On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The body was of an adult male dressed in a trenchcoat, a uniform, and boots, with a black attaché case chained to his waist. His wallet identified him as Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines. (…)

It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. Spain was a neutral country, but much of its military was pro-German, and the Nazis found an officer in the Spanish general staff who was willing to help. A thin metal rod was inserted into the envelope; the documents were then wound around it and slid out through a gap, without disturbing the envelope’s seals. What the officer discovered was astounding. Major Martin was a courier, carrying a personal letter from Lieutenant General Archibald Nye, the vice-chief of the Imperial General Staff, in London, to General Harold Alexander, the senior British officer under Eisenhower in Tunisia. Nye’s letter spelled out what Allied intentions were in southern Europe. American and British forces planned to cross the Mediterranean from their positions in North Africa, and launch an attack on German-held Greece and Sardinia. Hitler transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese, in Greece, and the German military command sent an urgent message to the head of its forces in the region: “The measures to be taken in Sardinia and the Peloponnese have priority over any others.”

The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake, and the frantic messages between London and Madrid a carefully choreographed act. When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history. (…)

Each stage of the deception had to be worked out in advance. Martin’s personal effects needed to be detailed enough to suggest that he was a real person, but not so detailed as to suggest that someone was trying to make him look like a real person. Cholmondeley and Montagu filled Martin’s pockets with odds and ends, including angry letters from creditors and a bill from his tailor. “Hour after hour, in the Admiralty basement, they discussed and refined this imaginary person, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses,” Macintyre writes. “In the evening, they repaired to the Gargoyle Club, a glamorous Soho dive of which Montagu was a member, to continue the odd process of creating a man from scratch.” (…)

The dated papers in Martin’s pockets indicated that he had been in the water for barely five days. Had the Germans seen the body, though, they would have realized that it was far too decomposed to have been in the water for less than a week. And, had they talked to the Spanish coroner who examined Martin, they would have discovered that he had noticed various red flags. The doctor had seen the bodies of many drowned fishermen in his time, and invariably there were fish and crab bites on the ears and other appendages. In this case, there were none. Hair, after being submerged for a week, becomes brittle and dull. Martin’s hair was not. Nor did his clothes appear to have been in the water very long. But the Germans couldn’t talk to the coroner without blowing their cover. Secrecy stood in the way of accuracy.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

The inscription refers to the most famous public demonstration of ether as an anesthetic during surgery. On October 16th, 1846 a crowd of doctors and students gathered in the surgical amphitheater at Massachusetts General Hospital to watch as a dentist named William T.G. Morton instructed a patient to inhale the fumes from an ether-soaked sponge. After the patient was sufficiently sedated, a surgeon removed a tumor from his neck. When the patient awoke from his ether-induced stupor, the surgeon asked how he felt, to which he reportedly replied, “feels as if my neck’s been scratched.”

{ Smells like science | Continue reading }

installation { Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Interstage, 2005 | wax figure, plaster body, iron, aluminium, wood | 300 x 250 x 851 cm }

{ Kill Devil Hills is a town in Dare County, North Carolina, USA. Nearby Kitty Hawk is frequently cited as the location of the Wright brothers‘ first controlled, powered airplane flights on December 17, 1903. The flights actually occurred in Kill Devil Hills. | Wikipedia | Continue reading Photo: First flight of the Wright Flyer I, December 17, 1903, Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip. }

Meet Donald Trump’s bankers. Like the characters in the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a gaggle of major financial institutions has finally been forced to admit, after lending Trump billions of dollars, that there’s a lot less to the emperor — or at least his empire — than the banks had believed.

Not quite nine months after bailing out Trump with a rescue package that gave him $65 million in new loans and eased credit terms on his bank debt, Trump’s bankers last week stopped the game. Already more than $3.8 billion in the hole and sliding perilously close to a mammoth personal bankruptcy, the brash New York developer had no choice but to accept the dismantling of his vast holdings.

{ Time, May 1991 | Continue reading }

related { Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit }

unrelated { Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs? }

How did dinosaurs manage to have sex?

From behind, probably.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Richard Kern }

The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. (…)

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven’t left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Social convention of 1884, when FDR was photographed at age 2 1/2, dictated that boys wore dresses until age 6 or 7, also the time of their first haircut. Franklin’s outfit was considered gender-neutral.

But nowadays people just have to know the sex of a baby or young child at first glance, says Jo B. Paoletti, a historian at the University of Maryland and author of Pink and Blue: Telling the Girls From the Boys in America. (…)

For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. (…) The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

{ Smithsonian Magazine | Continue reading }

Medieval Venice was a trading empire, one of the busiest ports of the late medieval world. As a hub of commerce waves of plague visited and revisited Venice in 1348, 1462, 1485, 1506, 1575-1577, and 1630-1632 with the last two producing mortality rates around 30% of the population.

As we all know, Venice has a land problem, or rather a lack of land problem. Thriving economies draw large populations and burial space becomes difficult to come by. Adding the plague on top and we have the perfect conditions for the discovery of mass plague burials.

{ Detecting pathogens in medieval Venice | Contagions | Continue reading }

photo { Grave of Peggy Guggenheim and her dogs in Venice | i took the photo | Starting in late December 1937, Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett had a brief affair. | And: Of everything she did in her life, she said discovering Pollock was “by far the most honourable achievement.” But Pollock was rarely invited to her outrageous bashes “as he drank so much and did unpleasant things on such occasions.” He once urinated into a fireplace. }

I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly–and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. (…)

P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

{ Letter from Jourdan Anderson to His Former Master, 1865 | Continue reading | PDF }

During the late Victorian period British women maintained a significant numerical advantage over men such that “almost one in three of all adult women were single and one in four would never marry.” Therefore it is no coincidence that spinsters “provided the backbone” of the women’s suffrage movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These spinster-led feminists opposed patriarchal exploitation and challenged “the idea that male sexuality was a powerful and uncontrollable urge,” and in the course of their activism drew much needed attention to other related problems such as prostitution and the abuse of girls. But by presenting such resistance to the status quo their rising success roused an equally powerful countervailing enemy whose rise to power was intimately connected to the proponents of the “sexual revolution” that came to fruition in the 1920s.

{ Swans| Continue reading }

In late 1979, Debbie Harry suggested that Nile Rodgers join her and Chris Stein at a Hip hop event in a communal space taken over by young kids and teenagers with boom box stereos, who would play various pieces of music to which performers would break dance. The main piece of music they would use was the break section of “Good Times.”

A few weeks later, Blondie, The Clash and Chic were playing a gig in New York at Bonds nightclub. When Chic started playing “Good Times,” rapper Fab Five Freddy and members of the Sugarhill Gang jumped up on stage and started freestyling with the band; Rodgers allowed them to “do their improvisation thing like poets, much like I would play guitar with Prince.”

A few weeks later Rodgers was on the dance floor of New York club LaViticus and suddenly heard the DJ play a song which opened with Edwards bass line from “Good Times”. Rogers approached the DJ who said he was playing a record he had just bought that day in Harlem. The song turned out to be an early version of “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang, which Rogers noted also included a scratched version of the song’s string section. Rogers and Edwards threatened The Sugarhill Gang with legal action, which resulted in them being credited as co-writers on “Rappers Delight”.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Among 20th-century artists, few can compare for sheer cinematic drama with the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, “probably the most mythologized modern artist since Van Gogh,” according to the art historian Kenneth Silver. Scenes from the life of Modigliani might include “Modi” hobnobbing with Picasso in Montmartre, having a torrid affair with the married Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and ending his long relationship with the English journalist Beatrice Hastings when her new lover drew a gun on him at a drunken party attended by Picasso, Matisse, and Juan Gris.

Modigliani drank heavily, used cocaine and hashish, and, a gorgeous hunk of a man despite his modest height of 5 feet 3 inches, fathered an indeterminate number of illegitimate children. (…)

“Sometimes, when drunk, he would begin undressing,” a friend reported in a typical account of Modigliani misbehaving, “under the eager eyes of the faded English and American girls who frequented the canteen … then display himself quite naked, slim and white, his torso arched.” When his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 35, his final lover, Jeanne, eight months pregnant with their second child, threw herself out of a window.

{ Slate | Continue reading | More: Loving Modigliani thanks to Daniel }

artwork { Modigliani, Femme nue, 1916 }

Dr Principe wants to rehabilitate alchemy. He believes that most alchemists were respectable seekers after knowledge and that they were working with well constructed (if ultimately misguided) theories. The reputation of the alchemists, he reckons, was deliberately undermined by gentleman amateurs who were trying to give the emerging science of chemistry the social respectability it needed to sit at the academic high table.

The work of Dr Principe, though, also serves as a useful reminder to modern scientists that even the most cherished theories need to be treated with constant scepticism. This is because, as the alchemists found out, it can be all too easy to see in your results what you want to see, rather than what is actually there.

Alchemy’s roots lie in Hellenistic Egypt. It was compounded from a mixture of practical knowledge of things like metallurgy, pharmacy and glassmaking with the Greek practice of analysing and theorising about the world that is known as philosophy. These Hermetic ideas (Hermes was the legendary founder of alchemy) were picked up and developed by Arab scholars when Egypt fell to the armies of Islam in the seventh century, and then transmitted to Europe during the scholastic renaissance of the 12th century.

For the next five centuries, Dr Principe thinks, alchemists were the “northern chemists” of Europe.

{ Economist | Continue reading }

At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan (Secret Service code name: Rawhide) walked out of a Washington hotel and was shot by John Hinckley Jr. In the confused moments that followed, no one was sure exactly what had happened—or if Mr. Reagan had even been hurt. In this excerpt from the forthcoming book “Rawhide Down,” a detailed account of the attempted assassination, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr has just shoved Mr. Reagan into his car after hearing the gunshots.

{ Del Quentin Wilber/WSJ | Continue reading | More }

The Ides of March is the name of 15 March in the Roman calendar, probably referring to the day of the full moon.

The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.

In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | More: Assassination of Julius Caesar }

related { Each of the suspects stabbed Ratchett once, so that no one could know who delivered the fatal blow. }

painting { Vincenzo Camuccini, Morte di Giulio Cesare (Death of Julius Caesar), 1798 }

{ Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783) was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his “character heads,” a collection of busts with faces contorted in extreme facial expressions. | Wikipedia | Continue reading | More: I have been researching franz xaver messerschmidt and his «mad heads» (as i like to call them) between 1990 and 2003 }

Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | more photos }

Face-detection software is everywhere. Defeat it with some artfully-applied, avant-garde face makeup called CV Dazzle.

CV Dazzle is named after the ingenious warship-camouflage designs deployed during World War I. Rather than actually hiding military vessels, the bold, jagged paint jobs made it difficult for naval rangefinders to discern details about the ship’s size, heading, armament, and so forth. Or at least, that was the idea — unlike Harvey’s digital version, the original Dazzle’s effectiveness was never proven. Of course, CV Dazzle benefits from the fact that face-detection software is much stupider than WWI seamen: you only have to apply a few strokes of face-paint to confuse it, rather than coat your whole kisser.

{ Fast Company| Continue reading }

In a book to be published in April, “The Origins of Political Order,” Francis Fukuyama of Stanford University presents a sweeping new overview of human social structures throughout history. (…)

Dr. Fukuyama, a political scientist, is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that human social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare.

Because of this shared human nature, with its biological foundation, “human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures,” he writes. It is these worldwide patterns he seeks to describe in an analysis that stretches from prehistoric times to the French Revolution.

Previous attempts to write grand analyses of human development have tended to focus on a single causal explanation, like economics or warfare, or, as with Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel,” on geography. Dr. Fukuyama’s is unusual in that he considers several factors, including warfare, religion, and in particular human social behaviors like favoring kin.

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Nathan Osterhaus }

…everyone will agree that there are no restraints against the formation of organic compounds from non-organic reactants.  This has been demonstrated since 1952 when Stanley Miller and Harold Urey did their famous experiment. (…) In fact, organic compounds have been found in the oddest places; Titan,  nebula, and meteorites.

Now, the question, of course, is how did these disparate pieces come together and form the living system we see today?

{ Cassandra’s Tears | Continue reading }

The Miller and Urey experiment was an experiment that simulated hypothetical conditions thought at the time to be present on the early Earth, and tested for the occurrence of chemical origins of life.

Specifically, the experiment tested Oparin’s and Haldane’s hypothesis that conditions on the primitive Earth favored chemical reactions that synthesized organic compounds from inorganic precursors. Considered to be the classic experiment on the origin of life, it was conducted in 1952 and published in 1953.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

installation { Dimension/Next, Miller-Urey Bong, 2010 | Dimension/Next specifically proposes that the addition of C21H30O2 to the existing Miller-Urey hypothesis of CH4 + NH3 + H2 + H20 has a high chance of producing exceptional results. }

At the height of his fame and success, whilst his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Oscar Wilde sued his lover’s father for libel. After a series of trials, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and imprisoned for two years, held to hard labour.

In prison he wrote De Profundis, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.

Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Wilde was released from prison 19 May 1897, and wandered between a small band of friends in England, France and Italy for the next few years. Since the death of his wife in 1898 he had been denied access to his two sons and given £150 a year from her estate to live on.

In August 1899, he moved from the Hotel Marsollier to the Hotel d’Alsace on the Rue des Beaux-Arts (today this is just called L’Hotel), the owner, Jean Dupoirier, having paid off Wilde’s debts at the former hotel.

He spent the days wandering the streets of Paris, drinking with old friends and supporters who would bump into to him and, shocked by his appearance, feed him, or being blanked by former friends.

His former lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) inherited £20,000 on the death of his father, the Marquess of Queensbury, the cause of Wilde’s downfall.

During a meal at the Café de la Paix, Wilde asked Bosie if he could have an income from his money. Bosie said, “I can’t afford to spend anything except on myself,” and accused Wilde of “wheedling like an old whore.”

Wilde replied, “If you do not recognise my claim, there is nothing more to be said.”

{ Find a death | Continue reading }

photo { Oscar Wilde (at left) and Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas in Oxford, 1893 | The Private Life of Oscar Wilde | W | full story }