blacksundae

Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, was a man with a singular passion. He collected books of which only one copy was known to exist. If he ever discovered that one of the volumes in his library had a duplicate anywhere in the world, he would immediately dispose of it. So when he died on September 1, 1839 he possessed only fifty-two books, but each of them was absolutely unique.

His heir, not sharing the old man’s passion for book collecting, arranged for an auction to sell off the library, and so a catalog of this small but highly unusual collection was mailed to bibliophiles throughout Europe. The auction, the collectors were told, was to be held in the offices of Mâitre Mourlon, notary, 9 rue de l’Église, in Binche, Belgium on August 10, 1840.

Unfortunately for those collectors, neither Comte de Fortsas nor the collection existed.

The man behind the hoax was a local antiquarian named Renier Hubert Ghislain Chalon (1802-1889). The planning that had gone into the deception was incredible. He had carefully researched the interests of all the major bibliophiles in Europe in order to ensure that they would make the long and fruitless trek to Binche. And he had done all this merely for the sake of a practical joke.

The hoax proved not to be a total loss for its victims. The catalog they had received itself became a highly coveted collector’s item. Within a few decades it had more than quadrupled in price.

Librarian and bibliophile Jeremy Dibbell has posted the contents of said catalog to LibraryThing. You can also view scans of it on Google Books.

[via ZPi]

BBC News:

Ms Garwood says it is an “historic fallacy” that everyone from ancient times to the Dark Ages believed the earth to be flat, and were only disabused of this “mad idea” once Christopher Columbus successfully sailed to America without “falling off the edge of the world”.

In fact, people have known since at least the 4th century BC that the earth is round, and the pseudo-scientific conviction that we actually live on a disc didn’t emerge until Victorian times.

Theories about the earth being flat really came to the fore in 19th Century England. With the rise and rise of scientific rationalism, which seemed to undermine Biblical authority, some Christian thinkers decided to launch an attack on established science.

Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884) assumed the pseudonym of “Parallax” and founded a new school of “Zetetic astronomy”. He toured England arguing that the Earth was a stationary disc and the Sun was only 400 miles away.

In the 1870s, Christian polemicist John Hampden wrote numerous works about the Earth being flat, and described Isaac Newton as “in liquor or insane”.

Well, he was kinda right about Newton. The guy was crazy as a loon (but amazing). Read on.

McClatchy:

On Wednesday, Fagan’s 7-foot statue of the nation’s 40th president will be unveiled at the U.S. Capitol, replacing the likeness of a lesser-known California hero, Thomas Starr King. Nancy Reagan is expected to attend, along with Fagan.

It’s the end of an era for Starr King, a 19th-century San Francisco Unitarian Universalist preacher who’s received star billing at the Capitol for 78 years.

It also caps a five-year effort by California Republican Rep. Ken Calvert, who launched the campaign to remove Starr King shortly after Reagan’s death on June 5, 2004.

“I thought, well, you know, he was a great person, but he’s been here for a while. Maybe we can replace him with Ronald Reagan,” Calvert said. “And one thing led to another. … We were able to get it done.”

Because Reagan is underrepresented in the public sphere? Also, nice logic. “Washington was a great guy, and all… but the city’s been named after him for a while. Why not change it to Mister T, DC?” Link

The Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS) directed by Prof. Dario Floreano focuses on the development of robotic systems and artificial intelligence methods inspired by biological principles of self-organization. Currently, we address three interconnected research areas: flying robots, artificial evolution and social systems.

Link! Be sure to check out their projects page (which I would link to directly, but they’re using frames…. Tsk! Tsk!). Via this post on Current.

Spiegel Online:

According to the recipe, the meat was to be cut into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with “myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe” and then soaked in spirits of wine for a few days.

Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, wrote these words in the 17th century. But the meat to which he was referring was not cured ham or beef tenderloin. The instructions specifically called for the “cadaver of a reddish man … of around 24 years old,” who had been “dead of a violent death but not an illness” and then laid out “exposed to the moon rays for one day and one night” with, he noted, “a clear sky.”

Read on.

I have a healthy appreciation for bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m generally very anti-bullshit, especially when it comes to things like justifications for war, regressive anti-science and scaring people to (literal) death. You know: things that matter.

But I must confess, I do take a certain amount of pleasure in watching bullshit separate fools from their money. If it’s audacious enough, it can be like watching a well-crafted crime caper.

Which leads us to H²Om.
Read the rest of this entry »

The New Yorker:

In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling and meticulous book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” But the most accurate account of the bomb’s inner workings—an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree.

Read on.

East European Quarterly:

Anne Applebaum, the author of the recent major synthesis of the evolution of the Soviet Gulag, mentions a number of such phenomena. (12) As an example, in May 1933, 6,114 peasants were being deported to the uninhabited Nazino Island of the Ob River, beyond the Artic Cir le, where they were deposited without any food. On the very first day of their arrival 295 of them died. Three months later, when a party functionary visited the island to examine the situation, he was forced to report that of the original six thousand only about one-third were still alive, but only because they lived off the flesh of their deceased comrades. (13) According to one of the Gulag-inmates, who encountered several of the former Nazino-inhabitants in a prison at Tomsk, the former “settlers” of Nazino appeared to him like “walking corpses.” (14) They were imprisoned at Tomsk for their cannibalistic activities, even though it was cannibalism that had kept them alive while on Nazino.

Read on.

Here at blacksundae we, or at least two of us, are into pneumatic delivery systems - you know, those cool retro tubes that used to snake around inside department stores, delivering layaway slips and cash and other paper. And you see them at drive-through banks; you put your transaction in a plastic capsule and it gets sucked through a “pipeline” to where the teller is.

Well, come to find out we don’t know jack. Tim Howgego, on the other hand, is a certified capsule pipeline nerd! His Capsule Pipelines web site is a serious look at the history and status of pneumatic, hydraulic and other tube systems of various sizes used, or intended to be used, for carrying … no, not just money orders and retail paperwork, but … freight and passengers!

Pack a lunch; there’s lots to peruse on Tim’s site. You’ll, uh, get sucked in. (Sorry.)

Saw this bizarre flier in South Park the other day. It appears to be related to this group, founded by “Octavio Coleman, Esquire.” (I wonder what you have to do these days to have Esquire appended to your name.)

Did a bit of Googling and apparently this is what it’s about.