This week, the Bank of England announced that it will feature Alan Turing on its £50 banknote, thus completing the political rehabilitation of the English mathematician, computer scientist and code breaker. The new note will go into circulation in 2021. Find more at The Guardian.
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Religion, history, medicine, poetry, ethnography, zoology, cosmology, political philosophy—in many a medieval text, these categories all seem to melt together. Or rather, they don’t exist separately in the way we think of them, as labels on a library shelf and courses in a catalogue. The same logical rules do not apply—the appeal to authority, for example is not a fallacy so much as a primary methodology. If knowledge came from the right prophet, scholar, or sage, it could be trusted, a mode of thinking that gave rise to monsters, phantoms, and outlandish beings of all kinds.
It’s easy to call these methods primitive, but so-called medieval ways of thinking are still very much with us, and thinkers hundreds and thousands of years ago have had surprisingly scientific approaches, despite limited resources and technologies.
We find both the fantastical and the scientific woven together in medieval manuscripts, illuminating and commenting on each other. And we find exactly that in the works of Abu Yahya Zakariya’ ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini, Persian writer, physician, astronomer, geographer, and author of a 13th century treatise called ‘Ajā’ib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharā’ib al-mawjūdāt, or Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing.
This work is “the most well-known example,” writes the National Library of Medicine, “of a genre of classical Islamic literature that was concerned with ‘mirabilia’ or wonders of creation.” Drawing on 50 different authors, including several ancient Islamic geographers and historians, Qazwini weaves myth, legend, and science, tying them together with stories and poetry. The Qur’an and hadith are significant sources—for a section on “angelology,” for example. When the cosmography comes down to earth, moving down through the ranks of humans, beasts, plants, and minerals, all sorts of weird, folkloric terrestrial creatures show up.
The phoenix (or Simurgh), for example, and the Homa, or paradise bird—which lands on someone’s head and instantly makes them king—sit comfortably next to eagles, vultures, and ostriches, all of which are construed as marvelous or miraculous in some way.
The treatise covered all the wonders of the world, and the variety of the subject matter (humans and their anatomy, plants, animals, strange creatures at the edges of the inhabited world, constellations of stars, zodiacal signs, angels, and demons) provided great scope for the artist.
First written in Arabic in the late 1200s and dedicated to the governor of Baghdad, the manuscript was “immensely popular” in the Islamic world. It was translated into Persian and Turkish and copied out in richly illustrated editions for centuries. The images here come from a Persian translation, “thought to hail from 17th-century Mughal India,” writes The Public Domain Review, and the art vividly displays the “eclectic mix of topics” in al-Qazwini’s book. These were subjects that “challenged understanding”—often because they concerned things that do not exist, and often because they described natural phenomenon that could not yet be explained.
“From humans and their anatomy to strange mythical creatures; from plants and animals to constellations of stars and zodiacal signs,” The Public Domain Review explains, the treatise purported to survey all the “known” world. Al-Qazwini embellished his explorations for entertainment purposes, but he also created extensive taxonomies and described practical science like the use of “a type of pitch or tar that we today know as asphalt,” San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum notes in their catalogue description of another illustrated manuscript, in Arabic, from 1650. For al-Qazwini and his readers, as for other 13th-century scholars, writers, and readers around the world, the boundaries between faith, fact, and fiction were permeable, and imagination sometimes seems to have been the ultimate authority.
Then the day you begin to play with both hands? So grown up.
Eventually you start using more than two fingers.
And then comes the party where a proud parent, possibly with a drink or two in him, commands you to play for the guests, who indulge your efforts with applause and the suggestion that perhaps their child, a contemporary of yours, take a turn at the keyboard.
Mozart.
Beethoven.
Maximum humiliation.
How soon can you bail on those damn piano lessons?
I flashed on that universal experience whilst listening to pianist and composer Nahre Sol demonstrate the “endless possibilities” of piano composition and interpretation by subjecting “Happy Birthday” to sixteen levels of increasing complexity.
‘Round about level five is where our respective talents began to part ways.
After a lot of practice and false starts, I can sometimes manage a simple arpeggio.
Now I know what made the visitors’ kid so much more advanced than me—broken octaves, glissandos, great muscular spans, a confident command of harmonies and rhythm…
Sol blows that performance out of the water, with seemingly very little effort, breezily explaining what she’s doing each time she takes things up a notch, culminating in level 16, which encompasses all previous steps.
As homelessricegum observes in the comment section of the video, “Level 17: you will now need your third hand.”
Investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio has a net worth of $18.4 billion. That alone would persuade a great many of us to listen to any and all advice he has to offer, but unlike many multi-billionaires, he’s also put no small amount of thought into just what advice to give and how to give it. One reason is that the pieces of advice he doles out publicly began as pieces of advice for himself, discovered through trial and error and refined into a set of principles. These he lays out in his book Principles: Life and Work, the content of which he has also distilled into the animated video above, “Principles for Success by Ray Dalio.”
Dalio breaks down his own journey to success as the continued repetition of a five-step process:
Know your goals and run after them
Encounter the problems that stand in the way of getting to your goals
Diagnose these problems to get at their root causes
Design a plan to eliminate the problems
Execute those designs
This framework already sets Dalio apart from other successful advice-givers, some of whom offer nothing more than broad platitudes about believing in yourself and never giving up hope, and others of whom fall back on cynical cracks about doing unto others before they do unto you. Dalio, for his part, endorses a mindset he calls “hyperrealism,” the adoption of which demands putting the truth before all else. And the hyperrealist first examines the truth about himself, assessing as objectively as possible his weaknesses as well as his strengths and regularly drawing upon the perspectives of those who disagree with him.
Underlying Dalio’s ideas about hyperrealism and success is a mechanistic conception of humanity, the economy, the world, indeed all reality: “Everything is a machine,” as he starkly puts it. By this, he doesn’t mean we should think of ourselves as pre-programmed robots, but that we can approach all of our choices as puzzles to be figured out. “Most everything happens over and over again in slightly different ways,” he says, but most of us, with our viewpoints biased toward recent history and our “ego and blind spot barriers” that keep us from seeing the full picture, mistakenly regard the situations in which we find ourselves as unique, thus making them into more difficult problems than they are.
Of course, even if we embrace hyperrealism and develop ever more reliable strategies to surmount the obstacles that crop up along our chosen paths, we’ll fail as often as we succeed. Dalio tells of his own grand humbling in the early 1980s when he bet everything on a depression that never came, and explains how the fallout taught him that “truth is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.” Even if we have no interest in doing what it takes to make $18.4 billion, we might still bear in mind the two principle-driven equations that Dalio provides — “Dreams + reality + determination = a successful life” and “Pain + reflection = progress” — along with his conviction that success requires not just knowing the truth of world, but the truth of ourselves as well.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
Very few artists enjoy the degree of recognition that’s been conferred upon the late television educator Bob Ross, though sales of his work hover around zero.
It’s not due to scarcity. Ross pumped out three nearly-identical paintings per episode of his series, The Joy of Painting (watch them online here). That’s 403 episodes over the course of 31 seasons on public television—or 1209 canvases of clouds, mountains, and “happy little trees.”
Shouldn’t economics dictate that these would have only increased in value following their creator’s untimely death from lymphoma in 1995?
Is the painter’s legendary hypnotic appeal a factor? Did he subconsciously manipulate even the most cutthroat collectors into a state of sentimental attachment wherein profit matters not a jot?
As The New York Times-produced video above points out, Ross’ great mission in life was to get others painting—quickly and joyfully.
Which is not to say he blithely tossed the fruits of his labor into the incinerator after that purpose had been served.
The reason Ross’ paintings aren’t on the market is they’re neatly stacked in cardboard cartons at Bob Ross Inc. in Herndon, Virginia. It hardly constitutes archival storage, but the boxes are neatly numbered, and everything is accounted for.
And that is where they’re likely to remain, according to executive assistant Sarah Strohl and president Joan Kowalski, the daughter of Ross’ longtime business partner. (Her mother, Annette is Ross’ former student and the foremost authenticator of his work.)
For now, if anyone endeavors to sell you a Bob Ross original, it’s safe to assume it’s a fake.
Better yet, paint your own. Bob Ross Inc. tends to both the master’s reputation and his lucrative off-screen business, selling instructional books and painting supplies.
Ross, of course, never broke a sweat on camera, which lends a bit of cognitive dissonance to the Times’ video’s frenetic editing. (I never thought I’d have to issue a seizure warning for something Bob Ross-related, but those canvases flash by awfully quickly at the 1:09 mark and again at 10:36. )
No, he didn’t help defeat an implacable zombie army intent on wiping out all life. But English obstetrician John Snow seems as important as the similarly-named Game of Thrones hero for his role in persuading modern medicine of the germ theory of disease. During the 1854 outbreak of cholera in London, Snow convinced authorities and critics that the disease spread from a contaminated water pump on Broad Street, leading to the now-legendary infographic map above showing the incidences of cholera clustered around the pump.
Snow’s persistence resulted in the removal of the handle from the Broad Street pump and has been credited with ending an epidemic that claimed 500 lives. The Broad Street pump map has become “an enduring feature of the folklore of public health and epidemiology,” write the authors of an article published in The Lancet. They also point out that, contrary to popular retellings, the “map did not give rise to the insight” that the pump and its germ-covered handle caused the outbreak. “Rather it tended to confirm theories already held by the various investigators.”
Snow himself published a pamphlet in 1849 called “On the Mode of Communication of Cholera” in which he argued that “cholera is communicated by the evacuations from the alimentary canal.” As he reminded readers of The Edinburgh Medical Journal in an 1856 letter, in that same year, “Dr William Budd published a pamphlet ‘On Malignant Cholera’ in which he expressed views similar to my own.” Germ theory had a long, distinguished history already, and Snow and his contemporaries made sound, evidence-based arguments for it.
But their position “largely went ignored by the medical establishment,” notes Randy Alfred at Wired, “and was opposed by a local water company near one London outbreak.” The accepted, mainstream scientific opinion held that all disease was spread through “miasma,” or bad air. Pollution, it was thought, must be the cause. After the pump handle’s removal, Snow published an 1855 monograph on waterborne diseases. This was the first public appearance of the legendary map—after the removal of the handle.
Helping to inform Snow’s map, another investigator, parish priest Henry Whitehead had “concluded that it was the washing of soiled diapers into drains which flowed to the communal cesspool that contaminated the pump and started the outbreak,” writes Atlas Obscura. Whitehead, a former critic of germ theory, later pointed out that the removal of the pump handle didn’t actually stop the epidemic, which, he said, “had already run its course” by that point.
Nonetheless, Snow and other proponents of the theory were vindicated, Whitehead had to admit, and Snow’s intervention “had probably everything to do with preventing a new outbreak.” The simple, yet sophisticated data visualization would lead to radical new ways of conceptualizing disease outbreaks, helping to stop or prevent who knows how many epidemics before they killed hundreds or thousands. Snow’s map also deserves credit for giving “data journalists a model of how to work today.”
It was hardly the first or only data visualization of cholera outbreaks of the time. “As early as the 1830s,” Visual Capitalist points out, “geographers began using spacial analysis to study cholera epidemiology.” But Snow’s was by far the most influential, and effective, of them all. In his TED talk above, journalist Steven Johnson (author of The Ghost Map:The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World) tells the story of how the outbreak, and Snow’s theory and map, “helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today.”
Read a Q&A with Johnson here; head over to The Guardian’s Data Blog to see Snow’s visualization recreated over a modern, satellite-view map of London and the Soho neighborhood of the famous Broad Street pump; and learn more about Snow and deadly cholera outbreaks in the crowded European cities of the early 19th century at the John Snow Archive and Research Companion online.
Two of the most startlingly original science fiction writers of the past century, Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, emerged in the 60s and 70s and created dystopian visions that resonate with us today with more depth and immediacy than the majority of their contemporaries. Both writers also happened to be African American. But why should this detail matter? Why indeed, asked Butler, in an equally relevant question, “is science fiction so white?” She went on to explore the question in a 1980 essay published in Transmission, not with a history of the genre, but with rebuttals to the reasons for excluding people like her.
“A more insidious problem than outright racism is simply habit, custom,” Butler writes. People get comfortable with things as they are—an attitude antithetical to the spirit of sci-fi. “Science fiction, more than any other genre deals with change—change in science and technology, and social change. But science fiction itself changes slowly, often under protest.”
Butler died too young, in 2006 at age 58; but she lived to see resistance to change in science fiction persist into the 21st century. Yet in her most compelling, and slightly terrifying, projection into the future—her mid-90s Parable series of novels—change is the only thing that anyone can rely on.
All that you touch, you Change. All that you Change Changes you.
N.K. Jemison quotes these lines from Parable of the Sowerin her introduction to the book’s reissue this year. Published in 1993, Parable’s futurism didn’t have the same frisson as that of, say, William Gibson at the time. “Roving, uncontested gangs of pedophiles and drug-addicted pyromaniacs? Slavery 2.0? A powerful coalition of white-supremacist, homophobic, Christian zealots taking over the country?” writes Jemison. “Nah, I thought, and hoped Butler would get back to aliens soon.” Set in the context of a U.S. post-massive climate collapse (possibly), hyper-financialization, and corporate rule.… the novel now seems all too prescient to its current-day readers.
But even Butler’s alien stories are stories about humans in radical transition, and collective social actions with both devastating and transformative outcomes. In Dawn, the first novel in her Xenogenesis trilogy (now called “Lilith’s Brood”), human woman Lilith Iyapo “awakens after 250 years of stasis,” following an apocalyptic nuclear war on Earth, “to find herself surrounded by aliens called the Oankali,” as the animated TED-Ed lesson above by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey tells it. These beings want to trade DNA with the remaining humans, thereby creating a hybrid species. The alternative is sterilization.
The chilling scenario in Dawnand its successors has its moments of Lovecraftian dread, but it goes in an even stranger direction, bringing an added dimension to the meaning of the word “dehumanization.” What would it mean to slowly transform into another species? Such profoundly universal questions about the meaning of human identity reached “readers who had been excluded from the genre,” notes Emanuella Grinberg at CNN. Butler peoples her books with humans of every color and ethnicity, and aliens only she might have imagined. But most of her protagonists are black and brown women. Many of the readers Butler influenced, like Jemison, are women of color who became genre-changing sci-fi writers themselves.
Butler’s work “helped define the literary cornerstone of Afrofuturism,” notes Grinberg. Her writing was strategic, a way to confront dehumanizing political and social political realities. Parable of the Sower, the TED lesson explains, was partly a response to Butler’s home state of California’s Proposition 187, which denied undocumented immigrants basic healthcare, education, and basic services. In the follow-up, Parable of the Talents (1998), an authoritarian presidential candidate campaigns on the slogan “Make American Great Again.” Her best-selling novel, Kindred, published in 1979, tells the story of a contemporary woman repeatedly pulled back in time to the Maryland plantation of her enslaved ancestor.
Why should we read Octavia Butler? You’ll have to read her to answer that question yourself. But I’d venture to say—along with the intro to her life and work above—because she had a better read on how the time she lived in would turn into the time we live in now than nearly anyone writing at the time; because she told strange, wonderful, outlandish, compelling stories that stretched the imagination without losing sight of the human core; because, like Ursula K. Le Guin, she challenged the world as it is with profound visions of what it might be; and because she not only excelled as a storyteller but specifically as a committed science fiction storyteller, one who deeply touched, and thus deeply changed, the form.
“As a cartoonist, I read Krazy Kat with awe and wonder,” writes Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson in his introduction to The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat. The creator of quite possibly the most beloved comic strip of the past thirty years calls Krazy Kat “such a pure and completely realized personal vision that the strip’s inner mechanism is ultimately as unknowable as George Herriman,” the artist who wrote and drew it for its entire three-decade run from 1913 to 1944. “I marvel at how this fanciful world could be so forcefully imagined and brought to paper with such immediacy. THIS is how good a comic strip can be.”
High praise, especially from the hyperbole-resistant Watterson, a sharp-eyed critic of his art form and perceiver of its unrealized potential. “Quirky, individual, and uncompromised, Krazy Kat is one of the very few comic strips that takes full advantage of its medium. There are some things a comic strip can do that no other medium, not even animation, can touch, and Krazy Kat is a virtual essay on comic strip essence.”
The “self-consciously baroque narrations and monologues” show that “words can be funny in themselves”; “the sky turns from black to white to zigzags and plaids simply because, in a comic strip, it CAN”; its surreal Arizona desert setting “is a character in the story, and the strip is ‘about’ that landscape as much as it is about the animals who populate it,” Ignatz Mouse, Offissa Pupp, and the titular Krazy Kat.
Ignatz Mouse “demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her” (though their genders, so modern observers note, were never quite stable), “Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love,” and Offissa Pupp, the desert’s lone lawman, is “obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz’s ‘sin,’ thereby interfering with a process that’s satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons.”
I myself first picked up a Krazy Kat collection as a Calvin and Hobbes-loving elementary schooler, and soon found myself captivated by the sheer density of strangeness in its pages. But read enough of Herriman’s masterwork, and that strangeness takes on a strong meaning that nevertheless differs from reader to reader. “Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a ‘surrealistic’ poem, unfolding over years and years,” writes Chris Ware, another of the most respected comic-strip artists alive. “It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip.” And now, 75 years after its conclusion, much more of humanity can enjoy Krazy Kat than ever. Explore digitized scans at Franusic’s web site. Or pick up a copy of the new edition of The Complete Krazy Kat in Color, a color facsimile of the complete pages of Krazy Kat 1935–44.
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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The 448 page Mueller Report doesn’t make for breezy beach reading. That’s for sure. But, “buried within the Mueller report, there is a narrative that reads in parts like a thriller.” Working with that theory, Insider.com “hired Mark Bowden, a journalist and author known for his brilliant works of narrative nonfiction like Black Hawk Down, Killing Pablo, and Hue 1968.” And they gave him an assignment: “Use the interviews and facts laid out in the Mueller Report (plus those from reliable, fact-checked sources and published firsthand accounts)” and create an account that’s “so gripping it will hold your attention (and maybe your congressional representative’s).” They also hired “Chad Hurd, an illustrator from the art department of Archer,” and “asked him to draw out scenes from the report to bring them to life.” Find the resulting illustrated edition of The Mueller Report right here.
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Headaches number among humanity’s most common ailments. The headache-related disorders known as migraines may be rarer, afflicting roughly fifteen percent of the population, but they’re also much more severe. Besides a headache that can last as long as three days, migraines can also come with various other symptoms including nausea as well as sensitivity to light, sound, and smells. They even cause some sufferers to hallucinate: the visual elements of these pre-migraine “auras” might take the shape of distortions, vibrations, zig-zag lines, bright lights, blobs, or blind spots. Sometimes they also come in color, and brilliant color at that.
Those colors jump right out of this 1870 drawing by English physician Hubert Airy, with which he sought to capture his own visual experience of a migraine. He “first became aware of his affliction in the fall of 1854,” writes National Geographic’s Greg Miller, “when he noticed a small blind spot interfering with his ability to read. ‘At first it looked just like the spot which you see after having looked at the sun or some bright object,’ he later wrote. But the blind spot was growing, its edges taking on a zigzag shape that reminded Airy of the bastions of a fortified medieval town.” As Airy describes it, “All the interior of the fortification, so to speak, was boiling and rolling about in a most wonderful manner as if it was some thick liquid all alive.”
To a migraneur, that description may sound familiar, and the drawing that accompanied it in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1870 may look even more so. Called “arguably the most beautiful scientific records of migraine aura ever made” by G.D. Schott in Brain, Airy’s drawings “record the progress and expansion of his own visual disturbances” over their half-hour-long onset. Apart from their stark beauty, writes Miller, the set of drawings “anticipates discoveries in neuroscience that were still decades in the future,” such as the assumption that the hallucinations originate in the brain rather than the eyes and that certain parts of the field of vision correspond to certain parts of the visual cortex.
“There’s still much we don’t know about migraines and migraine auras,” Miller writes. “One hypothesis is that a sort of electrical wave sweeps across the visual cortex, causing hallucinations that spread across the corresponding parts of the visual field” — an idea with which Airy’s early renderings also accord. And what about the source of all those colors? Electrical waves passing through parts of the brain “that contain neurons that respond to specific colors” may be responsible, but nearly 150 years after the publication of Airy’s drawings, “no one really knows.” Migraine research of the kind pioneered by Airy himself may have dispelled some of the mystery surrounding the affliction, but a great deal nevertheless remains. Airy’s drawings, still among the most vivid representations of the visual aspect of migraines ever created, will no doubt inspire generations of future neuroscientists to find out 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
In the definitive celebration of two pop culture icons, Barbie honors the ultimate pop chameleon, English singer, songwriter and actor, David Bowie.
This collectible Barbie doll wears the metallic Ziggy Stardust ‘space suit’ with red and blue stripes, flared shoulders and Bowie’s signature cherry-red platform boots.
Special details include bold makeup — featuring the famed astral sphere forehead icon — and a hairstyle inspired by Bowie’s fiery-red locks.
Specially designed packaging makes Barbie David Bowie the ultimate collector’s item for Bowie and Barbie fans alike.
Honor David Bowie’s extraordinary talent and undeniable influence with Barbie David Bowie doll.
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