.

"SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and impropriety of writing.

"PHAEDRUS: Yes. ...

"SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them a censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, 'This,' said Theuth, 'will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.' Thamus replied: 'O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.' ...

"PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the Theban is right in his view about letters."

"SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?

"PHAEDRUS: That is most true.

"SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

"PHAEDRUS: That again is most true."

delanceyplace.com 4/30/13 - zelda and scott fitzgerald

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in the shell-shocked aftermath of World War I, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were among the lost generation that led the literary world into the raucous and roaring Jazz Age. They both died young -- he of a heart attack and she in an asylum -- after lives laced with alcohol and desperate abandon:

"[F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)] exploded onto the literary scene with his first novel at the age of twenty-one. The book, This Side of Paradise, was little more than thinly veiled autobiography -- a struggling Princeton graduate makes a living writing advertising copy -- but it was nonetheless an eye-opening look at the young men and women of his generation. ...

"While he rode the zeitgeist to literary bestsellerdom, Fitzgerald did little to endear himself to the public. His comments about women are especially grating to the modern ear. 'I know that after a few moments of inane conversation with most girls I get so bored that unless I have a few drinks I have to leave the room,' he said. 'All women over thirty-five should be murdered.' (He was, one hopes, kidding.) He once told a reporter that the average Midwestern girl 'is unattractive, selfish, snobbish, egotistical, utterly graceless, talks with an ugly accent and in her heart knows that she would feel more at home in a kitchen than in a ballroom.' Still, he wasn't entirely dismissive of the fairer sex. 'The southern girl is easily the most attractive type in America,' he said.

"His wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948), was a southern girl, born and raised in Alabama. Scott proposed to her with his mother's ring in 1919. Zelda, however, wasn't yet sure if Scott was marriage material. She locked the ring away and cut off sexual relations with Scott until he showed signs of material success.

Zelda Fitzgerald

"At one point, Zelda even returned the ring to her fiancé and called things off. Fitzgerald went on a three-week bender. He wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, 'Since I last saw you, I've tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death.' Fitzgerald's prospects changed for the better after he sold his first novel for publication; Zelda readily agreed to get married as soon as possible. ...

"Early on in his career, Fitzgerald said, 'We were married and we've lived -- happily --ever afterwards. That is, we expect to.'

"But then came the parties, and then came Zelda's madness. Ah, the parties . . . Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald perfected the art of professional party crashing. They were prone to show up at the door uninvited, on all fours and barking like dogs. If they tricked the host into letting them into the house, they might strip naked and take a bath in the master bathroom tub. Zelda frequently shed her clothing in public, and stories abound of her panties or bra coming off at parties. Dorothy Parker found them 'too ostentatious for words. Their behavior was calculated to shock.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/29/13 - flip wilson/comedy is a mask for pain

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:38:00 -0400

In today's selection -- Flip Wilson was television's first black superstar, lighting up the screen in his award-winning comedy show with such comedy characters as Geraldine ("what you see is what you get") and the Reverend Leroy, pastor of the Church of What's Happening Now. Born Clerow Wilson, Jr., in his early life he bore the pain, fear and separation characteristic of the lives of so many great comedians:

"Clerow Sr. and Cornelia had had nine children before Clerow came along. Soon there were two more, making him the tenth of a dozen Wilson kids spilling into streets [of Jersey City, New Jersey] jammed with trolley cars and buses, soldiers and sailors, church bells, glad and angry and prayerful voices, soapbox evangelists, flying Spaldeens, dogs, cats and rats, junkies and numbers runners. In an era when light skin meant status and many blacks dreamed of passing for white, Clerow Jr. had the darkest skin in the family. 'You're black as burnt toast. Black as a bad banana,' his father said. 'I ought to throw you out with the garbage.' Clerow was ashamed to be so black until he decided it made him special. When Mrs. Davis at P.S. 14 pointed out the window at the Statue of Liberty and said, 'If one of you lazybones ever did something worthwhile, maybe she'd turn back around this way,' he thought he might be the one....

"One day he went home to find his brothers and sisters huddling in an empty apartment. Their mother was gone. 'She ran off with a man. Took my baby brother and all the furniture, too. My pops went to the bank and his money was gone. She'd been there with a certificate of his death and withdrawn it.' Unable to pay rent, Clerow Sr. lost the apartment. He herded his kids into a coal cellar, where they huddled on the floor while he slept sitting up on the stairs. After they got kicked out of there, Clerow Sr. spent his nights in other basements or tool sheds while the children fended for themselves. Some wound up in foster homes. Clerow Jr. moved in with his older sister Eleanor, who had married a long-haul truck driver. Eleanor and her husband had three children of their own. 'They always ate first,' he remembered. 'I had to wait. I got what their kids didn't eat, and they resented me being there, so they'd slop their food around and play with it, just to show me who was who.'

"Life in Jersey City's slums was chaotic and often violent. When a relative raped one of the Wilsons' cousins, a girl of eleven, nobody reported it. When a man pitched his wife out a second-story window, she spent a night in the hospital and then climbed back up the stairs to her husband. Clerow's sister Eleanor slept with other men when her husband was on the road. ... One night Eleanor's husband amused his friends by having little Clerow serve as their craps table. The boy sat in a kitchen chair with the dice board on his lap. He had to sit up straight so they could use his stomach as a backstop for the dice. ...

"A neighbor filed a complaint about the Wilson kids running the streets. The New Jersey Board of Children's Guardians rounded them up and placed them in foster homes. Clerow wound up with a black family [the Lewises] in Bayonne, just south of Jersey City. ... As at Eleanor's apartment, the 'real' family ate first. Clerow sat in a corner watching the Lewises' real son drink the milk the state sent for Clerow, watching the boy smile and wipe off his milk mustache. ...

[When Eleanor whipped him for running away, Clerow] distracted himself by hatching a plan: he would keep running away until the Board of Children's Guardians sent him to reform school, where his brother Clifford was. He ran away eight times in a year. The social workers responded by transferring him from one foster home to another. ...

"Finally the state gave up on him. The Board of Children's Guardians assigned Clerow Wilson to the New Jersey Reform School at Jamesburg, forty miles southwest of Jersey City. He was eight and a half. Surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire, the notorious Jamesburg school provided beds and a rudimentary education for more than four hundred boys deemed too wild for the foster-care system. The barracks were crowded, discipline strict, meals sloppy and cold. Clerow loved the place. 'I was the smartest kid there. And Sundays we got tapioca pudding.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/26/13 - the original sadist turns to writing

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- our word "sadism," the derivation of pleasure as a result of inflicting pain, cruelty, degradation, or humiliation, comes from the Marquis de Sade (1740 - 1814). Born into French royalty, he was subjected to abuse from an early age, and grew into a young adult of monstrous sexual appetites and behaviors that kept him in trouble with his family and the law. Denied sexual prey with his imprisonment at age twenty eight, he turned to writing and played out his fantasies on the page. He spent thirty two years of his life either in prison or an asylum:

"Upon his return to France [a wanted man, having escaped captivity], [the Marquis de] Sade hid in plain sight at his Lacoste estate. The marquis kept a relatively low profile, which for him meant months-long orgies -- often involving underage girls and boys, hired as maids and cooks. One girl ended up pregnant; another died following a short illness. At one point, an angry father showed up to liberate his daughter and fired a pistol point-blank at Sade's chest. The gun misfired, and the marquis lived to sodomize another day. 'I pass for the werewolf of these parts!' he wrote with delight in a letter. 'Poor little chicks!'

"In 1777, his mother-in-law lured him into Paris under the pretense that his mother was on her deathbed. (She had, in fact, already passed away.) [She] alerted authorities that Sade was back within city limits, and they arrested him on the outstanding charges of poisoning and sodomy. [She] again argued with her daughter that what she was doing was in Sade's best interests: it was the only way Sade could appeal his previous conviction and clear his name, thus restoring respectability to their family. ... [In the end the final] verdict was ... life in prison. The term would begin immediately.

"With the years stretching out infinitely before him, Sade picked up a pen. If he could not act out his fantasies any longer, he would write them down. ... The marquis wrote many novels during his imprisonment, including Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised; The 120 Days of Sodom; and Philosophy in the Bedroom. While he may have written fiction before this date, he never made any mention of it. Authorship was considered an ignoble profession for a gentleman of the Marquis de Sade's standing (ironic, considering his other passions). It was only when he was stripped of his nobility and freedom that he became the man of letters we know him as today. Sade 'went into prison a man; he came out a writer,' French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote. ...

Sade in later life

"Improbably, a political sea change in France led to the release of prisoners held under royal decrees. On Good Friday in 1790 ... Sade was set free ... [at] a time when erotic works were in great demand, and many of his books went through multiple editions ...

"As could be expected based on his past behavior, no subject was off limits in Sade's work: sexual violence, suffering, torture, rape, sodomy, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, and cannibalism were among the topics he explored. Sade's wish for The 120 Days of Sodom, for example, was to pen 'the most impure tale that has ever been written since the world exists.' ...

"Although his books sold well, Sade was not a critical darling. Petites-Affiches, in 1791, advised young people to avoid Justine. 'Mature men, read it to see how far one can go in derangement of the human imagination,' the journal wrote. 'But throw it into the fire immediately thereafter.' ...

"In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte assumed leadership of France. He was determined to clean up the country, starting with the plague of immorality that besieged it. In 1801, government officials ordered the arrest of the author of the 'pornographic' novel Juliette. Sade, who was at his publisher's office making corrections to the manuscript when the police arrived, was easily identified as the author. ...

"In 1814, the marquis died in prison of natural causes. His family burned all of his unpublished manuscripts. If they wished to prevent the Marquis de Sade from further tarnishing the family name, they were unsuccessful: the word sadisme, meaning 'to derive pleasure, especially sexual gratification, from inflicting pain, suffering, and humiliation on others,' entered the French language, and later begat the English word 'sadism' and its many derivatives. As Sade once wrote to his son, 'Do not be sorry to see your name live on in immortality. My works are bringing it about, and your virtues, though preferable to my works, would never do that.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/25/13 - the unwritten rules of baseball

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- with the baseball season in full swing, astute fans will want to brush up on the unwritten rules of baseball -- those rules which are not in the official major league rulebook but are nevertheless stringently observed. Here are the unwritten rules that cover "basebrawls" -- the fights that break out during games:

1.7.0. Basebrawls Are a Rare but Necessary Part of the Game, with Their Own Set of Rules

"There are times [such as when a pitcher intentionally hits a batter with a pitch] when the action of your opponent is so far over the line that the only answer is to duke it out on the field in a battle royale in which no one is actually likely to get hurt. It is a ritual closer to ballet than a true street fight.

1.7.1. In a Fight, Everyone Must Leave the Bench and the Bullpen Has to Join In

" 'No teammates are closer than they are in baseball, because there are so many games and players spend so much time with one another,' writes ESPN's Tim Kurkjian. 'As corny as it sounds, they become family, and when a family member is in a fight, everyone joins in. If a player doesn't run on the field, even if it's just to dance with the enemy, he might get fined and certainly will be ostracized by his teammates.' Teams become something of a family over the course of a long season, developing an 'all-for-one' mentality, and everyone goes out there to push and shove.

"There is a practical purpose to everybody going on the field, which is that it actually reduces the chance of anyone actually getting hurt. Writer Patrick Hruby has called 'Basebrawl Etiquette' a code of conduct 'as rigidly mannered as one of the dutiful, repressed English butlers in a Merchant-Ivory film.' One of the reasons that everyone is so willing to get into the faux battle is that everyone knows that when the dust settles, nothing much will really have happened, and it is rare that anyone will have been hurt.

"The extent to which this rule is observed can lapse into the extreme. During a 1984 Atlanta Braves -- San Diego Padres scuffle, injured Brave Bob Horner -- who was watching the game from the press box -- raced down to the clubhouse, put on his uniform, and ended up in the middle of the brawl. Indians [then] manager Charlie Manuel was once suspended for two games for running onto the field from the clubhouse. Manuel had been ejected from the game, but said he could not in good conscience stay in the clubhouse while his players were throwing haymakers.

1.7.2. All Basebrawls Are Clean: No Cleats, No Sucker Punches, and No Bats

"Baseball fights normally are tame endeavors that do not last more than a few minutes, but every now and then, they get ugly and become donnybrooks. Former Brewers center fielder Gorman Thomas recalled a fight with New York during which Yankees pitcher Luis Tiant emerged from the tunnel and into the dugout wrapped only in a towel and smoking a cigar. 'It wasn't a pretty sight,' said Thomas to Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But even here there were no cheap shots from behind. 'If you are going to fight, do it face-to-face' is the prime rule in play. This is not to say that baseball fights cannot become violent affairs. There are many examples of these, but none so graphic as Juan Marichal's use of a bat against John Roseboro on August 22, 1965. Fourteen stitches were required to close the gash in Roseboro's head.

1.7.3. When in Doubt, Dogpile

"A dogpile is a tussle that begins between two opposing players who are quickly buried under a human avalanche. Why dogpile? It protects the combatants and keeps the whole thing from getting out of control. There is a saying in baseball that the safest place to be in a fight is in the middle of it -- or in this case, the bottom of it."

delanceyplace.com 4/24/13 - the fbi's use of psychological profiling

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- the FBI's use of psychological profiling has become world famous through books, television, and movies including The Silence of the Lambs. However, it may be less useful than commonly believed:

"On the surface, the FBI's system seems extraordinarily useful. Consider a case study widely used in the profiling literature. The body of a twenty-six-year-old special-education teacher was found on the roof of her Bronx apartment building. She was apparently abducted just after she left her house for work, at six-thirty in the morning. She had been beaten beyond recognition and tied up with her stockings and belt. The killer had mutilated her sexual organs, chopped off her nipples, covered her body with bites, written obscenities across her abdomen, masturbated, and then defecated next to the body.

"Let's pretend that we're an FBI profiler. First question: race. The victim is white, so let's call the offender white. Let's say he's in his midtwenties to early thirties, which is when the thirty-six men in the FBI's sample started killing. Is the crime organized or disorganized? Disorganized, clearly. It's on a rooftop, in the Bronx, in broad daylight -- high risk. So what is the killer doing in the building at six-thirty in the morning? He could be some kind of serviceman, or he could live in the neighborhood. Either way, he appears to be familiar with the building. He's disorganized, though, so he's not stable. If he is employed, it's blue-collar work at best. He probably has a prior offense, having to do with violence or sex. His relationships with women will be either nonexistent or deeply troubled. And the mutilation and the defecation are so strange that he's probably mentally ill or has some kind of substance-abuse problem. How does that sound? As it turns out, it's spot-on. The killer was Carmine Calabro, age thirty, a single, unemployed, deeply troubled actor who, when he was not in a mental institution, lived with his widowed father on the fourth floor of the building where the murder took place.

"But how useful is that profile really? The police already had Calabro on their list of suspects: if you're looking for the person who killed and mutilated someone on the roof, you don't really need a profiler to tell you to check out the disheveled, mentally ill guy living with his father on the fourth floor. ...

"In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed 184 crimes to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a criminal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That's just 2.7 percent. ...

"A few years ago, [the author of The Forensic Psychologist's Casebook, Laurence] Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the FBI's approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.

"Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse -- the 'statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite.' ('I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self-effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.') The Jacques Statement, named for the character in As You Like It who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, 'If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger.' There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that 'leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific.' ('I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?') And that's only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess -- all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

'Moving on to career matters, you don't work with children, do you?'

Rowland will ask his subjects, in an example of what he dubs the 'Vanishing Negative.'

No, I don't.
'No, I thought not. That's not really your role.'

"Of course, if the subject answers differently, there's another way to play the question:

'Moving on to career matters, you don't work with children, do you?'

I do, actually, part time.
'Yes, I thought so.'

"After Alison had analyzed the rooftop-killer profile, he decided to play a version of the cold-reading game. He gave the details of the crime, the profile prepared by the FBI, and a description of the offender to a group of senior police officers and forensic professionals in England. How did they find the profile? Highly accurate. Then Alison gave the same packet of case materials to another group of police officers, but this time he invented an imaginary offender, one who was altogether different from Calabro. The new killer was thirty-seven years old. He was an alcoholic. He had recently been laid off from his job with the water board and had met the victim before on one of his rounds. What's more, Alison claimed, he had a history of violent relationships with women, and prior convictions for assault and burglary. How accurate did a group of experienced police officers find the FBI's profile when it was matched with the phony offender? Every bit as accurate as when it was matched to the real offender."

delanceyplace.com 4/23/13 - humans cheat

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- not all people cheat, but cheating is "astoundingly common", and people are much more inclined to cheat if others around them are cheating:

"Although it is comforting to think that most people are essentially honest, cheating -- defined as acting dishonestly to gain an advantage -- is actually astoundingly common. In a 1997 survey, management professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University and Linda Klebe Treviño, a professor of organizational behavior at the Pennsylvania State University, revealed that about three fourths of 1,800 students at nine state universities admitted to cheating on tests or written assignments. In 2005 sociologist Brian Martinson of the HealthPartners Research Foundation in Bloomington, Minn., and his colleagues reported that one third of scientists confessed to engaging in questionable research practices during the previous three years. ...

"Humans are surprisingly quick to cheat when the circumstances are conducive. In 2008 behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University and his colleagues described what happened when they asked college students to solve math puzzles for cash rewards. When the researchers changed the experimental conditions such that the students assumed the examiner could not detect cheating, the average self-reported test score rose significantly. The researchers determined that the scores were not inflated by a few students who cheated a lot but rather by many students cheating a little. ...

"If cheaters used a simple cost-benefit calculation, one might predict that people would cheat as much as possible, not just a little bit. Yet in Ariely's study, students on average reported six correct answers when they got only four right, even though they could have raised their scores to a maximum of 20. In addition, no simple relation exists between the magnitude of the reward and the likelihood of cheating. When Ariely's team increased the cash reward, the amount of cheating actually declined. Ariely suggests that the students felt guilty when they cheated more or received larger amounts of cash through dishonest behavior. ... Another possibility is that the students thought they would be less likely to attract attention if they cheated only a little. ...

"In 2011 Ariely and behavioral economist Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School reported that people who score higher on psychological tests of creativity are more apt to engage in dishonesty -- a connection that is perhaps not surprising considering that creativity and tactical deception are both products of the neocortex. ... They submit that creative individuals are better at self-deception: they come up with more inventive rationalizations for cheating as a way of making themselves feel better about doing it. As Proust observed in Remembrance of Things Past, 'It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.' Or as George told Jerry on Seinfeld 75 years later, "It's not a lie if you believe it." Ironically, the creativity and intelligence that we regard as distinctly human might have arisen alongside our ability to deceive. We are who we are because we cheat. ...

"Unchecked dishonesty can promote the perception that one must cheat to remain competitive, ... and [certain] observations have led Ariely to refer to cheating as 'infectious.' ... Social contagion may help explain the high prevalence of cheating in relatively small groups of people. For example, 125 Harvard students were recently under investigation for cheating on the final examination in an introductory government course. (More than half these students were told to withdraw from school for up to a year as punishment.) It is statistically unlikely that nearly half the 279 students in that class are sociopaths given the low prevalence of sociopathy -- about 3 percent in males and 1 percent in females. A more plausible explanation is contagion. The widespread bending of the rules probably led students to conclude that collaborating with other students was okay. (The class was called 'Introduction to Congress,' so perhaps the students were simply identifying too much with the material.)"

delanceyplace.com 4/22/13 - prime minister out, dictator in

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in 1960, after years of protests, Belgium granted the African colony of the Congo its freedom. In short order, newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with the assistance of the CIA, and a dictator named Joseph Mobutu soon took his place and began his thirty-two year rule:

"When pressure grew and independence came in 1960, in the entire [Congolese] territory there were fewer than thirty African university graduates. There were no Congolese army officers, engineers, agronomists, or physicians. The colony's administration had made few other steps toward a Congo run by its own people: of some five thousand management-level positions in the civil service, only three were filled by Africans.

"King Baudouin of Belgium arrived in Leopoldville to grant, officially and patronizingly, the Congo its freedom. He said, 'It is now up to you, gentlemen, to show that you are worthy of our confidence.' An angry, impromptu speech in reply by Patrice Lumumba caught the world's attention. Barely a month earlier, an election had made Lumumba a coalition-government prime minister. It was the first democratic national election the territory had ever had, but it produced a winner who left the Belgians deeply dismayed. Lumumba believed that political independence was not enough to free Africa from its colonial past; the continent must also cease to be an economic colony of Europe. His speeches set off immediate alarm signals in Western capitals. Belgian, British, and American corporations by now had vast investments in the Congo, which was rich in copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, tin, manganese, and zinc.

"An inspired orator whose voice was rapidly carrying beyond his country's borders, Lumumba was a mercurial and charismatic figure. His message, Western governments feared, was contagious: Moreover, he could not be bought. Finding no sympathy in the West, he asked for help from the Soviet Union. Anathema to American and European capital, he became a leader whose days were numbered. Less than two months after being named the Congo's first democratically chosen prime minister, a US. National Security Council subcommittee on covert operations, which included CIA director Allen Dulles, authorized his assassination. Richard Bissell, CIA operations chief at the time, later said, 'The President, Dwight D. Eisenhower ... regarded Lumumba as I did and a lot of other people did: as a mad dog ... and he wanted the problem dealt with:' In a key meeting, another official who was there recalled, Eisenhower clearly told CIA chief Dulles "that Lumumba should be eliminated."

"Alternatives for dealing with 'the problem' were considered, among them poison (a supply of which was sent to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville), a high-powered rifle, and free-lance hit men. But it proved hard to get close enough to Lumumba to use these, so, instead, the CIA and Belgians still working in the Congo's army and police supported anti-Lumumba factions in the Congo government, confident that they would do the job. After being arrested and repeatedly beaten, the prime minister was secretly shot in Elizabethville in January 1961. Covertly urged on by their own government, a Belgian pilot flew the plane that took him there and a Belgian officer commanded the firing squad. Two Belgians then cut up his body and dissolved it in acid, to leave no martyr's grave. ...

"The key figure in the Congolese forces that arranged Lumumba's murder was a young man named Joseph Désiré Mobutu, then chief of staff of the army and a former NCO in the old colonial Force Publique. Early on, the Western powers had spotted Mobutu as someone who would look out for their interests. He had received cash payments from the local CIA man and Western military attachés while Lumumba's murder was being planned. Wearing dark glasses and his general's uniform with gold braid and a sword, he later met President Kennedy at the White House in 1963. Kennedy gave him an airplane for his personal use -- and a US. Air Force crew to fly it for him. With United States encouragement, Mobutu staged a coup in 1965 that made him the country's dictator. And in that position he remained for more than thirty years.

"Further U.S. military aid helped Mobutu repel several attempts to overthrow him. Some of his political enemies he ordered tortured and killed; some he co-opted into his ruling circles; others he forced into exile. The United States gave him well over a billion dollars in civilian and military aid during the three decades of his rule; European powers -- especially France -- contributed more. For its heavy investment, the United States and its allies got a regime that was reliably anti-Communist and a secure staging area for CIA and French military operations, but Mobutu brought his country little except a change of name, in 1971, to Zaire. ...

"With American and European approval, the country's wealth flowed mainly into the pockets of [Mobutu] and foreign mining companies. Mobutu's loyalty to his Western backers made him a popular visitor to Washington, where he shrewdly abandoned his military uniform for civilian dress, a carved ebony cane, and a trademark African-looking leopard-skin hat that had actually been made by an elegant Paris milliner. Ronald Reagan received him at the White House several times, praising him as 'a voice of good sense and good will.' ...

"Mobutu and his entourage helped themselves to state revenue so freely that the Congolese government ceased to function. When he ran out of money to pay the army and other state workers in 1993, he printed up a new kind of currency. Because shopkeepers would not accept it, soldiers rioted, looting shops, government buildings, and private homes. Hundreds of people were killed. For years, garbage piled up in heaps, uncollected. ...

"Before Mobutu was overthrown, in 1997, his thirty-two years in power had made him one of the world's richest men; his personal wealth at its peak was estimated at $4 billion. He spent much of his time on his yacht, on the river at Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville. One of the big lakes he renamed Lake Mobutu Sese Seko. He acquired palatial homes in France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and elsewhere. He made no distinction between state assets and his own; in a single year, he dispatched a state-owned jet airliner thirty-two times to Venezuela to ferry five thousand long-haired sheep to his ranch at Gbadolite. ... And he demanded, and got, a piece of the action in almost every major corporation operating in the country."

delanceyplace.com 4/19/13 - land fever in america

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in the years before the American Revolution, the population growth of the colonies was virtually exploding. British and colonial authorities could scarcely comprehend the meaning of the huge increase of people in search of land -- much less their mobility and restlessness. That growth brought unprecedented disruption, but it also brought many colonials unprecedented wealth through land speculation -- the "land fever" of the day being much like today's internet investing. Notably, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and other key Revolutionary figures were involved in "some of the most grandiose land schemes in modern history." But then the British intervened, placing a firm western boundary beyond which colonials were not allowed to purchase land -- because of a morass of issues including Indian rebellions, land ownership disputes, and a general desire to reserve the lands. That prohibition was one of the key items which, along with debtor issues, religious divisions, and -- famously -- taxation, caused the colonists to erupt into Revolution:

"In the middle decades of the eighteenth century ... the population of the North American colonies was ... virtually exploding -- and had been doing so almost since the beginning of the settlements. Indeed, the North American colonists continued to multiply more rapidly than any other people in the Western world. Between 1750 and 1770 they doubled in number, from 1 million to more than 2 million, and thereby became an even more important part of the British world. In 1700 the American population had been only one twentieth of the British and Irish populations combined; by 1770 it was nearly one fifth, and such farsighted colonists as Benjamin Franklin were predicting that sooner or later the center of the British Empire would shift to America. ...

"For nearly a century and a half the colonists had been confined to a several-hundred-mile-wide strip of territory along the Atlantic coast. But in the middle decades of the eighteenth century, the pressures of increasing population density began to be felt. Over-cultivated soil in the East was becoming depleted. Particularly in the Chesapeake areas the number of tenants was visibly growing. Older towns now seemed overcrowded, especially in New England, and young men coming of age could no longer count on obtaining pieces of land as their fathers had done. ...

"With the defeat of the French [in 1763], people set out in all directions, eager to take advantage of the newly acquired land in the interior. In 1759 speculators and settlers moved into the area around Lake Champlain and westward along the Mohawk River into central New York. Between 1749 and 1771, New York's population grew from 73,348 to 168,007. ... North Carolina increased its population sixfold between 1750 and 1775 to become the fourth-largest colony. ... By the early 1760s hunters and explorers such as Daniel Boone began opening up paths westward through the Appalachians. Settlers soon followed. ...

"British and colonial authorities could scarcely comprehend the meaning of this enormous explosion of people in search of land. The colonists, one astonished official observed, were moving 'as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to place: but wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness incident to it that they should forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.' Land fever infected all levels of society. While Ezra Stiles, a minister in Newport, Rhode Island, and later the president of Yale University, bought and sold small shares in places all over New England and in Pennsylvania and New York, more influential figures like Benjamin Franklin were concocting huge speculative schemes in the vast unsettled lands of the West. ...

"[After an Indian rebellion in the Ohio Valley in 1763, a British] demarcation line along the Appalachians that closed the West to white settlers was hastily and crudely drawn. ... [The accompanying] new [Indian] trading regulations and sites were widely ignored and created more chaos in the Indian trade than had existed earlier. So confusing was the situation in the West that the British government could never convince the various contending interests that the proclamation was anything more than, in the words of George Washington, who had speculative interests in western lands, 'a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.' Scores of land speculators and lobbyists pressured the unsteady British governments to negotiate a series of Indian treaties shifting the line of settlement westward. But each modification only whetted the appetites of the land speculators and led to some of the most grandiose land schemes in modern history.

"In [a new act,] the Quebec Act of 1774, the British government finally tried to steady its dizzy western policy. This act transferred to the province of Quebec the land and control of the Indian trade in the huge area between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and allowed Quebec's French inhabitants French law and Roman Catholicism. As enlightened as this act was toward the French Canadians, it managed to anger all American interests -- speculators, settlers, and traders alike."

delanceyplace.com 4/18/13 - the loneliness of the frontier and the second great awakening

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- prior to the American Revolution, the British had forbidden the colonists from moving beyond the Appalachian mountains. With American independence, the metaphorical floodgates were opened and there was a massive westward migration of Americans. But this migration had a cost -- the wholesale disruption of the support provided by family, community and church, and the loneliness and alienation of the frontier. For Protestant church leaders in the East, who were already under assault from the deism of the American intellectual elite, this disruption in church membership was a crisis, and they began to form missionary societies and use revivals to take the gospel to the West. With this came a pivotal moment in American history -- the Great Revival of 1801 and the Second Great Awakening:

"[Encouraged by the smaller but successful Gasper River revival in 1800, Barton] Stone announced a sacramental service for August 6, 1801. While he surely believed that people would come, neither he nor anyone else could possibly have been prepared for the response that ensued. Eyewitness accounts estimated that between 10,000 and 25,000 people came to Cane Ridge. At the time there were only a quarter-million people in all of Kentucky and only 1800 in Lexington, Kentucky's largest city. Technically this was a Presbyterian meeting, but there were many Baptists and Methodists present, including preachers from those denominations. Preaching stands were erected at several points across the camp-meeting field so that several preachers could speak at once to separate audiences. Hundreds were converted, either for the first time in their lives or as part of what Protestants often called a rededication.

"James Finley, who would later become a Methodist minister, was one of those converted at Cane Ridge, and his story was not unusual. He was 21 years of age at the time, the wayward son of a Princeton-trained Presbyterian minister. He had drifted off to the frontier and taken to drinking, dancing, and assorted other activities, all considered serious sins in the Protestant faith of the time. He went to Cane Ridge merely to observe the excitement, being determined not be drawn in. He was also an educated young man, and the frontier emotionalism of revivals was not for him. As he watched hundreds of people shrieking and gyrating in spiritual agony, he was deeply moved and felt physically weak.

"He rushed first to the woods, then to a tavern, where he took a stiff drink to calm himself. He returned to the meeting and walked again among the people caught up in revival, feeling the weight of his own sins pressing on his conscience. After a nearly sleepless night in a haystack, the next day he headed for home. Along the way he stopped in a woods to pray and fell to the ground, unable to move. Neighbors found him, took him to a nearby home and put him to bed. When he awoke, he reported, he felt spiritual release and was able to continue his journey home with the assurance that his sins were forgiven. Finley's is just one of the more vivid and detailed accounts of conversion at Cane Ridge. Another account has Rachel Martin entering into what was called 'catalepsy.' She lay in bed for nine days without moving, speaking, or eating before gaining spiritual release and conversion.

"When the revival was completed, it was referred to widely as the greatest outpouring of the Holy Spirit since Pentecost in the first century, when St. Peter and the other apostles preached and saw thousands converted to the new faith. Stone himself ... wrote a treatise describing in systematic fashion some of the emotional gyrations that people experienced during the revival. In addition to Rachel Martin's catalepsy, he catalogued these as spiritual exercises: 'the falling exercise, jerking exercise, dancing exercise, barking exercise, laughing exercise, running exercise, and singing exercise.' Such emotional responses have made it very difficult to evaluate the Cane Ridge revival, and many of these physical manifestations were viewed unfavorably even by contemporaries. Hardly anyone in that day or since can be objective about such things.

"As one might guess, those who opposed the revivals used the 'barking exercise' to argue that these meetings were excessive. Accounts of that particular exercise described people in the throes of spiritual agony rocking back and forth, causing grunts and groans. The faster they rocked, the louder and more staccato the noise, until it eventually sounded like a bark. Critics also pointed out that along with the spiritual experiences were other more sensate and sensory excesses. Specifically, there was a good deal of alcohol consumed by those who came to the revivals more out of carnal than spiritual curiosity. Hucksters sold whisky from wagons on the outskirts of the encampment. Moreover, for those who attended primarily to be part of a good party, there were sexual liaisons, leading some to claim that more souls were conceived than saved. While revivals were almost always emotional affairs with crying, shouting, and sometimes falling, excesses such as barking and treeing the devil, often cited to discredit the revivals, were limited. With the possible exception of the early meetings, they never became regular features of the Second Great Awakening. ...

"Cane Ridge set off waves of revivals that would last for years, and this Great Revival is generally regarded as the beginning of the Second Great Awakening."

delanceyplace.com 4/17/13 - the precious children of england

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in the 1700s and 1800s, the new factories of the Industrial Revolution took a gruesome toll on the underprivileged children of Great Britain, all under the complicit eye of factory overseers, physicians, and government officials:

"Children went to work after their sixth birthday. The Industrial Revolution did not invent child labor, but it did expand and systematize the exploitation of the very young. The reign of George III saw a rising trade in orphans and pauper children, collected from the parish workhouses of London and Birmingham, who were shipped off in thousands to the new industrial centers of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lancashire. One London child-slave, Robert Blincoe, who was placed in the St. Pancras Workhouse in 1796 at the age of four and sent off with eighty other abandoned children to the Lambert cotton mill outside Nottingham, gave testimony to a Parliamentary committee on child labor some forty years later:

Q. Do you have any children? -- Three.

Q. Do you send them to factories? -- No; I would rather have them transported. ... I have seen the time when two hand-vices of a pound weight each, more or less, have been screwed to my ears, at Lytton mill in Derbyshire. These are the scars still remaining behind my ears. Then three or four of us have been hung at once on a cross-beam above the machinery, hanging by our hands, without shirts or stockings. Then we used to stand up, in a skip, without our shirts, and be beaten with straps or sticks; the skip was to prevent us from running away from the straps. . . . Then they used to tie up a 28-pounds weight, one or two at once, according to our size, to hang down our backs, with no shirt on.

"Doctors tended to side with their class allies, the factory-owners, and went on record again and again with their considered opinions that cotton lint, coal dust and phosphorus were harmless to the human lung, that fifteen hours at a machine in a room temperature of 85 degrees did not cause fatigue, that ten-year-olds could work a full night shift without risk of harm. Employers, naturally, resisted the very thought of reform. Some of them were cultivated men like Josiah Wedgwood, uncle to Charles Darwin and heir to his father's great pottery in Staffordshire, who employed 387 people -- 13 under ten years old, 103 between ten and eighteen -- in such work as dipping ware in a glaze partly composed of lead oxide, a deadly poison which, as he admitted, made them 'very subject to disease,' though no more so than plumbers or painters. Yet 'I have a strong opinion,' Wedgwood told the Peel Committee in 1816, 'that, from all I know at present of manufactories in general, and certainly from all I know of my own, we had better be left alone.'

"Of all the testimony offered to the Royal Commissions on factory labor, there is perhaps none more chilling than the evidence of Joseph Badder, a children's overseer in a Leicester mill, to the Factory Commission of 1833. It has a prophetic ring: Here, the factory-induced dystopic visions of man as automaton that would run from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) are made pitiably concrete:

'I used to beat them. ... I told them I was very sorry after I had done it, but I was forced to it. The masters expected me to do my work, and I could not do mine unless the children did theirs. Then I used to joke with them to keep up their spirits.

I have seen them fall asleep, and they have been performing their work with their hands until they were asleep, after the billy [yarning machine] had stopped, when their work was over. I have stopped and looked at them for two minutes, going through the motions of piecening [joining threads in spinning] fast asleep, when there was really no work to do, and when they were really doing nothing.' "

delanceyplace.com 4/16/13 - why popeye eats spinach

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in 1870, a German chemist made an error in transcribing the data on how much iron was in spinach, providing a lesson in the spread and persistence of erroneous information in society:

"One of the strangest examples of the spread of error is related to Popeye the Sailor. Popeye, with his odd accent and improbable forearms, used spinach to great effect, a sort of anti-Kryptonite. It gave him his strength, and perhaps his distinctive speaking style. But why did Popeye eat so much spinach? What was the reason for his obsession with such a strange food?

"The truth begins more than fifty years earlier. Back in 1870, Erich von Wolf, a German chemist, examined the amount of iron within spinach, among many other green vegetables. In recording his findings, von Wolf accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook, changing the iron content in spinach by an order of magnitude. While there are actually only 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100-gram serving of spinach, the accepted fact became 35 milligrams. To put this in perspective, if the calculation were correct each 100-gram serving would be like eating a small piece of a paper clip.

"Once this incorrect number was printed, spinach's nutritional value became legendary. So when Popeye was created, studio executives recommended he eat spinach for his strength, due to its vaunted health properties. Apparently Popeye helped increase American consumption of spinach by a third!

"This error was eventually corrected in 1937, when someone rechecked the numbers. But the damage had been done. It spread and spread, and only recently has gone by the wayside, no doubt helped by Popeye's relative obscurity today. But the error was so widespread that the British Medical Journal published an article discussing this spinach incident in 1981, trying its best to finally debunk the issue.

"Ultimately, the reason these [types of] errors spread is because it's a lot easier to spread the first thing you find, or the fact that sounds correct, than to delve deeply into the literature in search of the correct fact."

delanceyplace.com 4/15/13 - america in 1889: uncouth and for sale

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- when famed British author Rudyard Kipling first traveled to America in 1889, he landed in San Francisco and soon concluded that Americans were vulgar and uncouth. And with Britain having not yet transitioned to a democratic government, he examined American democracy and found it a sham -- with the city instead under the thumb of corrupt local political party bosses. (However, the longer he stayed, the more admiration he developed for Americans):

"[Kipling] decided more or less on landing that San Francisco and its inhabitants, however exciting in some respects, were essentially uncouth and provincial. 'They spit even as in the time of Dickens,' he told Aunt Georgie after three days, 'and their speech is not sweet to listen to -- 'specially the women's.' In his [writings], he transformed the spittoon into an icon of local vulgarity:

In a vast marble-paved hall under the glare of an electric light sat forty or fifty men; and for their use and amusement were provided spittoons of infinite capacity and generous gape. Most of the men wore frock-coats and top-hats, -- the things that we in [British] India put on at a wedding breakfast if we possessed them, -- but they all spat. They spat on principle. The spittoons were on the staircases, in each bedroom -- yea, and in chambers even more sacred than these. They chased one into retirement, but they blossomed in chiefest splendour round the Bar, and they were all used, every reeking one of 'em.

"Nor were San Franciscans much more prepossessing when they used their mouths to speak:

They delude themselves into the belief that they talk English, -- the English -- and I have already been pitied for speaking with 'an English accent.' The man who pitied me spoke, so far as I was concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do ... Again and again I loitered at the heels of a couple of resplendent beings, only to overhear, when I expected the level voice of culture, the staccato 'Sez he', 'Sez I,' that is the mark of the white servant-girl all the world over.

"[Kipling] even claimed that 'the American has no language', that instead 'he is dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth'. ...

"No sooner had he stepped off the boat [in San Francisco] than he witnessed the stabbing of a Chinaman. A sortie to a gambling den in Chinatown produced a dead Mexican, shot before his eyes over a poker game. In another equally unverifiable episode, a 'bunco-steerer' (card-sharp) tried -- unsuccessfully of course -- to get him drunk and fleece him." ...

"There was also his predictable refusal to be deceived by the 'freedom' of American democracy, which he presented as merely a sham, sustained by corruption and self-interest. The two political parties were equally beneath contempt: 'Sometimes he [the Democrat] says one thing and sometimes another, in order to contradict the Republican, who is always contradicting himself.' And, at his most aggressively English, [Kipling] poured scorn on the way the democratic process was perpetually at the mercy of the largest cheque-book:

Boss Buckley, by tact and deep knowledge of the seamy side of the city, won himself a following of voters. He sought no office himself, or rarely: but as his following increased he sold their services to the highest bidder, himself taking toll of the revenues of every office. He controlled the Democratic party in the city of San Francisco. The people appoint their own judges. Boss Buckley's people appointed judges. These judges naturally were Boss Buckley's property. "

delanceyplace.com 4/12/13 - the horrors of the congo

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in one of the greatest atrocities of the modern era, Belgian King Leopold II was responsible for the deaths from 1885 to 1908 of ten million Africans in the lands surrounding the Congo River. Determined to acquire a colony from which to extract personal riches, the king had used famed explorer Henry Stanley to trick village chieftains into selling their lands to him for token compensation. To the world, he presented a face of benevolence regarding the colony, professing himself to be anti-slavery and his mission to be charitable. In fact, his personal army forced millions of Africans into de facto slavery to amass a personal fortune from elephant tusks and rubber plants. It was King Leopold's Congo that served as the subject for Joseph Conrad's famed novel Heart of Darkness. Two individuals who were among the earliest to begin reporting the horrors of the colony back to the western world were George Washington Williams and William Sheppard. In enforcing the Africans to work, King Leopold's soldiers often had to shoot those who would not cooperate. To get credit for these actions, as well as to help prevent the waste of ammunition, these soldiers had to show the hands of those they had killed:

"[In his Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, Williams reported that in acquiring lands for King Leopold, Henry] Stanley and his white assistants had used a variety of tricks, such as fooling Africans into thinking that whites had supernatural powers, to get Congo chiefs to sign their land over to Leopold. For example: 'A number of electric batteries had been purchased in London, and when attached to the arm under the coat, communicated with a band of ribbon which passed over the palm of the white brother's hand, and when he gave the black brother a cordial grasp of the hand the black brother was greatly surprised to find his white brother so strong, that he nearly knocked him off his feet. . . . When the native inquired about the disparity of strength between himself and his white brother, he was told that the white man could pull up trees and perform the most prodigious feats of strength.' Another trick was to use a magnifying glass to light a cigar, after which 'the white man explained his intimate relation to the sun, and declared that if he were to request him to burn up his black brother's village it would be done.' In another ruse, a white man would ostentatiously load a gun but covertly slip the bullet up his sleeve. He would then hand the gun to a black chief, step off a distance, and ask the chief to take aim and shoot; the white man, unharmed, would bend over and retrieve the bullet from his shoe. 'By such means . . . and a few boxes of gin, whole villages have been signed away to your Majesty.' Land purchased in this way, Williams wrote, was 'territory to which your Majesty has no more legal claim, than I have to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian army.' ...

" 'Your Majesty's Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offenses, to the chain gang. . . . Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound.' Leopold's claim that his new state was providing wise government and public services was a fraud. There were no schools and no hospitals except for a few sheds 'not fit to be occupied by a horse.' ...

"White traders and state officials were kidnapping African women and using them as concubines.

"White officers were shooting villagers, sometimes to capture their women, sometimes to intimidate the survivors into working as forced laborers, and sometimes for sport. 'Two Belgian Army officers saw, from the deck of their steamer, a native in a canoe some distance away. . . . The officers made a wager of £5 that they could hit the native with their rifles. Three shots were fired and the native fell dead, pierced through the head.'

"Instead of Leopold's being the noble antislavery crusader he portrayed himself as, 'Your Majesty's Government is engaged in the slave-trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. Your Majesty's Government gives £3 per head for able-bodied slaves for military service. . . . The labour force at the stations of your Majesty's Government in the Upper River is composed of slaves of all ages and both sexes.' ...

"In 1899 the reluctant [William] Sheppard was ordered by his superiors to travel into the [Congo] bush, at some risk to himself, to investigate the source of the fighting. There he found bloodstained ground, destroyed villages, and many bodies; the air was thick with the stench of rotting flesh. On the day he reached the marauders' camp, his eye was caught by a large number of objects being smoked. The chief 'conducted us to a framework of sticks, under which was burning a slow fire, and there they were, the right hands, I counted them, 81 in all.' The chief told Sheppard, 'See! Here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the State how many we have killed.' He proudly showed Sheppard some of the bodies the hands had come from. The smoking preserved the hands in the hot, moist climate, for it might be days or weeks before the chief could display them to the proper official and receive credit for his kills.

"Sheppard had stumbled on one of the most grisly aspects of Leopold's rubber system. ... If a village refused to submit to the [forced work of harvesting rubber], state or company troops or their allies sometimes shot everyone in sight, so that nearby villages would get the message. But on such occasions some European officers were mistrustful. For each cartridge issued to their soldiers they demanded proof that the bullet had been used to kill someone, not 'wasted' in hunting or, worse yet, saved for possible use in a mutiny. The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. 'Sometimes,' said one officer to a missionary, soldiers 'shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man.' In some military units there was even a 'keeper of the hands'; his job was the smoking."

delanceyplace.com 4/11/13 - the greatest real estate deal in history

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's encore selection -- very early in its national life, the United States had the opportunity to purchase a vast tract of land from Napoleon and France. Some consider it the greatest real estate deal in history. However, the U.S. didn't have the funds -- the price was $15 million and the U.S. still had $82 million in unpaid war debts -- and Napoleon needed to be paid in cash for his war with Britain. Amazingly, it was a British banker, Alexander Baring, who raised the funds for America to pay for the land -- thus strengthening both Britain's archenemy Napoleon and Britain's emerging competitor and ex-colony, America:

"The second budget shock [for the U.S. after the expenditures needed to fight the Barbary pirates] was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, probably the greatest real estate deal in history. Great for the U.S., that is, which doubled its size for a mere $15 million, about 4 cents an acre. Overnight, the upstart nation acquired land physically larger than France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, and the British Isles combined. Crowning the vast territory was the magnificent port city of New Orleans, which gave western farmers a much-needed water outlet to world markets. The country could now grow westward without fear that trans-Appalachian states would secede to gain cheap access to the sea.

"Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory because he was waging war with Britain and was strapped for cash. He wrongly believed the area a wasteland and hence strongly preferred to retain instead the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which occupied the western half of the island of Hispaniola (the eastern half being the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo). Saint-Domingue boasted a population of 500,000 and plantations of sugar cane, indigo, coffee, and cocoa rich enough to fill 700 ships a year. The French then promptly lost the colony when, in 1804, a successful revolution by black slaves led to the independence of the new nation of Haiti.

"Jefferson was not certain, however, that the purchase was Constitutional. Recall that Jefferson interpreted the Constitution strictly, or at least publicly purported to do so. The Constitution made no specific provision for purchasing new territory, so Jefferson was inclined to believe that a Constitutional amendment might have to be passed before the nation could take title to the territory. Madison and most other cabinet members were inclined to agree. [Secretary of the Treasury Albert] Gallatin, however, took a page from Hamilton and persuaded the president and the cabinet that the Constitution contained certain implied powers, including the inherent right to acquire territory. The movement to begin the lengthy process of amending the Constitution was dropped, and Congress quickly approved the purchase.

A government map, probably created in the mid-20th
century, that depicts a simplified history of territorial
acquisitions within the continental United States.

"Hamilton cast an even larger shadow over the proceedings because the Republicans were about to start borrowing. To pay the purchase price and acquire good title, Gallatin had to pay Napoleon the full price in cash up front. As a distressed dictator desperate for cash, the little Corsican was not about to 'hold the mortgage.' And Gallatin had on hand only about one quarter of the cash needed to make the purchase. He therefore floated a bond issue through the Dutch banking house of Hope and Company, which promptly sold it to Baring Brothers, a British investment bank. Alexander Baring worked closely with Gallatin for five months in Washington to finalize the details. Although the two financiers formed a friendship, the price tag of the bond issue bothered Gallatin. He realized, however, that the port of New Orleans would increase federal revenues some $200,000 a year. Moreover, Gallatin and other Republicans must have savored the irony of British investors lending money to vastly increase the power of their former colonies and to replenish the coffers of Britain's arch enemy, Napoleon Bonaparte."

delanceyplace.com 4/10/13 - how to win the lottery

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- though the average person is more likely to drop dead within one hour of purchasing a lottery ticket than to win the lottery, here are two strategies for you to consider:

"The UK National Lottery has a simple structure. You pay £1 to select six different numbers from the list 1, 2, 3, . . . , 48, 49. You win a prize if at least three of the numbers on your ticket match those on six different balls selected by a machine that is designed to make random choices from the 49 numbered balls. Once drawn, the balls are not returned to the machine. The more numbers you match, the bigger the prize you win. Match all six and you will share the jackpot with any others who also share the same six matching numbers. In addition to the six drawn balls, an extra one is drawn and called the 'Bonus Ball'. This affects only those players who have matched five of the six numbers already drawn. If they also match the Bonus Ball then they get a larger prize than those who matched only the other five numbers.

"What are your chances of picking six numbers from the 49 possibilities correctly, assuming that the machine picks winning numbers at random? The drawing of each ball is an independent event that has no effect on the next drawing, aside from reducing the number of balls to be chosen from. The chance of getting the first of the 6 winning numbers from the 49 is therefore just the fraction 6/49. The chance of picking the next of the remaining 5 from the 48 balls that remain is 5/48. The chance of picking the next of the remaining 4 from the 47 balls that remain is 4/47. And so on, the remaining three probabilities being 3/46, 2/45 and 1 /44. So the probability that you pick them all independently and share the jackpot is:

6/49 X 5/48 x 4/47 x 3/46 x 2/45 X 1/44 = 720/10068347520

"If you divide this out you get the odds as 1 in 13,983,816 -- that's about one chance in 13.9 million. If you want to match 5 numbers plus the Bonus Ball, then the odds are 6 times smaller, and your chance of sharing the prize is 1 in 13,983,816/6 or 1 in 2,330,636.

Let's take the collection of all the possible draws -- all 13,983,816 of them -- and ask how many of them will result in 5, or 4, or 3, or 2, or 1, or zero numbers being chosen correctly. There are just 258 of them that get 5 numbers correct, but 6 of them win the Bonus Ball prize, so that leaves 252; 13,545 of them get 4 balls correct, 246,820 of them that get 3 balls correct, 1,851,150 of them that get 2 balls correct, 5,775,588 of them get just 1 ball correct, and 6,096,454 of them get none of them correct. So to get the odds for you to get, say, 5 numbers correct you just divide the number of ways it can happen by the total number of possible combinations, i.e. 252/13,983,816, which means odds of 1 in 55,491 if you buy one lottery ticket. For matching 4 balls the odds are 1 in 1,032; for matching 3 balls they are 1 in 57. The number of the 13,983,816 outcomes that win a prize is 1 + 258 + 13,545 + 246,820 = 260,624 and so the odds of winning any prize when you buy a single ticket are 1 in 13,983,816/260,624, that is about 1 in 54. Buy a ticket a week with an extra one on your birthday and at Christmas and you have an evens chance of winning something.

"This arithmetic is not very encouraging. Statistician John Haigh points out that the average person is more likely to drop dead within one hour of purchasing a ticket than to win the jackpot. Although it is true that if you don't buy a ticket you will certainly not win, what if you buy lots of tickets?

"The only way to be sure of winning a lottery is to buy all the tickets. There have been several attempts to use such a strategy in different lotteries around the world. If no jackpot is won in the draw, then usually the unwon prize is rolled over to the following week to create a super-jackpot. In such situations it might be attractive to try to buy almost all the tickets. This is quite legal! The Virginia State Lottery in the USA is like the UK Lottery except the six winning numbers are chosen from only 44 balls, so there are 7,059,052 possible outcomes. When the jackpot had rolled over to $27 million, Australian gambler Peter Mandral set in operation a well-oiled ticket buying and printing operation that managed to buy 90% of the tickets (a failure by some of his team was responsible for the worrying gap of 10%). He won the rollover jackpot and went home with a healthy profit on his $10 million outlay on tickets and payments to his ticket-buying 'workers'."

delanceyplace.com 4/9/13 - a vast colony of criminals

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- in 1787, fresh in the wake of losing their American colonies, the British started a colony of another sort. In a social experiment grotesque in its purpose and scale, the British shipped over 160,000 criminals -- including men, women and children -- as far out of sight as possible, to an largely uncharted outpost on the other side of the world:

"In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia. Never had a colony been founded so far from its parent state, or in such ignorance of the land it occupied. There had been no reconnaissance. In 1770 Captain James Cook had made landfall on the unexplored east coast of this utterly enigmatic continent, stopped for a short while at a place named Botany Bay and gone north again. Since then, no ship had called: not a word, not an observation, for seventeen years, each one of which was exactly like the thousands that had preceded it, locked in its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers.

Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770.

"Now this coast was to witness a new colonial experiment, never tried before, not repeated since. An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very air and sea, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.

"The late eighteenth century abounded in schemes of social goodness thrown off by its burgeoning sense of revolution. But here, the process was to be reversed: not Utopia, but Dystopia; not Rousseau's natural man moving in moral grace amid free social contracts, but man coerced, exiled, deracinated, in chains. Other parts of the Pacific, especially Tahiti, might seem to confirm Rousseau. But the intellectual patrons of Australia, in its first colonial years, were Hobbes and Sade.

"In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that it would eventually swallow a whole class -- the 'criminal class,' whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the 'criminal class' but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnameable. Jeremy Bentham, inveighing against the 'thief-colony' in 1812, argued that transportation:

was indeed a measure of experiment . . . but the subject-matter of experiment was, in this case, a peculiarly commodious one; a set of animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected, and accordingly was projected -- projected, and as it should seem purposely -- as far out of sight as possible.

"To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a mutant society but another planet -- an exiled world, summed up in its popular name, 'Botany Bay.' It was remote and anomalous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind. There was as yet no such thing as 'Australian' history or culture. For its first forty years, everything that happened in the thief-colony was English. In the whole period of convict transportation, the Crown shipped more than 160,000 men, women and children (due to defects in the records, the true number will never be precisely known) in bondage to Australia. This was the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history. Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century's vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a birth, and its pangs may be said to have begun on the afternoon of January 26, 1788, when a fleet of eleven vessels carrying 1,030 people, including 548 male and 188 female convicts, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip in his flagship Sirius, entered Port Jackson or, as it would presently be called, Sydney Harbor."

delanceyplace.com 4/8/13 - nice scientific guys finish first

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 03:30:00 -0400

In today's selection -- the influence of a scientist can be measured by the number of times their research work is cited. Nobel prize winners are more likely to give the spotlight for research to others:

"We can ... understand the impact of [scientific research] papers and the results within them by measuring how many other publications cite them. The more important a work is, the more likely it is to be referenced in many other papers, implying that it has had a certain foundational impact on the work that comes after it. While this is certainly an imperfect measure -- you can cite a paper even if you disagree with it -- much of the field of scientometrics is devoted to understanding the relationship between citations, scientific impact, and the importance of different scientists.

"Using this sort of approach, scientometrics can even determine what types of teams yield research that has the highest impact. For example, a group of researchers at Northwestern University found that high-impact results are more likely to come from collaborative teams rather than from a single scientist. In other words, the days of the lone hero scientist, along the lines of an Einstein, are vanishing, and you can measure it.

"Citations can also be used as building blocks for other metrics. By examining the average number of times articles in a given journal are cited, we can get what is known as the impact factor. This is widely used and carefully considered: Scientists want their papers to be published in journals with high impact factors, as it is good both for their research and influences decisions such as funding and tenure. The journals with the highest impact factors have even penetrated the public consciousness -- no doubt due to the highly cited individual papers within them -- and include the general science publications such as Nature and Science, as well as high-profile medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Scientometrics has even given bragging tools to scientists, such as the h-index, which measures the impact of a paper on other researchers. It was created by Jorge Hirsch (and named after himself; notice the h) and essentially counts the number of articles a scientist has published that have been cited at least that many times. If you have an h-index value of 45, it means that you have forty-five articles that have each been cited at least forty-five times (though you have likely published many more articles that have been cited fewer times). It also has the side benefit of meaning that you are statistically more likely to be a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious U.S. scientific organization. ...

"Scientometrics can demonstrate the relationship between money and research output. The National Science Foundation has examined how much money a university spends relative to how many articles its scientists publish. Other studies have looked at how age is related to science. For example, over the past decades, the age at which scientists receive grants from the National Institutes of Health has increased, causing a certain amount of concern among younger scientists.

"There's even research that examines how being a mensch is related to scientific productivity. For example, in the 1960s, Harriet Zuckerman, a sociologist of science -- someone who studies the interactions and people underlying the entire scientific venture -- decided to study the scientific output of Nobel laureates to see if any patterns could be seen in how they work that might distinguish them from their less successful peers. One striking finding was the beneficence of Nobel laureates ... or as Zuckerman termed it, noblesse oblige. In general, when a scientific paper is published, the author who did the most is listed first. There are exceptions to this, and this can vary from field to field, but Zuckerman took it as a useful rule of thumb. What she found was that Nobel laureates are first authors of numerous publications early in their careers, but quickly begin to give their junior colleagues first authorship. And this happens far before they receive the Nobel Prize.

"As one generous Nobel laureate in chemistry put it: 'It helps a young man to be senior author, first author, and doesn't detract from the credit that I get if my name is farther down the list.' On the other hand, those peers of Nobel laureates who were not as successful tried to maintain first authorship for themselves far more often, garnering more glory for themselves. By their forties, Nobel laureates are first authors on only 26 percent of their papers, as compared to their less accomplished contemporaries, who are first authors 56 percent of the time. Nicer people are indeed more creative, more successful, and even more likely to win Nobel prizes."