Born to German parents in what is now part of Poland, Germaine Krull (1897-1985) had an unconventional childhood that seemed to prime her for an independent life.

Her father, an engineer who moved the family frequently from city to city, largely educated her himself.

He also let her dress as a boy for some years, as she was inclined to do, perhaps foreshadowing her open-mindedness toward women’s social and sexual roles.

Krull’s father’s progressive views on social justice also seem to have predisposed her to involvement with radical politics.

Professional training in photography in Munich gave Krull a means to make her way through the world, as both observer and activist.

Krull learned a soft-focus, “pictorialist” style in school but soon undermined the false lyricism associated with it in a series of nudes from the early ’20s that are almost like satires of lesbian pornography.

{ San Francisco Chronicles | Continue reading | Wikipedia }

photos { Germaine Krull, The Friends, 1924 | more | more }

{ 10cc , I’m Not In Love, Making of documentary | Thanks Tim }

During World War II, Allied forces readily admitted German tanks were superior to their own. The big question for Allied forces, then, was how many tanks Germany was producing. Knowing that would help them counter the threat. Here’s how they reverse-engineered serial numbers to find out.

To solve the problem of determining production numbers, Allied forces initially tried conventional intelligence gathering: spying, intercepting and decoding transmissions and interrogating captured enemies.

Using these methods, the Allies deduced that the German military industrial complex churned out around 1,400 tanks each month from June 1940 through September 1942. That just didn’t seem right.

To put that number in context, Axis forces used 1,200 tanks during the Battle of Stalingrad, an eight month battle that resulted in almost two million casualties. That meant the estimate of 1,400 most likely was too high.

Obviously skeptical of that result, the Allies looked for other methods of estimation. That’s when they found a critical clue: serial numbers.

Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production. They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942.

Turns out the serial-number methodology was spot on. After the war, internal German data put der Führer’s production at 256 tanks per month—one more than the estimate.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

{ May 2, 1975: Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, left, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Baxter Ward hold a news conference in an old Pacific Electric tunnel to propose an 80-mile light-rail system that would use the former tunnel for part of its downtown connection. The project was never built. | LA Times | Continue reading }

In 1904, King Gillette — who names their kid King? — received two patents on razors, blades, and the combination of the two. As the patents make clear, Gillette had a clear vision of the markets that he would create: “Hence,” stated the patent application, “I am able to produce and sell my blades so cheaply that the user may buy them in quantities and throw them away when dull without making the expense … as great as that of keeping the prior blades sharp.”

But Gillette did more than invent a new razor and a new blade. As Chris Anderson notes in his recent business bestseller, Free, Gillette invented an entire business strategy, one that’s still invoked in business schools and implemented today across many industries — from VCRs and DVD players to video game systems like the Xbox and now ebook readers. It’s pretty simple: invest in an installed base by selling a product at low prices or even giving them away, then sell a related product at high prices to recoup the prior investment. King Gillette launched us down this road.

Or did he?

{ Randy Picker/Harvard Business School | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Half Face with Collar, 1963 }

Strangely, history has never figured into the equation when it comes to exploring why some countries prosper and others don’t. To understand how it might relate, Diego Comin at Harvard Business School, Erick Gong at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started by compiling a list of 11 ancient technologies that were around in 1000 B.C.: Was there written language? The wheel? Agriculture and iron tools? We drew today’s boundaries on the ancient world and assigned each separate technology history to the future country that would form within that territory. Then we expanded the survey to 1500 A.D., looking for the adoption of 24 technologies, including oceangoing ships, paper, printing, firearms, artillery, the magnetic compass, and steel.

We found that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe already had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel. Britain had all 24 of our sample technologies in 1500. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga had none of them. But technology also travels. North America, Australia, and New Zealand had among the world’s most backward technology in 1500; today, they are among the wealthiest regions on Earth, reflecting the principle that it’s the people who matter, not the places. As migration has transformed parts of the world that were nearly empty in the Middle Ages, technology has migrated with them.

{ Foreign Policy | Continue reading }

When I was seven years old, I would sit by the window and wait for Mr. Kramer. He would show up at 4:00 every Wednesday. He wore a brown fedora and a rumpled brown suit and had a stub of an unlit cigar hanging from his mouth. He always had a great big smile on his face and, to keep the cigar from falling, he clenched it between his teeth and talked in a mumble.

He smelled like a cigar and, now that I think about it, dressed all in brown, he looked like a cigar. A fat, stubby cigar. His big belly would hang over his belt and he always perspired so that winter or summer, you could see beads of sweat on his forehead. He was a nice jolly man and, as a kid, I could never understand why my mother would make a sour face when I would shout out, “Mr. Kramer is here, Mom.”

“How are you, Mrs. Della Femina?” he would ask.

“I am fine,” she would say, deadpan. I never saw her smile in front of Mr. Kramer.

“And you,” he would say, “you little monkey. How are you doing in school?”

“I’ve got three stars already, Mr. Kramer,” I would answer proudly.

“Isn’t that great?” he would say.

While we talked, my mother would be digging into her pocketbook and most of the time she would come up with 75 cents. Sometimes she would say, “Mr. Kramer, I’m a little short this week. Is it okay if I pay you next week?”

“No problem” he would reply. But he would look serious and my Mom would look even more serious. A few seconds later he would break into a smile and say, “I’ll see you next week.” Then he would pinch my cheek and say, “Keep getting those stars, monkey, and everything will be all right.”

“I will,” I would answer, not knowing that as one gets older those stars become harder and harder to come by in life. Then he was off next door to see Adeline, my friend Andy’s mother, and collect her 75 cents.

One day I said, “I really like Mr. Kramer. Why does everybody give him money?” (Thinking to myself maybe this was a career for me. You know, you walk around with a cigar in your mouth, smile and everybody gives you money).

“Because he’s an insurance man.” (…)

At that time, my father, a good union man who voted Democrat all the way, was working at three jobs. He was a press operator at The New York Times. He sold newspapers in the Sea Beach (now the N) train station, starting at 6:00 in the morning. And he ran a ride in Coney Island from 7 PM until midnight. The three jobs brought in a total of $35. When you work three jobs to make $35 a week, 75 cents to pay for a coffin when you’re dead is a lot of money. But my mom paid. She had no choice.

{ Jerry Della Femina | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, To Repel Ghosts, 1986 }

{ The townspeople demanded that Mary be killed. Debates on how to kill Mary ensued. It was determined that no gun existed big enough to take her down. Electrocution and canons were other proposed methods. Finally, it was decided that Mary would be hung from a rail yard crane in the nearby town of Erwin, Tennessee. | Keep my words | Continue reading }

related { Squirrels refuse medical care }

bonus:

{ Sam Hood Baby elephant, Taronga Zoo, 1930s }

Nobody asked me, but the building was designed for the Astor Estate by Herman Lee Meader, a Harvard-trained architect who gave legendary parties and kept a boa in his penthouse.

{ Christopher Gray | Photo: Ray Sawhill }

Herman Lee Meader (died February 14, 1930 at 55) was an American architect and author. He designed several prominent buildings in Manhattan, both commercial and residential, as well as much work on the Astor estate, including the Waldorf building located at 8 west 33rd St., then the heart of the fashionable shopping district. Meader lived in the Waldorf Building penthouse, where he created a surrounding rooftop Italian garden. There he held elaborate parties which attracted musicians, artists, writers, prizefighters, chess players and others—at one, Meader staged a fight between a black snake and a king snake.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

bonus [click to enlarge]:

{ NY Times }

In his three volume work Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter, Geoffrey Sonnabend departed from all previous memory research with the premise that memory is an illusion. Forgetting, he believed, not remembering is the inevitable outcome of all experience. From this perspective,

We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present, have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.

Sonnabend believed that long term or “distant” memory was illusion, but similarly he questioned short term or “immediate” memory. On a number of occasions Sonnabend wrote, “there is only experience and its decay” by which he meant to suggest that what we typically call short term memory is, in fact, our experiencing the decay of an experience. Interestingly, however, Sonnabend employed the term true memory, to describe this process of decay which, he held, was, in actuality, not memory at all.

Sonnabend believed that this phenomenon of true memory was our only connection to the past, if only the immediate past, and, as a result, he became obsessed with understanding the mechanisms of true memory by which experience decays. In an effort to illustrate his understanding of this process, Sonnabend, over the next several years, constructed an elaborate Model of Obliscence (or model of forgetting) which, in its simplest form, can be seen as the intersection of a plane and cone.

{ Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder | Google Books | Continue reading | Amazon }

painting { left: Linnea Strid }

The Windmills of Your Mind, music written by Michel Legrand, with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair.

Noel Harrison performed the song for the film score. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1969 (Harrison’s father, the British actor Rex Harrison, had performed the previous year’s Oscar-winning “Talk to the Animals”).

The opening two melodic sentences were adapted from Mozart’s second movement from his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Lyrics and guitar chord transcription | Listen | Download }

In late 1929, Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors erecting the Empire State Building, announced that they were increasing the height of the building to 1,250 feet from 1,050. Mr. Smith, a past governor of New York, denied that competition with the 1,046-foot-high Chrysler Building was a factor. “We are measuring its rise by principles of economic investment rather than spectacular standards,” he told The New York Times.

The extra 200 feet, it was announced, was to serve as a mooring mast for dirigibles so that they could dock in Midtown, rather than out in Lakehurst, N.J., the station used by the German Graf Zeppelin. Mr. Smith said that at the Empire State Building, airships like the Graf, almost 800 feet long, would “swing in the breeze and the passengers go down a gangplank”; seven minutes later they would be on the street.

But the Germans, who dominated dirigible technology, had not asked for a docking station, and passenger traffic on dirigibles was still minuscule. The mast camouflaged the quest for boasting rights to the world’s tallest building, an ambition to which it seemed indecent to admit.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Lewis W. Hine, Welders on the Empire State Building, circa 1930 }

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught.

About 6,000 years ago, the Sumerians created the first schools, called tablet houses, to teach writing. They trained children in Sumerian cuneiform by having them copy the symbols on one half of a soft clay tablet onto the other half, using a stylus. When children did this — and when the Sumerians invented a system of representation, a way to make one thing symbolize another — their brains changed.

Maryanne Wolf explains the neurological developments writing wrought: “The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words …; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.”

The Sumerians did not have an alphabet — nor did the Egyptians, who may have gotten to writing earlier. Which alphabet came first is debated; many consider it to be the Greek version, a system based upon Phoenician. Alphabets created even more neural pathways, allowing us to think in new ways (neither better nor worse than non-alphabetic systems, like Chinese, yet different nonetheless).

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

{ mattwolf.info | Continue reading }

{ berkeley.edu | more }

About 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang created a big mess of matter that eventually gave rise to life, the universe, and everything. Now a new material may help scientists understand why.

The material was designed to detect a theorized but unproven property of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative charge that orbit the centers of atoms.

If this “new” property of electrons exists, scientists say, it would help explain the current imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe. (…)

The sheer fact that we’re here must mean that matter behaves slightly different than antimatter, so that over time the universe has accumulated more ordinary matter than antimatter.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

related { Nonexpanding Cosmology Attempts to Oust Big Bang Theory }

{ The pie chart first appeared in 1801 in a publication entitled The Statistical Breviary by William Playfair. | Thanks James }

Is it “Ms.” or “Miss”?

A rare occurrence of “Ms.” in 1885 suggests that the term is an abbreviation of “Miss.”

Ever since “Ms.” emerged as a marriage-neutral alternative to “Miss” and “Mrs.” in the 1970s, linguists have been trying to trace the origins of this new honorific. It turns out that “Ms.” is not so new after all. The form goes back at least to the 1760s, when it served as an abbreviation for “Mistress” (remember Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly?) and for “Miss,” already a shortened form of “Mistress,” which was also sometimes spelled “Mis.” The few early instances of “Ms.” carried no particular information about matrimonial status (it was used for single or for married women) and no political statement about gender equality. Eventually “Miss” and “Mrs.” emerged as the standard honorifics for women, just as “Mr.” was used for men (“Master,” from which “Mr.” derives, was often used for boys, though it’s not common today). While “Miss” was often prefixed to the names of unmarried women or used for young women or girls, it could also refer to married women. And “Mrs.,” typically reserved for married women, did not always signal marital status (for example, widows and divorced women often continued to use “Mrs.”). The spread of “Ms.” over the past forty years both simplifies and complicates the title paradigm.

{ OUP | Continue reading }

The Norse god Loki, as a typical trickster god, works both with and against the other gods.

However, when he engineers the death of the god Baldr, the gods finally decide he has gone too far, and bind him to a rock with a serpent dripping venom above him.

His wife Sigyn stayed with him and tried to catch the venom in a bowl, but when she left to empty it, as here, his writhing from the pain of the venom created earthquakes.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }