There are no jaguar kittens

that have been photographed in the wild. Just in case you were wondering how secretive mother cats can be. Or how hapless PBS photographers actually are. I could talk about animals abandoned after they have been in documentaries, or the current Inuit complaint about how the radio tags are harming the polar animals. But maybe soon we can go into more details. For now let us just say Jaguar mothers have their reasons.

Before we had xerox machines

In the olden days, oh, say the late 1990's, it occurred to me that someone ought to worry what would happen to historical knowledge with so much data then available online. What scholar in their right mind would choose to study dusty leather bound volumes or crumbling paper when they could work from internet resources? So I imagined that history would, for all intents and purposes begin about 1980, and my mind's eye saw generations of children for whom anything that happened prior to the 1950's would have not causative value at all, not really, not when they consulted their hearts.
Then Google books came along and I had to find something else to worry about. But the article below reminded me of this silly anticipation of mine. Now all I have to worry about is who will scan those cuneiform clay tablets.
(The full article can be seen here)

December 28, 2007

The United States Supreme Court

Stacey Cramp

For the past year, a rare early copy of the Declaration of Independence has hung unassumingly in a side hallway at the Supreme Court.

...Where was it before it went on public display?...

Court officials confirmed last week that the 1824 vellum copy had spent seven forgotten years hidden behind a filing cabinet at the Court clerk's office, until it was discovered in 2003, fixed up and displayed for public viewing in 2006.

The copy, one of only 200 made from the 1776 original, would likely fetch $500,000 or more if sold on the open market, according to an expert dealer in historic documents.

The story of the document begins in 1820, when then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams ordered copies made of the declaration, out of concern about the condition of the 1776 original. The document signed in Philadelphia had been kept in several locations, had been furled and unfurled, and was already beginning to fade.

The future president hired a D.C. engraver named William Stone to execute a small number of copies to be sent to the states, to members of Congress and to the Supreme Court.

Stone used a wet-transfer method that damaged the original further by drawing some of its ink away to make a copy. From the paper copy, Stone made a copperplate engraving that then made a strong impression when printed on vellum, a parchment made from animal skin. The vellum copies were completed and distributed in 1824.

"It is as close to the original declaration as you can possibly get," says Elwin Fraley, a collector and dealer of rare documents who operates History Buff Inc. in Minnesota and Florida. "They give you goose bumps when you see them. They are extremely valuable." Fraley was surprised to hear that the Court's copy was misplaced for such a long time.

The Court's copy had hung in the clerk's office since the building opened in 1935. But when the clerk's office underwent renovations in 1996, an unnamed employee apparently put the document behind one of the office's Lektrievers, which are automated filing cabinets. It was done for "safekeeping," a Court spokeswoman says.

There, Court officials say, it was "forgotten" for unexplained reasons until the curator's office launched a successful search for it in 2003. Once it was found behind the cabinet, some restoration work and reframing was done. In 2006 it was placed back on display, but not in the clerk's office. Instead, it hangs near a ground-floor elevator where it can be viewed by visitors to the Court. The copy is a remarkably vivid rendition of the faded original, which is on view at the National Archives...

Some of the 200 copies are in poor condition and some have fallen into private hands, says Fraley. Within the past year, Fraley says, another William Stone copy of the declaration sold for approximately $450,000. The sale on Dec. 18 of a copy of the Magna Carta for more than $21 million...

Pity the Cat

that killed those people at the San Francisco Zoo

Money and Art and Drugs

You have heard of Eli Lilly Pharmaceuticals., I assume. Ruth Lilly, one of the heirs,
In 2002, gave Poetry Magazine a gift of stock worth more than $100 million. This gift ensures the continuation of a leading proponent of an art which is notoriously poorly rewarded in financial terms. Wallace Stevens, for instance, worked at an insurance company for years to survive. Ruth Lilly, not having to get a job, herself submitted poems for years to Poetry magazine, founded by Harriet Monroe. Independent financial wealth is itself a time honored path of artists, I think of the James Merrill in this category. Lilly's poems were never accepted for publication in Poetry magazine. Her gift though shows a kind of genius. Poetry magazine spent some of their wealth in supporting Garrison Keillor. So keep taking those drugs.

Claude Cahun (1894-1954)

Lucy Schwob is the name of a French woman born into an avante garde family in 1894. She is more famous as Claude Cahun, an artist, but she is not well known and from the photographs of her art I cannot evaluate her artistic talent. But the stories I have read about her activity during World War II remind me about the amazing possibilities of human heroism. She and the Jewish woman who was her lover refused to leave their home on the Channel Islands as a German invasion was imminent. For four years they conducted, they being two women by themselves, an anti German campaign and were undetected. They distributed anti Nazi leaflets when to be found out meant certain deportation to concentration camps if not execution. Two middle aged women with no family or other support near by. An amazing story I discovered from a review of a new book written by Louise Downie and discussed by Terry Castle in the London Review of Books.

Suddenly we have flowers

140 million years ago was when the ancestors of most (more than 99 per cent) flowering plants suddenly appeared on the planet. The evolutionary event took a mere few million years. This is blink in geological time.

From the New Scientist web site, we get this information:
Earlier research had failed to identify the relationships between the major groups of flowering plants, apart from showing that water lilies, a rare shrub called Amborella from New Caledonia, and a handful of other plants were the first to split from the main line of flowering plants. Now Mike Moore at Oberlin College in Ohio and colleagues have gone further.

The team sequenced entire chloroplast genomes for 45 flower species from all major groups, which revealed that five sister groups split off nearly simultaneously. Two groups, the eudicots (including roses, sunflowers and tomatoes) and the monocots (grasses and their relatives), together account for 95 per cent of flowering plants. Magnolias occupy a third group. The two others are less well known

What caused the explosive divergence remains a mystery, although large water-transport tubes may have played a part. Moore notes that the five groups are the only plants with this adaptation.

Okay that's the end of the quote from the New Scientist article. The really mysterious part, though, is not the "explosive divergence." The really mysterious part is that nobody draws a lesson from such events about the limits of human thought.

Mrs. William Blake

Talk about amazing, there was a woman who the most amazing man in the 19th century met, and was nourished by. A man who by some freak planetary accident, could think creatively and consistently. It is the latter adverb that is the amazing part. And this poet, artist, gentle person, had the protection of marriage, a woman who was content without monetary rewards, who was by his side. What, you want us to have tea together, in the garden, and both of us without any clothes on. Meeting the neighbors thusly. Yes, darling, if that is what you want, let's do it.
My admiration goes to Mrs. Blake, for her accomplishments, this nurturing, this steadying, she accomplished, was the result of totally mechanical forces. No one remembers Mrs. Blake, and yet one has to believe she made William Blakes's productivity greater. As how to classify Blake himself, we may have another post soon on that.

Sterne's skull still speaking

The skull of Lawrence Sterne, buried in an unmarked grave, was recognised by the leading authority in the 20th C on Sterne, and reburied in a well marked grave. The occasion for the discovery was the disposal of remains that occurred during a commercial redevelopment of the original grave area. Kenneth Monkman is the name of the scholar who recognised the skull. After two hundred years.

Banks have no form for this

And that is amazing to me --- banks do not have a form, any kind of receipt or digitized fill in the blanks document for --- when you bring them back money they gave you in error. Actually I was just pretending they gave me the wrong change, as a matter of curiosity. But isn't that interesting--how many thousands of forms, digital and paper and so volumious, and yet no form for when a customer returns money the bank overpaid them.

Possums never stop growing

Or so the naturalists say. Which makes one wonder, where are the refrigerator sized possums? I suppose they got hit by cars, before that is, they got so large.

Diamonds can play you false

A recent article in Wired magazine reported that it is now possible to create artificial diamonds that cannot be detected by any amount of laboratory analysis. THERE IS NO WAY TO DETECT PHONY DIAMONDS absolutely -- not all fake stones. What the article did not discuss was whether this applied to other gemstones, though I guess it may. And also this was not discussed --the repercussions on the precious stones market. It seems to me that this scientific feat of creating such good artificial diamonds should diminish the value of all stones, except maybe older stones with a well documented provenance. And heck, if you can fake a diamond, faking a provenance is a piece of marzipan. Well some of us anyway are out of the diamond market.