The CIA Has Declassified 2,780 Pages of UFO-Related Documents, and They’re Now Free to Download

in Sci Fi, Science | January 14th, 2021

Every­body knows that UFO stands for “uniden­ti­fied fly­ing object.” Coined by the Unit­ed States Air Force in 1953, the term has come to stand for a wide range of phe­nom­e­na that sug­gest we’ve been con­tact­ed by alien civ­i­liza­tions — and in fact has even spawned the field of ufol­o­gy, ded­i­cat­ed to the inves­ti­ga­tion of such phe­nom­e­na. But times change, and with them the approved ter­mi­nol­o­gy. These days the U.S. gov­ern­ment seems to pre­fer the abbre­vi­a­tion UAP, which stands for “uniden­ti­fied aer­i­al phe­nom­e­non.” Those three words may sound more pre­cise­ly descrip­tive, but they also pro­vide some dis­tance from the decades of not entire­ly desir­able cul­tur­al asso­ci­a­tions built up around the con­cept of the UFO.

Yet this is hard­ly a bad time to be a ufol­o­gist. “Buried in the lat­est fed­er­al omnibus spend­ing bill signed into law on Decem­ber 27, 2020 — notable for its inclu­sion of coro­n­avirus relief — is a man­date that may bring UFO watch­ers one step clos­er to find­ing out whether the gov­ern­ment has been watch­ing the skies,” writes Men­tal Floss’ Jake Rossen.

That same site’s Ellen Gutoskey fol­lowed up with an announce­ment that the CIA’s entire col­lec­tion of declas­si­fied UFO doc­u­ments is now avail­able to down­load. You can do so at The Black Vault, a clear­ing house for UFO relat­ed-infor­ma­tion run by ufol­o­gist John Gree­newald Jr. These doc­u­ments come to 2,780 pages in total, the release of which neces­si­tat­ed the fil­ing of more than 10,000 Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act reports.

Samir Fer­dowsi at Vice’s Moth­er­board quotes Gree­newald describ­ing the process as “like pulling teeth,” with results more impres­sive in quan­ti­ty than qual­i­ty. “The CIA has made it INCREDIBLY dif­fi­cult to use their records in a rea­son­able man­ner,” Gree­newals writes. “They offer a for­mat that is very out­dat­ed (mul­ti page .tif) and offer text file out­puts, large­ly unus­able,” all of which “makes it very dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to see the doc­u­ments, and use them, for any research pur­pose.” He’s thus also made avail­able a ver­sion of the CIA’s declas­si­fied UFO doc­u­ments con­vert­ed into 713 PDFs. The Black Vault advis­es down­load­ers to bear in mind that “many of these doc­u­ments are poor­ly pho­to­copied, so the com­put­er can only ‘see’ so much to con­vert for search­ing.”

But even with these dif­fi­cul­ties, UFO enthu­si­asts have already turned up mate­r­i­al of inter­est: “From a dis­pute with a Bosn­ian fugi­tive with alleged E.T. con­tact to mys­te­ri­ous mid­night explo­sions in a small Russ­ian town, the reports def­i­nite­ly take read­ers for a wild ride,” writes Fer­dowsi. “One of the most inter­est­ing doc­u­ments in the drop, Gree­newald said, involved the Assis­tant Deputy Direc­tor for Sci­ence & Tech­nol­o­gy being hand-deliv­ered some piece of infor­ma­tion on a UFO in the 1970s.” This doc­u­ment, like most of the oth­ers, comes with many parts blacked out, but as Gree­newald recent­ly tweet­ed, “I have an open ‘Manda­to­ry Declas­si­fi­ca­tion Review’ request to HOPEFULLY get some of these redac­tions lift­ed, so we can see what was hand deliv­ered, and what his advice may be.” Ufol­o­gy demands a great deal of curios­i­ty, but an even greater deal of patience. Enter the Black Vault here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The CIA Puts Hun­dreds of Declas­si­fied Doc­u­ments About UFO Sight­ings Online, Plus 10 Tips for Inves­ti­gat­ing Fly­ing Saucers

12 Mil­lion Declas­si­fied CIA Doc­u­ments Now Free Online: Secret Tun­nels, UFOs, Psy­chic Exper­i­ments & More

What Do Aliens Look Like? Oxford Astro­bi­ol­o­gists Draw a Pic­ture, Based on Dar­win­ian The­o­ries of Evo­lu­tion

The Appeal of UFO Nar­ra­tives: Inves­tiga­tive Jour­nal­ist Paul Beban Vis­its Pret­ty Much Pop #14

Richard Feyn­man: The Like­li­hood of Fly­ing Saucers

Carl Jung’s Fas­ci­nat­ing 1957 Let­ter on UFOs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Behold an Interactive Online Edition of Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants (1868)

in Books, History, Science | January 8th, 2021

Of all the var­ied objects of cre­ation there is, prob­a­bly, no por­tion that affords so much grat­i­fi­ca­tion and delight to mankind as plants. —Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing

“Who owned nature in the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry?” asks Lon­da Schiebinger in Plants and Empire, a study of what the Stan­ford his­to­ri­an of sci­ence calls “colo­nial bio­prospect­ing in the Atlantic World.” The ques­tion was large­ly decid­ed at the time by “hero­ic voy­ag­ing botanists” and “biopi­rates” who claimed the world’s nat­ur­al resources as their own. The mat­ter was set­tled in the next cou­ple cen­turies by mer­chants like Thomas Twin­ing and his descen­dants, pro­pri­etors of Twin­ings tea. Found­ed as Britain’s first known tea shop in 1706, the com­pa­ny went on to become one of the largest pur­vey­ors of teas grown in the British colonies.

One of Twining’s descen­dants, Eliz­a­beth Twin­ing, car­ried on the lega­cy as what Schiebinger calls one of many “arm­chair nat­u­ral­ists, who coor­di­nat­ed and syn­the­sized col­lect­ing from sinecures in Europe,” a role often tak­en on by women who could not trav­el the world. Twin­ing aimed, how­ev­er, not to cre­ate tax­onomies of the world’s plants but those of her own coun­try in a com­par­a­tive analy­sis.

Her 1868 Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, she wrote in her intro­duc­tion, was “the first work which has thus done due hon­our to our British plants by con­nect­ing with oth­ers, and plac­ing them when­ev­er pos­si­ble at the head of the Order to be illus­trat­ed.”

Twining’s reval­u­a­tion of local British plants was in keep­ing with the reformist spir­it of the age, and she her­self was such a reformer. “Apart from her artis­tic endeav­ors,” writes Nicholas Rougeaux, Twin­ing “was a notable phil­an­thropist,” estab­lish­ing almshous­es and tem­per­ance halls, found­ing “mother’s meet­ings” in Lon­don, and help­ing to found the Bed­ford Col­lege for Women. She was inspired by Curtis’s The Botan­i­cal Mag­a­zine and “she prac­ticed by mak­ing sketch­es from works in the Dul­wich Pic­ture Gallery, and toured famous muse­ums thanks to her father’s patron­age.”

Twin­ing authored and illus­trat­ed sev­er­al botan­i­cal books, “most notably,” Rougeux writes, “the two vol­ume Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants, which includ­ed a total of 160 hand-col­ored lith­o­graphs, roy­al folio, report­ed­ly based on obser­va­tion at the Roy­al Botan­i­cal Gar­dens in Kew and at Lex­den Park in Colch­ester.” Rougeux has done for her work what the design­er pre­vi­ous­ly did for oth­er illus­trat­ed clas­sics of sci­ence and math (see the relat­ed links below): dig­i­tiz­ing the illus­tra­tions and translit­er­at­ing the text into a dig­i­tal for­mat, with hyper­links and shar­ing fea­tures.

Rougeux’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants offers itself as “a com­plete repro­duc­tion and restora­tion… enhanced with inter­ac­tive illus­tra­tions, descrip­tions, and posters fea­tur­ing the illus­tra­tions.” The first two vol­umes of the orig­i­nal book were pub­lished in 1849 and 1855. Rougeux’s online ver­sion of the text is based on the 1868 sec­ond edi­tion “with re-drawn illus­tra­tions based on her orig­i­nals.” (See pages from the text above and below.) Rougeux’s dig­i­tized text is thus two steps removed from Twining’s orig­i­nal illus­tra­tions, but we can see the care and atten­tion she put into clas­si­fy­ing the flo­ra of her native coun­try.

“Twin­ing chose to illus­trate plants using the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem cre­at­ed by Augustin-Pyra­me de Can­dolle based on mul­ti­ple char­ac­ter­is­tics of plants—rather than the more wide­ly used sys­tem by Carl Lin­naeus which was focused on plants’ repro­duc­tive char­ac­ter­is­tics,” notes Rougeux, “because the De Can­dolle sys­tem was new­er and she want­ed her read­ers to be up to date as clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems were evolv­ing.”

Although bio­log­i­cal tax­onomies have changed con­sid­er­ably since her time, Twining’s Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al Orders of Plants remains an intrigu­ing “snap­shot in time” that depicts not only the lat­est ideas about plant clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry but also the atti­tudes a promi­nent mem­ber of the British rul­ing class adopt­ed toward nature as a whole. See Rougeux’s online edi­tion of Twin­ing’s text here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of the Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed, 200-Year-Old British & Exot­ic Min­er­al­o­gy

A Beau­ti­ful­ly-Designed Edi­tion of Euclid’s Ele­ments from 1847 Gets Dig­i­tized: Explore the New Online, Inter­ac­tive Repro­duc­tion

Explore an Inter­ac­tive, Online Ver­sion of Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours, a 200-Year-Old Guide to the Col­ors of the Nat­ur­al World

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

in Film, History, Science | December 29th, 2020

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“You do not real­ly under­stand some­thing unless you can explain it to your grand­moth­er,” goes a well-known quote attrib­uted var­i­ous­ly to Albert Ein­stein, Richard Feyn­man, and Ernest Ruther­ford. No mat­ter who said it, “the sen­ti­ment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lav­ery, “for researchers in all dis­ci­plines from par­ti­cle physics to ecopsy­chol­o­gy.” As Feyn­man dis­cov­ered dur­ing his many years of teach­ing, it could be “the mot­to of all pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tors,” The Guardian’s Rus­sell Gross­man writes, “and espe­cial­ly those who earn a liv­ing com­mu­ni­cat­ing the tricky busi­ness of sci­ence.”

Ein­stein became one of the world’s great sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tors by choice, not neces­si­ty, and found ways to explain his com­plex the­o­ries to chil­dren and the elder­ly alike. But per­haps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoid­ed words alto­geth­er, and pre­ferred acro­bat­ic feats of silent dar­ing to get his mes­sage across. We might at least con­clude so from his rev­er­ence for the work of Char­lie Chap­lin. Chap­lin was the only per­son Ein­stein want­ed to meet in Cal­i­for­nia dur­ing his sec­ond, 1930–31 vis­it to the U.S., when he was “at the height of his fame,” notes Claire Cock-Starkey at Men­tal Floss, “with news­pa­pers track­ing his every move and aca­d­e­mics clam­or­ing for expla­na­tions of his the­o­ries.”

The admi­ra­tion, of course, was mutu­al. Their first meet­ings hap­pened out­side the press’s scruti­ny, at Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios, “where the pair took a tour and had lunch togeth­er. They hit it off straight away, shar­ing quick wits and curi­ous minds.” In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Chap­lin writes that Einstein’s wife Elsa fina­gled an invi­ta­tion to din­ner at Chaplin’s house. And he “was only too hap­py to oblige,” Cock-Starkey writes, arrang­ing an “inti­mate din­ner, at which Elsa regaled him with the sto­ry of when Ein­stein came up with his world-chang­ing the­o­ry, some­time around 1915.”

The two con­tin­ued to cor­re­spond, and the big pub­lic unveil­ing of their friend­ship came when Chap­lin invit­ed Ein­stein to the pre­mier of City Lights in 1931 (see pho­to up top) where the mega-celebri­ties from very dif­fer­ent worlds were greet­ed by reporters, pho­tog­ra­phers, and ador­ing crowds. There are sev­er­al record­ed ver­sions of their con­ver­sa­tion. In one account, Ein­stein expressed bemuse­ment at the cheer­ing, and Chap­lin remarked, “the peo­ple applaud me because every­one under­stands me, and they applaud you because no one under­stands you.”

Chap­lin him­self wrote in his 1933–34 trav­el­ogue, A Come­di­an Sees the World, that one of Einstein’s sons uttered the line, weeks after­ward: “You are pop­u­lar [because] you are under­stood by the mass­es. On the oth­er hand, the professor’s pop­u­lar­i­ty with the mass­es is because he is not under­stood.” Yet anoth­er ver­sion, cir­cu­lat­ing on the Nobel Prize’s Insta­gram and col­lect­ing tens of thou­sands of likes, has the exchange take place in a dia­logue.

Ein­stein: “What I most admire about your art, is your uni­ver­sal­i­ty. You don’t say a word, yet the world under­stands you!”

Chap­lin: “True. But your glo­ry is even greater! The whole world admires you, even though they don’t under­stand a word of what you say.”

What­ev­er they real­ly said to each oth­er, it’s clear Ein­stein saw some­thing in Char­lie Chap­lin worth emu­lat­ing. Chap­lin left his mark on Exis­ten­tial­ist phi­los­o­phy, lend­ing the name of his film Mod­ern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s influ­en­tial jour­nal, Les Temps Mod­ernes. He left a lega­cy on Beat poet­ry, lend­ing the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s infa­mous San Fran­cis­co book­store and pub­lish­er. And it seems he also maybe had some small effect on physics, or on the most famous of physi­cists, who might have har­bored a secret ambi­tion to be a silent film comedian—or to com­mu­ni­cate, at least, with the uni­ver­sal effec­tive­ness of one as skilled as Char­lie Chap­lin, favorite of genius­es and grand­moth­ers (and genius grand­moth­ers) every­where.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Einstein’s The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty Explained in One of the Ear­li­est Sci­ence Films Ever Made (1923)

Hear Albert Ein­stein Read “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” (1941)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Do Vaccines (Including the COVID-19 Vaccines) Work?: Watch Animated Introductions

in Current Affairs, Health, Science | December 18th, 2020

The oth­er day, I found myself read­ing about what life is like in coun­tries that have suc­cess­ful­ly min­i­mized the pan­dem­ic: wor­ry free hol­i­days, meet­ing friends and fam­i­ly with­out the dan­ger of infec­tion, a gen­er­al air of nor­mal­cy thanks to a com­bi­na­tion of rig­or­ous pub­lic health efforts and pub­lic coop­er­a­tion. I live in the U.S., where the polit­i­cal par­ty cur­rent­ly in pow­er (and des­per­ate to keep it) con­vinced mil­lions of my fel­low cit­i­zens that the virus was a hoax, a scam, a polit­i­cal ploy. The real­i­ty of a virus-free exis­tence seems like a fairy tale.

But per­haps, after a year of death, suf­fer­ing, and luna­cy, we will begin to see the tide turn once enough peo­ple get vac­ci­nat­ed…  if we can over­come the mas­sive wave of anti-sci­ence bias and dis­in­for­ma­tion about vac­cines…. “The anti-vac­ci­na­tion move­ment is going to make Covid-19 more dif­fi­cult to get under con­trol,” says Scott Ratzan, dis­tin­guished lec­tur­er at the CUNY Grad­u­ate School of Pub­lic Health and Health Pol­i­cy.

Long before the vac­cine arrived, Kather­ine O’Brien, a direc­tor at WHO, not­ed there was already a promi­nent “anti-vac­ci­na­tion voice” on social media. “We have to take this seri­ous­ly,” she told The BMJ. “Vac­ci­na­tion isn’t just an indi­vid­ual choice; it pro­tects those who can’t be vac­ci­nat­ed.” We’ve seen the term “herd immu­ni­ty”  mis­used a lot late­ly. What it essen­tial­ly means is that a small num­ber of peo­ple can be shield­ed from the virus if the vast major­i­ty get vac­ci­nat­ed. Or as WHO puts it, “herd immu­ni­ty is achieved by pro­tect­ing peo­ple from a virus, not by expos­ing them to it.”

All of this means there will like­ly nev­er be a more crit­i­cal moment to edu­cate our­selves and oth­ers on the sci­ence of vac­cines. We may not sway those faith­ful to a cer­tain nar­ra­tive, but it can help shift the con­ver­sa­tion from fears of the unknown to the long his­to­ry of the known when it comes to erad­i­cat­ing high­ly infec­tious, dead­ly dis­eases. A great way to start is with the basics, which you’ll find in the videos above from TED-Ed, Mech­a­nisms of Med­i­cine, and PBS. Watch them your­self, share them on social media, and keep the con­ver­sa­tion about vac­cines’ effi­ca­cy going.

In the TED-Ed les­son just above, we learn some more spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion about the key phas­es of devel­op­ing a new vac­cine: explorato­ry research, clin­i­cal test­ing, and man­u­fac­tur­ing. You’ll find much more detailed infor­ma­tion on the his­to­ry of vac­cines, spu­ri­ous anti-vac­ci­na­tion claims, and the coro­n­avirus vac­cines now on the mar­ket and cur­rent­ly ship­ping around the world, at the award-win­ning site, The His­to­ry of Vac­cines, from the Col­lege of Physi­cians of Philadel­phia.

The COVID-19 vac­cine is a spe­cial kind of vac­cine (mRNA) that works dif­fer­ent­ly from most, and you can learn about how it works here. A quick primer on herd immu­ni­ty appears at the bot­tom.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Does the Unit­ed States’ Coro­n­avirus Response Look Like Abroad?: Watch the Rest of the World Stare Aghast at Our Han­dling of COVID-19

Inter­ac­tive Web Site Tracks the Glob­al Spread of the Coro­n­avirus: Cre­at­ed and Sup­port­ed by Johns Hop­kins

19th Cen­tu­ry Maps Visu­al­ize Measles in Amer­i­ca Before the Mir­a­cle of Vac­cines

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Map of Doom: A Data-Driven Visualization of the Biggest Threats to Humanity, Ranked from Likely to Unlikely

in Data, Life, Science | December 9th, 2020

Sure­ly you’ve learned, as I have, to fil­ter out the con­stant threats of doom. It’s impos­si­ble to func­tion on high alert all of the time. But one must stay at least min­i­mal­ly informed. To check the news even once a day is to encounter head­line after head­line announc­ing DOOM IS COMING! Say that we’re all desen­si­tized, and rather than react, we eval­u­ate: In what way will doom arrive? How bad will the doom be? There are many com­pet­ing the­o­ries of doom. Which one is most like­ly, and how can we under­stand them in rela­tion to each oth­er?

For this lev­el of analy­sis, we might turn to Dominic Wal­li­man, physi­cist and pro­pri­etor of Domain of Sci­ence, the YouTube chan­nel and web­site that has brought us enter­tain­ing and com­pre­hen­sive maps of sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic fields, such as biol­o­gy, chem­istry, math­e­mat­ics, com­put­er sci­ence, and quan­tum physics. Is rank­ing apoc­a­lypses a sci­en­tif­ic field of study, you might won­der? Yes, when it is a data-dri­ven threat assess­ment. Wal­li­man sur­veyed and ana­lyzed, as he says in his intro­duc­tion, “all of the dif­fer­ent threats to human­i­ty that exist.”

When the pan­dem­ic hit last win­ter, “we as a soci­ety were com­plete­ly unpre­pared for it,” despite the fact that experts had been warn­ing us for decades that exact­ly such a threat was high on the scale of like­li­hood. Are we focus­ing on the wrong kinds of doom, to the exclu­sion of more press­ing threats? Instead of pan­ick­ing when the coro­n­avirus hit, Wal­li­man cooly won­dered what else might be lurk­ing around the cor­ner. “Crikey,” says the New Zealan­der upon the first reveal of his Map of Doom, “there’s quite a lot aren’t there?”

Not con­tent to just col­lect dis­as­ters (and draw them as if they were all hap­pen­ing at the same time), Wal­li­man also want­ed to find out which ones pose the biggest threat, “using some real data.” After the Map of Doom comes the Chart of Doom, an XY grid plot­ting the like­li­hood and sever­i­ty of var­i­ous crises. These include ancient stal­warts like super vol­ca­noes; far more recent threats like nuclear war and cat­a­stroph­ic cli­mate change; cos­mic threats like aster­oids and col­laps­ing stars; ter­res­tri­al threats like wide­spread soci­etal col­lapse and extra-ter­res­tri­al threats like hos­tile aliens….

At the top of the graph, at the lim­it of “high like­li­hood,” there lies the “already hap­pen­ing zone,” includ­ing, of course, COVID-19, cli­mate change, and volatile extreme weath­er events like hur­ri­canes and tsunamis. At the bot­tom, in the “impos­si­ble to cal­cu­late” zone, we find sci-fi events like rogue AI, rogue black holes, rogue nano-bots, hos­tile aliens, and the col­lapse of the vac­u­um of space. All the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble, but in Wal­li­man’s analy­sis most­ly unlike­ly to occur. As in all of his maps, he cites his sources on the video’s YouTube page.

If you’re not feel­ing quite up to a data pre­sen­ta­tion on mass casu­al­ty events just now, you can down­load the Map and Chart of Doom here and peruse them at your leisure. Pick up a Map of Doom for the wall at Wal­li­man’s site, and while you’re there, why not buy an “I sur­vived 2020” stick­er. Maybe it’s pre­ma­ture, and maybe in poor taste. And maybe in times of doom we need some­one to face the facts of doom square­ly, turn them into car­toon info­graph­ics of doom, and claim vic­to­ries like liv­ing through anoth­er cal­en­dar year.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Info­graph­ics Show How the Dif­fer­ent Fields of Biol­o­gy, Chem­istry, Math­e­mat­ics, Physics & Com­put­er Sci­ence Fit Togeth­er

M.I.T. Com­put­er Pro­gram Alarm­ing­ly Pre­dicts in 1973 That Civ­i­liza­tion Will End by 2040

In 1704, Isaac New­ton Pre­dicts the World Will End in 2060

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Why Humans Are Obsessed with Cats

in Biology, History, K-12, Life, Nature, Science | December 4th, 2020

A house cat is not real­ly a fur baby, but it is some­thing rather more remark­able: a tiny con­quis­ta­dor with the whole plan­et at its feet —Abi­gail Tuck­er

As part of its Annals of Obses­sion video series, The New York­er invit­ed sci­ence jour­nal­ist Abi­gail Tuck­er, author of The Lion in the Liv­ing Room, to reflect on “how felines took over the Inter­net, our homes, and our lives.”

It goes with­out say­ing that cats and humans have co-exist­ed for a very long time.

Most of us are acquaint­ed with the high regard in which Ancient Egyp­tians held Felis catus.

And we may know some­thing of their sea­far­ing his­to­ry, begin­ning with the Vikings and con­tin­u­ing on through Unsink­able Sam and oth­er cel­e­brat­ed ship’s cats.

An over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of us have spent the last decade or so glued to online exam­ples of their antics—rid­ing robot vac­u­ums, react­ing with ter­ror to cucum­bers, and pounc­ing on humans, some of whom have had the temer­i­ty to write and record voiceovers that sug­gest they have insight as to what goes on inside a cat’s hat. (As if!)

It’s grat­i­fy­ing to hear Tuck­er echo what cat lovers have long sus­pect­ed (and embla­zoned on t‑shirts, cof­fee mugs, and dec­o­ra­tive pillows)—the cats, not the own­ers, are the ones run­ning the show.

For­give us. Dogs have own­ers. Cats have staff.

Cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, moti­vat­ed, then as now, by the food they knew to be stored in our set­tle­ments.

Tuck­er describes it as a series of cat con­trolled takeovers—a process of arti­fi­cial selec­tion, under­tak­en on the cats’ own ini­tia­tive:

House cats are supreme­ly adapt­able. They can live any­where and, while they must have plen­ty of pro­tein, they eat prac­ti­cal­ly any­thing that moves, from pel­i­cans to crick­ets, and many things that don’t, like hot dogs. (Some of their imper­iled feline rel­a­tives, by con­trast, are adapt­ed to hunt only a rare species of chin­chilla.) House cats can tweak their sleep­ing sched­ules and social lives. They can breed like crazy.

In cer­tain ways the house cat’s rise is trag­ic, for the same forces that favor them have destroyed many oth­er crea­tures. House cats are car­pet­bag­gers, arriv­istes, and they’re among the most trans­for­ma­tive invaders the world has ever seen—except for Homo sapi­ens, of course. It’s no coin­ci­dence that when they show up in ecosys­tems, lions and oth­er megafau­na are usu­al­ly on their way out.

Aloof as many of their num­ber may be, cats have engi­neered things in such a way as to be phys­i­cal­ly irre­sistible to most humans:

Their big heads and big eyes are so cute!

Their fur is so soft!

We can car­ry them around!

Dress them in doll clothes (some­times)!

Their cries mim­ic the cries of hun­gry human babies, and elic­it a sim­i­lar response from their human care­givers.

We may not love lit­ter box duty, but with 1 in 3 humans infect­ed by Tox­o­plas­ma gondii, we’ll like­ly be teth­ered to them for all eter­ni­ty.

For bet­ter or worse, we love them. And so do dog lovers. They just don’t know it yet.

But do not ever imag­ine that the feel­ing is rec­i­p­ro­cal.

They’re arch­car­ni­vores who can­not open their own cans. As Tuck­er wry­ly observes:

I think it’s fair to say that we are obsessed and they are not.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

GPS Track­ing Reveals the Secret Lives of Out­door Cats

In 1183, a Chi­nese Poet Describes Being Domes­ti­cat­ed by His Own Cats

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She loves cats, but most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Some­times beau­ti­ful things come out of ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. This does not jus­ti­fy more ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. But as evi­dence of the resilience, resource­ful­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty of human beings—and more specif­i­cal­ly of moth­ers in dire straits—we offer the fol­low­ing: A Curi­ous Herbal, Eliz­a­beth Blackwell’s fine­ly illus­trat­ed, engraved, and col­ored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describ­ing their appear­ance, their prop­er­ties and how they may be used for prepar­ing oint­ments,” the British Library writes.

Born some­time around 1700 to a suc­cess­ful mer­chant fam­i­ly in Scot­land, Eliz­a­beth mar­ried Alexan­der Black­well, a “shady char­ac­ter” who pro­ceed­ed to drag her through a series of mis­ad­ven­tures involv­ing him pos­ing as a doc­tor and a print­er, despite the fact that he’d had no train­ing in either pro­fes­sion.

Black­well incurred sev­er­al hefty fines from the author­i­ties, which he could not pay, and he was final­ly remand­ed to debtor’s prison, an insti­tu­tion that often left women with young chil­dren to fend for them­selves.

“With Alexan­der in prison, Eliz­a­beth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep her­self and her child.” For­tu­nate­ly, she had been pre­pared with life skills dur­ing her pros­per­ous upbring­ing, hav­ing learned a thing or two about busi­ness and “received tuition in draw­ing and paint­ing, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Black­well real­ized a pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty: find­ing no high-qual­i­ty herbals avail­able, she decid­ed to make her own in “a rare tri­umph of turn­ing des­per­a­tion into inspi­ra­tion,” Maria Popo­va writes.

After befriend­ing the head cura­tor Chelsea Physic Gar­den — a teach­ing facil­i­ty for appren­tice apothe­caries estab­lished sev­er­al decades ear­li­er — she real­ized that there was a need for a hand­book depict­ing and describ­ing the garden’s new col­lec­tion of mys­te­ri­ous plants from the New World. A keen observ­er, a gift­ed artist, and an entre­pre­neur by nature, she set about bridg­ing the world’s need and her own.

The gor­geous book, A Curi­ous Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she com­plet­ed all of the illus­tra­tions from start to fin­ish. She also enlist­ed her husband’s help, vis­it­ing his cell to have him “sup­ply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Dutch, and Ger­man.” Black­well pro­duced 500 illus­tra­tions in total. She adver­tised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in sev­er­al jour­nals” and “showed her­self an adept busi­ness­woman, strik­ing mutu­al­ly advan­ta­geous deals with book­sellers that ensured the finan­cial suc­cess of the herbal.”

Black­well not only ben­e­fit­ed her fam­i­ly and her read­ers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been dig­i­tized in full by the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. The herbal will also give back to the nat­ur­al world she lov­ing­ly ren­dered (includ­ing plants that have since gone extinct). Popo­va has made a selec­tion of the illus­tra­tions avail­able as prints to ben­e­fit The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. See Blackwell’s dig­i­tized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

in Art, Science | November 20th, 2020

The peri­od called the Enlight­en­ment pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion in which one sense, vision, became priv­i­leged above all oth­ers. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Roy­al Soci­ety Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence, “sci­ence is supreme­ly visu­al. Indeed, one might say, exces­sive­ly so.” Kusukawa sit­u­ates Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist and illus­tra­tor Richard Waller at the begin­ning of her his­to­ry about how sight came to dom­i­nate, and Sarah Lowen­gard places Waller’s col­or chart, pre­sent­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1686, at a for­ma­tive moment in “the cre­ation of col­or in Eigh­teenth-Cen­tu­ry Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that col­or didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it did­n’t exist in neat tax­onomies that divid­ed col­or dis­crete­ly, named and cat­e­go­rized it, and mapped the nat­ur­al world by means of col­or the­o­ry. Waller’s “‘Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors Both Mixt and Sim­ple’ would per­mit unam­bigu­ous descrip­tions of the col­ors of nat­ur­al bod­ies. To describe a plant, for exam­ple, one could com­pare it to the chart and use the names found there to iden­ti­fy the col­ors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions of the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he sug­gest­ed.”

The nat­u­ral­ist approach to col­or would inform the arti­fi­cial cre­ation of col­or, help­ing “man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce con­sis­tent dyes and paints,” notes the Smith­son­ian Libraries. Waller’s sys­tem was not pre­cise enough for the task, but many oth­ers, includ­ing board game pio­neer Mil­ton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, pro­duc­ing not only sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al col­or guides, but also ped­a­go­gies like Bradley’s Ele­men­tary Col­or text­book for chil­dren. Kei­th Moore, Head of Library & Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices at the Roy­al Soci­ety, traces Waller’s col­or dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vin­tage com­ic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointil­lism and divi­sion­ism pio­neered by Georges Seu­rat.”

Dozens of col­or sys­tems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hun­dred years, from the elab­o­rate to the very sim­ple. All of them have encoun­tered the same basic issue, name­ly the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of visu­al per­cep­tion. “Waller’s visu­al sys­tem exhibits the same con­cep­tu­al prob­lem… that plagued near­ly all eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems. Which col­ors can be includ­ed and what is their ‘cor­rect’ order? The answer was always tem­pered by avail­able col­or­ing mate­ri­als and choice of media.” As more pig­ments became avail­able, so too did more col­ors in the col­or charts.

Is the mak­ing of col­or clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems more of a sci­ence or an art? It depends, per­haps, on what they’re used for, but “col­or remains elu­sive to sci­en­tists and col­or experts,” the Smith­son­ian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, how­ev­er, the lan­guage of col­or has evolved, as he envi­sioned, into a prac­ti­cal and poet­ic syn­tax and vocab­u­lary.

See a larg­er ver­sion of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowen­gard’s excel­lent arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast