“Failure is simply the non-presence of success. But a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.”*…
When things go wrong– very, very wrong: an example from your correspondent’s childhood…
When Beach Park’s Howard Hilton was planning the Great Tampa Snow Show, he envisioned smiling kids, Santa Claus spreading good cheer, frolicking reindeer and lots of snow. A giant Christmas tree would hulk over the festivities, and there would be a massive, five-story ski slope.
Instead, Hilton’s eight-day event turned into the most flawed spectacle in Tampa history.
The event… was designed to promote downtown businesses during the Christmas season. Even though hundreds of thousands came to the show, it resulted in 47 lawsuits, three dead deer and several sunburned seals…
It was supposed to be a winter wonderland: “Tampa’s 1958 Snow Show was an epic fiasco” from @TB_Times.
(TotH to Rusty Foster and his glorious newsletter, Today in Tabs, which reminded me of a singular event in my first Christmas season in Central Florida… one that I had, I guess, repressed…)
For more (laugh out loud) stories of snafu: “Fiasco,” from This American Life (especially “Act One,” which is possibly the funniest true story I’ve ever heard.)
* Orlando Bloom
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As we celebrate shambles, we might note that today is Twilight Zone Day, a celebration of Rod Serling’s masterful series, The Twilight Zone (See also here and here)– in which, of course, unintended consequences feature centrally.
“X marks the spot”*…
A reprise (because it’s just so much fun): the challenge facing pre-20th century alphabet book authors…
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history which would lead to myriad improvements to people’s health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see… in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too…
Many more amusing examples: “X is for...” from @PublicDomainRev.
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As we wrestle with representation, we might spare a thought for Thomas Young; he died on this date 1829. A polmath described as “the last man who knew everything,” he made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light (in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton).
Further, Young was an astute student of languages. He noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”
And Young was instrumental in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
“Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”*…
The number of households that live above the poverty line but are barely scraping by is ticking higher…
Over time, higher costs and sluggish wage growth have left more Americans financially vulnerable, with many known as “ALICEs.”
Nearly 40 million families, or 29% of the population, fall in the category of ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed — according to United Way’s United for ALICE program, which first coined the term to refer to households earning above the poverty line but less than what’s needed to get by.
That figure doesn’t include the 37.9 million Americans [individuals, as opposed to families as measured above] who live in poverty, comprising 11.5% of the total population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“ALICE is the nation’s child-care workers, home health aides and cashiers heralded during the pandemic — those working low-wage jobs, with little or no savings and one emergency from poverty,” said Stephanie Hoopes, national director at United for ALICE…
Read on for an explanation of how high inflation and higher interest rates have aggravated what was already a problem: “29% of households have jobs but struggle to cover basic needs,” from @CNBC.
Apposite: “Millions of Americans are about to lose internet access, and Congress is to blame.”
(Image above: source)
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As we knit a safety net, we might recall that, on this date in 2020, as a product of the COVID-19 recession, the U.S. unemployment rate to hit 14.9 percent, its worst rate since the Great Depression. Federal legislators enacted six major bills, centered on the American Rescue Plan and costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Those programs have now expired.
“If someone separated the art of counting and measuring and weighing from all the other arts, what was left of each (of the others) would be, so to speak, insignificant”*…
Mathematics, Bo Malmberg and Hannes Malmberg argue, was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today…
In school, you might have heard that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by the Scientific Revolution, when Newton uncovered the mechanical laws underlying motion and Galileo learned the true shape of the cosmos. Armed with this newfound knowledge and the scientific method, the inventors of the Industrial Revolution created machines – from watches to steam engines – that would change everything.
But was science really the key? Most of the significant inventions of the Industrial Revolution were not undergirded by a deep scientific understanding, and their inventors were not scientists.
The standard chronology ignores many of the important events of the previous 500 years. Widespread trade expanded throughout Europe. Artists began using linear perspective and mathematicians learned to use derivatives. Financiers started joint stock corporations and ships navigated the open seas. Fiscally powerful states were conducting warfare on a global scale.
There is an intellectual thread that runs through all of these advances: measurement and calculation. Geometric calculations led to breakthroughs in painting, astronomy, cartography, surveying, and physics. The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity…
The fascinating story: “How mathematics built the modern world,” from @bomalmb and @HannesMalmberg1 in @WorksInProgMag.
* Plato
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As we muse on measurement, we might recall that it was on this date in 1790, early in the French Revolution, that the French Assembly, acting on the urging of Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, moved to create a new system of weights and measures based on natural units– what we now know as the metric system.
“Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it.”*…
Liz Tracey on Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language— and the way that it declared Americans free from the tyranny of British institutions and their vocabularies…
Sometimes, a dictionary is more than just words and definitions—it may be intended to serve as a declaration of linguistic independence. When Noah Webster’s first edition of the American Dictionary of the English Language was published in April 1828, it held 70,000 words, 12,000 of which were making their first appearance in dictionary form. Webster’s goals for the work were grand: “to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue, which we shall not be ashamed to bequeath to three hundred millions of people, who are destined to occupy, and I hope, to adorn the vast territory within our jurisdiction.”
Noah Webster’s roles in the formation of the early United States were manifold: editor of the Federalist Papers, owner and editor of the first American daily newspaper [see below], textbook author, a founder of Amherst College, promoter of the first US copyright laws, and author of one of the first works on epidemiology, used by nineteenth-century medical schools.
But his 1828 dictionary is what he’s remembered for, coming at a tremendous personal cost: twenty-one years invested, and a lifelong struggle with debt. In his preface to the three-volume work, he writes of his hopes that the dictionary will result in his fellow Americans’ “improvement and their happiness; and for the continued increase of the wealth, the learning, the moral and religious elevation of character, and the glory of my country.”…
More at: “Webster’s Dictionary 1828: Annotated,” from @liztracey in @JSTOR_Daily.
* Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
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As we vindicate vernacular, we might recall that it was on this date in 1846 that the first edition of the Cambridge Chronicle was published. One of the earliest weeklies in the U.S., it served the newly-incorporated city of Cambridge, MA– using language consistent with Webster’s dictionary. (Nearby Boston was home to the first U.S. newspaper, the Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, which was founded in 1690 (albeit short-lived).
The Cambridge Chronicle is technically the longest continuously-published weekly newspaper in the U.S… though it ceased original serving up original content in 2022, after being purchased by Gannett. It now re-publishes regional stories from other Gannett papers.
As for Webster, he began his journalistic career in 1779, writing articles for New England newspapers justifying the Revolutionary War. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton recruited him to edit the leading Federalist Party newspaper; then in December of that year, Webster founded New York’s (and the new American nation’s) first daily newspaper American Minerva, later renamed the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited for four years (writing the equivalent of 20 volumes of articles and editorials).
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