Laurie Anderson Creates a Virtual Reality Installation That Takes Viewers on an Unconventional Tour of the Moon

in Art, Science, Technology | October 24th, 2018

Next year, NASA will cel­e­brate the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing, and as part of the cel­e­bra­tion will restore the orig­i­nal beige and green con­trol pan­els from the late 60’s Mis­sion Con­trol. “We want to take you back to July 20, 1969,” says direc­tor of the non-prof­it Space Cen­ter Hous­ton, the offi­cial vis­i­tors cen­ter for the John­son Space Cen­ter. “You’re going to expe­ri­ence the final few moments before Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin land­ed on the moon for the first time.”

But the agency isn’t only look­ing back to half a cen­tu­ry ago. It’s also look­ing for­ward to launch­ing more moon expe­di­tions—in part­ner­ship with com­mer­cial and inter­na­tion­al agencies—next year. And while those of us who aren’t astro­nauts or bil­lion­aires are unlike­ly to ever see the moon up close, Lau­rie Ander­son, NASA’s first artist-in-res­i­dence, can trans­port view­ers there for the cost of a tick­et to Den­mark.

Start­ing last month and run­ning until Jan­u­ary 2019, the country’s Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art fea­tures Anderson’s new moon-themed vir­tu­al real­i­ty project as part of its exhi­bi­tion The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Out­er Space.

Cre­at­ed with mul­ti­me­dia artist Hsin-Chien Huang—with whom Ander­son col­lab­o­rat­ed on anoth­er beau­ti­ful VR expe­ri­ence last year—this project trans­ports vis­i­tors to a vir­tu­al moon, where they can view con­stel­la­tions invent­ed by Ander­son, sym­bols of things that have, or that seem poised to, dis­ap­pear: a dinosaur, a polar bear, democ­ra­cy. “All of those things that you think are so sta­ble are so frag­ile, and can be lost,” she says in the video intro­duc­tion to her project above.

So, okay, it’s not the moon Arm­strong and Aldrin plant­ed their country’s flag on in 1969. It’s also pop­u­lat­ed by dinosaurs, birds, and oth­er crea­tures cre­at­ed from a lat­tice­work of DNA mol­e­cules.

Not only did Ander­son and Huang depict a thrilling fan­ta­sy VR moon, but they also cre­at­ed a “’hideous’ ver­sion,” reports CNN, “in which peo­ple had dumped all the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al from Earth. “We did dif­fer­ent phas­es of the moon,” says Ander­son, “dif­fer­ent aspects, looked not just at the roman­ti­cism of the moon but dystopias.” This isn’t her first for­ay into moon-themed art. As artist-in-res­i­dence at NASA since 2003, she has had some time to reflect on the agency’s mis­sion.

After her first year with NASA, she debuted a 90-minute per­for­mance piece called “The End of the Moon,” the sec­ond in a tril­o­gy she described as an “epic poem” about con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture. She is not the obvi­ous choice to work for a gov­ern­ment agency. Her work has been fierce­ly crit­i­cal of the country’s wars and its repres­sion on the domes­tic front. “Frankly, I find liv­ing in Amer­i­can cul­ture at the moment real­ly prob­lem­at­ic,” she said back in 2004. “But when I think of NASA, it’s the one thing that feels future-ori­ent­ed in a way that’s inspir­ing.”

Look­ing both back­ward and for­ward, next year’s anniver­sary of the moon land­ing will give us all rea­sons to think about humanity’s past and future in out­er space. Will it include “unbe­liev­able aspi­ra­tions,” as Ander­son mused, like “the green­ing of Mars,” or the dystopi­an dump­ing of radioac­tive waste on the Moon? Giv­en the trash and trea­sure of our cur­rent rela­tion­ship with the cosmos—not to men­tion our own planet—probably both. See more 2‑D excerpts from Ander­son and Huang’s piece in the scene test above, and, if you can score a tick­et, enter the full VR expe­ri­ence at the Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art.

via @dark_shark

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Ander­son Intro­duces Her Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Lets You Fly Mag­i­cal­ly Through Sto­ries

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

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

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Stephen Hawking’s Final Book and Scientific Paper Just Got Published: Brief Answers to the Big Questions and “Information Paradox”

in Astronomy, Physics, Science | October 18th, 2018

How did it all begin?  Is there a god? Can we pre­dict the future? Is there oth­er intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse? For decades, many of us turned to Stephen Hawk­ing for answers to those ques­tions, or at least supreme­ly intel­li­gent sug­ges­tions as to where the answers might lie. But the cel­e­brat­ed astro­physi­cist’s death ear­li­er this year — after an aston­ish­ing­ly long life and career, giv­en the chal­lenges he faced — took that option away. It turns out, though, that we haven’t actu­al­ly heard the last of him: his last book, Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions (whose trail­er you can watch just above), came out just this week.

“The book is quin­tes­sen­tial Hawk­ing,” writes physics pro­fes­sor Marce­lo Gleis­er at NPR. “He starts by address­ing the ques­tions in physics and cos­mol­o­gy that he ded­i­cat­ed his intel­lec­tu­al life to answer, using easy-to-fol­low argu­ments and draw­ing from every­day images and thought exper­i­ments.” Hawk­ing’s answers to the big ques­tions fig­ure into his view of not just the world but all exis­tence: he believes, writes Gleis­er, “that human­i­ty’s evo­lu­tion­ary mis­sion is to spread through the galaxy as a sort of cos­mic gar­den­er, sow­ing life along the way. He believes, even if not with­out wor­ry, that we will devel­op a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship with intel­li­gent machines and that, togeth­er, we will redesign the cur­rent fate of the world and of our species.”

In par­al­lel with his career as a pub­lic fig­ure and writer of pop­u­lar explana­to­ry books, which began with 1988’s A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Hawk­ing per­formed sci­en­tif­ic research on black holes. The Guardian’s sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple describes it as a “career-long effort to under­stand what hap­pens to infor­ma­tion when objects fall into black holes,” capped off by a posthu­mous­ly pub­lished paper titled “Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair.” “Toss an object into a black hole and the black hole’s tem­per­a­ture ought to change,” writes Sam­ple. “So too will a prop­er­ty called entropy, a mea­sure of an object’s inter­nal dis­or­der, which ris­es the hot­ter it gets.” In the paper Hawk­ing and his col­lab­o­ra­tors show that “a black hole’s entropy may be record­ed by pho­tons that sur­round the black hole’s event hori­zon, the point at which light can­not escape the intense grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. They call this sheen of pho­tons ‘soft hair’.”

If that sounds tricky to under­stand, all of us who have appre­ci­at­ed Hawk­ing’s writ­ing know that we can at least go back to his books to get a grip on black holes and the ques­tions about them that get sci­en­tists most curi­ous. Much remains for future astro­physi­cists to work on about that “infor­ma­tion para­dox,” to do with where, exact­ly, every­thing that seem­ing­ly gets sucked into a black hole actu­al­ly goes. “We don’t know that Hawk­ing entropy accounts for every­thing you could pos­si­bly throw at a black hole, so this is real­ly a step along the way,” Hawk­ing’s col­lab­o­ra­tor Mal­colm J. Per­ry tells Sam­ple. “We think it’s a pret­ty good step, but there is a lot more work to be done.” As Hawk­ing sure­ly knew, the big ques­tions — in physics or any oth­er realm of exis­tence — nev­er quite get ful­ly answered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing (RIP) Explains His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary The­o­ry of Black Holes with the Help of Chalk­board Ani­ma­tions

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Watch Stephen Hawking’s Inter­view with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Record­ed 10 Days Before His Death: A Last Con­ver­sa­tion about Black Holes, Time Trav­el & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

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Learn Anatomy Through a Pictorial History of James Bond 007

in Art, Biology, Comics/Cartoons, Film, Science | October 15th, 2018

Remem­ber the scene in Tomor­row Nev­er Dies when sexy dou­ble agent Wai Lin hand­cuffs James Bond to the show­er and leaves him there?

Alter­nate­ly, remem­ber “Table 9” from anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albi­nus’ 1749 Tab­u­lae sceleti et mus­cu­lo­rum cor­poris humani?

Kri­o­ta Will­berg, an edu­ca­tor, mas­sage ther­a­pist at Memo­r­i­al Sloan Ket­ter­ing Can­cer Cen­ter, and author of Draw Stronger: Self-Care For Car­toon­ists and Oth­er Visu­al Artists, is suf­fi­cient­ly steeped in both Bond and Albi­nus to iden­ti­fy strik­ing visu­al sim­i­lar­i­ties.

That show­er scene is just one icon­ic moment that Will­berg includ­ed in her mini-com­ic, Pic­to­r­i­al Anato­my of 007.

Agent Bond’s sar­to­r­i­al sense is a cru­cial aspect of his appeal, but Will­berg, a Bond fan who’s seen every film in the canon at least five times, digs below that cel­e­brat­ed sur­face, peel­ing back skin to expose the struc­tures that lie beneath.

Sean Connery’s Bond exhibits a vet­er­an artist’s mod­el’s still­ness wait­ing for the right time to make his move against Dr. No’s “eight-legged assas­sin.” Even before Will­berg got involved, it was an excel­lent show­case for his pecs, delta, and ster­n­ocleit­o­mas­toid mus­cles.

Leav­ing her flayed Bonds in their cin­e­mat­ic set­tings are a way of pay­ing trib­ute to the antique anatom­i­cal illus­tra­tions Will­berg admires for their dynamism:

…sit­ting in a chair, tak­ing a stroll, hold­ing its skin or organs out of the way so that the read­er can get a bet­ter look at deep­er struc­tures. Some of the cadav­ers are very flir­ty. The pic­tures remind us that we are the organs we see on the page. They do stuff! 

The New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine select­ed Will­berg as its first Artist in Res­i­dence, because of the way she explores the inter­sec­tions between body sci­ences and artis­tic prac­tices. (Oth­er projects include an intri­cate needle­point X‑Ray of her own root canal and Stitchin’ Time!, a fic­tion­al encounter in which Aulus Cor­nelius Cel­sus (c. 25 BCE – c. 50 CE), author of  De Med­i­c­i­na, and sur­geon Aelius Galenus (129  – c. 200 CE) team up to repair a dis­em­bow­eled glad­i­a­tor.

Is there a squea­mish bone in this artist’s body?

All signs point to no.

Asked to pick a favorite Bond movie, she names Goldfin­ger for the mythol­o­gy con­cern­ing the infa­mous scene where­in a beau­ti­ful woman is paint­ed gold, but also 2006’s Casi­no Royale for keep­ing the tor­ture scene from the book:

I didn’t think they’d have the balls! Sor­ry! Poor taste but I couldn’t resist. Although Tim­o­thy Dal­ton phys­i­cal­ly resem­bled Bond as described in the books, most of the movies make Bond out to be smarter than Flem­ing wrote him. I think Judy Dench called Daniel Craig, Casi­no Royale’s Bond, a “blunt instru­ment” which is pret­ty much how he’s writ­ten. He’s tough and lucky and that’s why he’s sur­vived. Plus the machete fight is great. 

Some­times peo­ple get too pris­sy about the body. I am meat and liv­er and sausage and so are you. Your body is inescapable while you live. You should get to know it. Think about it in dif­fer­ent con­texts. It’s fun!

When From Rus­sia With Love’s Rosa Klebb punch­es mas­ter assas­sin, Red Grant, in the stom­ach, she is squish­ing a liv­ing liv­er through liv­ing abdom­i­nal mus­cles.

Hard copies of Kri­o­ta Willberg’s anato­my-based comics, includ­ing Pic­to­r­i­al Anato­my of 007, are avail­able from Bird­cage Bot­tom Books.

Lis­ten to an hour-long inter­view with Comics Alter­na­tive in which Will­berg dis­cuss­es her New York Acad­e­my of Med­i­cine res­i­den­cy, anatom­i­cal research, and the ways in which humor informs her approach here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Spell­bind­ing Art of Human Anato­my: From the Renais­sance to Our Mod­ern Times

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es 

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her lat­est script, Fawn­book, is avail­able in a dig­i­tal edi­tion from Indie The­ater Now.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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You’re Only As Old As You Feel: Harvard Psychologist Ellen Langer Shows How Mental Attitude Can Potentially Reverse the Effects of Aging

in Harvard, Health, Psychology, Science | October 8th, 2018

You’re only as old as you feel, right? The plat­i­tude may be true. In a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly ver­i­fi­able sense, “feeling”—a state of mind—may not only deter­mine psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being but phys­i­cal health as well, includ­ing the nat­ur­al aging process­es of the body.

Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Ellen Langer has spent decades test­ing the hypoth­e­sis, and has come to some inter­est­ing con­clu­sions about the rela­tion­ship between men­tal process­es and bod­i­ly aging. In order to do the kind of work she has for decades, she has had to put aside the thorny “mind-body” problem—a long­stand­ing philo­soph­i­cal and prac­ti­cal impasse in fig­ur­ing out how the two inter­act. “Let’s for­get about how you get from one to the oth­er,” she tells CBS This Morn­ing in a 2014 inter­view above, “and in fact see those as just words…. Wher­ev­er you’re putting the mind, you’re nec­es­sar­i­ly putting the body.”

What hap­pens to the one, she the­o­rized, will nec­es­sar­i­ly affect the oth­er. In a 1981 exper­i­ment, which she called the “coun­ter­clock­wise study,” she and her research team placed eight men in their late 70s in a monastery in New Hamp­shire, con­vert­ed to trans­port them all to 1959 when they were in their prime. Fur­ni­ture, décor, news, sports, music, TV, movies: every cul­tur­al ref­er­ence dat­ed from the peri­od. There were no mir­rors, only pho­tos of the men in their 20s. They spoke and act­ed as though they had trav­eled back in time and got­ten younger.

The results were extra­or­di­nary, almost too good to be true, she felt. “On sev­er­al mea­sures,” The New York Times report­ed in 2014, “they out­per­formed a con­trol group that came ear­li­er to the monastery but didn’t imag­ine them­selves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encour­aged to rem­i­nisce.” The “coun­ter­clock­wise” par­tic­i­pants “were sup­pler, showed greater man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty and sat taller…. Per­haps most improb­a­bly, their sight improved” as well as their hear­ing.  Giv­en the seem­ing­ly mirac­u­lous out­comes, tiny sam­ple size, and the unortho­doxy of the exper­i­ment, Langer decid­ed not to pub­lish at the time but con­tin­ued to work on sim­i­lar stud­ies look­ing at how the mind affects the body.

Then, almost thir­ty years lat­er, the BBC con­tact­ed her about stag­ing a tele­vised recre­ation of the monastery exper­i­ment, “with six aging for­mer celebri­ties as guinea pigs,” who were trans­port­ed back to 1975 by sim­i­lar means. The stars “emerged after a week as appar­ent­ly reju­ve­nat­ed as Langer’s sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­ans in New Hamp­shire.” These exper­i­ments and sev­er­al oth­ers Langer has con­duct­ed over the years strong­ly sug­gest that chrono­log­i­cal age is not a lin­ear clock push­ing us inex­orably toward decline. It is, rather, a col­lec­tion of vari­ables that include psy­cho­log­i­cal well-being and some­thing called an “epi­ge­net­ic clock,” a mech­a­nism that UCLA geneti­cist Steve Hor­vath has dis­cov­ered direct­ly cor­re­lates with the aging process, and may show us how to change it.

But while Hor­vath has yet to answer sev­er­al press­ing ques­tions about how cer­tain genet­ic mech­a­nisms inter­act, Langer has put such ques­tions aside in favor of test­ing the mind-body con­nec­tion in a series of exper­i­ments, which engage the aging—or peo­ple with spe­cif­ic conditions—in stud­ies that stretch their minds. By cre­at­ing illu­sions like the monastery time machine, Langer has found that per­cep­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant effect on aging. If we per­ceive our­selves to be younger, health­i­er, more capa­ble, more vibrant, despite the mes­sages about how we should look and act at our chrono­log­i­cal age, then our cells and tis­sues get the mes­sage. Not only can a change in per­cep­tion affect aging, but also, Langer the­o­rizes, obe­si­ty, can­cer, dia­betes, and oth­er chron­ic or life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. Much of her research here gets spelled out in her book, Coun­ter­clock­wise: Mind­ful Health and the Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty.

“Whether it’s about aging or any­thing else,” says Lager, “if you are sur­round­ed by peo­ple who have cer­tain expec­ta­tions for you, you tend to meet those expec­ta­tions, pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive.” The social expec­ta­tion for the aging is that they will get weak­er, less capa­ble, and more prone to dete­ri­o­ra­tion and ill­ness. Ignor­ing these expec­ta­tions and chang­ing our per­cep­tion of what chrono­log­i­cal age means—and doesn’t mean—Langer says, seems to actu­al­ly slow or par­tial­ly reverse the decline and to ward off dis­ease. Those psy­cho­log­i­cal changes can come about through inter­ven­tions like car­ing for chil­dren, plants, or ani­mals and using mind­ful­ness prac­tices to learn how to be atten­tive to change.

You can read more about Langer and Horvath’s spe­cif­ic find­ings on aging, psy­chol­o­gy, and epi­ge­net­ics at Nau­tilus.

Note: you can get Langer’s book–Coun­ter­clock­wise Mind­ful Health and the Trans­for­ma­tive Pow­er of Pos­si­bil­i­ty–as a free audio­book through Audible.com’s free tri­al pro­gram. Get more details on the free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

How Mind­ful­ness Makes Us Hap­pi­er & Bet­ter Able to Meet Life’s Chal­lenges: Two Ani­mat­ed Primers Explain

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

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

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The Emperor of Japan, Akihito, Is Still Publishing Scientific Papers in His 80s

in Science | October 5th, 2018

State Depart­ment pho­to by William Ng, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

On April 30, 2019, Emper­or Aki­hi­to of Japan will abdi­cate, and pass the throne to his son, Crown Prince Naruhi­to. What will he do in his retire­ment? Prob­a­bly the same thing he has done most of his life: make “tax­o­nom­ic stud­ies of gob­ies,” as the Min­istry of For­eign Affairs of Japan reports, “small fish found in fresh, brack­ish and marine waters.” Aki­hi­to has been a mem­ber of Japan’s Ichthy­olog­i­cal Soci­ety of Japan for decades and “pub­lished 30 papers in the society’s jour­nal between 1963 and 1989.”

Aki­hi­to ascend­ed the throne in 1989, at age 56, and yes, Japan still has an emper­or, though—since the post-war Con­sti­tu­tion of 1947—the con­sti­tu­tion­al monarch has no polit­i­cal pow­er and serves only a cer­e­mo­ni­al role. This has left Aki­hi­to with a lot of time to fill with sci­en­tif­ic pur­suits: to become an hon­orary mem­ber of the Lin­nean Soci­ety of Lon­don, Zoo­log­i­cal Soci­ety of Lon­don, and Research Insti­tute for Nat­ur­al Sci­ence of Argenti­na, and a research asso­ciate at the Aus­tralian Muse­um.

Emper­or Aki­hi­to remained an active sci­en­tist in his emper­or­ship, pub­lish­ing a his­to­ry of sci­ence arti­cle in Nature titled “Lin­naeus and tax­on­o­my in Japan” in 2007. In 2016, Aki­hi­to appeared as first author in a study pub­lished in Gene. The sec­ond author is his younger son, Crown Prince Fumi­hi­to Akishi­no, who stud­ied fish tax­on­o­my at St. John’s Col­lege, Oxford, then com­plet­ed a doc­tor­al degree in ornithol­o­gy. The prince now serves as the pres­i­dent of the Yamashina Insti­tute for Ornithol­o­gy and the Japan­ese Asso­ci­a­tion of Zoo­log­i­cal Gar­dens and Aquar­i­ums.

The family’s inter­est in sci­ence goes beyond the dab­bling of bored aris­to­crats or a sense of noblesse oblige. Fumi­hi­to intro­duced tilapia to Thai­land as an impor­tant food source and has helped Thai sci­en­tists expand their aqua­cul­tur­al research. The Emperor’s broth­er, Prince Masahi­to, is a can­cer researcher who has been rec­og­nized for mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to the field, pub­lish­ing in jour­nals like Can­cer Research and the Jour­nal of the Inter­na­tion­al Union Against Can­cer.

The Impe­r­i­al fam­i­ly may rep­re­sent an out­mod­ed and archa­ic insti­tu­tion, one humankind can do just as well with­out. But it’s refresh­ing to see peo­ple with such vast resources and priv­i­lege use them for the pur­suit of intel­lec­tu­al inquiry and the bet­ter­ment of human and ani­mal life. You can read the first page of one of Emper­or Akihito’s papers, “Ear­ly Cul­ti­va­tors of Sci­ence in Japan” at Sci­ence in which he makes a case for the glob­al shar­ing of knowl­edge.

“Through my own study of ichthy­ol­o­gy,” Aki­hi­to writes, “I have come to feel strong­ly the impor­tance of inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion in con­duct­ing sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. I recall with a sense of grat­i­tude that behind each one of the papers I have pub­lished there has been the unspar­ing coop­er­a­tion of peo­ple abroad.”

via Sha­haf Peleg

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

After­math of the Tsuna­mi in Japan

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

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

in Art, Biology, Books, Science | September 27th, 2018

In a post ear­li­er this year, we brought to your atten­tion Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours. Used by artists and nat­u­ral­ists alike, the guide orig­i­nal­ly relied on writ­ten descrip­tion alone, with­out any col­or to be found among its pages. Instead, in the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, Ger­man min­er­al­o­gist Abra­ham Got­t­lob Wern­er painstak­ing­ly detailed the qual­i­ties of the 110 col­ors he sur­veyed, by ref­er­ence to where they might be found on ani­mals, veg­eta­bles, and min­er­als. The col­or “Pearl Gray,” for exam­ple, might be locat­ed on the “Backs of black head­ed and Kittwake Gulls,” the “Back of Petals of Pur­ple Het­at­i­ca,” or on “Porce­lain Jasper.”

The lit­er­ary pos­si­bil­i­ties of this approach may seem vast. But its use­ful­ness to those engaged in the visu­al arts—or in close obser­va­tion of new species in, say, the Gala­pa­gos Islands—may have been some­what lack­ing until Scot­tish painter Patrick Syme updat­ed the guide in 1814 with col­or swatch­es, most of them using the very min­er­als Wern­er described.

It was the sec­ond edi­tion of Syme’s guide that accom­pa­nied Charles Dar­win on his 1831 voy­age aboard the HMS Bea­gle, where he “used it to cat­a­logue the flo­ra and fau­na that lat­er inspired his the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion,” as his­to­ri­an Daniel Lewis writes at Smith­son­ian.

While we might think of tax­onomies of col­or as prin­ci­pal­ly guid­ing artists, web design­ers, and house painters, they have been indis­pens­able for sci­en­tists. “They can indi­cate when a plant or ani­mal is a dif­fer­ent species or a sub­species,” Lewis notes; “in the 19th cen­tu­ry, the use of col­or to dif­fer­en­ti­ate species was impor­tant for what it said about evo­lu­tion and how species changed over time and from region to region.” For his­to­ri­ans of sci­ence, there­fore, Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours rep­re­sents an essen­tial tool in the ear­ly devel­op­ment of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy.

Oth­er col­or dic­tio­nar­ies fol­lowed, “designed to give peo­ple around the world a com­mon vocab­u­lary to describe the col­ors of every­thing from rocks and flow­ers to stars, birds, and postage stamps.” Some of these were high­ly spe­cial­ized, such as the two-vol­ume set cre­at­ed by the French Soci­ety of Chrysan­themists in 1905. All of them, how­ev­er, strove to meet the high bar set by Wern­er when it came to lev­el of detailed descrip­tion. These are guides that speak in human terms, in con­trast to the nomen­cla­ture most often used today, which “is real­ly a machine lan­guage,” Kelsey Cam­bell-Dol­laghan writes at Fast Com­pa­ny, “numer­i­cal hex codes craft­ed to com­mu­ni­cate with soft­ware on com­put­ers and print­ers.”

In recog­ni­tion of Wern­er and Syme’s con­tri­bu­tion to col­or nomen­cla­ture, Smith­son­ian Books recent­ly repub­lished the 1814 edi­tion of their guide, and the revised 1821 edi­tion has been avail­able for some time as scans at the Inter­net Archive. Now it has received a 21st update thanks to design­er Nicholas Rougeux, who has cre­at­ed an online inter­ac­tive ver­sion of the book, “with addi­tions like data visu­al­iza­tions of its 100 col­ors and inter­net-sourced pho­tographs of the ani­mals and min­er­als that the book references”—a fea­ture its cre­ators could nev­er have dreamed of. You can read Werner’s com­plete text, see all of the col­ors as illus­trat­ed and cat­e­go­rized by Syme, and even pur­chase through Rougeux’s site cool 36” x 24” posters like that above, start­ing at $27.80.

It’s true, view­ing the book online has its draw­backs, relat­ed to how Syme’s paint swatch­es are trans­lat­ed into hex codes, then dis­played dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on var­i­ous screen set­tings. But Rougeux has tried to com­pen­sate for this dif­fer­ence between print and screen. On a pub­licly acces­si­ble Google Doc, he has pro­vid­ed the hex codes “for each of the 18th-cen­tu­ry hues, from Skimmed Milk (#e6e1c9) to Veinous Blood Red (#3f3033).” Not near­ly as poet­ic as Werner’s descrip­tions, but it’s what we have to work with these days when ref­er­ence books get writ­ten for com­put­ers as much as they do for humans.

See the inter­ac­tive Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colours here.

via Fast Com­pa­ny

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

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

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How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence

in History, Physics, Science | September 25th, 2018

Every­one knows that Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ed in 79 AD, entomb­ing the Roman town of Pom­peii in ash. Almost every­one knows that it also did the same to sev­er­al oth­er towns, includ­ing wealthy Her­cu­la­neum on the Bay of Naples. Count­less schol­ars have ded­i­cat­ed their lives to study­ing these unusu­al­ly well-pre­served first-cen­tu­ry ruins and the his­tor­i­cal trea­sures found with­in. We now under­stand a great deal about the lay­out, the struc­tures, the social life of Her­cu­la­neum, but some aspects remain unknow­able, such as the con­tents of the scrolls, charred beyond recog­ni­tion, that fill its libraries — or at least that remained unknow­able until now.

“In the 18th cen­tu­ry, work­men employed by King Charles III of Spain, then in charge of much of south­ern Italy, dis­cov­ered the remains of a mag­nif­i­cent vil­la, thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caeson­i­nus (known as Piso), a wealthy states­man and the father-in-law of Julius Cae­sar,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Jo Marchant. There, “in what was to become one of the most frus­trat­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies ever, the work­men also found approx­i­mate­ly 2,000 papyrus scrolls.” But since the heat and gas­es of Vesu­vius had turned them “black and hard like lumps of coal”  — and indeed, some of Charles III’s work­men mis­took them for coal and threw them away — attempts to open them “cre­at­ed a mess of frag­ile flakes that yield­ed only brief snip­pets of text.”

The time of Charles III bare­ly had suf­fi­cient know-how to avoid destroy­ing the scrolls of Her­cu­la­neum, let alone to read them. That task turns out to demand even the most cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy we have today, includ­ing cus­tom-made 3D mod­el­ing soft­ware, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, and the most advanced x‑ray facil­i­ties in exis­tence. Marchan­t’s arti­cle focus­es on an Amer­i­can com­put­er sci­en­tist named Brent Seales (Pro­fes­sor and Chair of Com­put­er Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ken­tucky), whose quest to read the Her­cu­la­neum scrolls has become a quest to devel­op a method to vir­tu­al­ly “unroll” them. This requires not just the com­put­ing pow­er and log­ic to deter­mine how these black­ened lumps (Seales calls two of them “Fat Bas­tard” and “Banana Boy”) might orig­i­nal­ly have opened up, but the most advanced par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tors in the world to scan them in the first place.

You can read more about Seales’ work with the Her­cu­la­neum scrolls, which after twen­ty years has shown real promise, at Men­tal Floss and Newsweek. Though quite expen­sive (demand for “beam time” on a par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor being what it is), huge­ly time-con­sum­ing, and occa­sion­al­ly, in Seales’ words, “excru­ci­at­ing­ly frus­trat­ing,” the inven­tion of a reli­able method for read­ing these and oth­er seem­ing­ly lost texts from antiq­ui­ty could make sub­stan­tial addi­tions to what we think of as the canon. (The texts revealed so far have had to do with the ideas of Epi­cu­rus, a primer on whose phi­los­o­phy we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture.) But gain­ing the fullest pos­si­ble under­stand­ing of what our ances­tors knew in the first cen­tu­ry may first require a few more 21st-cen­tu­ry devel­op­ments in physics and com­put­er sci­ence yet.

via Men­tal Floss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hid­den Ancient Greek Med­ical Text Read for the First Time in a Thou­sand Years — with a Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tor

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

See the Expan­sive Ruins of Pom­peii Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

2,000-Year-Old Man­u­script of the Ten Com­mand­ments Gets Dig­i­tized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Res­o­lu­tion

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Res­o­lu­tion)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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 or on Face­book.

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Long-Lost Letter Shows How Galileo Tried to Fool the Inquisition & Escape Censure for Putting Scientific Truth Ahead of Church Dogma (1613)

in History, Science | September 24th, 2018

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” wrote Emi­ly Dick­in­son, “Suc­cess in Cir­cuit lies.” No doubt she had more lit­er­ary, or meta­phys­i­cal, mat­ters in mind than sci­en­tif­ic. But for sci­en­tists work­ing in times hos­tile to change, telling the truth, as they know it, can be dan­ger­ous. This applies to EPA sci­en­tists work­ing today as it did 400 years ago to Euro­pean astronomers, who faced censure—with pos­si­bly fatal consequences—for con­tra­dict­ing the offi­cial ver­sion of real­i­ty dic­tat­ed by the Catholic Church and enforced by the Inqui­si­tion.

The sto­ry of Galileo Galilei’s infa­mous con­fronta­tion with what the Rice Uni­ver­si­ty Galileo Project calls that “per­ma­nent insti­tu­tion” of the Church, “charged with the erad­i­ca­tion of here­sies,” has swelled into leg­end, with the astronomer play­ing the part of a mar­tyr for rea­son and evi­dence. Oth­er ver­sions, like Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, por­tray him, writes The New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik, not as “a mar­tyr-hero but a turn­coat, albeit one of genius.” Rather than stand­ing on prin­ci­ple, he hedged and com­pro­mised.

A “new­er (and, unsur­pris­ing­ly, Church-endorsed) view,” writes Gop­nik, “is that Galileo made need­less trou­ble for him­self by being impolitic,” and that all the poor Church want­ed, “as today’s intel­li­gent design­ers now say,” was to “’teach the con­tro­ver­sy’” between Coper­ni­can and Aris­totelian the­o­ries. What­ev­er their inter­pre­ta­tion, his­to­ri­ans of the events lead­ing up to Galileo’s con­vic­tion for heresy after the pub­li­ca­tion of his Dia­logue Con­cern­ing the Two Chief World Sys­tems now have a new piece of evi­dence to add to their assess­ment.

A let­ter, “long thought lost,” Nature reports, has reap­peared, pro­vid­ing “the strongest evi­dence yet that, at the start of his bat­tle with the reli­gious author­i­ties, Galileo active­ly engaged in dam­age con­trol and tried to spread a toned-down ver­sion of his claims.” In the sev­en-page doc­u­ment, writ­ten to his friend Benedet­to Castel­li in 1613, Galileo “set out for the first time his argu­ments that sci­en­tif­ic research should be free from the­o­log­i­cal doc­trine.” Fur­ther­more, and most damn­ing­ly for him:

He argued that the scant ref­er­ences in the Bible to astro­nom­i­cal events should not be tak­en lit­er­al­ly, because scribes had sim­pli­fied these descrip­tions so that they could be under­stood by com­mon peo­ple. Reli­gious author­i­ties who argued oth­er­wise, he wrote, didn’t have the com­pe­tence to judge. Most cru­cial­ly, he rea­soned that the helio­cen­tric mod­el of Earth orbit­ing the Sun, pro­posed by Pol­ish astronomer Nico­laus Coper­ni­cus 70 years ear­li­er, is not actu­al­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the Bible.

Copies of the con­tro­ver­sial let­ter cir­cu­lat­ed, and inevitably made their way into the hands of Inqui­si­tion author­i­ties in 1615, for­ward­ed by a Domini­can fri­ar named Nic­colò Lori­ni. Alarmed, Galileo “wrote to his friend Piero Dini, a cler­ic in Rome, sug­gest­ing that the let­ter Lori­ni had sent to the Inqui­si­tion might have been doc­tored.” He enclosed anoth­er, less inflam­ma­to­ry, ver­sion, which he claimed was the orig­i­nal. He wrote of the “wicked­ness and igno­rance” of those he claimed had tried to frame him. The Inquisi­tors, he wrote “may be in part deceived by this fraud which is going around under the cloak of zeal and char­i­ty.”

His­to­ri­ans have long known of the two let­ters, but were uncer­tain as to whose ver­sion of events to believe. The orig­i­nal of the Lori­ni copy was thought to have been lost, until its recent dis­cov­ery by post­doc­tor­al sci­ence his­to­ri­an Sal­va­tore Ric­cia­r­do, who found it, of all places, in the Roy­al Soci­ety library, where it had sat unno­ticed for 250 years. The orig­i­nal let­ter, which Castel­li had returned to Galileo, shows edits in his own hand. “Beneath its scratch­ings-out and amend­ments, the signed copy dis­cov­ered by Ric­cia­r­do shows Galileo’s orig­i­nal wording—and it is the same as in the Lori­ni copy” that land­ed him in trou­ble.

The evi­dence proves that Galileo strong­ly advo­cat­ed for the Coper­ni­can sys­tem, and against Church inter­fer­ence in free inquiry, in 1613. In one pas­sage of the let­ter, orig­i­nal­ly describ­ing the Bible as “false if one goes by the lit­er­al mean­ing of the words,” Galileo cross­es out “false” and inserts “look dif­fer­ent from the truth.” In anoth­er ref­er­ence to scrip­ture as “con­ceal­ing” the truth, he opts for the more the­o­log­i­cal-sound­ing “veil­ing.” The let­ter shows Galileo soft­en­ing his views to escape con­dem­na­tion, but it does not show him recant­i­ng in any way.

In 1616, the year after the Church received a copy of the first let­ter from Lori­ni and Galileo’s doc­tored ver­sion, he was warned to stop argu­ing for the Coper­ni­can mod­el, though he lat­er received assur­ances from Pope Urban VIII that he could con­tin­ue to write about helio­cen­trism if he pre­sent­ed the idea as a math­e­mat­i­cal propo­si­tion rather than a state­ment of fact. Of course, as we know, his con­tin­ued sup­port for the sci­ence earned him per­ma­nent house arrest in 1633, and cen­turies of endur­ing admi­ra­tion from the oppo­nents of dog­mat­ic sup­pres­sion of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge.

via Nature

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Book Thief Forged a Rare Edi­tion of Galileo’s Sci­en­tif­ic Work, and Almost Pulled it Off

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Physics Intro­duces the Dis­cov­er­ies of Galileo, New­ton, Maxwell & Ein­stein

See Galileo’s Famous Grav­i­ty Exper­i­ment Per­formed in the World’s Largest Vac­u­um Cham­ber, and on the Moon

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

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