View and Download Nearly 60,000 Maps from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)

By rea­sons of par­ent­ing, I’ve become well acquaint­ed with a song—perhaps you know it?— called “Fifty Nifty Unit­ed States,” taught to school­child­ren as a geo­graph­i­cal mnemon­ic device. The lyrics men­tion that “each indi­vid­ual state con­tributes a qual­i­ty that is great.” What are some great qual­i­ties of, say, Delaware, New Mex­i­co, or South Dako­ta? We aren’t told. Hey, it’s enough that a five or six-year-old can remem­ber “shout ‘em, scout ‘em, tell all about ‘em” before rat­tling off an alpha­bet­i­cal list of “ev’ry state in the good old U.S.A.”

But if you hail from the U.S., you can enu­mer­ate many con­tri­bu­tions from a few nifty states, whether culi­nary delights, his­tor­i­cal events, writ­ers, artists, sports heroes, etc. And most everyone’s got sto­ries about vis­it­ing nat­ur­al won­ders, hik­ing moun­tain trails, ford­ing rivers, gaz­ing upon breath­tak­ing vis­tas.

We may be occa­sion­al tourists, trav­el enthu­si­asts, or experts, but what­ev­er our lev­el of expe­ri­ence in the coun­try, it’s prob­a­bly kid stuff com­pared to the work of the sci­en­tists at the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey (USGS).

Estab­lished by Con­gress in 1879, this august body has doc­u­ment­ed U.S. lands and waters for 125 years, gath­er­ing an incred­i­ble amount of detailed infor­ma­tion as “the nation’s largest water, earth, and bio­log­i­cal sci­ence and civil­ian map­ping agency.” Thanks to the Libre Map Project, the gen­er­al pub­lic can view and down­load near­ly 60,000 of those topo­graph­i­cal maps, from all fifty states, and near­ly every region with­in each of those states. See Colorado’s Pike Nation­al For­est and sur­round­ing envi­rons, at the top, for exam­ple, cre­at­ed from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en in 1950. Above, see a map of San Fran­cis­co, com­piled in 1956, then revised in 1993 and fur­ther edit­ed in 1996.

And just above, the dev­as­tat­ing Kīlauea Vol­cano, in a map com­piled from aer­i­al pho­tos tak­en in 1954 and 1961. (See the USGS site for the lat­est info about the ongo­ing erup­tion there.) Below, a nifty map of New York City, cre­at­ed “by pho­togram­met­ric meth­ods from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en [in] 1954 and plan­etable sur­veys [in] 1955. Revised from aer­i­al pho­tographs tak­en [in] 1966.” Google maps may be more cur­rent, but these USGS maps have an aura of sci­en­tif­ic author­i­ty around them, evi­dence of painstak­ing sur­veys, checked and rechecked over the decades by hun­dreds of pairs of hands and eyes.

Brows­ing the archive can be a chal­lenge, since the maps are cat­a­logued by coor­di­nates rather than place names, but you can enter the names of spe­cif­ic loca­tions in the search field. Also, be advised, the maps “are best used with glob­al posi­tion­ing soft­ware,” the archive tells vis­i­tors. Nonethe­less, you can click on the first down­load option for “Mul­ti Page Processed TIFF” to pull up a huge, down­load­able image. Enter the archive here and get to scout­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Has Dig­i­tized Its Col­lec­tion of 6,000+ Vin­tage Maps: See a Curat­ed Selec­tion of Maps Pub­lished Between 1888 and Today

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

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

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Documented by Pollution Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

When we see sto­ries pop up involv­ing sci­en­tif­ic find­ings in glac­i­er ice, we might brace for unpleas­ant envi­ron­men­tal news about the future. But a paper pub­lished just recent­ly in Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences instead reveals fas­ci­nat­ing find­ings about the dis­tant past—the his­to­ry of ancient Rome between 1100 B.C.E. to 800 C.E. His­to­ri­ans know this 1,900-year peri­od through archae­o­log­i­cal and lit­er­ary evi­dence. Now cli­mate sci­en­tists have pro­vid­ed a trea­sury of new data to help sub­stan­ti­ate or revise schol­ar­ly under­stand­ings of Rome’s eco­nom­ic ris­es and falls, by mea­sur­ing the strat­i­fi­ca­tions of lead pol­lu­tion in a rough­ly 400-meter ice core from Green­land.

Why lead? “It’s a proxy for coin pro­duc­tion,” says Seth Bernard, pro­fes­sor of ancient his­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. Roman cur­ren­cy, the denar­ius, was made from sil­ver, mined pri­mar­i­ly on the Iber­ian Penin­su­la. “But these mines didn’t exca­vate pure sil­ver,” notes Robin­son Mey­er at The Atlantic. “Instead, they unearthed an ore of sil­ver, lead, and cop­per that had to be smelt­ed into sil­ver. This process filled the air with lead pol­lu­tion,” which even­tu­al­ly made its way on air cur­rents to Green­land, where “storms deposit­ed lead-taint­ed snow or sleet over the Arc­tic island.” New lay­ers formed upon the old, each one pre­served for pos­ter­i­ty.

In the mid-1990s, sci­en­tists began drilling Greenland’s ice sheet in the North Green­land Ice core Project (NGRIP). At the time, a team attempt­ed a sim­i­lar analy­sis on the lead lev­els and their cor­re­spon­dence to ancient coinage, “which used a sim­i­lar but rudi­men­ta­ry tech­nique,” Mey­er writes. But this study only drew from 18 data points. By con­trast, the new research “made 25,000 dif­fer­ent mea­sure­ments of the ice core.” Improved tech­nol­o­gy has refined the mea­sure­ment process, allow­ing researchers to detect “the pres­ence of 35 dif­fer­ent ele­ments and chem­i­cals at once,” and to tie their obser­va­tions to spe­cif­ic years, or fair­ly close to it, any­way. The chart above shows the fluc­tu­a­tions in lead emis­sions over the almost 2000-year span.

One of the study’s authors, Joseph McConnell, esti­mates the mar­gin of error as with­in one or two years. “That’s pret­ty good,” he says, “a lot bet­ter than what archae­ol­o­gists are used to, I can tell you that.” This allows the team of cli­mate sci­en­tists, archae­ol­o­gists, and his­to­ri­ans to match their obser­va­tions about lead lev­els to known his­tor­i­cal events. As The New York Times reports, “lead emis­sions rose in peri­ods of peace and pros­per­i­ty, such as the Pax Romana, which ran from 27 BC to 180 A.D. and dropped dur­ing the civ­il wars that pre­ced­ed the Pax and the rise of the emper­or Augus­tus. There were also dra­mat­ic drops that coin­cid­ed with the Anto­nine plague of 165–180 A.D., thought to have been small pox, and the Cypri­an plague, cause uncer­tain, of 250–270 A.D.”

The data, notes The Econ­o­mist, “pro­vide a new win­dow onto the work­ings of the ancient econ­o­my…. Not all of the lead trapped in the glac­i­er comes from sil­ver mind­ing, but much of it does,” and sci­en­tists can make informed guess­es about just how much. Many unan­swered ques­tions remain. “What we’d love to have is a doc­u­ment that says Rome had a state mon­e­tary pol­i­cy,” says Bernard. The empire’s spe­cif­ic eco­nom­ic poli­cies are large­ly a mys­tery, but the ice core sam­ples pro­vide a wealth of new evi­dence for the increase and decrease in cur­ren­cy pro­duc­tion, and ever-more refined tech­nolo­gies will allow for even more data to emerge from the pol­lu­tants trapped in glacial ice in the near future.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

How Did the Romans Make Con­crete That Lasts Longer Than Mod­ern Con­crete? The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved

The Rise & Fall of the Romans: Every Year Shown in a Time­lapse Map Ani­ma­tion (753 BC ‑1479 AD)

A Huge Scale Mod­el of Ancient Rome at Its Archi­tec­tur­al Peak, Orig­i­nal­ly Com­mis­sioned by Mus­soli­ni

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

The Muggletonians, an Obscure Religious Sect, Made Beautiful Maps That Put the Earth at the Center of the Solar System (1846)

In 1975, the philoso­pher of sci­ence Paul Fey­er­abend pub­lished his high­ly con­trar­i­an Against Method, a book in which he argued that “sci­ence is essen­tial­ly an anar­chic enter­prise,” and as such, ought to be accord­ed no more priv­i­lege than any oth­er way of know­ing in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety. Moti­vat­ed by con­cerns about sci­ence as a dom­i­neer­ing ide­ol­o­gy, he argued the his­tor­i­cal messi­ness of sci­en­tif­ic prac­tice, in which the­o­ries come about not through ele­gant log­i­cal think­ing but often by com­plete acci­dent, through copi­ous tri­al and error, intu­ition, imag­i­na­tion, etc. Only in hind­sight do we impose restric­tions and tidy rules and nar­ra­tives on rev­o­lu­tion­ary dis­cov­er­ies.

Sev­er­al years lat­er, in the third, 1993 edi­tion of the book, Fey­erebend observed with alarm the same wide­spread anti-sci­ence bias that Carl Sagan wrote of two years lat­er in Demon-Haunt­ed World. “Times have changed,” he wrote, “Con­sid­er­ing some ten­den­cies in U.S. edu­ca­tion… and in the world at large I think that rea­son should now be giv­en greater weight.”

Fey­er­abend died the fol­low­ing year, but I won­der how he might revise or qual­i­fy a 2018 edi­tion of the book, or whether he would repub­lish it at all. Polit­i­cal­ly-moti­vat­ed sci­ence denial­ism reigns. Indeed, a blithe denial of any observ­able real­i­ty, aid­ed by dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, has become a dystopi­an new norm. But as the philoso­pher also com­ment­ed, such cir­cum­stances may “occur fre­quent­ly today… but may dis­ap­pear tomor­row.”

In the record­ed his­to­ry of human inquiry across cul­tures and civ­i­liza­tions, we see ideas we call sci­en­tif­ic co-exist­ing with what we rec­og­nize as pseu­do- and anti-sci­en­tif­ic notions. The dif­fer­ences aren’t always very clear at the time. And then, some­times, they are. Dur­ing the so-called Age of Rea­son, when the devel­op­ment of the mod­ern sci­ences in Europe slow­ly eclipsed oth­er modes of expla­na­tion, one obscure group of con­trar­i­ans per­sist­ed in almost com­i­cal­ly stub­born unrea­son. Call­ing them­selves the Mug­gle­to­ni­ans, the Protes­tant sect—like those today who deny cli­mate change and evolution—resisted an over­whelm­ing con­sen­sus of empir­i­cal sci­ence, the Coper­ni­can view of the solar sys­tem, despite all avail­able evi­dence the con­trary. In so doing, they left behind a series of “beau­ti­ful celes­tial maps,” notes Greg Miller at Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, some of which resem­ble William Blake’s visu­al poet­ry.

The sect began in 1651, when a Lon­don tai­lor named John Reeve “claimed to have received a mes­sage from God” nam­ing his cousin Lodow­icke Mug­gle­ton as the “’last mes­sen­ger for a great work unto this bloody unbe­liev­ing world.’… One of the main prin­ci­ples of their faith, a lat­er observ­er wrote, was that ‘There is no Dev­il but the unclean Rea­son of men.’” Their view of the uni­verse, based, of course, on scrip­ture, resem­bles the Medieval Catholic view that Galileo attempt­ed to cor­rect, but their prin­ci­ple antag­o­nist was not the Ital­ian poly­math or the ear­li­er Renais­sance astronomer Coper­ni­cus, but the great sci­en­tif­ic mind of the time, Isaac New­ton, whom Mug­gle­to­ni­ans railed against into the 19th and even 20th cen­tu­ry. Mug­gle­to­ni­ans, Miller writes,” had remark­able longevity—the last known mem­ber died in 1979 after donat­ing the sect’s archive of books and papers… to the British Library.”

These plates come from an 1846 book called Two Sys­tems of Astron­o­my. Writ­ten by Mug­gle­ton­ian Isaac Frost, it “pit­ted the sci­en­tif­ic sys­tem of Isaac Newton—which held that the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull of the sun holds the Earth and oth­er plan­ets in orbit around it—against an Earth-cen­tered uni­verse based on a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible.” The plate above, for exam­ple, “attempts to show the absur­di­ty of the New­ton­ian sys­tem by depict­ing our solar sys­tem as one of many in an infi­nite and god­less uni­verse.” Iron­i­cal­ly, in attempt­ing to ridicule New­ton (who was him­self a pseu­do-sci­en­tist and Bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ist in oth­er ways), the Mug­gle­to­ni­ans stum­bled upon the view of mod­ern astronomers, who extrap­o­late a mind-bog­gling num­ber of pos­si­ble solar sys­tems in an observ­able uni­verse of over 100 bil­lion galax­ies (though these sys­tems are not enclosed cells crammed togeth­er side-by-side). Anoth­er plate, below, shows Frost’s depic­tion of the hat­ed New­ton­ian sys­tem, with the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter orbit­ing the Sun.

The oth­er maps, fur­ther up, all rep­re­sent the Mug­gle­ton­ian view. His­to­ri­an of sci­ence Fran­cis Reid describes it thus:

Accord­ing to Frost, Scrip­ture clear­ly states that the Sun, the Moon and the Stars are embed­ded in a fir­ma­ment made of con­gealed water and revolve around the Earth, that Heav­en has a phys­i­cal real­i­ty above and beyond the stars, and that the plan­ets and the Moon do not reflect the Sun’s rays but are them­selves inde­pen­dent sources of light.

Frost gave lec­tures at “estab­lish­ments set up for the edu­ca­tion of arti­sans and oth­er work­men.” It seems he didn’t attract much atten­tion and was fre­quent­ly heck­led by audi­ence mem­bers. Like flat earth­ers, Mug­gle­to­ni­ans were treat­ed as cranks, and unlike today’s reli­gious anti-sci­ence cru­saders, they nev­er had the pow­er to influ­ence pub­lic pol­i­cy or edu­ca­tion. For this rea­son, per­haps, it is easy to see them as quaint­ly humor­ous. Frost’s maps, as Miller writes, “remain strange­ly allur­ing” for both their artis­tic qual­i­ty and their aston­ish­ing­ly deter­mined creduli­ty. The plates are now part of the mas­sive David Rum­sey col­lec­tion, which hous­es thou­sands of rare his­tor­i­cal maps. For anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing look at reli­gious car­tog­ra­phy, see Miller’s Nation­al Geo­graph­ic post “map­ping the Apoc­a­lypse.”

via Nation­al Geo­graph­ic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Down­load 67,000 His­toric Maps (in High Res­o­lu­tion) from the Won­der­ful David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

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

The Cutting-Edge Science That Can Turn Everyday Objects, Like a Bag of Chips, Into a Listening Device

For decades we’ve laughed at the per­sis­tent movie and tele­vi­sion cliche of “image enhance,” where­by char­ac­ters — usu­al­ly detec­tives of one kind or anoth­er in pur­suit of a yet-unknown vil­lain — dis­cov­er just the clue they need by way of tech­no­log­i­cal mag­ic that some­how increas­es the amount of detail in a piece of found footage. But now, of course, our age of rapid­ly improv­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has brought an algo­rithm for that. And not only can such tech­nolo­gies find visu­al data we nev­er thought an image con­tained, they can find son­ic data as well: recov­er­ing the sound, in oth­er words, “record­ed” in osten­si­bly silent video.

“When sound hits an object, it caus­es small vibra­tions of the object’s sur­face,” explains the abstract of “The Visu­al Micro­phone: Pas­sive Recov­ery of Sound from Video,” a paper by Abe Davis, Michael Rubin­stein, Neal Wad­hwa, Gau­tham Mysore, Fre­do Durand, and William T. Free­man. “We show how, using only high-speed video of the object, we can extract those minute vibra­tions and par­tial­ly recov­er the sound that pro­duced them, allow­ing us to turn every­day objects — a glass of water, a pot­ted plant, a box of tis­sues, or a bag of chips — into visu­al micro­phones.” Or a lis­ten­ing device. You can see, and more impres­sive­ly hear, this process in action in the video at the top of the post.

The video just above mag­ni­fies the sound-caused motion of a bag of chips, to give us a sense of what their algo­rithm has to work with when it infers the sound present in the bag’s envi­ron­ment. In a way this all holds up to com­mon sense, giv­en that sound, as we all learn, comes from waves that make oth­er things vibrate, be they our eardrums, our speak­ers — or, as this research reveals, pret­ty much every­thing else as well. Though the bag of chips turned out to work quite well as a record­ing medi­um, some of their oth­er test sub­jects, includ­ing a brick cho­sen specif­i­cal­ly for its lack of sound-cap­tur­ing poten­tial, also did bet­ter than expect­ed.

The hid­den infor­ma­tion poten­tial­ly recov­er­able from video hard­ly stops there, as sug­gest­ed by Rubin­stein’s TED Talk just above. “Of course, sur­veil­lance is the first appli­ca­tion that comes to mind,” he says, to slight­ly ner­vous laugh­ter from the crowd. But “maybe in the future we’ll be able to use it, for exam­ple, to recov­er sound across space, because sound can’t trav­el in space, but light can.” Just one of many sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly noble pos­si­bil­i­ties, for which watch­ing what we say next time we open up a bag of Dori­tos would be, per­haps, a small price to pay.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

Hear What Music Sounds Like When It’s Cre­at­ed by Syn­the­siz­ers Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Radiooooo: Dis­cov­er the Musi­cal Time Machine That Lets You Hear What Played on the Radio in Dif­fer­ent Times & Places

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.

Help a Library Transcribe Magical Manuscripts & Recover the Charms, Potions & Witchcraft That Flourished in Early Modern Europe and America

Mag­ic is real—hear me out. No, you can’t solve life’s prob­lems with a wand and made-up Latin. But there are aca­d­e­m­ic depart­ments of mag­ic, only they go by dif­fer­ent names now. A few hun­dred years ago the dif­fer­ence between chem­istry and alche­my was nil. Witch­craft involved as much botany as spell­work. A lot of fun bits of mag­ic got weed­ed out when gen­tle­men in pow­dered wigs purged weird sis­ters and gnos­tic heretics from the field. Did the old spells work? Maybe, maybe not. Sci­ence has become pret­ty reli­able, I guess. Stan­dard­ized clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems and mea­sure­ments are okay, but yawn… don’t we long for some witch­ing and wiz­ard­ing? A well-placed hex might work won­ders.

Say no more, we’ve got you cov­ered: you, yes you, can learn charms and potions, demonolo­gy and oth­er assort­ed dark arts. How? For a one­time fee of absolute­ly noth­ing, you can enter mag­i­cal books from the Ear­ly Mod­ern Peri­od.

T’was a ver­i­ta­ble gold­en age of mag­ic, when wiz­ard­ing sci­en­tists like John Dee—Queen Eliz­a­beth’s sooth­say­ing astrologer and reveal­er of the lan­guage of the angels—burned bright­ly just before they were extin­guished, or run under­ground, by ortho­dox­ies of all sorts. The New­ber­ry, “Chicago’s Inde­pen­dent Research Library Since 1887,” has reached out to the crowds to help “unlock the mys­ter­ies” of rare man­u­scripts and bring the diver­si­ty of the time alive.

The library’s Tran­scrib­ing Faith ini­tia­tive gives users a chance to con­nect with texts like The Book of Mag­i­cal Charms (above), by tran­scrib­ing and/or trans­lat­ing the con­tents there­in. Like soft­ware engi­neer Joseph Peterson—founder of the Eso­teric Archives, which con­tains a large col­lec­tion of John Dee’s work—you can vol­un­teer to help the Newberry’s project “Reli­gious Change, 1450–1700.” The New­ber­ry aims to edu­cate the gen­er­al pub­lic on a peri­od of immense upheaval. “The Ref­or­ma­tion and the Sci­en­tif­ic Rev­o­lu­tion are very big, cap­i­tal let­ter con­cepts,” project coor­di­na­tor Christo­pher Fletch­er tells Smithsonian.com, “we lose sight of the fact that these were real events that hap­pened to real peo­ple.”

By aim­ing to return these texts to “real peo­ple” on the inter­net, the New­ber­ry hopes to demys­ti­fy, so to speak, key moments in Euro­pean his­to­ry. “You don’t need a Ph.D. to tran­scribe,” Fletch­er points out. Atlas Obscu­ra describes the process as “much like updat­ing a Wikipedia page,” only “any­one can start tran­scrib­ing and trans­lat­ing and they don’t need to sign up to do so.” Check out some tran­scrip­tions of The Book of Mag­i­cal Charms—writ­ten by var­i­ous anony­mous authors in the sev­en­teenth cen­tu­ry—here. The book, writes the New­ber­ry, describes “every­thing from speak­ing with spir­its to cheat­ing at dice to cur­ing a toothache.”

Need to call up a spir­it for some dirty work? Just fol­low the instruc­tions below:

Call their names Ori­moth, Bel­moth Limoc and Say thus. I con­jure you by the neims of the Angels + Sator and Azamor that yee intend to me in this Aore, and Send unto me a Spirite called Sag­rigid that doe full­fill my comand­ng and desire and that can also undar­stand my words for one or 2 yuares; or as long as I will.

Seems sim­ple enough, but of course this busi­ness did not sit well with some pow­er­ful peo­ple, includ­ing one Increase Math­er, father of Cot­ton, pres­i­dent of Har­vard, best known from his work on the Salem Witch Tri­als. Increase defend­ed the pros­e­cu­tions in a man­u­script titled Cas­es of Con­science Con­cern­ing Evil Spir­its, a page from which you can see fur­ther up. The text reads, in part:

an Evi­dence Sup­posed to be in the Tes­ti­mo­ny
which is throw­ly to be Weighed, & if it doe
not infal­li­bly prove the Crime against the
per­son accused, it ought not to deter­mine
him Guilty of it for So right­eous may
be con­demned unjust­ly.

Math­er did not con­sid­er these to be show tri­als or “witch­hunts” but rather the fair and judi­cious appli­ca­tion of due process, for what­ev­er that’s worth. Else­where in the text he famous­ly wrote, “It were bet­ter that Ten Sus­pect­ed Witch­es should escape, than that one Inno­cent Per­son should be Con­demned.” Cold com­fort to those con­demned as guilty for like­ly prac­tic­ing some mix of reli­gion and ear­ly sci­ence.

These texts are writ­ten in Eng­lish and con­cern them­selves with mag­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al mat­ters express­ly. Oth­er man­u­scripts in the project’s archive roam more broad­ly across top­ics and lan­guages, and “shed light on the entwined prac­tices of reli­gion and read­ing.” One “com­mon­place book,” for exam­ple (above), from some­time between 1590 and 1620, con­tains ser­mons by John Donne as well as “reli­gious, polit­i­cal, and prac­ti­cal texts, includ­ing a Mid­dle Eng­lish lyric,” all care­ful­ly writ­ten out by an Eng­lish scribe named Hen­ry Feilde in order to prac­tice his cal­lig­ra­phy.

Anoth­er such text, large­ly in Latin, “may have been start­ed as ear­ly as the 16th cen­tu­ry, but con­tin­ued to be used and added to well into the 19th cen­tu­ry. Its com­pil­ers expressed inter­est in a wide range of top­ics, from reli­gious and moral ques­tions to the lib­er­al arts to strange events.” Books like these “reflect­ed the read­ing habits of ear­ly mod­ern peo­ple, who tend­ed not to read books from begin­ning to end, but instead to dip in and out of them,” extract­ing bits and bobs of wis­dom, quo­ta­tions, recipes, prayers, and even the odd spell or two.

The final work in need of transcription/translation is also the only print­ed text, or texts, rather, a col­lec­tion of Ital­ian reli­gious broad­sides, adver­tis­ing “pub­lic cel­e­bra­tions and com­mem­o­ra­tions of Catholic feast days and oth­er reli­gious occa­sions.” Hard­ly sum­mon­ing spir­its, though some may beg to dif­fer. If you’re so inclined to take part in open­ing the secrets of these rare books for lay read­ers every­where, vis­it Tran­scrib­ing Faith here and get to work.

via Smith­son­ianAtlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,600 Occult Books Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online, Thanks to the Rit­man Library and Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Behold the Mys­te­ri­ous Voyn­ich Man­u­script: The 15th-Cen­tu­ry Text That Lin­guists & Code-Break­ers Can’t Under­stand

Isaac Newton’s Recipe for the Myth­i­cal ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ Is Being Dig­i­tized & Put Online (Along with His Oth­er Alche­my Man­u­scripts)

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

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

Albert Ein­stein, 1921, by Fer­di­nand Schmutzer via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Here’s an extra­or­di­nary record­ing of Albert Ein­stein from the fall of 1941, read­ing a full-length essay in Eng­lish:

The essay is called “The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence.” It was record­ed in Sep­tem­ber of 1941 as a radio address to the British Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence. The record­ing was appar­ent­ly made in Amer­i­ca, as Ein­stein nev­er returned to Europe after emi­grat­ing from Ger­many in 1933.

Ein­stein begins by sketch­ing a brief out­line of the devel­op­ment of lan­guage, before explor­ing the con­nec­tion between lan­guage and think­ing. “Is there no think­ing with­out the use of lan­guage,” asks Ein­stein, “name­ly in con­cepts and con­cept-com­bi­na­tions for which words need not nec­es­sar­i­ly come to mind? Has not every one of us strug­gled for words although the con­nec­tion between ‘things’ was already clear?”

Despite this evi­dent sep­a­ra­tion between lan­guage and think­ing, Ein­stein quick­ly points out that it would be a gross mis­take to con­clude that the two are entire­ly inde­pen­dent. In fact, he says, “the men­tal devel­op­ment of the indi­vid­ual and his way of form­ing con­cepts depend to a high degree upon lan­guage.” Thus a shared lan­guage implies a shared men­tal­i­ty. For this rea­son Ein­stein sees the lan­guage of sci­ence, with its math­e­mat­i­cal signs, as hav­ing a tru­ly glob­al role in influ­enc­ing the way peo­ple think:

The super­na­tion­al char­ac­ter of sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts and sci­en­tif­ic lan­guage is due to the fact that they have been set up by the best brains of all coun­tries and all times. In soli­tude, and yet in coop­er­a­tive effort as regards the final effect, they cre­at­ed the spir­i­tu­al tools for the tech­ni­cal rev­o­lu­tions which have trans­formed the life of mankind in the last cen­turies. Their sys­tem of con­cepts has served as a guide in the bewil­der­ing chaos of per­cep­tions so that we learned to grasp gen­er­al truths from par­tic­u­lar obser­va­tions.

Ein­stein con­cludes with a cau­tion­ary reminder that the sci­en­tif­ic method is only a means toward an end, and that the wel­fare of human­i­ty depends ulti­mate­ly on shared goals.

Per­fec­tion of means and con­fu­sion of goals seem–in my opinion–to char­ac­ter­ize our age. If we desire sin­cere­ly and pas­sion­ate­ly for the safe­ty, the wel­fare, and the free devel­op­ment of the tal­ents of all men, we shall not be in want of the means to approach such a state. Even if only a small part of mankind strives for such goals, their supe­ri­or­i­ty will prove itself in the long run.

The imme­di­ate con­text of Ein­stein’s mes­sage was, of course, World War II. The air force of Ein­stein’s native coun­try had only recent­ly called off its bomb­ing cam­paign against Eng­land. A year before, Lon­don weath­ered 57 straight nights of bomb­ing by the Luft­waffe. Ein­stein had always felt a deep sense of grat­i­tude to the British sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty for its efforts dur­ing World War I to test the Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty, despite the fact that its author was from an ene­my nation.

“The Com­mon Lan­guage of Sci­ence” was first pub­lished a year after the radio address, in Advance­ment of Sci­ence 2, no. 5. It is cur­rent­ly avail­able in the Ein­stein antholo­gies Out of My Lat­er Years and Ideas and Opin­ions.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in March 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Albert Ein­stein on Indi­vid­ual Lib­er­ty, With­out Which There Would Be ‘No Shake­speare, No Goethe, No New­ton’

Albert Ein­stein Tells His Son The Key to Learn­ing & Hap­pi­ness is Los­ing Your­self in Cre­ativ­i­ty (or “Find­ing Flow”)

Albert Ein­stein Called Racism “A Dis­ease of White Peo­ple” in His Lit­tle-Known Fight for Civ­il Rights

Find Cours­es on Ein­stein in the Physics Sec­tion of our Free Online Cours­es Col­lec­tion

A Shazam for Nature: A New Free App Helps You Identify Plants, Animals & Other Denizens of the Natural World

Do you ever long for those not-so-long-ago days when you skipped through the world, breath­less with the antic­i­pa­tion of catch­ing Poké­mon on your phone screen?

If so, you might enjoy bag­ging some of the Pokeverse’s real world coun­ter­parts using Seek, iNaturalist’s new pho­to-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion app. It does for the nat­ur­al world what Shaz­am does for music.

Aim your phone’s cam­era at a non­de­script leaf or the grasshop­per-ish-look­ing crea­ture who’s camped on your porch light. With a bit of luck, Seek will pull up the rel­e­vant Wikipedia entry to help the two of you get bet­ter acquaint­ed.

Reg­is­tered users can pin their finds to their per­son­al col­lec­tions, pro­vid­ed the app’s recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy pro­duces a match.

(Sev­er­al ear­ly adopters sug­gest it’s still a few house­plants shy of true func­tion­al­i­ty…)

Seek’s pro­tec­tive stance with regard to pri­va­cy set­tings is well suit­ed to junior spec­i­men col­lec­tors, as are the vir­tu­al badges with which it rewards ener­getic upload­ers.

While it doesn’t hang onto user data, Seek is build­ing a pho­to library, com­posed in part of user sub­mis­sions.

(Your cat is ready for her close up, Mr. DeMille…)

(Dit­to your Por­to­bel­lo Mush­room burg­er…)

Down­load Seek for free on iTunes or Google Play.

via Earth­er/My Mod­ern Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Watch 50 Hours of Nature Sound­scapes from the BBC: Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly Proven to Ease Stress and Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness & Awe

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happened When Stephen Hawking Threw a Cocktail Party for Time Travelers (2009)

Who among us has nev­er fan­ta­sized about trav­el­ing through time? But then, who among us has­n’t trav­eled through time? Every sin­gle one of us is a time trav­el­er, tech­ni­cal­ly speak­ing, mov­ing as we do through one sec­ond per sec­ond, one hour per hour, one day per day. Though I nev­er per­son­al­ly heard the late Stephen Hawk­ing point out that fact, I feel almost cer­tain that he did, espe­cial­ly in light of one par­tic­u­lar piece of sci­en­tif­ic per­for­mance art he pulled off in 2009: throw­ing a cock­tail par­ty for time trav­el­ers — the prop­er kind, who come from the future.

“Hawking’s par­ty was actu­al­ly an exper­i­ment on the pos­si­bil­i­ty of time trav­el,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Anne Ewbank. “Along with many physi­cists, Hawk­ing had mused about whether going for­ward and back in time was pos­si­ble. And what time trav­el­er could resist sip­ping cham­pagne with Stephen Hawk­ing him­self?” ”

By pub­lish­ing the par­ty invi­ta­tion in his mini-series Into the Uni­verse With Stephen Hawk­ing, Hawk­ing hoped to lure futur­is­tic time trav­el­ers. You are cor­dial­ly invit­ed to a recep­tion for Time Trav­ellers, the invi­ta­tion read, along with the the date, time, and coor­di­nates for the event. The the­o­ry, Hawk­ing explained, was that only some­one from the future would be able to attend.”

Alas, no time trav­el­ers turned up. Since some­one pos­sessed of that tech­nol­o­gy at any point in the future would the­o­ret­i­cal­ly be able to attend, does Hawk­ing’s lone­ly par­ty, which you can see in the clip above, prove that time trav­el will nev­er become pos­si­ble? Maybe — or maybe the poten­tial time-trav­el­ers of the future know some­thing about the space-time-con­tin­u­um-threat­en­ing risks of the prac­tice that we don’t. As for Dr. Hawk­ing, I have to imag­ine that he came away sat­is­fied from the shindig, even though his hoped-for Ms. Uni­verse from the future nev­er walked through the door. “I like sim­ple exper­i­ments… and cham­pagne,” he said, and this cham­pagne-laden sim­ple exper­i­ment will con­tin­ue to remind the rest of us to enjoy our time on Earth, wher­ev­er in that time we may find our­selves.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

The Lighter Side of Stephen Hawk­ing: The Physi­cist Cracks Jokes and a Smile with John Oliv­er

Pro­fes­sor Ronald Mal­lett Wants to Build a Time Machine in this Cen­tu­ry … and He’s Not Kid­ding

What’s the Ori­gin of Time Trav­el Fic­tion?: New Video Essay Explains How Time Trav­el Writ­ing Got Its Start with Charles Dar­win & His Lit­er­ary Peers

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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