1. John Snow’s Cholera Map

When over 500 people died of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London in 1854, John Snow mapped and identified patterns in the outbreak, clustered around the public water pump on Broad Street. This provided the evidence needed to affirm that the disease was spread through contaminated water, and not through the air, as many had thought. Read more at: 1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak on Wikipedia.

2. London Street Gangs

According to the London Street Gangs website, over 15,000 people in Greater London belong to one of 200+ gangs. This excellent community-based website offers a huge amount of research and news, including maps of claimed territories.

3. Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps

When the claim was made in the late 1800s that 25% of Londoners lived in abject poverty, Charles Booth criticised the figure as an exaggeration. He set out to study the truth, investigating a wide range of social indicators and often living with working-class families for weeks at a time. His team of investigators also included Beatrice Potter, who would later found the London School of Economics and New Statesman magazine.

Booth and his team found that the number had actually been under-estimated, and as much as 35% of all Londoners lived in poverty.

The classification system used on the maps is interesting in itself, for the lack of modern political correctness in the wording: for the lowest class, ‘semi-criminal’, “their only luxury is drink”, whereas the middle-class are blessed with “much intelligence”.

4. Wenceslaus Hollar’s Survey of the Great Fire of London

In 1666, the Great Fire of London ravaged 436 acres and over 13,000 homes. After the fire, the king directed Wenceslaus Holler to survey the extent of the damage. Within months, and with the help of a team of surveyors, the plans were drawn in March 1667.

5. The Modern Plague of London: Pubs!

Who better to publish a handy map of Victorian London public houses than the Temperance Society! This 1886 map borrows from John Snow’s earlier work on mapping cholera in an attempt to depict alcohol as a spreading disease.

The map also has a connection to Charles Booth: one of his team later updated the map, and was told by a policeman that, “in the interests of sobriety there should be a greater number [of pubs] than there are. For he said you get drunkenness rows where there was a crowd.”

The thesis of the article Handwriting is History by Anne Trubek seems so obvious, but yet it’s something that I’d never considered before, despite that 99.9% of the writing I do is on my computer. Growing up and moving through the education system, a huge emphasis was always placed on the ability to write by hand – not just spelling, grammar and general proficiency in language, but actually the ability to draw those characters out by hand as a way of making meaning.

On a recent airport layover, I set out to write a bunch of letters and postcards for people back home. It was painful: my hand, fingers and wrist ached and my penmanship was atrocious. Worst of all, I found myself frustratingly incapable of making the words appear on the paper quickly enough to avoid many of them getting lost somewhere between my brain and the ink as it settled on the paper. I found writing by hand to be wildly inefficient.

Despite this experience, as I read Handwriting is History, I still found it difficult to accept the idea that we may live in a world where writing things out by hand is no longer necessary. What about lovely handwritten notes? What about handwriting as an art form? What about the personality of our handwriting? Surely all those concepts cannot be supplanted by choosing a font in our word processing software? Trubek has alarmingly good answers for most if not all of these questions, mainly rooted in the reality that handwriting is not and has never been about individuality: “when we worry about losing our individuality, we are likely misremembering our schooling, which included rote, rigid lessons in handwriting. We have long been taught the “right” way to form letters.”

Trubek also has solid grounds to conclude that even today we still politicize handwriting and attribute characteristics like intelligence to someone who has a ‘good hand’. She cites a study done at Vanderbilt University called The Handwriting Effect, which found that “teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literacy merit of text based on its overall legibility … when teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship.”

The conclusion of the article is that at its core, writing is about communicating ideas. Doing whatever we can to create a wide space through which our thoughts can flow unencumbered, or as unencumbered as possible, should be our primary concern when choosing a tool. Why then, do we continue to put so much focus on teaching proper handwriting techniques to children in schools when it is quite likely that lovely penmanship is something they will never need?

Thoughts?

Image Credit: Handwriting – free texture by Crafty Dogma

In addition to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the heartbreaking story of Henrietta Lacks, the US has recently admitted to and apologized for experimentation they did on prisoners, mental patients and soliders in Guatemala in the 1940s. In addition to using tax dollars to pay infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, officials also did things such as pour “the bacteria onto scrapes made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal puncture.” (source) This activity happened at the same time the US was involved in prosecuting Nazis for committing similar crimes in concentration camps across Europe.

The ‘purpose’ of the study was to look at the effects of penicillin on the disease but although the infected were treated with the drug “whether everyone was cured is not clear”. Perhaps it is no surprise that Doctor John Cutler was behind this study and was also the driving force between the reprehensible Tuskegee Study, which he defended throughout his life.

This continues the seemingly endless dark history of the practice of medical experimentation on human beings, without their consent.

From 1963 to 1966, researchers at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected … children [with disabilities] with hepatitis to test gamma globulin against it. And in 1963, elderly patients at the Brooklyn Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital were injected with live cancer cells to see if they caused tumors. (source)

Further Reading:

• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study: Another Look at Unethical Medicine
• Henrietta Lacks and the Tragic Story of Medical Ethics, Racial Politics and Health Care Reform in America

Image Credit: Syphilitic Diseases by Taberandrew

The last week of September is banned books week in Canada and the US. As in, not a week to ban books or celebrate their banning, but rather one to spend time discovering some of the great titles that have found themselves outlawed and to wonder at a culture that justifies the sometimes active attempt to oppress its own artifacts. In honor of this week, the American Library Association has put together a nifty list of the top ten reasons books have been historically banned (source):

The Top Ten Ludicrous Reasons To Ban A Book

1. “Encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them.” (A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstien)
2. “It caused a wave of rapes.” (Arabian Nights, or One Thousand and One Nights)
3. “If there is a possibility that something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown)
4. “Tarzan was ‘living in sin’ with Jane.” (Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
5. “It is a real ‘downer.’” (Diary of Anne Frank, by Anne Frank)
6. “The basket carried by Little Red Riding Hood contained a bottle of wine, which condones the use of alcohol.” (Little Red Riding Hood, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm K. Grimm)
7. “One bunny is white and the other is black and this ‘brainwashes’ readers into accepting miscegenation.” (The Rabbit’s Wedding, by Garth Williams)
8. “It is a religious book and public funds should not be used to purchase religious books.” (Evangelical Commentary on the Bible, by Walter A. Elwell, ed.)
9. “A female dog is called a bitch.” (My Friend Flicka, by Mary O’Hara)
10. “An unofficial version of the story of Noah’s Ark will confuse children.” (Many Waters, by Madeleine C. L’Engle)

The American Library Association (ALA) also has a great compendium of statistics on the banning of books. Some notable facts include that by far the most common reason for banning a book is because it is considered sexually explicit, and parents are overwhelmingly the initiators of book challenges and bans.

In the last ten years, the top ten banned/challenged books are:

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Myracle, Lauren
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

The top challenged classic books:

1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

The crazy thing is, people still attempt to ban books – regularly. If you live in the US and you know of a book that is being challenged or banned, you can report it on the ALA website. In the meantime, hug a librarian or independent bookseller because without them many of these classic books would no longer be in circulation.

Image Credit: Banned Books Week Banner by DML East Branch

Over the summer Tristan Perich released an album of five compositions called 1-Bit Symphony, housed in a regular CD jewel case.

So far so typical – apart from the fact that there is no CD here or any recording media. The music is generated live from a microchip inside the case and output from a headphone socket also housed on the case.

So 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording as such, but it is a physical artefact which allows you to experience the production of the music live, just for you. I use the word “orchestra” loosely but hey, this is art.

The tunes are also available as digital downloads but it’s not quite the same experience as the physical album package, which costs £23.99 (but has unfortunately sold out at the time of writing).

A microchip mini-orchestra is never going to become the dominant way of distributing music. But, just as quality photography prompted Picasso and other nonrepresentational artists to search for new and exciting areas in visual art, we could see this a creative reaction in physically-distributed music to the dominance of digital files. Fortunately many would concur that the actual music here is very good too.

There are thousands of websites and self-help books dedicated to helping artists (and wanna-be artists) find the inspiration required to become the next great writer, painter, musician …

The Ancient Greeks believed that goddesses (called muses) were the inspiration for most art and went as far as to offer supplication in return for being in their favour. In a recent Ted talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the best-selling travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love, reintroduced this idea when she suggested that some kind of force outside of the the artist is at least partially responsible for the act of creation. As an example, according to Gilbert, Tom Waits was driving on a freeway when a great melody came into his head. He was unable to write it down but was afraid to loose it so he appealed to the muses: “Excuse me. Can you not see I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment …  otherwise go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.” According to Gilbert, at this moment Waits entered into a new relationship with his creativity that was “peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration and conversation between Tom and the strange external genius that was not Tom.” (source)

For those of us who don’t necessarily believe in fairies, muses or an external divinity, a more practical alternative to mystical intervention is that our subconscious minds have the potential to act on our conscious desires and motivations. The New York Times article Who’s Minding the Mind highlights numerous studies that show that “once covertly activated, an unconscious goal persists with the same determination that is evident in our conscious pursuits.” (source)

There are many examples of artists who say that complete or nearly complete masterpieces came to them while they were asleep, including:

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge claims that Kubla Khan came to him in its entirety in an opium induced dream. According to the writer’s own account, when he woke up he began fervently composing line after line of poetry until he was interrupted by a visitor. After returning to the work he struggled to complete the rest of the poem because he could not remember the rest of the lines. Critics on the whole say that Kubla Khan is unlike most of Coleridge’s other work. (source)
• According to his own account, Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream: “For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.” (source)
• The melody for Yesterday, the most covered Beatles song in their entire catalog, came in its entirety to Paul McCartney in a dream. It came to him so completely that for months he was convinced that he’d plagiarized it and would play it for friends and record executives to try to determine its origins before finally accepting it as his own. (source)
• In her introduction to the 1931 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley “revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion.” (source)

Image Credit: An Angel in the Deluge by Ici et Ailleurs

Japanese born Shinya Kimura creates beautiful custom motorcycles. He’s best known for what is referred to as ‘Zero Style’, a concept that can be traced back to the Japaneses aesthetic tradition of wabi sabi:

A Zero-style bike is typically based around a rigid gooseneck, a pre-1984 Harley Davidson engine, springer front end, spoked wheels and often includes parts of the bike remaining in bare metal. The inspiration came from wabi sabi (austere refinement) and the beauty of the raw materials and incorporating the essence of wa (harmony) into his designs. (source)

Something beautiful for your Saturday afternoon.

I recently spent six weeks in Mexico in a small village bordered on one edge by the sea and on the other by a large fresh water mangrove estuary. The natural state of things was intensified by the rainy season, this meant a lot of bugs. The beautiful sea shore was a mine field of sand flies while everywhere else was swarming with bat-size mosquitoes. After six weeks, my skin was a mess of red welts and the scabby remains of bites I’d over scratched.

En route to Canada I spent a few days in Puerto Vallarta in a relatively nice, well-sealed air conditioned hotel. On my second morning there, I woke up with about ten red itchy welts along the outside of one of my legs. Irritated, I shared this information on Facebook and my aunt, who has spent a lot of time traveling in North Africa, informed me that it might be bed bugs and that if we had them, we would surely carry them in our clothing and luggage along with us wherever we went. Immediately, I became obsessed – examining sheets, duvet covers, in between mattresses and within the smaller folds of my clothing and suitcase. Apart from being disgusting, one of the most difficult things about bedbugs is that they are nocturnal, very small and good at hiding; so it’s not easy to determine if you have them.

After that morning, apart from the odd set of bites I could trace to time outside, I didn’t seem to get any additional welts and my bed mate remained mostly bite free; in the absence of a bed bug sniffing dog, I’ve decided that we did not have bed bugs; but not before spending hours on Google reading about them and looking at horrible pictures.

The most interesting thing that I read about the pests is the phenomenon of ‘Post Bed Bug Stress Disorder’, which I can very much relate to though I don’t think mine is a serious case:

Many formerly rational people are waking up in the middle of the night inspecting themselves or their children for bed bug bites. They often feel phantom bed bugs crawling on their bodies while lying in bed. Perhaps the most worrisome are those individuals who are sleeping in ounces of DEET, spearmint oil or other less-friendly concoctions in the hope that bed bugs — real or imagined — will be thwarted from biting them …

These people are suffering from what I like to call PBBSD — Post Bed Bug Stress Disorder — an illness characterized by irritability, sleeplessness, anxiety and bed bug hallucinations. Yes, these people also suffer from the physical effects of bed bug bites, but the bites go away. (source)

In 2008 a former Fox News employee successfully sued the maintenance company at NewsCorp headquarters for post traumatic stress syndrome brought on by a bed bug infestation in the building.

“My client is so acutely injured that she can’t take the subway and she is being seen by a doctor three times a week,” said Mr. Schnurman [the plaintiff's lawyer], who has handled “hundreds” of bedbug cases, most of which have been settled out of court. “She would literally take off all her clothes at the door and put on house clothes before she would even touch her baby. (source)

Oh, and by the way: bed bug infestations are on the rise.

Night, night!

Image: Whose that jumping on the bed?!? by Sappymoosetree

There’s some fascinating trivia about Charlie Chaplin over on IMDB:

• He was born four days before Adolf Hitler, in 1889.
• He had bright blue eyes.
• His understudy in England was Stan Laurel; they sailed to America together and shared a boarding house when they arrived.
• In 1925, he was the first actor to appear on the cover of Time magazine.
• At the height of his popularity, he failed to win a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest.
• His imprints were removed (and subsequently lost) from the Hollywood walk of fame because of his suspected communist views.
• Although Adolf Hitler despised Chaplin, he was aware of his popularity, and grew the Chaplin moustache to endear himself to the people.
• He never became a U.S. citizen.
• He composed about 500 melodies, including Smile.
• The last film he saw, in 1976, was Rocky.
• In 1978, his dead body was stolen for over two months. When it was recovered, it was re-buried in a vault encased in cement.

Credit: Portrait photograph of Charlie Chaplin via Wikimedia.

I like discovering linguistic terms for things that I thought were too trivial to be given an official name.

Eggcorns

An Eggcorn is a special case of a malapropism: a mistaken phrase that retains some of the original meaning. For example, where a malapropism might be the nonsensical, “He is the very pineapple [pinnacle] of politeness“, an eggcorn might be, ”Chickens coming home to roast“.

The term derives from a woman who thought acorns were egg corns.

Mondegreens

A Mondegreen is a mis-construal of a phrase in a song, poem or lyric. The most famous of these is the Jimi Hendrix line, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky“, which is often misheard as, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy“. However, some argue that this particular example is not really a mishearing, as Jimi may have purposefully sung the line to be interpreted both ways.

The Kiss This Guy database has an excellent collection of mondegreens, including the awesome, “Might as well face it, you’re a d**k with a glove” – Addicted to Love, by Robert Palmer.

The term derives from a misheard line in a poem, that was originally, “And laid him on the green“.

(Thanks to Francesco Cetraro for pointing me to the video above, which has some wonderful mondegreens, including “Steven Seagal”, which is always funny, in any context.)

Charactonyms / Aptronyms

An Aptronym is a person’s name that suits them, such as the American football player Chuck Long. Similarly, a Charactonym is the name of a fictional character that describes their personality, such as Mr. Bumble from Oliver Twist, or many of the adult character names from Harry Potter.