All Roads Lead to “Philosophy”

There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” ¹ This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.

It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. I put something together here based on JQuery and the JavaScript InfoViz Toolkit. It makes use of the HTML5 <canvas> element, so support for Internet Explorer is provided by the Google excanvas package.

I still have a lot of tweaking to do but the results so far are pretty nice.

Multiple titles can be added using a comma-separated list. JSONP requests are made to Wikipedia asynchronously, so more terms can be added while it is accumulating results.

There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain. This is relatively rare. If it finds that it moves to the next link in the chain. One good example is “Telecommunication”.

¹ See the tooltip by hovering over the cartoon at xkcd which is said to be the source of this observation. Though this posting on reddit.com appears to predate that by about a month.

Evolution of the Human Head

While the title of this book focuses on the evolution of the head, it is much more than that. The first half lays the groundwork with discussions of embryonic development, descriptions of the inter-related systems that make up the head and methods of comparative biology.

This initial survey has a lot of interesting material itself; for example, studies of the teeth and jaw have revealed that most orthodontic problems such as teeth crowding and over-bites, etc., appear to be due to the softer foods of the modern diet. Several hundred years ago impacted wisdom teeth were relatively rare. Softer foods result in less bone mass in the jaw and subsequently less room for the full set of adult teeth.

A description of the deeply interrelated workings of the inner ear and the visual system leads to a discussion of how balance and visual acuity is maintained during movement, especially running. The author, Daniel Lieberman is in fact a proponent of the relatively recent barefoot running phenomenon in large part due what the evolution of the head reveals about the body as a complete system.

It’s a dense book, which even the author says is not meant to be a best seller, but still rewarding.

Poor Little Rich Girl

I came across this now-forgotten story in the New York Times achieves recently. It has some personal interest mostly because of its brief intersection with my home town:

BANKER’S DAUGHTER FLEES IN OVERALLS

Fisherman Says She Cut Hair

BOSTON, Sept. 10.—Miss Louisa A. Fletcher, the 17-year-old daughter and heiress of Stoughton A. Fletcher, a banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, has vanished from the Summer home recently occupied by her parents at East Gloucester. She is said to have been seen just before she disappeared clad in a pair of overalls and with her hair clipped short.

HEIRESS CLIPS HAIR, DONS MALE GARB AND FLEES

Gloucester. Sept. 11. - Clad in a pair of carpenter’s overalls and with her hair cut short like a man’s, 17-year-0ld Louisa Fletcher, daughter of Stoughton A. Fletcher, millionaire banker, manufacturer and horse breeder of Indianapolis, rowed away from Rocky Neck shore shortly after noon Thursday and no trace of her has been discovered despite constant searching since.

She wasn’t on the lam very long, discovered only two days later “working as a boy” at Upland Farms in Ipswich, Mass., where she had been hired on as a farm hand. When approached by the police she gave the name “Willie Sullivan” and at first resisted being taken into custody. A Pittsburgh paper pointed out “SHE WAS SMOKING CIGARETTES.” which perhaps added to the sensation of the story at the time.

(Upland Farms is now long gone, but was off Fellows Lane, though a trace of it is left in the name of Upland Road.)

She had rowed the dory she stole from Gloucester up the Essex River to Rowley where she spent the next two nights in a barn, eating apples for food. She made her way to Ipswich and tried to sign onto a fishing boat but was turned away. She was reported to have said, “I was tired of being a ‘poor little rich girl’ I have had too much discipline. I wanted to make my own way in the world.”

There is some hint that perhaps she was looking to earn enough money to head to New York City. The owner of the house they had rented in Gloucester was owned by Langdon Gillette who had worked on Broadway.

Louisa Fletcher and her family appeared in newspaper archives again several times over the years. Her life ended up being short and tragic:

In March, 1921, her mother (and her mother’s mother) both committed suicide.

By 1924, the family empire was in ruins and her father was forced to declare bankruptcy.

In 1925 she declared her engagement to a Count Ernst Gottfried von Schmettow of Prussia, but upon her arrival in Berlin was rejected by the Count’s father and returned home in some shame to New York. The whole incident is shrouded in mystery as it seems that the Count may have been leading her on or she misinterpreted his intentions from the outset. She may have been trying to use her marriage to European nobility as a vehicle for her own career.

In January, 1927 she was arrested in Los Angeles after an altercation with a “Lady Diana Bathurst”. This “Lady Diana” was apparently a fraud who was trying to use her supposed ties to nobility for her own fame. This puts Louisa Fletcher’s account of her engagement to the Prussian count in to a different light.

She died July 18, 1927 in Los Angeles, reportedly of meningitis, aged 24.

Her brother, Stoughton A. “Bruz” Fletcher III, who had accompanied her to LA and became a staple on the “Pansy Craze” scene, committed suicide in 1941.

Atlas of Remote Islands

This book is an interesting artifact - I hesitate to call it an “atlas” at all, though that is very much the form it takes. In reality it is more a manifestation of the author’s own love of geography, maps, history and the nature of isolation. And these subjects just so happen to be personal interests of mine…

The maps are visually attractive and all at the same scale, which provides a certain consistency. The accompanying text for each subject island though is more an attempt to convey a sense of “remoteness” through bits of historical narrative. It goes for mood rather than raw information, which is the romantisized, artistic concete behind this whole approach to an “atlas.”

Out of my own desire to group more information about these places - and because it’s so easy to do so - I put together a “Companion Guide to an ‘Atlas of Remote Islands’” using WIkipedia’s “create a book” service. I was pretty surprised at how well it actually works. There is very little that can be done to configure the book other than to rename and group sections, but the default layout is nice.

Siamese

This short book by the Norwegian author Stig Sæterbakken is a darkly comic novel about the interior life of an elderly couple, Edwin and Erna Mortens, trapped together by their own neuroses and physical ailments. Edwin, who has become blind, spends his days confined to a rocking chair in his bathroom, chewing gum and screaming at his wife. His body has decayed to the point of total dependence on his wife, who has become hard of hearing.

Each chapter alternates between a narration from Edwin and Erna forming a continuous point/counter-point of their obsessions. The scene never leaves their small apartment and even there mostly stays in the gum-wrapper strewn confines of the single bathroom itself. It makes for an extremely claustrophobic (and scatological) atmosphere.

When not raging at his wife, Edwin turns his wrath on himself:

Sometimes I think my brain has a brain of its own, it can’t just be me who’s sending myself all of these messages, who’s ordering my thoughts away on these pathetic missions, who’s regaling me with these idiotic impressions, stranding me in all this confusion, really, it can’t all be coming from me, can it?

What do these endless speculations have to do with me? Who is it I think I am? What influence do I have over what’s said? I don’t know the difference between a period and a comma, a question mark or exclamation point … I can’t see whether one or the other is being used … Maybe that little extra brain of mine also has a brain of its own? Even smaller but all the more powerful for that, a tiny little devil brain, furrowed and hard like a dried pea … and, in reality, it’s the one behind everything …

and of course, it too has a brain of its own, the smallest and evilest of all…

This bit of black poetry, captures the self-obsession of the neurotic brilliantly. The book clearly isn’t for everyone…

The Path to Northern Supremacy

Following the trail of a few footnotes in the fascinating book “The Future History of the Arctic” by Charles Emmerson, led to some interesting papers:

Early twentieth century anthropologists built on the ideas of climatic determinism developed by Yale Professor Ellsworth Huntington. It remains a controversial topic having arisen during a time of eugenics and social Darwinism, but was still being concidered in the 1970s as evidenced by the graph below.

The leadership in world civilization is inseparably linked with climate. With advance in culture it has been transferred toward colder lands, and when extant culture has declined, leadership usually has retreated southward. [1]

The above graph is based on an earlier one by GilFillan (1923) who explicitly invoked Huntington (and which can be seen here.)

Scandinavia has in recent decades shown great cultural activity, as if preparing to lead the world next. Russia is rousing herself from a sleep of ages. In I914 the most virile architecture was that of the apartment houses of Berlin. In 2000 it will perhaps be found in Detroit and Copenhagen, in 2100 in Montreal, Christiania and Memel.

Farther we need not go. There is no necessity for civilization to be driven into Arctic snows; the law of coldward progress could be restated in such terms as would hold true for the past yet not require northward journeying indefinitely in the future. But that will require strange new houses and industries that cannot be discussed here. I see no reason to think that this 5ooo-year-old process will be altered within the 20th century.[2]

These ideas provided some, such as the controversial explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson with evidence for what he saw as a kind of northward Manifest Destiny. He attempted to supplant romanticized notions of a desolate Arctic, approachable only through heroic effort, with a resource-rich one which could flourish if approached with wisdom.

[1] Lambert, L. Don. “The Role of Climate in the Economic Development of Nations”, Land Economics, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Nov., 1971), pp. 339-344
[2] GilFillan, S. C. “The Coldward Course of Progress”, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sep., 1920), pp. 393-410

The True Size of Vatican City

Someone recently put together an interesting infographic bringing attention to the (perhaps) unexpected relative size of Africa in comparison to a group of countries.

I’ve always been interested in the extremes of scale, so I put together a similar graphic for the world’s smallest sovereign state, Vatican City, a country of less than a square kilometer in area.