Posts Tagged ‘moveable type’
“The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you”*…
‘Pope-Donkey’
Martin Luther’s theological battle with Catholicism and his verbal war against the Pope pioneered an attack technique that we would recognize as trolling. Luther’s grotesque caricatures of the Pope were certainly in keeping with the sixteenth century polemics that were vulgar, slanderous, and coarse. But importantly, Luther’s attacks were facilitated by a new technology — printing with movable type:
In 1523 [Martin] Luther and [his ally Philip] Melanchthon collaborated on an illustrated anti-Roman pamphlet based on the alleged appearance of two monstrosities. One, dubbed the ‘pope-donkey,’ was washed up on the banks of the Tiber river in Rome, and the other, called the ‘monk-calf,’ was born only a few miles from Wittenberg. The pope-donkey was pictured in front of the papal castle at Rome. It was a standing figure with a donkey’s head, a skin of fish scales, female breasts, a hoof and claw for feet, and the end of an elephant’s trunk for its right hand. The head of a dragon protruded from its rear. Luther deemed it a sign of God’s wrath against the papacy and warned that more omens would appear. Relying on a medieval treatise on the Antichrist, Melanchthon offered a similar reading in which, for example, the head protruding from the donkey’s rear signified the decline and demise of the papacy. …
Why would Luther and Melanchthon point such ugly fingers at the papacy and monasticism? First of all, because niceness was not a virtue in their day; and second, because, by 1523, they had been the butt of similar satire from their opponents. However, they also had more profound reasons, which went to the heart of the reformation. Luther was convinced that laity were being hoodwinked by the medieval church. … For Luther the pope-donkey and the monk-calf symbolized the futility of trusting in a religious authority that sanctioned the pursuit of perfection as the right way to heaven. On the contrary, claimed Luther, a less demanding and more merciful Christianity would liberate people from anxiety about reaching heaven and redirect their concern toward others in place of themselves. Beginning in 1518, an astounding number of people agreed with Luther, left behind the religion of their ancestors, and rallied to his side.
“Rome, however, did not buckle, and what ensued from 1520 to 1525 was a war of words and images on a scale never previously imagined. The war was made possible by a new, cheaper, and faster technology — printing with movable type. Luther’s facility with words, combined with the artistic skill of Lucas Cranach and his journeymen in Wittenberg, fed a burgeoning printing industry that gave Luther a distinct advantage in the competition to sway religious opinion. In those five years, around sixty Catholic writers produced more than 200 pamphlets and books against Luther and other Protestant authors. Many of these were theological essays of good quality, but they were written in Latin and thus inaccessible for most laypeople. In contrast, Luther wrote in a lively German style that explained clearly and directly the changes he wanted to make and the theological basis for them. It was not a fair fight. Protestant pamphlets outnumbered Catholic publications five to one; Luther alone published twice as many as all his Catholic opponents combined…
An excerpt from Martin Luther: Visionary Reformer, by Scott H. Hendrix; via Delancey Place.
* Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
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As we refrain from feeding the trolls, we might that this date in 1582 was one of ten that simply didn’t happen in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland. Those countries had introduced the Gregorian calendar. While this was “October 10” in the rest of the world, those four countries, adopting Pope Gregory XIII’s innovation, skipped ten days– so that there, the date shifted from October 4 to October 15. With the shift, the calendar was aligned with the equinoxes, and the lunar cycles used to establish the celebration of Easter. Britain and its colonies resisted this Popish change, and used the Julian calendar for another century and a half, until September 2, 1752.
From a work published in 1582, the year of the calendar reform; days 5 to 14 October are omitted.
“The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?”*…
Ziba, a Portland-based design firm, asked each staff member to submit his/her “top five” list of designs that have changed the way we think about the world over the organization’s 29-year history– back to 1983. They clustered the submissions around thematic statements that characterize the innovations, e.g. “The mundane shall be celebrated,” or “Connectivity is like oxygen.” Then, they captured the results in an infographic (a detail of which is above).
Explore a larger version here, and note that there are a number of things that didn’t make the cut: Napster? the GIF? Yelp?… but then, that’s the fun– and the useful provocation– of lists like this, encouraging us to make our own nominations.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
– Douglas Adams
* Charles Eames
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As we noodle on the new new thing, we might celebrate the emergence of a design, an innovation, a technology that took on a life of its own and changed… well, everything: this date in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type.
(Lest we think that there’s actually anything new under the sun, we might recall that The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377; and that Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.)
Emergent-cy…
Scripps Research Institute biologist Gerald Joyce (pictured above) and his colleague Tracey Lincoln have built an “immortal molecule.” They have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components. And since these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts, the process can continue indefinitely.
As Cosmos reports,
The ultimate goal is to create genetic systems that behave like life, and are for all intents “life” as we know it, but arose without using biological systems.
“The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment. But that we don’t have yet,” [Joyce] said.
“What we do have is a self-sustained chemical system that undergoes Darwinian evolution. They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving. But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent a whole cloth of functions. The idea is to give them enough information wherewithal [genetic building blocks] so they can start inventing their own solutions rather than just optimizing existing solutions,” he added.
Joyce said it was not practical to synthesize the more complex DNA-based life we know from scratch; it’s too complex and probably beyond today’s science. But it is conceivable to start with a much more basic form of life-like molecules based on RNA, and use evolution to build on them.
Many scientists believe that early life was based on RNA and predated the arrival of life based on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and proteins. RNA, which can both store information like DNA as well as act as an enzyme like proteins, may have supported pre-cellular life.
A leading proponent of this so-called “RNA world” hypothesis, Joyce believes that RNA-based catalysis and information storage may have been the first step in the evolution of cellular life.
Read the whole story here.
As we search our closets for those chemistry sets, we might celebrate the emergence of a technology that took on a life of its own and changed… well, everything: this date in 1455 is the traditionally-given date of the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type. The Jikji— the world’s oldest known extant movable metal type printed book– was published in Korea in 1377. Bi Sheng created the first known moveable type– out of wood– in China in 1040.
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