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10 interesting facts about the cello

Every summer since 1895, the Henry Wood Promenade Concert (commonly known as the BBC Proms) presents an eight-week orchestral classical music festival at the Royal Albert Hall in central London. This year’s Proms put a special focus on cellos.

Invented in the early 16th century, this massive instrument (second in size only to the double bass in the strings family) has a highly versatile history. The Baroque period saw Bach composing unaccompanied cello suites; Haydn, Schumann, and Brahms made use of cellos in concertos in the following Classical and Romantic eras; in recent times, there has been a rise in solo pieces, and soloists can frequently be found playing modern pop and rock music.

Since its birth in Europe, the cello has traveled all over the world, becoming a fixture in Chinese orchestra. Its unique tone and fluidity has made it a popular instrument in our time, making accomplished cellists such as Yo-Yo Ma and Jacqueline du Pre household names.  In celebration of this year’s Proms, and the cello, allow us to present a list of interesting things you might not have known about cellos.

‘Cello’ is actually only a nickname. It is the abbreviation of the full name  violoncello , which, in Italian, means a ‘small large viol.’ This bizarre name denotes its complicated history of size change.
The plural of cello (pronounced ‘CHEL-oh’) can be either celli or cellos.
We still don’t quite know the origins of the bass violin (the name used for the earliest forms of the cello) but what seems certain is that it first appeared in its present size, name, and tuning south of the Alps.
Traditionally, cellos used in orchestras had coarser black hair on a heavier bow, while cellos used for solo playing had white hair on a lighter bow.


Gaga Symphony Orchestra, by Carlo Alberto Cazzuffi. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.


The neck of a cello slants backwards so that the downward force a cellist exerts on the bridge is increased, thereby producing the louder sound needed to compete within an orchestra during a concerto.
Before the 18th century, the cello was held upright solely through the strength of the cellist’s legs. The pointed endpin we see on celli nowadays was made popular by A.F. Servais, a prominent performer and tutor, who became too portly to hold his Stradivari with just his legs, and made use of an endpin as support.
Originally, cello strings were made out of sheep gut. Now, metal wiring has become predominant.
Four strings weren’t always the case. From the 17th to the 18th century, five-string celli were used in Germany, as well as Dutch and Flemish areas.
In most modern orchestra settings, the cellists sit on the second-to-right hand side of the conductor, though this may vary for each orchestra.
Vibrato, a technique used to intensify long notes, is also called the ‘close shake’ or ‘tremolo,’ though most commentators recommend using this technique sparingly, as indiscriminate application ‘produced a most disagreeable and whining effect.’

Featured image: Cello by enbuscadelosdragones0. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The Arms Trade Treaty and exports to Saudi Arabia: “Now is the summer of our discontent?”

For some campaigners, the acid test of the effectiveness of a putative global arms trade treaty was whether it would prohibit or somehow legitimize the selling of arms to Saudi Arabia. Of course, those who expected a total prohibition on arms trading were always going to be deeply disappointed, but many of us felt it similarly unlikely that an international instrument would ever make it impossible for internally repressive regimes to procure weapons on the open market. Switzerland, among a number of arms-exporting nations that adhered to the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty, did see the text of the ATT as effectively giving a green light for sales to Saudi Arabia, presumably on the basis that the risk of a serious violation of international human rights law (IHRL) was not “overriding” in the sense of Article 7 of the treaty.

But in the words of Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’.” For Saudi Arabia is now engaged front and centre in armed conflict in Yemen. Thus, it is not just the risk of a serious violation of IHRL that is at stake but also the risk of a serious violation of international humanitarian law (IHL) – the law that prohibits certain acts in armed conflict. This has significant implications for those exporting nations that are party to the ATT.

The first test that must be considered in assessing the potential for a serious violation of IHL to occur is easily met: there is clearly an armed conflict affecting a possible recipient of an arms export. Saudi Arabia is party to at least a non-international armed conflict with the Houthis, and arguably it is an international armed conflict against the regime that is, today, in effective control of much of Yemen.

it is not just the risk of a serious violation of IHRL that is at stake but also the risk of a serious violation of international humanitarian law

The second test is to determine what violations might occur. The two customary law rules most relevant to Saudi Arabia’s bombing campaign are distinction and proportionality in attack. These demand, respectively, that Saudi direct their bombs only against lawful military objectives, and in so doing, refrain from launching any attack that may be expected to cause excessive civilian harm in relation to the “concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”. In February 2016, a United Nations panel looking into the bombing campaign concluded that there had been “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian targets, which violated IHL. Saudi Arabia denied that it was targeting civilians.

For the United Kingdom, which adhered to the ATT on 2 April 2014, provisionally applying from that date the key provisions (articles 6 and 7), a clear and immediate obligation was imposed under international law in relation to any proposed export to anyone, including Saudi Arabia. Prior to authorizing a proposed export, it had to assess whether the arms would contribute to or undermine peace and security. (If they would undermine peace and security this would already preclude export.) But even if this difficult hurdle could be overcome (given the instability and widespread misery inflicted on the Yemeni people by the conflict), the UK then had to assess the potential that they could be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of IHL and IHRL.

This assessment should have been relatively straightforward to conduct given that UK military personnel have been providing assistance in targeting and its legal aspects to the Saudis. In late July 2016, however, on the final day of Parliament before its closure for the summer recess, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office dropped a bombshell (if you excuse the pun). They announced that, despite earlier unequivocal assurances given to parliament on a number of occasions by senior members of government, no assessment of Saudi compliance with international law had in fact been carried out. This is an astonishing admission of a treaty violation by the UK. For the ATT is unambiguous: an objective and non-discriminatory assessment shall be made prior to authorization of an export.

The second annual session of the Conference of States Parties to the ATT is being held in Geneva on 22–26 August. Based on recent events, states parties will clearly have extra grist to the mill for their review of treaty implementation. And when Parliament reconvenes in London on 5 September, the government surely needs to explain how the House of Commons was not misled, and how openly breaching a core ATT obligation is not somehow a violation of international law. Perhaps someone in Whitehall was listening too closely to the American journalist, Regina Brett, when she said, “Summer is the annual permission slip to be lazy. To do nothing and have it count for something.”

Featured image credit: Remains of the day, by Wajahat Mahmood. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Etymology gleanings for August 2016

A few comments on cloth, in connection with the post “Sartor Resartus“

There was a desperate attempt to find a valid Greek cognate for cloth, but such a word did not turn up. One way out of the difficulty was to discover a Greek noun or verb beginning with sk– and refer its s to what is known as s-mobile (“movable s”). Movable s is all over the place. For instance, the English cognate of German kratzen is s cratch (the same meaning). Similarly, for a long time people wondered what the origin of the word slang is, and one of the suggestions was that slang contains the root of language, with movable s attached. Some scholars denied the existence of this enigmatic s, and indeed, its function and origin have never been ascertained to everybody’s satisfaction. Yet it apparently exists, together with many other irritating things in our life.
Is pea jacket related to the Greek word baítē? No, it is not. Our correspondent wrote that a quick search referred him to Finnish. I would be grateful for the reference, because I don’t have it in my database. Everybody seems to be in agreement that pea jacket (or pea–jacket) is a borrowing of Dutch pijjakker, in which both elements (pij and jakker ~ jekker) mean approximately the same, namely “a kind of coat.” So pea jacket is a tautological compound (see the post of February 11, 2009, akimbo, on such words). Those who can read Dutch and are interested in the origin of several obscure Dutch names of articles of clothing will benefit from consulting the published dissertation of Alphonsus M. F. J. Moerdijk on this subject (Nijmegen, 1979; I’ll give its title if someone happens to ask me about it). Pp. 111-116 are about the history of the word cloth. 3. I am grateful to Stephen Goranson, who posted a passage from a 1930 obituary of Axel Erdmann, the author of a thorough work on the history and origin of the word cloth. I did not know that obituary and could not even discover Erdmann’s full name (the title page has only A.). It is said in the note that Erdmann’s results are now universally acknowledged. Perhaps so, but dictionaries keep saying: “Cloth: Origin unknown.” The wheels of etymological lexicography grind slowly.

This a a pea jacket, or a pea coat. Its name has nothing to do with peas, and pie, which at one time preceded pea in it, has nothing to do with magpie any other pie.
Jitney

Many thanks to those who pointed out that on the East Coast the word jitney is still very much alive. I was aware of that fact, but I wonder whether New Yorkers and their neighbors remember what the word jitney once meant. As to its origin, no one is expected to know the etymology of words, either obsolete or those in common use.

Word use: car and train

♦ J. Peter Maher sent me the following: “In the 1880 and earlier 1900s the usual manner of referring to what we now call ‘a train’ was ‘the cars’, elliptical for ‘a train of cars’… I first came across ‘we took the cars to NY’ in 1956-7 when I was teaching at Chenango Forks NY. Central School Theater Club put on an old play The Ticket of Leave Man. … Chicagoans today often say ‘train’ even for a single car (carriage GB).”

Some words loved to death                                                           

“Top nuclear experts from Iran and the United states huddled in Vienna on disputes that….” They did so long ago, but I notice that where we, humble individuals, meet and talk, presidents and “top experts” invariably huddle. Why do only big wigs nestle so closely when they congregate? Do those conspirators exchange whispers, so that no one can hear what they are saying? I have also noticed that ratchet up has ousted the verbs increase and accelerate. Pain, agony, speed, tensions—all have fallen victim to ratcheting up. I assume that one day, somebody described two or more functionaries as huddled, with their pulse ratcheting up, and then the entire journalist corps began to say so. No hearing aids will help those who suffer from language deafness.

One does not have to be a top expert to be able to huddle.
Grammar        

Grammatical agreement

The man quoted in a newspaper said: “There’s more things going on at once than just an intervention thing” and a few minutes later: “There’s limitations on what you can and can’t do.” This usage is rather common, and one can find similar examples in the older periods of the Germanic languages, but usually people try to put a singular noun first (“here’s your hat and gloves,” not “here’s your gloves and hat”). So what is the verdict on there’s more things and there’s limitations? The spellchecker underlined the first case but ignored the second. However, when it comes to grammar, the spellchecker is a clumsy and unfeeling brute, and its recommendations should be followed with caution.

My next example is trivial and falls under the category I call “The mood of the tales are gloomy” (a sentence from a student’s paper). “Analysts have said the speed with which the untested Kim [written three years ago] is collecting titles after the death of his father…show that he is vulnerable…” This usage is ineradicable. As another student of mine once put it: “This may be wrong, but it flows better.” It sure does. Once again the spellchecker revolted only at the first example (the one about the mood).

Split infinitive

Nowadays, sentences like I want to briefly talk with you are the norm. But to my dying day I will cling to the conviction that titles like “Ford to soon offer police cars with armor-piercing bullet protection” are ugly and that we cannot get rid of them too soon. Of course we won’t. It is always preferable to not be.

Prepositions

I was rather amused to watch an unconscious case of variation in an article from The New York Times: “Four days after a decisive vote to leave the European Union, Britain was consumed on Monday with questions of when and how the country’s departure from the block will happen,” and a bit later: “… both the governing Conservative Party and the opposition Labour Party were consumed by internal warfare….” Of course, none of the three authors who wrote the article noticed the variation because by and with are interchangeable after consume, but isn’t it better to say that the forest was consumed by fire and the man responsible for the conflagration was consumed with regret? Or is my distinction mere pedantry?

Consumed by fire                                                                                             Consumed by passion

Images: (1) “DesignerOutletSalzburg_BigLuxe_M_Versace Jeans bei LuxuryMall_Pea Coat dunkelgrün” by McArthurGlen Designer Outlets, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr. (2) Meerkats by Karen Arnold, Public Domain via Pixabay.

Featured image: “New Brighton Crystal Ball Sunrise” by Martyn Cook, Public Domain via Pixabay.

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A flame as a moth: how I began chronicling the life of Harrison G. Dyar, Jr., Part 1

Although I never met Harrison Dyar (1866-1929), I have often felt during my pursuit of knowledge on moths that he was looking over my shoulder. It was my research on moths, in turn, that led to my unraveling parts of Dyar’s complex life.

Life history of the New York slug caterpillars

I first became acquainted with Dyar’s work on the moth family Limacodidae, my chosen entomology dissertation topic, in 1983 at the University of Minnesota. It was in the Hodson Hall library on the St. Paul campus where I noted how Dyar’s authorship dominated the Journal of the New York Entomological Society in the middle to late 1890s. Particularly notable was his running series from 1895-1899 entitled “The Life Histories of the New York Slug Caterpillars”. The odd caterpillars of limacodid moths are referred to as slugs, in part because of their sticky underbelly and some smooth-backed ones are similar to these mollusks. However, spine-backed species known as “nettle caterpillars” dominate the group worldwide.

These accurate and extensive illustrations, hand colored by Emily Morton or Dyar’s sister Perle Knopf, are among those that accompanied Dyar’s “Life Histories of the New York Slug caterpillars” in the Journal of the New York Entomological Society. Image Credit: New York Entomological Society, used with permission.

Clues of a love triangle from moths

Dyar’s wives and their limacodid species: Wellesca Pollock Allen Dyar with Parasa wellesca (above) named in 1900 and Zella Peabody Dyar with Acharia zellans (below) named in 1926. Image Credits: Wellesca Pollock Allen Dyar by the Office of the Smithsonian Archives, used with permission. Zella Peabody by the Handy Family, used with permission. Parasa wellesca and Acharia zellans by Mark E. Epstein, used with permission.

On my early visits to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC as a graduate student, merely mentioning Dyar to present day workers elicited tales of his bigamy and digging tunnels that connected his two families. Dyar had worked at the National Museum from 1897 until his death in 1929, often gratis and able to do it because he had the wealth. Sadly, when he needed a paid gig the most was after he lost his government position in 1917.

At the time I began my Smithsonian fellowship, I visited the institution’s historian Pamela M. Henson, who kept files on some of the more unusual Smithsonian scientists, a rather onerous club that Dyar belonged to. Henson told me about Dyar’s Dupont Circle tunnel, a bit about his mistress, including correspondence from Dyar’s assistant who mentioned a “suit of cloths” presented to her by Dyar during a trip to Colorado in 1901. When I inquired about her name I was astonished to hear “Wellesca Pollock.” Parasa wellesca was the name of a limacodid from Costa Rica that I studied during my graduate work. To find out more about Wellesca I checked old DC city directories at the historical society (note: this was prior to the internet). I found Wellesca and her family to be prominent in the kindergarten teaching movement, and her brother a proprietor at Glen Echo, Maryland.

When I went back to Pam to report my findings I asked her the name of Dyar’s wife and once again she spoke a name I was familiar with. Acharia zellans was a limacodid named for Zella Dyar, though many years beyond the Wellesca species in 1926 and well after Dyar’s divorce scandal. This was an eureka moment because even though Dyar had done a massive amount of work on Lepidoptera and mosquitoes, naming over 3,000 of them, limacodid moths appeared to be favorites. This, I would find, was only the beginning!

“Digging for Dyar”

At the time I met Pam Henson she mentioned a newspaper clipping about Dyar’s tunnel in Dupont Circle from September 1924: it had been sent to Dyar by a correspondent in South America. I went to the Library of Congress microfiches of Washington, DC papers and I was amazed to find articles about not just one set of Dyar’s tunnels, but another across from the National Mall. These findings got us talking about writing an article about Dyar. There was interest from American Entomologist, but I was concerned about being able to do the project because I had a limited term postdoctoral appointment. Fortunately, I got funded for a second one, which enabled me to remain in Washington to finish the project.

Among the images related to the Dyar tunnels that were found using microfiche early in my research. Image Credit: The Washington Post, used with permission.

We began our research combing archives at the Smithsonian and around Washington, DC. Soon, correspondence between Dyar and his cohorts drew attention back to limacodid moths. We found Dyar outraged over the removal of limacodids from the US National Museum’s insect collection by William Barnes, MD, of Decatur, Illinois. Barnes, who had the largest private collection of Lepidoptera in North America, would take material from the collection when Dyar was out on collecting trips or attempting a quiet divorce in California or Nevada. Barnes justified removing specimens because he was donating others to the museum and his curators in Illinois needed specimens from the National Collection to compare with his. When Barnes was ask to return the specimens, August Busck, a colleague at the museum who assisted Barnes with the pilfering, referred to the limacodids as Dyar’s special “pets” and Dyar vented that Barnes had taken “his most cherished treasures.”

During a visit to the National Archives to examine records in the US Department of Agriculture files, Pam and I found a letter from Barnes’s nephew that he was attempting to remove items from these very files that could prove damaging to the sale of his collection to the government. She aptly referred to this letter as the “smoking gun,” which in fact was placed at the front of a file so a future researcher could easily see it. We believed that among these “items” that Barnes’s nephew attempted to remove were letters about his taking limacodid moths from the National Collection without proper loan forms. We knew it was now time to publish the full story of Dyar.

Featured image credit: Parasa wellesca by Mark. E. Epstein, used with permission.

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Australia in three words, part 2 – “Kangaroo court”

A ‘kangaroo court’ is no more Australian than a Californian kangaroo rat. The term originated in the California of 1849, as a legacy of the summary and dubious efforts at informal justice on lawless gold fields. By contrast, the Australian gold fields of that period felt heavily the overbearing hand of the law.

This contrast epitomes a larger paradox. Australians are seen as ‘disrespectful of authority’; the truth is they have, from their beginnings, been highly law-prone. In 1788, years before a single bridge had been thrown together, the infant European settlement of Sydney had a significant legal life. In the following decades the favoured priority of civil works was the erection of court houses; numerous, expensive, and over-large. The judges that presided there soon constituted the aristocracy of local society, founding dynasties of a lustre unmatched in business or politics, and establishing their profession as the acme of social distinction. The pitch of glory to which the law now reaches in Australia is reflected in the rampant profusion of law students. Incredibly, Australia now annually graduates, relative to population, five times the number of law students as the United States.

How to explain the blatant disconnect between the Australian reality of a law-addicted culture and the myth of ‘wild colonial boys’? The myth has some glamour, and it is not surprising Australians have cultivated it, and, in part, fabricated it. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ – at one point Australia’s ‘National Song’ – tells of a sheep thief who chose to drown himself rather than be captured by police. This tale was confected by a Sydney solicitor, from misreports of a ‘barmy’ shearer who had abruptly shot himself, to the mystification of his workmates, and without a single ‘trooper’ in sight.

But the myth’s vigour may also traceable to a certain clawhold it has on reality. There is doubleness of the ‘quiet continent’ with respect to law and order; undeniably, a wildness has co-existed with tameness in her history. Australia had plenty of bushangers – but no lynch mobs. It experienced an insurrection in the mid-19th century gold fields –‘the Eureka Stockade’ – but Lord Salisbury was ‘aghast’ at the submissiveness he encountered on those fields; strikes were endemic, but (in general) had an orderliness that left Jack London almost indignant with incredulity during his sojourn in Sydney 1908.

The Trial by Sidney Nolan 1947. CC0 Public domain via  Wikiart.

This duality speaks of a hollowness in Australia’s attachment to law, which in turns betrays a characteristically Australian mistaking the sign of the thing for the spirit of it. The Australian deference to symbols of authority might be described as a lawyer-abidingness rather than law-abidingness. The last is probably rooted in a consciousness of legitimacy; a consciousness that quickened in the middle ages, and was intensely exercised in the constitutional and religious struggles of the 17th century, and remains latent in American political sensibility as a legacy of those struggles. Australia received no such bequest: the quarter deck, the parade ground, the flogging triangle: these were her forcing houses.

The thinness in the sense of the legitimate is correlate with Australians’ evident lack of talent in navigating and coping with conflict. In January 2015 two men brawl near Bondi Beach. Not an extraordinary sight: except that the two are scions of Australian business life; James Packer (worth $A5B) and David Gyngel, the then manager of the Channel 9 Network, once owned by James’ father, Kerry. “I went to his place to punch him” Gyngel later explained to the media.

One upshot of this inability to manage conflict is the destructiveness of conflict; and, as a further consequence, a typically Australian anxiety to avoid conflict. If the first impulse is attack, the second thought is to side-step the confrontation, or hope to somehow dissolve it. One manifestation of this is the ready resort in Australia to various legal gadgetry to try to ‘solve’ a conflict. Thus the extensive attempts in Australia to substitute ‘independent’ authorities for economic and political contestation. A spectacular instance is the ‘new province of law and order’ proudly announced a century ago, which inserted tribunals as a compulsory interface between firms and unions, and which to this day regulate, choke, and poison the relations between management and workers. A second instance might be the ill-starred attempt in 1975 of the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, to ‘solve’, by use of his ‘reserve powers’, a confrontation between the Prime Minister Whitlam and his political enemies. Both attempts to defuse conflict were to prove utterly abortive. By casting business and unions in adversarial postures, Australia’s system of industrial relations has institutionalised conflict; entrenched it; induced it. And Sir John – so deeply involved in that industrial relations system – would have presided over less conflict if he had let politicians strike their blows.

Beyond the futile and counterproductive attempts to avoid conflict, there is another doleful consequence of an impoverished sense of law. Sucking on its dry rind instead of its pith has fostered in Australia an authoritarianism, which utterly belies the myth of ‘the larrikin’. The historian of Australia will be aware that Australia established compulsory peace time military training long before any other Anglophone society. The casual visitor will be struck by the officious signage that festoons and disfigure public spaces; by the high handed confiscations of security guards at public venues, meekly accepted by patrons; by the smoking bans that now extend to every square inch of her huge national parks. I regularly travel by train; I remain dismayed but no longer surprised by loudspeaker announcements that menace any smoker passenger with ‘undercover policeman’ and ‘police sniffer dogs’ if they dare relieve their addiction on board.

Welcome to Australia.

Featured image credit: A Flag in the Breeze by Timothy Swinson, CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Dodgy dossiers in the Middle Ages

Government advisers don’t regularly admit to handling doctored evidence. The extent to which the actions of recent governments may have depended on documents which had been ‘sexed up’ have—quite rightly—become matters for close scrutiny in recent decades. But the modern world has no monopoly over the spurious, the doubtful, and the falsified. Over one thousand years ago, a curious pamphlet arrived at the palace of the Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious (r. 814–840). It claimed to contain a complete and infallible report of the state of Louis’ kingdom. Along with it came a story that seems to epitomize all our stereotypes about the credulity of the Middle Ages. The pamphlet addressed to the emperor was in fact a message from heaven.

The story went like this. There was a blind man named Alberic who resided at a church in what is now Germany. Despite his blindness, it was rumoured that Alberic experienced visions. One winter’s night, Alberic was met by a spirit while he slept. The spirit appeared to him as an old man, robed in white and carrying a golden rod. He listed a series of grievances relating to the current state of the kingdom, and told Alberic to memorize a set of instructions that would allow the emperor to put them right. Alberic’s task was to dictate the commands to a local scribe when he awoke, so that a written copy could be taken to the palace. This Alberic did. At first, he assumed that he was acting on the orders of St Marcellinus, a long-dead Roman saint whose bones were kept in the church. The figure certainly looked like Marcellinus; but in a final twist, the spirit revealed that he was in fact the archangel Gabriel, who had merely assumed the form of St Marcellinus in order to deliver this message at the saint’s shrine.

Almost every aspect of this story now manages to raise our eyebrows.

Almost every aspect of this story now manages to raise our eyebrows. In what sense can blind men experience visions? Why should an archangel need to disguise itself as an obscure Roman martyr? Was there no other way to attract an emperor’s attention than for an angel to impersonate a saint, in order to instruct a blind man, in order to have the blind man tell a local notary, in order to make a written copy, in order to inform the palace? But these weren’t insurmountable difficulties for medieval Christians. Other people told stories of angels assuming such varied forms as beautiful birds, shipwrecked sailors, or mounted warriors if the circumstances required it. They also spoke of angels raising the sick from their beds, or appearing before the eyes of the blind, and explained that such wonders were intended to ensure that distractible mortals treated the angels’ messages with the seriousness they deserved.

No, the truly unexpected aspect of this whole affair was the reaction that these heavenly instructions prompted when they reached the palace. The booklet was received by Einhard, a prominent member of the royal court and the man who had built the church in which Gabriel had spoken with Alberic. He passed the archangel’s instructions on to the emperor as he was told to do—but only after he had rewritten them. According to Einhard’s own account of the events, he had the booklet “corrected and written anew.”

Why? Perhaps Einhard meant that he had simply tidied up the Latin. In his day, a major effort was underway to rid devotional texts of scribal errors and corruptions. Einhard must at least have ensured that his rewritten booklet bore no imperfections of that kind.

But did Einhard’s corrections go deeper than that, and extend also to matters of content? Had he sexed up the dossier? He held in his hands a list of commands which sought to steer a troubled kingdom in a new direction. As a man with the ear of the emperor, Einhard had his own views about the kingdom’s future. Here was an opportunity for such views to be articulated, and to be granted the authority that came with divine backing.

As modern interpreters, we are in a fix. We have only Einhard’s account of his actions, and that account would permit either interpretation to be true. We depend upon what we know of Einhard’s world to help us decide whether mere copy editing or fraudulent rewriting is the more likely scenario.

But at moments like this, we also realize how problematic our assumptions about the Middle Ages can be. To suppose that Einhard would not have dared to interfere substantially with this purported revelation is to resurrect old stereotypes of the Middle Ages as a simple ‘age of faith’. Medieval men and women did not think that they lived in such an age, and spoke openly about the possibility that there were individuals who peddled fake relics, made up miracle-stories, and fabricated letters from heaven.

If, however, we think instead that Einhard couldn’t have resisted the temptation to insert his own bugbears into the archangel’s complaints, we also resurrect stereotypes of another kind. After the Reformation, it suited many to think that the Middle Ages were not an age of faith, but of falsity. Every story of miracles, revelations, and apparitions was in this view a cynical ploy to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes. Yet if such deceptions truly were endemic in medieval Christianity, then what would Einhard stand to gain—for surely the emperor’s circle of intellectuals, clerics, and aristocrats, whom he hoped to convince, would have represented the major perpetrators of such falsehoods.

The Middle Ages resist our attempts to stereotype and to simplify them. Medieval writings tell us things that we do not believe, and that we must nevertheless take seriously if we are to understand the world which produced them. If nothing else, they require us to face up to the insufficiency of the easy answers we so readily turn to in the face of other cultures, other times, and other places.

Feature image credit: Detail from an ivory plaque (northern France, c. 850 × 900). New York, Metropolitan Museum, The Cloisters Collection, 1970.324.1. Photo by Sailko. CC ASA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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15 surprising facts about Guglielmo Marconi, the man behind radio communication

Guglielmo Marconi is popularly known as “the inventor of radio,” a mischaracterization that critics and supporters of his many rivals are quick to seize upon. Marconi was actually the first person to use radio waves to communicate. His first patent was for “Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals and in Apparatus Therefor,” and he considered what he was doing to be a form of wireless telegraphy.

But Marconi was indeed the first truly global figure in modern, mass communication. What came to be known as radio would have been impossible without the groundwork laid by Marconi. As soon as he discovered how to send signals across a room in his parents’ attic in 1895, Marconi was convinced that he would eventually be able to connect any two points on earth by wireless. Conventional physics scoffed at the idea but Marconi was right.

Marconi was also a global media celebrity, followed everywhere by paparazzi who recorded his every move. However, much about him that made him who he was has either never before been known or has been forgotten. Here are some little-known facts about Marconi:

1. Marconi was half-Italian and half-Irish. His father was a landed gentleman from Bologna, where Marconi was born and grew up, but his mother was a member of the Jameson Whiskey family. Annie Jameson’s family business connections in London were crucial to the launch of Marconi’s global company in 1897, when he was 23.

2. Marconi had no formal higher education. He did poorly in school as a child and his parents hired private teachers to tutor him in chemistry, math, and physics. His most important mentor was a high school physics teacher in Livorno by the name of Vincenzo Rosa. He was an avid, self-guided reader of popular scientific journals, where he learned of the discovery of radio waves by the German physicist Heinrich Hertz.

3. Marconi was twice engaged to American feminists: Josephine B. Holman, a graduate of the Indianapolis Classical School for Girls as well as Bryn Mawr, and Inez Milholland, a Greenwich Village social activist who famously led a 1913 suffragist parade riding a white horse. Marconi’s two wives were more conventional women but Marconi was forever becoming romantically involved with artists, film stars, opera singers, and journalists.

4. Marconi was the first inventor-entrepreneur to win a Nobel Prize, for Physics, in 1909 (he shared the prize with German physicist Ferdinand Braun). The Nobel Committee had never before awarded the prize for a practical application rather than theoretical accomplishments. In 1909, it considered giving the prize to the Wright brothers, but decided on Marconi because of public concern about the safety of airplanes.

Marconi and Inez Milholland, Tribune front page, 23 May 1915 (New-York tribune. (New York [N.Y.]), 23 May 1915. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers). Public domain via the Library of Congress.

5. No one would have survived the Titanic disaster had it not been equipped with a Marconi transmitter. Thanks to wireless, the nearby Carpathia arrived at the scene in time to save 705 passengers and crew members. Marconi, who happened to be in New York at the time, was one of the first witnesses called by the US Senate Inquiry into the disaster. He advocated that ships at sea be obliged to operate their wireless equipment round the clock, and this was endorsed by the committee.

6. Marconi was the first person to speak publicly about what we now call cellphones, tasers, and radar. He was forever being egged on by the press to make outlandish predictions, but he refused to forecast anything he was unable to demonstrate empirically. “Spiritualists”, such as the writer A. Conan Doyle, considered wireless communication a form of mental telepathy but Marconi insisted that it was rooted in the natural universe.

7. Marconi was an Italian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference, after the First World War. He met privately with US President Woodrow Wilson in Paris, but was unable to convince Wilson to support Italian postwar claims to parts of the dismantled Austro-Hungarian Empire. The rejection of Italy’s claims in Paris eventually led Marconi (and many others) to support Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement which aimed to restore Italian grandeur.

8. Marconi’s company was involved in the founding of both NBC and the BBC. In England, the Marconi company was the lead member of a consortium of electrical equipment manufacturers that formed the British Broadcasting Company; in the US, the Radio Corporation of America, parent of NBC, was created by the forced takeover of Marconi’s US assets in 1919.

9. Marconi built the world’s first international shortwave broadcast station, Vatican Radio, which went on the air in 1931 (a year before the BBC World Service). A street in the Vatican Gardens is named after Marconi, a rare distinction for someone with no direct connection to the Church.

10. For nearly twenty years, Marconi’s home was a 220-foot yacht that he christened the Elettra (or “spark”). Marconi purchased the boat, which had been built for an Austrian prince, from the British government after the First World War. He equipped it with a wireless research lab and a staff of 35, and also named his youngest daughter Elettra.

11. Marconi was a member of Mussolini’s Grand Council of Fascism. He joined the National Fascist Party in 1923 and served Mussolini as president of Italy’s National Research Council, and the Royal Academy of Italy.

12. Contrary to a persistent urban legend (started by an erroneous report in the New York Times), Mussolini was neither the best man nor a witness at Marconi’s second wedding in 1927. Marconi had invited Mussolini to attend, but he replied that he was too busy and sent a telegram of congratulations.

13. When Marconi died, radio stations all over the world went silent in his honour. The Vatican Osservatore Romano reported that he had died “a Christian death,” but in fact Marconi declined to receive the last rites of the Church.

14. Marconi was said to be privately disturbed by Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, but as late as April 1936 he publicly called for closer ties between Italy and Nazi Germany. The German führer sent the largest wreath to Marconi’s funeral.

15. In his radio address celebrating the fall of Rome in June 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt called Marconi one of the four “great sons of the Italian people,” along with Galileo, Michelangelo, and Dante.

Featured image credit: Marconi (second from left) hosting Nazi Minister Hans Frank (fourth from left) at the Italian Academy, Villa Farnesina, Rome, 4 April 1936 (Archivio storico Istituto Luce). Image used with permission. 

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Jim Crow redux: Donald Trump and the racial fear factor

Donald Trump’s mantra, to “make America great again,” plays on the word “again,” and is presumably meant to evoke among his supporters a return to an earlier, more bountiful, time. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on what the word “again” means. According to the OED, “again” means repeat or return. Trump, however, is typically unclear about what era he means to repeat or recall; surely not the recent Obama years, which he so robustly criticizes, nor the George Bush period, when the President was a man he now calls a liar. No, Trump’s appeal is meant to tap into other memories of a more distant past, of an ideal golden age when no one who mattered had to worry about political correctness, or Muslims, or immigrants, or African Americans, or assertive women, but a time when white men felt secure in their control of all our national life.

The reality is that our history is quite different from the Trump allusion. Our evolving narrative is of a national quest for inclusiveness, or “wholeness,” and has led to the election of an African American as President, and a woman as the presumptive nominee of a major political party. The evidence reveals that a majority of Americans have decided that white supremacists are no longer the gate keepers of opportunity, a rejection of the seemingly “golden time” alluded to by Trump. But by constantly calling up a vague time past, he evokes the darker angels of our nature, and speaks to the fears of his supporters about the diversity of our present age, realized for many in the person of Barack Obama.

Brent Staples of the New York Times in one of his recent columns made the connection quite specific. He said that as he surveyed what has occurred “in the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency,” he has discerned a similarity “in tone” to the post-Civil War years of Reconstruction when slaves became freed people able to vote and claim their civil rights. That period was followed by a white counter-revolution.

Trump’s campaign smacks of the racism that was the centerpiece of that counter-revolutionary era. In the preceding Reconstruction years of the nineteenth century, many Southern whites spoke of a sense of fear, afraid they would lose control over the levers of power in their society if former slaves voted and held civil rights. Politicians, sensing the mood, quickly capitalized on those fears. As Staples noted, “Every era of racial progress engenders a racist backlash,” and it was not long before the revolutionary gains of Reconstruction—black voting and civil rights–were undone. White politicians, variously known as Redeemers or Bourbons, after ginning up fears of a “race war,” returned Southern state governments to white control. The unfolding social revolution went backwards.

The most vivid Southern historical example of that retrenchment familiar to me relates to the experience of black people in the countryside and small towns of Mississippi. The Magnolia State in our own time has many progressive people working on efforts to polish its tarnished image as a racist stronghold, most notably through the programs of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. The Winter Institute staff, unlike the Redeemer politicians, does not cast around for scapegoats on whom to place the blame for the manifold misdeeds of a once-divided society. Rather, the Institute program is attempting to build bridges between communities, not walls. In Trump’s agenda, however, scapegoating is in full flower, with thumping calls to make America great again that recall a xenophobic era of America First. His nationalistic fervor can unfortunately be heard in echoes from across western Europe, where there, too, narrow populist movements advance their own anti-immigrant diatribes.

America’s experience with this kind of behavior in the closing years of the nineteenth century created an apartheid society that endured until the civil rights movement. Trump’s flirtation with David Duke, and with vestiges of the Ku Klux Klan, among other racist actions, suggest that it is not too far a reach to see parallels in his campaign to “make America great again” with the movement that “redeemed” the white South, created Jim Crow, and not incidentally coincided with the spread of world colonialism.

It is therefore important that the historical resonance of the Civil War era, and the cause for which the war was fought, not be lost. In the years before the conflict, there was a tiny portion of the Southern white population for whom life in the region was indeed “great,” and they were the wealthy planters whose cotton profits allowed them to buy expensive European goods. But the war ended their extravagant way of life, and with the proposals advanced by Reconstruction leaders, they feared that not just their resources but their power would be undermined. Business leaders tried to recoup their losses through investments in railroads and financial industries, and when the economy still faltered, they looked for scapegoats, but also new adherents, who might be recruited from among the poor and struggling whites. Politicians raised the specter of “race war” in Mississippi, arguing that tax dollars were going to educate former slaves, ignoring the fact that many whites also benefited from the new social programs. The pattern is not an unfamiliar one in the rise of nationalist/populist movements: a powerful leadership group appeals to the economic insecurities of the poorer elements in their ethnic society, nurturing prejudices of “outsider” communities who are blamed for creating the prevailing economic and social distress.

In Mississippi beginning in 1876, whites went to great lengths to restore their hegemony. As Redeemers or Bourbons, they rigged elections, stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated or misled black voters, and finally resorted to lynching. By August, 1890, the Mississippi Redeemers were able to call a constitutional convention that effectively ended Reconstruction reforms, and replaced black civil rights with the segregation of Jim Crow.

Not until the 1950s did hope for a racially just society re-emerge on the national scene, beginning with the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. Many believed we were on the cusp of a Second Reconstruction. The civil rights movement opened up opportunities closed for over fifty years, and black Americans began voting again, finding jobs and school acceptance open to them. But as America encountered the headwinds of wars and recession, old patterns reappeared, and responsibility for the nation’s problems was again blamed on those at the margins, in particular people who were black or brown.

This painful pattern of scapegoating, whether by Mississippi Redeemers or Republican presidential candidates, only leads to more disruption and distress. As the eight years of the Obama administration come to an end, many of those who locate their problems in the black Presidency may find it reassuring to climb aboard the Trump train, expecting to be saved from the complexity of our present age by another who poses as a “redeemer.” An American majority will never allow the Second Reconstruction to end as the first one, but it will require an active and vigilant electorate to protect against politicians who would pander to the fears of people who believe their economic needs are ignored for the benefit of social “outsiders.”

Featured image credit: “President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, look on” by Cecil Stoughton, White House Press Office (WHPO). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The importance of smell

The captivating scent of cakes and the compelling aroma of freshly brewed coffee attract you to a bakery in the morning. A male moth is fluttering around, frenetically following the scent plume released by his female.

What do these two phenomena have in common? Much more than we suspect, when we look at the molecular level. Imagine if we had a very powerful microscope enabling us to detect details at the levels below one millionth of a millimeter. What we would discover is that in both cases volatile molecules floating in the air are responsible for both events, when they collide with your nose or the antennae of the insect.

We are dealing in both cases with molecular recognition, which means deciphering the information encoded in molecular structures.

Such messages are conveyed by the beautiful and unique architecture of molecules, just like a concept is encrypted in the elegant combination of strokes making a Chinese character.

To decode and interpret such chemical messages, specific proteins sitting at the membrane of olfactory neurons in our nose or in the antenna of an insect check on the identity of each volatile molecule arriving, like sentinels at a city gate, and report to the interior. Thus, chemical information, translated into electric signals, travels to the brain and affects behavior choices, as well as mood. All this is often done without us paying much attention to smells in our environment.

The antennae of insects house thousands of tiny chemosensitive hairs, where binding proteins and receptors recognize volatile molecules (odorants and pheromones) and translate the chemical messages encoded in their structure into electric impulses that are sent to the brain. The human nose, despite its completely different anatomy, performs analogous functions using a similar biochemical machinery to detect and recognize environmental smells. Image Credit: Paolo Pelosi, used with permission.

It is the sense of smell that guides our food choices, that wets our appetite and unconsciously, but inexorably drives us to our favorite coffee shop. And it is smell again that makes us choosy about food and justifies the absurd price of an aged bottle of claret.

Smell again can detect warning messages from that bottle of milk left too long in the fridge or give away the pretended freshness of fish.

Without the sense of smell, we would miss a lot of interesting experiences, emotions, and pleasure; our life would lack a whole dimension. However, from a physiological point of view, it would be a perfectly normal life.

But this is not the case for most animals. From mammals to insects, fish and snakes, olfaction is essential for finding and recognizing the partner of the same species, detecting a prey and escaping a predator, or selecting the good food and avoiding poisonous plants.

A male insect with impaired sense of smell would not be able to recognize the love message sent by the female of its own species and would end its life without passing its genes to the next generation. A similar short life without the chance of reproduction would be the fate of a gazelle unable to smell the approaching lion or that of a mouse which could not distinguish good food from poison.

The chemical language of molecules, used by most animal species to exchange information, can be as complex as any language we use to communicate with each other. Breaking the olfactory code has the flavor and excitement of deciphering an ancient scripture and reveals a key to understand and eavesdrop the desperate call of a moth calling her partners or the gossip going on in a beehive about the best foraging sites or the health of the queen. Konrad Lorenz indicated the study of behavior as the ring of King Solomon, enabling us to understand the language of animals. Often such behavior, particularly in insects, is mediated by odors and pheromones, which represent the basic units of their language.

The structure of an odorant-binding protein (OBP) of the backdiamond moth (Plutella xylostella) encapsulating a molecule of the specific pheromone. OBPs are located at the interface between external environment and olfactory receptors and represent the first biochemical tools to interact with molecules of smells and pheromones. Thanks to their extremely compact and robust structure, OBPs can be used in biosensors for instrumental monitoring of environmental odors. Image Credit: Paolo Pelosi, used with permission.

We are just beginning to decipher this alphabet (or these alphabets, because humans, cats, and mosquitoes all speak different idioms), but understanding the complex rules of grammar and syntax of the chemical language is a task still far from being reached.

We might think that knowledge sometimes produces cold. The more we understand Nature, the more it loses interest and attraction. This is not my view. Lifting the veil of mystery that surrounded for a long time our perception of odors probably dissolved that aura of magic and dream associated with perfumes and flavors, but at the same time revealed new, exciting, and unpredicted aspects of the complex phenomena behind our sense of smell. More than once have I experienced the excitement of opening a door and discovering a new unexpected scenario with more doors waiting to be opened.

Feature Image: Cup of coffee and coffee beans by Unsplash. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Five crimes being committed by Pokémon Go players

The record-breaking mobile app Pokémon Go has been downloaded over 75 million times worldwide, a number set only to increase as the game is released in more territories.

For anyone still in the dark, Pokémon Go is a virtual reality game which uses GPS to create a map on the player’s mobile phone screen, placing images of Pokémon seemingly in the real world. It has been a huge commercial success – but the game that everyone’s talking about hasn’t come without its problems.

What five common crimes have police officers had to attend to as a result of this craze taking off?

Theft

The most commonly reported Pokémon Go related crime seems to be theft. There have been multiple incidences of players having their phones snatched out of their hands while not paying attention to their surroundings, as well as cases of criminals setting lures to draw unsuspecting victims to secluded areas to rob them.

Trespassing

Players have been warned to be careful about entering private property without permission. Whether wandering onto the property by accident due to being absorbed in the game, or by deliberately seeking out Pokémon, some players have been causing a nuisance to property owners.

Harassment

Similarly, instances of people calling the police due to feeling threatened or being caused significant distress as a result of Pokémon placed on or nearby their property could result in harassment charges being brought to players. In one reported case, “at least five individuals knocked on plaintiff’s door, informed plaintiff that there was a Pokémon in his backyard, and asked for access to plaintiff’s backyard in order to ‘catch’ the Pokémon.”

Image credit: ‘pokemon-go-1543556_640,’ by natureaddict. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.


Dangerous driving

The potential for road-related incidents while playing Pokémon Go are numerous, not least with pedestrians stepping into the road without looking whilst being more concerned with their phone screen. While mobile phones causing road traffic accidents is perhaps nothing new, there have also been reports of a multi-car pileup caused by a Pokémon Go playing driver, as well as one distracted user crashing into a police car.

Data Protection

In the process of downloading the app and in order for the game to work, users are providing detailed information about their location, along with other personal data. Although there have been no reported cases, Pokémon Go players run the risk of losing that data to hackers, potentially falling victim to credit card fraud or identity theft.

There are undoubtedly other ways that Pokémon Go players will fall victim to, or commit, crimes while playing the game, as use of the app continues to increase. Although, it’s not all bad news — there are also reports of Pokémon Go players helping to solve crimes too.

Featured image credit: pokemon-go-1569794_1920 by Tumisu. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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