omenti

pinterest in the 17th century

The amount of information around us is increasing at a staggering rate with no end in sight.  An industry has emerged to deal with overload, but we've been up against the boundary for a long time.  Civilization has produced too much information to keep up with for centuries.  We deal with it with filters and curation.  The trick is not so much storages and access, but rather to be reflection and recontextualization.

 

Technologies have a curious habit of not having all of the pieces in place at first - it often takes a long time before they reach even a few percent penetration of a market.  At some point everything comes together for a few winning technologies and we see the famous S shaped growth curve.  Looking back we rarely recognize the long path that came before.

 

Gutenberg's invention was just such an example.  A practical printing press  lowered the effort and cost involved in book publishing, but the finished product was still far too expensive for anything approaching a mass market.  Early Gutenberg books were still chained to desks like there handmade predecessors.   But another technology took off nearly immediately. Paper became widely available and inexpensive.  Students, scholars and other readers would visit libraries armed with pen and paper to copy passages into blank books - a common place for storing and making sense of information.

 

When I'm in a great library I like to track down their collections of commonplace books as some are beautiful and most are interesting.   Annotations, sketches and calculations flow through the pages of copied text.  Critically they are organized in a manner to benefit their author.  Categorization and lists are easy to spot and you get a sense of the interests of the owner.  

 

Commonplacing became part of an education. Students had to copy  passages with penmanship and accuracy being graded.  In theory it would provide a foundation for copying bits and shards into some organized pattern that could be later used for a deeper purpose.   Unfortunately many schools missed the point and too often education descended to rote memory.

 

By the 1800s  printed books had become inexpensive.  The act of copying and annotation evolved towards clipping , organizing and annotation.  Shards of music scores, writing, even early photography.  This form of scrapbooking was an extension of the diary, but often a public extension.  People would have friends write in their books and create a a sort of early multi-media diary.  If you're lucky some of these may have been passed down from earlier generations.

 

We still have them.  Moleskine encourages the practice and scrapbooking is common in some groups of teenage girls.  I maintain notebooks of sketches and calculations that are something of a diary. Very little of it is electronically produced.  
Usually I'll sketch the results of a graph to reflect on it - a process I find worthwhile.¹  I have a loose organization organization.  Looking at old notes and annotations are references from other times allows me to reflect on the original information and sometimes make deeper connections.  This is one of my standard methods.

 

Of course I could do this digitally and do with quite a bit of information, but the tools lack the fluidity and intellectual presence of a pen or pencil on paper - at least not for me.  There is signal in how I arrange, sketch and annotate that help me recreate the context of my thoughts at the time.  Context is far too important when you're working on ideas that span months or more.  In the process I'm filtering, sorting and recontextualizing information.  I have  commonplace books that are only for far flung connections -  sport and physics, fashion and material science and the ideas of others, and so on.  these are extremely valuable to me.  The process involved in creating them is messy and difficult to describe - I'm unsophisticated enough a tool user than I can only capture it in free form.  I also find myself using higher quality paper and pencils so as to focus more on thoughts.²

 

While some of us are paper and pen dinosaurs, digital commonplacing is - well - common.  Pinterest is one of the best examples.  Users commonplacing images.  Users "pin" images in themed areas as they browse the web - they're creating a self categorized record of their interests.  They can annotate and others can re-pin images to their spaces as well as comment on the originals - a process that allows communities of focused common interests to form - it is the old notion of passing around commonplace books to others to allow them to add and enrich the original.  Republishing, remixing, and recontextualizing is a big part of the process separating Pinterest from most image storage sites.³

 

Twitter is another commonplace tool - one that I use, although not for the same purpose I create physical books.  It began as a microblogging service with short 140 character messages, but quickly the concept of the hashtag emerged.  The author can now categorize and contextualize the message, which is shared with followers.  Others can search on hashtags and put together something of a commonplace page on a specific subject often with rich context.  Links, images and videos can be included making it a multimedia experience.  The links are particularly important and they allow a rich web of user driven context to emerge.  

 

Over the weekend a reader asked why I used Twitter.  I replied with an unthought answer, but the real reason is there are times when I'm taking a break from thought and just want to wander the digital flow of the portion of the digital metropolis I find myself in.  Following a Twitter stream and casually branching off to see where it leads is like the wanderings of the flaneur as she moves through the streets of a place just enjoying the sights, smells and sounds of the place.  I become a digital flaneur as recreation, but it sometimes allows seemingly random connections and I occasionally find ideas that are original, at least to me, appear.  I don't recommend living there, but it is a fine place to visit.

 

One can go on and on.  I suspect the process of commonplacing enables a deep way to make sense of information and its context.  Some services are commonplace tools, others aren't.  As with most services there are issues of interface and experience across types of information.  New modalities and richer connections have emerged, but we're only at the beginning and the path will be long.  I suspect I'll be using paper and pen or pencil for some time, but will be augmenting it with something new.  It is also possible that I'll become a better flaneur along the way.

 

Even with the shortcomings this is terrifically interesting as information can be ripped from culture, remixed and then published (burned;) in new forms.  A major component of digital literacy is to produce as well as consume - many are doing it without a second thought.  Copyright sometimes gets in the way, but I suspect commonplacing will route around that as it has for centuries.  

 

This touches the physical world, but my hour is up...

__________

¹ I regularly attend a conference that doesn't allow viewgraphs.  There is slate blackboard for equations and graphs, but projection isn't allowed.  Speaker notes aren't allowed.  There are a few other quirky rules, but it a brilliant place with wonderful exchanges.

The image consists of a few back of the envelope calculations to determine if the the too early confirmation of inflation was real.  I heard about it on a Monday - I was boarding a place and found myself doing a few estimates on the observed signal to see if it was consistent with cosmic inflation.

² In addition to Moleskein I like Field Notes and old school composition notebooks. I was given an excellent Habana notebook, but it is too spendy for my purposes.  All nice, but the best notebook is the one you have with you or the one you can quickly buy.  Regular notebooks for middle and high school are sometimes all you have.

³ Interesting arguments can be made for Instagram and a few other services, but they' occupy a different space - one that also has a rather old foundation.

 

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Roasted fruit is delicious.  Put blueberries, grapes or other small seedless fruit on a tray and bake at 425°F for 15 to 20 minutes.  The fruit darks and deepens in flavor.  Plums and peaches work well if you slice them into half inch thick wedges and roast for about ten minutes longer.  Just move the fruit around a bit and don't let it get black.

I stir it into whole plain Fage yogurt.  A quick little dessert is to spread yogurt onto a tart crust and then top with roasted fruit.

 

 

the context and quality of data

Passing white light through a prism to break it into a range of colored light, Newton introduced the word spectrum into optics.  The colored apparition was packed with information contained in the light - a mixture of frequencies and intensities.  Eventually it was learned that studying these revealed important aspects of matter the light had interacted with.  In the mid 1800s physicists reignited the sleepy field of astronomy by attached spectroscopes to telescopes allowing the study of what made the starlight.  Among the discoveries was an unknown yellow line in the Sun's spectrum.  It was proposed as a possible new element later called Helium in honor of the Sun. 25 years it was discovered on Earth.  

 

The technical is powerful and commonly used in many areas of science, medicine with thousands of commercial applications. The caveat is you need to use the right technique and appropriate instrument. 

 

The heart of many types of spectrometers is simple - a well characterized and calibrated light source, something to hold a sample, a prism or diffraction grating to break up the light into a spectrum and a way to measure the intensity of the spectrum as a function of its wavelength (color, sort of).  A smartphone has enough processing power to perform serious analysis and a few companies have made low cost spectrometers for teaching purposes.  A good example is this $400 unit from Pasco.  It lacks the precision to do serious work, but its great fun and works with an iPhone or iPad.

 

Three times in the past two years people have sent descriptions and pitches of even more portable units using integrated spectrometer modules.  While they might be fun, these usually do reflected light surface spectroscopy and appear to have poor resolution.  Silly claims are frequently made - that you can determine what is in your medicine, do food safety and calculate the calories in a meal.  

 

Nope - it isn't going to work like that.  You can't use out of context uncalibrated data and somehow perform cloud magic with 'algorithms' ... Success during a Kickstarter funding period does not guarantee impossible magic.  There will be a flood of interesting sensors and even serious instrumentation for smartphones and some of it will enable a density of information that is potentially transformative. Consider thousands of accurate pollution monitors per square kilometer in cities.  China is ripe for a revolt from a data informed citizenry.

 

Data, even the simplest data, has context.  What was the sample. how were the measurements made, what is the accuracy of the measuring tool, did the accuracy change over time, how was the data preprocessed, how was it postprocessed...?  

 

A few years ago I came across a detailed description of a rope transmission from Bordeaux, France that moved mechanical power from a water wheel to several businesses hundreds of feet away.  These contraptions sometimes often had mechanical efficiencies that still impress.  My answer seemed far too low.  I smugly came to the conclusion that the book must be in error.

 

The problem resurfaced recently when I was reading about the spread of the metric system in France.  Standardization of weights and measures was of vital importance to commerce as hundreds of local systems were being used.  The author noted rural Bordeaux defined a foot using a standard that was 35.7cm long - dramatically different from the now standard definition of about 30. 5cm.  I had been doing my calculations based on a bad assumption.  Using this definition a six foot tall person would be a bit over five foot one...

 

About three years ago a friend came to me with a question about a distribution of measurements.  She's quite tall and was thinking about putting together a specialized shop for tall women.  An important early question was to understand the potential market size.  While there are many factors that go into clothing size, height is a reasonable proxy to get a rough idea.  She knew there were tables showing height distributions,  but it wasn't clear to her how to navigate the information.  I had been involved in a large anthropometry survey in the nineties so one thing led to another...

 

You can make a histogram of heights - 100 people at 64 inches, 125 at 65 inches and so on. Increasing the number of people in your sample will make the distribution look smoother.  With a very large population and very small measurement increments you'll get something like this:

 

It isn't exactly the bell-shaped curve you probably expected.  The problem is it is the composite of two two curves.  Men are about five inches taller than women on average and need to be considered a separate population.   Plotting men and women separately gives two bell curves. Add them and the original distribution appears.

 

 

This type of curve is a Normal distribution - anyone with a STEM background has studied them in depth as they turn up almost everywhere.  Human height turns out to approximately follow this type of distribution making it easy to calculate the distribution of potential customer heights assuming the published curve is relevant to your population.  Measurements have been made in most countries and  are repeated at regular intervals.¹ 

 

My friend's  target market was women who stand more than six feet tall.  A small market, but she and her friends were underserved so it made sense to investigate.  Perhaps the Internet would allow her to find enough customers to justify production runs greater than a few pieces.  She chose a huge American survey and found wrote a simple program that calculated how many women were predicated to be at or about a height 

from her email:

 

Something is broken Steve  I just integrate a normal distribution with a mean of 64.3 and a standard deviation of 2.5  from a height through infinity to get the fraction at and above a height.  Here are my numbers with a little rounding.  Any ideas?!?

 

72"    1 in 966

73"    1 in 3,900

74"     1 in 19,150

75"     1 in 107,000

76"     1 in 697,200

77"     1 in 5,298,900

78"     1 in 47,022,800

This is SO WRONG!  The number of girls in college basketball and volleyball are instant disproofs!

 

To produce a clean fit it standard practice to exclude the tails of a measured distribution and tell the reader where it is valid.  It wasn't published in this case,  at least not prominently, but the fit was only good to about 5'11.  The tails on the real curve tend to be thicker, but making a large enough measurement to smooth them out is unrealistic.  It is possible to get a good enough fit for all but a tiny fraction of the population with only 100,000 or so people.

 

Now I was curious.  Would it be possible to find a better fit to the distribution?  Over a period of a few months I found a few ways to build a more accurate distribution function.  Rather than a simple normal distribution it is the sum of three separate distributions.  The tricky part was calculating the errors.

 

I won't list all of the results, but I'm 95% confident that a 6'3" woman (my friend's height) is between 1 in 16,070 and 18,070 with 1 in 16,950 being the most likely.²  1 in 17,000 is probably a good enough starting point and better than any of the major surveys.  My tall friend Colleen would be about 1 in 267,000, but the bound is much larger between 1 in 219,000 and 1 in 420,000.  Another good friend is 6'8,  the estimates are very sketchy at her level:  1 in 1.38 million with a range from 1 in .76 million to 1 in 2.79 million.  Counting athletes as a lower bound is probably better:-)

 

The final plot looks identical to the second plot as the size of the change is only 0.02% of the regular normal curve.  This is a feature as the densely populated portion of the distribution function is nearly identical to the original. To get a sense of the shape of the adjusted function,  imagine a world where my corrections are 2,500 times larger making their contribution equal to that of the normal female height distribution.

 

                         

 

 

 

The new female probability curve is red and the old uncorrected female curve is blue in the first plot and the uncorrected male curve is blue in the second.³  In this different world a quarter of the female population is six feet tall or more.  One in one hundred and thirty would be at least Colleen's height.  This  alternate world could be fodder for social commentary fiction.  Tall women certainly wouldn't have problems finding clothing and female sports would probably dominate.  Perhaps height would be unimportant socially. 

 

Continuous distribution functions derived from observed data are common and, when used correctly, powerful.  It is all too easy to miss a fundamental assumption and come to the wrong result while feeling good about it.  Separate sanity checks, like looking at the roster of college volleyball teams, need to be normal practice.  Being playful and not be easily seduced is a requirement.   

 

The clothing concept turned out to be impractical.  Quality sources for reasonable costs simply don't exist for the necessary low volumes.  It became clear that made to measure is necessary. Some is done for men's shirts in Asia and South Asia, but costs are currently high.  In addition to height, there was too much variability in sizes to make the effort practical... at least for now.  The trick is mass made-to-measure.  Eventually it will be standard practice and fit will become nothing more than a memory. Until then some segments of the apparel market are tough sledding.  Her advice for anyone dealt an usual body: learn to sew, find a good tailor and make enough money for a few quality custom pieces. Find your own style rather than following the trends.

__________

¹ Health organizations usually take the measurements as they are a proxy for human health.  Cheating I copy and paste from an email I sent on the subject:

We tend to pay a lot of attention to numbers without worrying about their accuracy. Height is a good example. If you measure a large number of adult males and females, their heights will distribute themselves along a bell shaped curve. Most people will be close to an average (a mean). The larger the sample the more the distribution will take the shape of a bell shaped curve called the normal distribution. Remarkably all you need to know is the average and a number that tells you something about how rapidly the curve changes shape. From this a designer will know the height distribution of potential customers and can adjust their manufacturing plans accordingly. You can do similar exercises for many measurements - shoe size for example. 

The characteristic curves vary regionally. The US is very similar to England and can be taken as the same within the accuracy of most measurements. Northern Europe is taller, with Holland being the tallest. The North of Holland is particularly tall and is sometimes treated separately. Asia and South Asia are shorter than the US and South America is much shorter. Changes in mean and standard deviation are studied over time as height is a good proxy for health within a population. A tall person is not necessarily healthier than a short person, but for a child about 20% to 25% of the variation of their final height is influenced by health and nutrition rather than genetics.  If the health of a nation changes, so will it’s average height. Holland has seen a dramatic change in the 20th century - particularly after WWII with Northern Holland being the tallest region in the World.  For adults under 35 female height is only an inch less than mean male height in the US and mean male height approaches 6'2.

² A quick comment - the curves are probability distribution functions.  The horizontal axis is height, the the vertical axis is probability, so you get a sense of roughly what it is.  The exact probability for a point is meaningless.  The probability of someone being 73.0000001 is very nearly zero.  Just integrate the function over the range you are interested in. 

Measurement errors in the height studies and insufficient statistics are the major components that make up the errors.  A trained person using a simple stadiometer - those vertical rulers with a sliding horizontal arm - can repeatedly measure height to about a half centimeter, but some surveys are self-reported.

³ Here I have plotted real probabilities for each inch of height and have connected them with a smooth curve - a similar to the density function, but a bit different.  I'm just doing it to show there are different ways to interpret and display the data and drawing conclusions requires some understanding.

Here is the probability plot of just the correction in black scaled up to represent a full population next to a normal female plot in red.  The shape isn't simple and has a much larger mean and width than the normal curve for women's height.  Scaled down by a factor of 2,500 and added to the normal women's distribution it gives a "fat tail" that squares with other measurements.

 

 

Playing games like this make it easy to spot errors in your thinking or calculations. At some level this is just a game.  A good thing as you can spend a lot of time getting everything to work.

 __________

Recipe Corner

 

This is modified from an old recipe from a cooking club I was part of

 

Indian Cauliflower with Several Spices

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 large head cauliflower, trimmed and separated into florets 

° 1 large yellow onion, thinly sliced

° 1 tbsp olive oil (you really should use coconut oil, but I didn't have any)

° 1 tsp mustard seeds 

° 1 tsp cumin seeds 

° 1 tsp nigella seeds (I didn't have so I skipped)

° 1 tsp fenugreek seeds 

° 1 tsp fennel seeds 

° 6 ounces tofu, stirred 'til smooth

° 1 tsp paprika

° ½ tsp cayenne

° ½ tsp turmeric

° juice of a half lemon

° kosher salt to taste

Technique

° heat the oil in a pan and add the seeds. When they dance and begin to darken, add the onions.

° sauté the onions until  translucent.

° add the cayenne, paprika and salt. 

° add the cauliflower florets and mix well.

° add the tofu, mix. Cover the pan and let the cauliflower cook until somewhat tender. Stir every few minutes

° add salt and lemon juice and mix .

 ° serve warm

 

linking points from beyond your neighborhood

Since college I've had a practice of tithing my time.  Its origins weren't particularly noble - mostly I was feeling guilty about my position as a middle class white male at a good school.  My upbringing encouraged paying a tithe.  It didn't make much sense to me.  A wealthy person wouldn't suffer if they game a tenth of their income away while a poor person might be ruined.  Money to an organization didn't make sense - particularly if it was seen as a bribe.  Donating time was the great equalizer.  How many CEO's donate four or six hours to some cause every week?  How many churches would be able to accept the drop in funding?  

 

Initially I found work in a soup kitchen.  It was mind numblingly boring.  I quit after a few minutes feeling that it was a failed experiment and a bit guilty.  Then a friend asked for help with the instrumentation on his experiment.  Learning about what he was doing and making my myself useful turned out to be fun.  I felt I was getting more out of the deal than he was.  It was grad school and I was completely hosed for time.  Well - mostly - this was a vacation from my own work.  For about a semester I'd spend about an hour a day helping and learning. The next semester came with a few smaller opportunities.  I found myself hinting that I'd be willing to help out.

 

At Bell Labs there were tithing opportunities outside of science.  The place had people from many walks of life - including musicians and artists.  These were people - seriously talented people - who wanted to dip their toes in projects,  but needed collaboration.  The amount of learning went up dramatically.  Tithing grew to about ten percent of my waking hours and external projects like working with a startup Black Women's fashion magazine came along.  Long lasting threads were being generated.  I found myself beginning to identify and connect widely separated fields bringing my background and abilities along for the ride.

 

Some threads tangled  and led me to territories I hadn't imagined.  A wild piece of serendipity occurred when someone from the fashion world told me there was someone I had to meet.  Colleen was spending a bit of time in NYC looking for ideas,  so we got together to see if any crazy projects presented themselves.  If you were to look at our backgrounds, other than a sense we needed to do something about global warming,  there was little overlap - something that proved to be a feature.  At the time she was a pro beach volleyball player and I was in need of a project far from the norm.  We got together and talked and listened and talked.  

 

Dots began to connect, but like sausage making the process was messy and required quite a bit of effort.  Threads began to emerge.  I'll just mention one that came from observation.  

 

She happens to be very tall - about five and a half standard deviations taller than the average woman and nearly three and a half  more the average man.  Interacting with man-made objects, particularly those that are mass produced, can be frustrating.  The design world usually focus on the five to ninety five percent range.  Colleen is at the  99.9998 percentile when it comes to height.

 

In physics you learn to focus on what appears to be broken - what doesn't match the models people have been working with.  Colleen clearly isn't broken - the problem is with the products.  

 

There were a few quick fixes.  She had come up with many on her own.  Jeans weren't long enough, so when a pair wears out you cut the bottom foot or so from each leg and use them to extend the legs of normal jeans.  Others proved a bit more difficult and part of the problem is recognizing there is a design issue rather than just adapting.  She loves to cook, but watching her wince with back pain after about 15 minutes of prep work was enough to spark a simple idea.  Anthropometric studies suggested a work surface 49" from the ground.  The standard American kitchen counter is 36", so the trick was a sturdy little 13" tall table with a high quality cutting surface.  

 

It worked so well that a small company got involved in making them.  She recorded and edited a YouTube promotion with her mother operating a Flip camera (remember that?).  The outtakes video shows off her sense of humor.

 

 

There were several other modified products ideas that were basically appropriately sized or positioned, but the big game was apparel.  Finding anything that remotely fits is a challenge.  Made to measure is the best path to success, but it isn't cheap.  This rekindled an interest in apparel design and manufacture - an interest that is still alive as disruption seems very likely.

 

She has been working on finding a path that will let her travel and write more - perhaps enough to make a living.  A part on a five episode reality show that highlights very tall women presented itself and she jumped at it.  The first episode of My Giant Life aired earlier this week on TLC and turned out to be more respectful of the women than these shows can be.¹  It is an opportunity for her to become a bit more well known and have a better chance with some of her ideas.  She's looking for her own set of points to connect and her own threads to weave.

 

The first episode shows a special bike that Trek made for her in recognition of her environmental efforts along with the cutting board and how she has hacked her 400 sq ft garden apartment to make use of the vertical space.  When you can easily put your palm on the ceiling, high spaces become attractive.  On the other hand a five foot tall refrigerator isn't very back friendly.  At least she is no longer just adapts - she observes and is filing away ideas.

 

Connecting the dots and using these experiences to weave threads through time is a path to creativity and adaptation.  The current focus of schools on STEM and the elimination of so many other subjects, particularly for the poor, strikes me as short sighted and perhaps dangerous.  I was delighted when Horace Dediu's wife wrote and pointed out Finland takes a very broad approach.  They're creating a very adaptable workforce. 

 

My college education was far too narrow.  In grad school I learned a bit more about my craft after several years of intense focus, effective rendering me more narrow.  Somehow I lucked out with curiosity beyond my field and have been able to build a continuing education that is a little broader.  Many of you do this and much more brilliantly.  

 

Tell your stories and inspire others...

 

__________

¹ It still had many annoying issues, but ... television.  Height is over sensationalized with camera angles at times and is the main driver of the plots, but that's what the series is about.  At least everyone is treated well so far and perhaps some people may realized how they treat those who are different needs to be changed.

The series will be available on iTunes.  Episode 1 is free and on their server for streaming and download.

__________

 

Recipe Corner

 

Great with freshly picked blueberries and more than ok with frozen.  The other ingredients need to be fresh.

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 large pasteurized eggs

° 1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

 

Technique

 

° toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

° wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

° mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

° churn freeze and season if you can stand the wait - I usually just eat it immediately!

 

perceptual filters for non-verbal communication

[credits rolling, theme music fades and a conversation between a couple begins]

Hello.
I'm sorry I'm late.
I had some important police business to attend to, you know.

- Everything's all right?

Yes, absolutely fine.
Allow me to let you in the car.

Please.
- It's beautiful.

- It's rather neat, isn't it?

I call it the Silver Hornet.

Yes.

It's a little overdue for service, unfortunately.

Perhaps it's better to leave that there.
It's a beautiful night. Why don't we walk?

What an excellent idea.

- L'm sorry about that.

- It's quite all right.

You look ravishing tonight.

- Yes, I know that.

- You know that?

I knew that you knew that.

You did? L knew you knew I knew that.

What made you decide to become a detective?

It's not something one decides every day of the week, you know.  But in my case, it began when my great aunt was kidnapped...  and held for ransom
by an unlicensed Armenian phrenologist.

An Armenian phrenologist?

Yes, you know. A man who reads the "bimps" on the head.

- The "bimps"?

- What?

[conversation fades, music returns]

- from the credit section of The Revenge of the Pink Panther

 

 Phrenology was rooted in the idea that the mind had a limited number of components that were regional in the brain and that the importance of each of these was determined by its size and shape.  Somehow this was reflected in the shape of the skull.  The phrenologist would feel the shape and bumps on a person's head and make judgement statements on the person's personality, mental capacity, and even their potential moral worth. It was a quick filter for information conveyed by a type of non-verbal communication and, like so many poorly thought-out filters, it was pseudoscience.

 

It was hugely popular until becoming discredited around the mid 1800s.  Part of the public discrediting came in the form satire.   Nasology (by George Jabet under the pseudonym Eden Warwick in 1848)  claimed to judge character based on the size and shape of the human nose.  The first printing of the book in England made its point, but a second printing years later somehow caught on in the US and was popular in some quarters as it appeared to justify racism.  Thankfully modern America is sophisticated enough to not fall for the satire of The Onion and The Daily Show.

 

We have rich communications, often unconscious, with others outside of our speech.  Non-verbal communication includes everything from body language, eye contact, physical distance, and much more.  Fashion and clothing are a signal that communicate class, personal taste, mood, and more.  Sometimes we make choices about the signals we send.  Sometimes there are miscommunications based on social non-verbal visual filtering.

 

As part of learning about apparel I've become interested in these communications.   The industry is beginning to undergo radical change and understanding filters as drivers of design is centrally important.  Of course this goes beyond what we chose to wear. We make similar judgements about a person based on their body shape and appearance.  Bodies are less malleable, but have a fashion of their own and that has driven dieting, physical fitness and body modification.  

 

Dieting for weight loss was popularized William Banting with his publication of the Letter on Corpulence, Addressed to the Public.  Perhaps the fact he was an undertaker by trade tells us something his diet consisted of large amounts of meat, some wine, smoking (!), and very few carbohydrates.  It became wildly popular in America establishing a model for the fad diets that followed up to the present.  Dieting was recommended and advertised in men's publications becoming a component of the Muscular Christianity movement that was beginning to gain steam around the same time.

 

Muscular Christianity linked physical health and piety to perceived character.   Self control through rigorous physical exercise supposedly conveyed purity.  Christian men were to be ruggedly masculine and the image of the ideal Western male shifted beginning with the elites.  Buff had become a desired state for the young, wealthy and white and casual clothing was developed to show it off.

 

Dieting and exercise were a path for the emerging middle class.  They came from a lower class and were excluded from power - partly became they were considered vulgar and uneducated.  Dieting and sport demonstrated they had self-control and worth.  Being overweight was linked to weakness, greed and corruption.  There was a worry that men had become too weak - too feminine.  The YMCA was a product of the movement along with games like basketball and volleyball which were invented as gym based physical activities.  This helped ignite an interest in sports like baseball and football in the US making them activities first at elite Eastern colleges and then at more aspirational institutions.  At the peak of the movement the Olympic Games of the modern era were established.

 

Women were initially excluded from this new drive to be physically fit.  A proper woman, at least in the US and England, wasn't to do physical labor.  The desired body type had become - well - plump.  Women's magazines told them losing weight would cause premature aging and a being unattractive for men.  Lillian Russell represented the wealthy white feminine ideal of a fertile plumpness. 

 

Change came from the women's rights movement.  It was believed that if women could control their bodies in the same way that men did they can show they are rational beings of high self worth deserving of equal rights.  Women began to diet and exercise as a means of liberation. 

 

These new visual signals were meant for the white middle and upper class only.  Those from the working class who didn't have the time and means to exercise were viewed as lazy and without worth as they can't control their bodies - and perhaps they should not be granted equal rights.

 

Youth fitness slowly emerged as an issue. During WWI it was noticed that some American draftees were rejected for being overweight.  The numbers weren't huge, but  it became an issue and lead to a study of the physical fitness of several thousand American and European children a few decades later.  The Americans fared poorly triggering alarms about future security.  President Eisenhower, something of a fitness junkie himself, established what later became the President's Counsel on Physical Fitness as a cold war effort.  American children had to become fit, but they had to do it by choice as a counter to the film reals of Soviet children doing required mass calisthenics.  That presented a problem.  It was easy for the Godless communists to motivate a generation, how do you do it in America?

 

The solution was quintessentially American. Hire the guys who gave us Smokey the Bear, our great influencers - the admen of Madison Avenue.  Physical fitness was pitched as being cool.  Gym classes received more attention and producing athletes as ideals became more important.  In Junior High I remember calisthenics to an old 45 record - the practice survived until the 70s.

It is useful to achieve some level of physical fitness, it is important not to judge.  We have powerful social learned visual filters that often lead to character judgements based on someone's race, appearance, height, weight and physical shape.  We may laugh at phrenology, but sometimes we use something equivalent. And there are other filters - some day perhaps I'll write about the phrenology of Google and Facebook...

 

__________

Recipe Corner

I've mostly been grilling veggies and various types of produce.  Since so little work was done I tried someone else's recipe.  A fun and delicious idea noted by David Lebovitz - vegetarian 'Faux Gras'.  It is great on a hearty bread.