The Year of the Horse

Posted on January 31, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – The Year of the Horse, 2004 celebration in Belmore Park, Sydney, Australia. Picture by J Bar from the Wikimedia Commons and published under GNU Free Documentation License.

I want to wish all of our friends and readers who celebrate Chinese New Year, Happy Year of the Horse. If you have the opportunity to visit a Chinese New Year celebration, I recommend that you bring camera in hand. These are exciting, color, and motion filled events. A number of places on the web are offering up stunning photoessays of New Year celebrations around the world, see for instance this one from the BBC. I am particularly taken by an AP image of the underwater festivities at Singapore’s South East Asia Aquarium.

Back in the sixties my father was a popular science teacher at Charles Sumner Junior Hight School (JHS 65) in New York City, which served New York’s Chinatown area. On Chinese New Year, we would go down and watch the parades and dancing dragons. It was insane. Firecrackers were everywhere, and a particular sport was exploding them within inches of Mr. Wolf’s face. Ah, those were the days. I always think of that on the Fourth of July during our local parade, when the staff of our neighborhood restaurant “Lotus Blossom” come by dressed as a giant dragon.

So Happy New Year everyone!

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival

Posted on January 30, 2014 by David

Figure 1 - Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Ann Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Figure 1 – Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival, 1973. Picture by Anne Burgess via the Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license 2.0

Enough with the bad weather already, he exclaimed. Most of the United States is currently suffering from some sort of miserable weather difficulties, and I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third, R3, to the cognoscenti,

“Now is the winter of our discontent…”

So, I was looking for inspiration this afternoon and found this great portfolio of pictures from Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. The Shetland Islands are described as being a subarctic archipelago of Scotland. Subarctic archipelago? Doesn’t that sound cold?

And you would expect the people that live there to know how to deal with winter’s rude bite. And they do. Hence, The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival. Check these pictures from the BBC out. The videos at this site are worth watch as well. Yes, you’re seeing correctly. Everyone is dressed as a Viking and, yes, they are setting a Viking longboat on fire. Puts winter in a whole new perspective. I want to be there! I want to be a Viking! “Pillaging hours 9 am to 5 pm M-F.”

The Up Helly Aa Viking fire festival began in the 1880s. The current Lerwick festival evolved from a Christmas tradition of dragging burning tar barrels through the town on sledges. Doesn’t everyone do that? When this was banned the festival slowly evolved into a Viking theme and also moved into January. Yes, you guessed it when everyone is miserable and fed up with the dark and cold and really need a lift. So grab you ski parkas, put on your Viking “quize,” and head to Lerwick. You are sure to find your inner Viking not to mention some wonderful photo opps. Yes, of course, there is a website.

The mystery of the mill girl

Posted on January 29, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – Unknown spinner, Lewis Hine, c1908, from the LOC and in the public domain.

I’d like to start today with the image of Figure 1. Taken between 1908-1912 it shows a young girl, who at age eleven had already been working for a year in a mill owned by the Rhodes Manufacturing Company in Lincolnton, North Carolina. The picture was taken by social reformer and photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who documented mill life and child labor in the mills. It was one of five thousand photographs taken by Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, documenting abuses of child labor laws in textiles and other industries. These photographs are now housed as an important social record in the Library of Congress.

Children were prized as laborers in the mills, since their small hands and bodies enabled them to reach inside the intricate machines. The results were often disastrous. Hine’s photographs were three decades later instrumental in the establishment of the Federal regulation of child labor began with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which for the first time set minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children. We can pat ourselves on the back, until we realize that all that has really happened is that child labor of this sort has mere been exported.

The picture itself is compositionally wonderful. The girl stands gazing out the window, symbolic perhaps of lost childhood. At any rate there is an outside, but pushing up and ready to devour her are the huge looms. And these stretch on infinitely in the photograph. The picture not only represents the life of the little girl and her loss of innocence, but also of the greater loss of national innocence brought on by the Industrial Revolution.

For over a century the name of that young girl has remained a mystery, as if industrialism had swallowed up her identity. She was identified in the picture as only as a “spinner” at the Rhodes Manufacturing Co.

Now, according to the Charlotte Observer, author and historian Joe Manning used the photograph to find her descendants and give her back her name. He feels confident that the girl was named Lalar Blanton and is the grandmother of Myra “Carol” Cook of Louisville, Ky. Thus, this image has served two powerful purposes: first, as a tool to bring about social change, and second, a hundred years later, to resurrect the life of the subject. Such is the power of the image.

Eyes on the homeless

Posted on January 28, 2014 by David

We have spoken before about the unseen crawlers – the people all around us, the poor, the homeless, the people we don’t want to see. The people that we look through. There is a very powerful recent image by the Jae C. Hong for the Associated Press that puts all of this in a new and very poignant perspective. It shows a homeless person in Los Angeles on January 14, 2014 sleeping beneath a mural painted by artist Ruben Soto. In Los Angeles homelessness has increased 15 percent from 2011 to 2013.

The picture functions on so many different levels. First there is the sense of seeing the unseen. But then you realize that the eyes themselves are really only a masquerade. It is as if we are faking the seeing. And for me there is just something strange about the face. I cannot quite place it. Maybe it’s because it is looking at us not the sleeping man. I also believe that there is a sense of imbalance. The face is huge, the man small. The figure of the man and his bundle of earthly possesions also is not quite dynamically balanced. All of this creates a wonderful sense of imbalance and of foreground-background switch. This is a wonderful and very telling image.

New exhibit of David Wolf’s photographs

Posted on January 27, 2014 by David

Figure 1 – New exhibit of David’s photographs at RMD in Watertown, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014

Hati and Skoll Gallery is pleased to announced that a permanent exhibit of David’s photographs has been installed in the Operations and Human Resources Department at Radiation Monitoring Devices at Watertown, Massachusetts. A photograph of the exhibit is shown in Figure 1. Several of the pictures may also be viewed on this website. The photographs on display are:

Top Row (L to R)

“Blind Cupid,” “Rodin and the creation of woman,” Nydia the Blind girl of Pompeii”

Middle Row (L to R)

“Neptune Fountain,” “Daniel Chester French memorial detail,” “Shaw Memorial”

Bottom Row (L to R)

“Pine Forest,”Boat house Old Manse,” Cormorant“

If you would like to visit the exhibit please call ahead to RMD.

John F. Kennedy and the Mars rock

Posted on January 26, 2014 by

Figure 1 - Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearnce and right after the mysterious appearance of the "Jelly doughnut" rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Images approximately two weeks apart from the Mars Rover. Left before the appearance and right after the mysterious appearance of the “Jelly doughnut” rock. Images from NASA and in the public domain.

Ten years ago NASA sent Mars Rover for a three month “robotic eyes” mission to the Red Planet, and now ten years later Rover is still sending back beautiful images and data. This past week it has spawned a great mystery. Comparing two images (see

As I write this, my cat has just knocked a container of bath salts into the bath tub – just sayin’… Also in New England each spring thaw brings a new crop of rocks to the surface of our lawns. We speak of our gardens growing stones. But this frost heave effect, does not appear to be at play in this case, and we are going to have to leave NASA scientists to figure it all out, which I am sure they will. I am reminded of a famous quote from physicist Sir Isaac Newton:

“I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

The amusing part of the Mars rock story is, of course, its supposed resemblance to a jelly doughty. It’s a pareidolia for sure. Honestly, I see it, but not so much! Fortunately, the Mars image did not cause me to run out and seek the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts. I don’t need that, for sure. It did get me thinking however, funny how the mind works, of John F. Kennedy:

“Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

Now it has been reported that what Kennedy actually meant to say was ‘Ich bin Berliner,’ meaning ‘I am from Berlin’ and what he actually said was “I am a jelly doughnut” – hence my brain’s connection with the Mars rock. However, and much to my relief, Wikipedia sets us straight on all of this. First of all, we learn that in Berlin a jelly doughnut is a “Pfannkuchen” (“pancake”). Only in northern ans western Germany is a jelly doughnut a “berliner.” The situation gets grammatically stickier, indeed, if Kennedy wanted to say “I am a person from Berlin”, he would have omitted the definite article. (I know this is getting complicated) But Kennedy meant that he was a Berliner in a figurative sense; so the statement is literally correct. Phew! Hopefully some of my German speaking readers will tell me that I am completely wrong and that Kennedy was indeed a jelly doughnut.

In the end neither Kennedy, who launched NASA and the American space program, nor the Mars rock are true jelly doughnuts. The speech and the video images are iconic and they still raise the Gänsehaut on the back of my neck.

B. F. Skinner and the decline of Facebook

Posted on January 25, 2014 by

Figure 1 – B. F. Skinner c 1950 from the Wikipedia, original work by Silly rabbit and in the public domain under GNU Free Documentation License,

In 1971 Harvard Psychology Professor B. F. Skinner(1904-1990) published his landmark and very annoying book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity.” For many, this book was annoying because it challenged the concept of free will – and we kinda like to think that our actions are our own choices – not preprogrammed choices. I mean it is rather annoying to think that someone could ultimately create a mathematical model of behaviour that could predict human action. Beyond the visceral reaction, I found it annoying for another reason. I could accept that fact that there were inputs and that laws governed how a psychological system dealt with this inputs and led us to an inevitable output. But, we had already learned from physics that while, for instance, Newton’s laws could predict how the molecule of a balloon filled with helium interacted, provided you knew the starting condition, that the system was ultimately so complicated that we needed statistical mechanics to explain it, and statistical mechanics ultimately provided only randomness and probabilities. Behavioural systems had to be perhaps even more complicated. Even if in principle they were totally deterministic; in practice they were statistical – that effectively there would be free will.

Well all this aside, there is something truly insulting about the view that mathematics can predict our behaviour. Well, a team of scientists at Princeton have done just that. They have modeled the rise and fall of Facebook with mathematical models designed to study viral disease epidemics. The prediction made by these models is that Facebook will lose 80% of its subscribers by 2015-2018. This must be doubly insulting to the folks at Facebook. Not only do they face imminent demise, but they are being likened to a disease. And if you look at the meteoric rise and fall of MySpace and compare the latest data for Facebook, things really aren’t looking that rosy.

The company admitted in October that its teen base is declining. And a study by IStrategy Labs indicates that Facebook had 25 percent fewer teenage users in 2013 compared to 2011. When this reached the news last fall, I heard a teen being questioned about it and she blamed the infestation of Facebook with adults. She pointed out that when she posts a picture of herself, she wants her friends to say how pretty she looks, not her parents’ friends to say how much she looks like her mother. Hmm! The teens are moving on, not away from social networks, but to other forms and forums of social connection. As the Princeton study points out:

“Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological model … Idea manifesters ultimately lose interest with the idea and no longer manifest the idea, which can be thought of as the gain of “immunity” to the idea.”

We have spoken before about technologies that represent true quantum leaps and what I have referred to as transitional technologies – ones that are short-lived and bridge a gap. Social media is, I think, something different. It has been made possible by major technological advances: e.g. computers and the internet. But it is itself more an amorphous concept or meme than a physical thing. Still I believe that social media is here to stay and is truly transforming the world. But the specific vehicle, or is it merely a product, is very short-lived.

Is social media making us unsocial?

Posted on January 24, 2014 by

We’ve spoken a lot here about social media and whether it is making us more or less social, more or less connected. And you know that I come down pretty squarely on the side of more connected.

So picture this, you’re on say the Metro North commuting into New York City. Everyone on the train is glued to their cell phones: talking, texting, searching the web. Antisocial? TIME WARP!! (I know not that again!). Now project yourself back to 1963 on the same train. Picture what you are doing. Actually, you don’t need to picture it because there is a wonderful picture circulating on the web, which pretty much answers the question.

The antithesis of cute and cuddly?

Posted on January 23, 2014 by

Apparently each year conservationist in Frankfurt, Germany get together to count the bats in the basement vaults of an old brewery. They started in 1987 when they found 150 bats. This year there were 1,800. I’m going to offer up today this excellent photograph by Patrick Pleul/dpa/Zuma Press showing conservationist holding a greater mouse-eared bat from the count on January 17.

One is tempted to count this the antithesis of cute and cuddly. But I don’t know. I used to look at the bats hibernating in the expansion cracks of the physics building at Cornell. They looked pretty cute and cuddly, and they are glorious to watch flying at night. Indeed, how would you like to make your living catching flying insects in the dark.

Two things come to mind. First, a numebr of years ago Harold Edgerton visited my laboratory at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. He showed some pretty spectacular of bats captured in the act of catching meal worms sling shot into the air. There was a man who knew how to enjoy science. And second, of course, is the thought of Count von Count joing the Frankfurt bat counting team:

Eine Fledermaus, zwei Fledermäuse, drei Fledermäuse…”