BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

CUVIER

All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe. Georges Cuvier, 1796.

Young Georges Cuvier had examined reports of bones found on the American frontier and around Paris. They were like elephants, but unlike too, and unlike enough to be an entirely different species. So Cuvier coined the word Mastodon for them, a term we still use. More, he argued that Mastodon was extinct. This was a revolutionary idea, and (appropriately) young Cuvier delivered it in the Institute de France, established in 1795 by the Convention of the new, revolutionary, French Republic. He would expand this thinking in an 1800 publication, Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles. But Cuvier was not a revolutionary at heart, and he stopped well short of a theory of evolution. The idea that species changed through time was in the air, advanced for instance by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), but stoutly rejected by Cuvier in 1796 and after. Instead, his theory would be known as catastrophism. The earth’s history was short, but it was punctuated by great upheavals (Cuvier favored floods) which had swept away (for instance) Mastodons. Perhaps Cuvier, having lived through the French revolution and then the Terror, was inclined to think catastrophically, but he’d sat out the revolution in Normandy, as a private tutor in the family of a Protestant noble. More likely, he could not abandon the idea of God as the creator of all things and the idea of a species as, in itself, immutable. Georges Cuvier was born in Montbéllard, in what is today eastern France, on August 23, 1769. His family had been Protestant for generations, and he would remain a devout Lutheran. His last major academic appointment (1822-1832) was as Grand Master of the Protestant Faculties at the Université de France. He was a precocious youth, interested in natural history, but educated in the classics, and graduated (in 1788) into a tight job market. So he became a private tutor and was thus shielded from the bloodier excitements of the revolution. After 1796, his brilliant work in comparative anatomy and paleontology helped him survive (and prosper) through the Napoleonic era, the reactionary Bourbon restoration, and then enter into the bourgeois monarchy of Louis Phillipe as an eminent civil servant, academic, and public intellectual. Later, his catastrophism would have many adherents, among them Charles Darwin’s most energetic and articulate scientific critics, like Louis Agassiz in the US and Richard Owen in Britain. But Cuvier’s work on comparative anatomy was foundational to Darwin’s explanation of how and why species originated, evolved, and disappeared. ©

[Stanley]

TURKEYS

[Julia Child] knew how to pick the turkey up off the floor and serve it. Karen Uhlenbeck, 2019.

Professor Uhlenbeck said this at Princeton, where she still holds a chair at the Institute for Advanced Study (as well as being emerita at Texas, where she spent most of her career). She was at a celebration for her Abel Prize (2019). That’s the “Mathematics Nobel,” for old Alfred Nobel hadn’t the wit to see that since mathematics was the lingua franca of all the sciences, it really should have been included in his original endowment. Uhlenbeck won the Abel for her work in geometric analysis, a field in which researchers use differential geometry to study solutions in differential equations, and vice versa. I don’t really understand that sentence, by the way, but Uhlenbeck (a very quotable scholar) tells me I should not worry. “One does not really understand what mathematics is until one is at least half-way through college when one takes an abstract math course and learns about proofs.” I never got there, so I guess I’m OK. Understanding Uhlenbeck’s achievement is difficult. An enjoyable effort was made in the New York Times by Siobhan Roberts, who herself has made a career explaining mathematics to the handicapped. Roberts wrote that Uhlenbeck’s work was all about bubbles, about how they randomly (but efficiently) form themselves into perfect spheres. ‘Geometric analysis’ has wide applications, even in astrophysics, and Uhlenbeck is regarded as one of the field’s founders. Founding mother, and singular, for so far Uhlenbeck is the only woman to have won the Abel. And in her speech at Princeton she brought up Julia Child’s ability to make haute cuisine out of a dropped turkey to explain what it had been like to embark on a career in which she had no obvious role model. Finding none, Uhlenbeck settled on Julia Child. Karen Uhlenbeck was born Karen Keskulla on August 24, 1942. She read a lot as a kid, exhausting libraries, and liked science best, but switched to a math major at the University of Michigan, winning her PhD at Brandeis in 1968. Uhlenbeck likes the messiness of mathematics, because she’s a bit disorderly herself; but the disorder intrigues her and helps to explain her own commitment to interdisciplinarity within the infinitely broad field of mathematics. At the Princeton party, introductory speakers stressed these things, but also talked of Uhlenbeck’s importance as a female mathematician. Uhlenbeck has indeed, throughout her career, been a lion, or lioness, for diversity, equity, and inclusion. But her brilliant comment about Julia Child’s dropped turkey suggests something else too. If you do not see an obvious role model (someone like you) in your chosen field, you can probably find a role model somewhere else. Role models rise up randomly, like bubbles. All you have to do is look. ©

[Stanley]

LICK

No, sir! I intend to rot like a gentleman. James Lick, in reaction to a suggestion that he might choose to be cremated.

James Lick had plenty of time to contemplate the disposal of his body. For nearly three years after suffering a stroke, he rested immobilized in his suite at the Lick House, a luxury hotel he’d built in San Francisco. He died in October 1876 and, as he’d emphatically wished, he was buried, not burned. In 1887 his body was re-interred at a construction site. It’s still there, under the Lick Observatory, marked by a brass plate that says, simply, “Here lies the body of James Lick.” It’s an odd touch of modesty in what is surely one of the most elaborate tombstones in the United States. The Lick’s marble floor, 60 feet in diameter, can be raised 16 feet, and brings astronomers within an eyelid’s distance of what was, in 1888, the world’s largest refracting telescope. It hadn’t been Lick’s first thought: a Pharaonic pyramid, bigger than Giza’s, in the heart of San Francisco. That wouldn’t have been as useful, but might have better fit Lick’s personality. Even his friends thought him a difficult cuss, prone to tempestuous outbursts and excessive display. And James Lick was a self-made man, by the time of his stroke the richest in California, but at his birth (August 25, 1796) a carpenter’s son of Pennsylvania Dutch origin. Not long after he was capable of doing so, he fathered a child, a son, and without marrying went off to Baltimore to learn piano making. That would be the basis of his fortune, in New York City, then Argentina, then Mexico. He arrived in San Francisco in 1846, before the Gold Rush. Sensibly, he brought a lot of gold with him, and though he was soon tempted to mine the stuff himself he invested instead in real estate, urban and rural, commercial and agricultural, mining and industrial. Lick also brought chocolate with him, and a Peruvian chocolatier named Ghirardelli, whose business turned out pretty well. Almost incidentally, Lick built San Francisco’s premier hotel and watering spot, the Lick House. Still and forever a bachelor, he had acknowledged his son John (John’s mother Barbara Snavely had died). Lick left John no money in the will but made him one of the trustees of a massive fund, the Lick Trust, that was to be used not for personal show (like that bizarre pyramid) but for the public good, not only the Lick Observatory but the University of California, public baths, and a technical college. And the only personal monument financed by the Lick Trust (other than that brass plate) was a statue in Golden Gate Park memorializing Francis Scott Key. The Lick House is no more, a casualty of the 1906 earthquake. Goodness knows what might have happened to the pyramid, had it been built. But the Lick Observatory still stands, or swivels, atop Mount Hamilton. ©

[Stanley]

JOAN THYNNE

Two households, both alike in dignity

(in fair Verona, where we lay our scene),

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny. The Prologue, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

Where did Shakespeare get the idea for this brilliant, tragic love story? Well, ‘fair Verona’ of course, or at least somewhere in Italy. Stories about hot-blooded Italians abounded, and Italian noble families were thought particularly prone to feuding. The Medici, the Sforza, the Borgia: all their passions (and their poisons) were notorious in England when Will began to puzzle out his play. But Shakespeare could have looked closer to home for a scandal involving young love, a child bride and her impetuous boy, and (better yet) both representing aristocratic families prone to feuding. She was Maria Tuchet, only 16, daughter of the 1stearl of Castlehaven. He was Thomas Thynne who, though also only 16, was the eldest son and heir of the Thynnes of Longleat House, Wiltshire. Thomas and Maria ran away from Queen Elizabeth’s court, not very far but far enough to declare their love. In 1594 they married secretly, before sworn witnesses, at a roadside inn in Beaconsfield. Such goings-on without the Queen’s permission were made even more risky by a generations-old feud between the Tuchets and the Thynnes. No poisons here, no suicides either, but a long, long court case in which the Thynnes tried to get the marriage annulled. But it wasn’t the men of the families that sustained the action, rather it was one of Elizabethan England’s more formidable women, Joan, Lady Thynne. She was baptized Joan Hayward on August 26, 1558. Her father was London’s Lord Mayor, so her arranged marriage (in 1576) to a Thynne heir was a stepping out, and a climbing up, to a higher station. Immediately Lady Joan was involved in a family feud, contesting her dowry (Caus Castle) with its sitting tenant, Lord Stafford. While Joan’s husband divided his time between Longleat and London, Joan Thynne organized Caus Castle’s defenses, making her bedroom into the castle’s armory, gunpowder and all. She also helped run (some say she managed) the Thynne estate in Wiltshire, all the while seeing to her main job, perpetuating the Thynne lineage. So her eldest son’s impetuous marriage was a threat, and it was she who led the battle to annul it. After losing her court case in 1604, Joan tried to right matters by passing her own properties on to her daughters—not her erring son or his child bride—but in the end all was for naught. The stern (male) requirements of primogeniture and entail meant that it was Thomas’s male line, and not Joan’s, that inherited Longleat House, and its estates. In 2025 they are still in possession. And The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is still a masterpiece: set, as it must be, in fair Verona. ©

[Stanley]

SMITH

It is not my design to render my sex any the less feminine, but to develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood, and furnish women with the means of usefulness, happiness and honor, now withheld from them. Sophia Smith, Last Will and Testament, 1870.

Smith is a common surname, and post-Revolutionary New England had a surplus of them, including at least two Joseph Smiths. One, Joseph Smith of Sharon, VT, joined tens of thousands of other New Englanders on a trek to find better land in the west. Instead he had visions, listened to angels, and birthed a new religion. The other, Joseph Smith of Hatfield, MA, stayed put. He inherited a goodly farm that stretched down to the Connecticut River, married well, fathered seven children, diversified his activities, and became the richest man in town. According to custom, his will benefited all seven offspring, mostly the boys. The eldest daughter, Sophia Smith, born in Hatfield on August 27, 1796, was left to take care of her three younger sisters, while the two surviving brothers took care of the Smith estate. The odd fact here is that no Smith sibling (although one brother married) had children. Instead, they added to old Joseph’s wealth and cultivated his reputation for thrift: so well that their neighbors thought them skinflints. By 1860, the two surviving Smiths, bachelor Austin and spinster Sophia, sat atop a huge fortune, and when Austin died Sophia got most of it. She spent her last decade, adding to it (for she seems to have learned how to invest wisely) and contemplating on where it should go when she died. A devout churchgoer, she consulted with her pastor on the matter, which resulted in several different drafts of her last will and testament. It’s impossible to say who decided what, or when, but Sophia knew her own mind. Stone deaf herself (for three decades) and the victim of botched surgeries to cure her deafness, she first wanted to endow a school for he deaf. But another philanthropist got there first, so Sophia turned to other ideas. She consulted with men, of course, including two Amherst professors, and considered giving it all to Amherst. Then, having decided instead on female education, she could have given it to Mount Holyoke, which already existed as a girls’ seminary. But Sophia wanted a proper degree-granting college, one that would strengthen its own students with a classical, ‘liberal’ curriculum (sciences and mathematics included), and also be a “perennial blessing” to the whole world. And so “The Smith College” was founded, with over $300,000 from Sophia ($7.5 million in today’s $$$, a rural fortune). Her will also required the town of Northampton to donate $25,000. But why not in Hatfield? It’s unclear. But Sophia did leave $25,000 to Hatfield. There the “Smith Academy” still exists as a public school. No doubt it teaches Hatfield’s boys and girls the virtues of equity and inclusion. ©

[Stanley]

ROCKS

For some years past there has been a remarkably rapid increase in the number of men who climb for climbing’s sake within the bounds of the British Isles. Walter Parry Haskett Smith, 1894 .

Taking them all together, mountain tops are a dime a dozen. Many require only a strenuous walk. Some can be reached on horseback. The view from the summit may be glorious, but then there’s the descent, the aching knees, the blistered heels. Climbing for climbing’s sake, “rock climbing,” is a different matter. Find a vertical cliff, even better an overhang, map your ascent, get to the top, then descend. To most, it looks too dangerous to be a “sport,” but even in St. Louis rock-climbing is a popular way to spend money and Saturdays, and if there aren’t many cliffs in the city several gyms provide artificial rocks and ways to climb them. Rock climbing is a sport of recent origin, a refinement of the Romantic era’s love affair with places wild and high. And it had its pioneers. One of them, in Germany, was Albrecht Karl von Richthofen (1859-1920) who, before he fathered the “Red Baron” of WWI fame, enjoyed betting life and limbs against Alpine pinnacles. In England, rock climbing (for the sake of climbing rocks) got its greatest boost from Walter Parry Haskett Smith, born in Sussex on August 28, 1859. He was not an aristocrat but close, the son of a gentleman farmer wealthy enough to set Walter up for life with a healthy income. The intention was for Walter to be a barrister, and at Eton and Oxford he was thought to be scholarly, mainly in the classics. He was a whiz at translation. But he was better at sports, athletics in particular. Later, instead of settling down to his apprenticeship in the Inns of Court, he loved to ramble, and then fell in love with the English Lake District, not so much its ponds and peaks but rather its pinnacles, cliffs, and chimneys. In June 1886, aged 26, he made the first (recorded) ascent of Napes Needle, a formidable 70-foot pillar of Rhyolite (quick-set lava) which from certain angles looks quite ready to tumble down into Wasdale. And he did it without ropes or anchors. Fifty years later, Smith made the same ascent in a ‘jubilee’ climb, before a small throng of enthusiasts-eccentrics who regarded Smith as a hero and mentor. To judge by the pictures taken of that jubilee climb, Smith had consented to use ropes, but he was still dressed in the garb of the amateur sportsman, tweeds and all. At 76 years of age, a person is entitled to his or her eccentricities. In between his first and last ascents of Napes Needle, Haskett Smith had become a leader of a large rock-climbing fraternity (one that by the 1920s included women). He never married, but lived with his sister (with whom he played etymological games) until the Luftwaffe bombed them out of London. By then he was too frail to climb needles, let alone descend them, but he is still honored for his loves (of impossible places and implausible words). ©.

[PanBiker]

A small aside to compliment Bobs Bits today. The Vibram rubber compound was developed by Vitale Bramani an Italian climber who wanted to give climbers more survivability in their chosen sport than the hobnailed boots that were used at the time in the late 19th century. Today there are many variants of the Vibram compound to match the specific usage of the foot ware. Countless lives have been saved by the constant development and usage of the compound.

[Tizer]

Bob's mention of rhyolite rock sparked a thought. The rock was first named by Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, father of the Red Baron of WW1 fame. He was a geologist and geographer who travelled widely and gathered much information about a wide range of subjects. Unfortunately all his records were lost, otherwise we would probably be as familiar with his name as with that of his aviator son, Manfred. Wikipedia

[Stanley]

SILENCE

They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. John Cage, 1952.

Thus John Cage reacted to the auditors’ reactions to the world premiere of his revolutionary composition, 4’33”, on August 29, 1952. And so, one could say, Cage became part of the noise. And there’s not much else to hear, because 4’33” is full to overflowing of nothing. Cage’s score is written for any number of players of any number of instruments, but as it happened in 1952 there was only a piano. The pianist closed the keyboard, then sat for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Indeed, there was nothing to play—just three movements of varying duration. John Cage (1912-1992) had already experimented with silences in other compositions, as had other modernist musicians. All sorts of composers, long before Cage and long since, have used and still use silences in music. I think they are called “rests.” And physicists will confirm that, really, there is no such thing as continuous sound. But no one before Cage had presented a continuous silence as a formal composition. And the score of 4’30” is indeed blank. You can see the original on line. But here’s where things start to get complicated. Apparently, for instance, there are now three ‘scores’ that are accepted as original. And there have been lawsuits, charging other musicians and other composers with plagiarism. It all sounds (pardon the pun) absurd, and it must be said that one of those court actions was an actual farce, bought for a $1,000 contribution to the John Cage Trust, which is (by the way) a real. registered charity with a postal address and an audited bank account. So it all needs to be taken seriously. Cage himself took it seriously, announcing years in advance his intention to experiment with silence. By presenting silence on stage he wanted his audience to hear noises off, not just the usual coughing and clearing of throats but whatever other sounds were going on in the enforced interval of 4’33”. Cage’s silence demonstrated that there was no such thing as silence. At subsequent performances, audiences have made their own noises, cat calls, boos, the shuffling of feet as people walk out of the hall, thus demonstrating that all music is participatory. That’s an important point, extended to other arts, and indeed part of Cage’s inspiration was his attending an exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg’s famous white canvases. Nothing on them at all, other than white. As for me, I would join the walkout. Paulette and I once did that ourselves, but not at a Cage concert. Rather we left a John Coltrane performance, in Madison, Wisconsin, because we decided that his jazz, on that night, was nothing but noise. I suppose that Cage would have stayed until the bitter end. In modern art, as in all things, you pay your money and you make your choices. ©.