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In the City
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Afternoon Light
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Can gravity be unreliable?
As a physicist I take a certain sense of certitude in such phenomena as gravity. So the question with gravity can be unreliable seems very threatening. As a result I feel compelled to share this image/video from the Scottish Isle of Mull in Scotland where gale force winds from Atlantic storm Henry caused two of the island’s waterfalls to flow up last week. This video was taken by a local and shared online.
What next? Shades of Macbeth:
“I pull in resolution and begin
To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend
That lies like truth. “Fear not, till Birnam wood
Do come to Dunsinane”; and now a wood
Comes toward Dunsinane.”
Splashes of Color
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A Million Lights
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Happy Valentine’s Day from Hati and Skoll
Figure 1 – The meat of Valentine’s Day. (c) DE Wolf 2016.
Happy Valentine’s Day from Hati and Skoll to all lovers young and old. I was settling in on a pretty cold New England afternoon to my usual thoughts of Valentine’s Day and its relationship to the Roman Wolf Festival, The Lupercalia, when I was struck by a display of heart shaped cuts of beef at the local grocery store. This is captured in Figure 1. Shut your eyes and apologies, vegetarian and vegan readers. This is pretty gross stuff and likely to make vegans of us all – especially since I have a friend on Facebook who keeps posting the most amazing vegan recipes.
There may be a connection yet with Roman rituals. I learned this afternoon from an NPR article called the “The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day,” that some pretty unsavory things happened on that day in the Roman past. It seems that during the feast of the Lupercalia. the men would sacrifice a goat and a dog. After seeing the movie Jurassic Park and hearing phrases like “scapegoat” and “Judas goat,” I have come to the realization that the world is not always kind to goats. But poor cuddly puppies are another thing! What the heck? And the real kicker is that the men would then whip the women with the hides of these victim animals. Most weirdly, the women were delighted because the ritual was thought to promote fertility. So I am left with an image in my mind that is much like that of Figure 1 and with the realization that women have certainly changed since Roman times.
But I cannot leave you, dear reader, with this image burned onto your retinas on Valentines Day. So let us enjoy instead the postcard image of Figure 2, “The Big Pink Heart” from the early twentieth century around 1910, which is when my grandmother and grandfather met and became Valentines. Don’t think about the expression “when in Rome do as the Romans do.”* Think love everyone, not cuts of beef, and then share it. The world could use a lot more than it has.
*”si fueris Rōmae, Rōmānō vīvitō mōre; si fueris alibī, vīvitō sicut ibi” (“if you should be in Rome, live in the Roman manner; if you should be elsewhere, live as they do there”). Attributed to St Ambrose.
Figure 2 – The Big Pink Heart – postcard from c. 1910 and in the public domain.
Photographic campaign buttons
Lincoln campaign button from the 1860 Presidential Election. From the Wikipedia and the US LOC, in the public domaign.
Let’s continue today with the theme of Abraham Lincoln. Certainly his face is instantly recognizable to us. It has become a meme. This, in part, stems from the fact that he lived at the time that photography came into maturity. We know him in daguerreotype, as we saw yesterday, and we know him in albumen prints. Interestingly, in this year of a contentious presidential campaign in the United States we also know him in tintype or ferrotype. Maybe it is a reminder that all presidential elections are contentious.
Campaign buttons or pins that carried the candidates’ photograph, reproduced by this process were first used in the presidential campaign of 1860 and there are images of Lincoln and his various opponents. An example from the collection of the United States Library of Congress is shown in Figure 1. The reverse side of the button shows a portrait of his running mate Hannibal Hamlin. The image is by Mathew Brady. For us, today, these images have just enough uniqueness and rarity to be interesting.
In 2008, a big deal was made of Barak Obama’s campaign’s use of the “latest in technology” the internet and social media to promote the candidate. The same was true with these seemingly modest Lincoln pins of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the latest technology and at a time when most newspaper and magazine illustrations were drawings, it gave the presidential hopeful both immediate recognition and a sense of modernity and forward thinking. The same was true of Obama’s election. The rest, as they say, is history.
Everyday Wonders
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