Man in the Middle

There's a chain of scientists and astronomers, from Copernicus to Newton, who figured out how the Solar System works. Today (September 28th) is the birthday of a guy who frequently gets left out of the chain, namely because he got part of the workings right and another part of it completely wrong. So, let's focus on him a little bit too much now, shall we?

Ismaël Boulliau, or Ismaël Bullialdus as he's called in his writings, was a French guy born in 1605. He was from a Calvinist family, so that meant he didn't have to worry too much about upsetting Papal authorities with new ideas about the heavens. His dad, an amateur astronomer, got young Ismaël interested in the latest theories about orbits and planetary motion.

Despite his Calvinist upbringing, Ismaël converted to Catholicism and became a priest at age 26. Fr. Bullialdus wound up working in the Royal Library in Paris, reading, sorting, and purchasing books for Louis XIII's court. King Louis was big on funding the arts and sciences, so Fr. Bullialdus was a busy guy for library acquisitions.

Ismaël continued the astronomy studies sparked by his father, and due to his position in the upper ranks of the government, became friends with other astronomers and mathematicians such as  Christiaan Huygens, Blaise Pascal, and Pierre Gassendi (all of whom were visitors to the royal court).  These men were on the cutting edge of planetary motion theories, and their correspondence shaped the investigations made by astronomers throughout Europe.

One of the hottest theories about planetary motion was made by a fellow astronomer in Germany at about the same time all these French guys were writing each other. Johannes Kepler figured out that the planets didn't move in circles around the Sun (as the astronomer Copernicus had theorized) but in a path of ellipses, with the Sun located on one focal point of the ellipse. Kepler wasn't sure what force caused the planets to move around the Sun in this manner, but he was pretty certain that the force was inversely proportional to the distance of a planet to the Sun.

Fr. Bullialdus was intrigued, but Kepler's numbers didn't add up. It seemed as though this mysterious force (if it did exist) would operate similar to how light and sound did with distance: namely, that the force would fade not by the inverse of the distance, but by the inverse of the distance, squared. When Bullialdus plugged in the numbers using his own formulas, the motions seemed to work just fine. Fr. Bullialdus published his findings in a book he called Astronomia philolaica, which appeared in 1645.

So, in 1645 Bullialdus had written this book that accurately described the motions of the planets. Unfortunately, he spent the second half of the book refuting the idea that some kind of "force" existed to make the planets go around the Sun. Instead, Ismaël believed the Sun and the planets were rolling around in the sky because of their initial trajectories at the beginning of the Universe. Fr. Bullialdus wrote, "I say that the Sun is moved by its own form around its axis, by which form it was ignited and made light, indeed I say that no kind of motion presses upon the remaining planets." Despite mathematical evidence to the contrary, he refused to apply the clues to discover the laws of gravity.

Thirty-eight years later, Sir Issac Newton would take the clues left by Bullialdus in Astronomia philolaica in order to shape his own book, the Principia Mathematica. Newton noted in the foreword to his book that Bullialdus's math was right on the money. However, Newton (and rival Robert Hooke) both managed to take the next step and specify that gravity was a predictable force in the Universe.

Tough break for Fr. Bullialdus. He retired to Abbey St. Victor, where he lived out his final years as a simple priest. On the plus side, today he's got a crater named after him - - if you have clear skies tonight, the sunlight should just be hitting his crater in the middle of the Sea of Clouds. Easy to spot - it's got a tiny peak in the middle that casts a shadow on lunar mornings.  So, maybe go out and take a look at the Moon tonight, and think of the fellow who had all the pieces, but didn't solve the puzzle.

(c) 2012 and a half...

Sigh.

I now have the official, required Library of Congress copyright investigation complete so that the Long-Forgotten Movie can be digitally duplicated.

Except, well (using Facebook relationship status-ese) -- it's complicated.

The investigator discovered that, yes, the Famous Rocket Company applied for a copyright, but that was for an *unpublished* work - - almost a year after they donated the film to the Not Very Famous Museum. The museum had already shown the film to close to THREE MILLION cash-paying visitors, so it was hardly "unpublished" anymore. By the timeline, the Famous Rocket Company was trying to copyright a work it had already given away. Based on this history, the Library of Congress researcher declared the film's copyright "questionable."

The Famous Rocket Company listed the Famous Director as "author" but since it's a work-for-hire, that probably takes care of the Famous Director part of the copyright claim equation. 

I feel like an astronaut with a bad comb-over,desperately trying to pry open a VHS tape with a butter knife before re-entry.

So now, the only remaining hurdles are getting something called a "quit-claim" from both the Famous Rocket Company and the Not Very Famous Museum. I've already written to the Famous Rocket Company, asking them to please dismiss their invalid copyright application, so that I can help the Library of Congress preserve this film. If (and yes, that's a huge "if") I can get that particular piece of paper, I'm going to ask the Not Very Famous Museum to do likewise, as they've already thrown out their only copies of the film and they've obviously shown no interest in saving this film anyway. My guess is that the museum is going to take a much longer time to resolve, as no one there seems to want to be in charge of legal matters like copyrights.

It's going to be a long summer. Hope for the best.

(c) 2012

I'm writing a book based, in part, on my Master's thesis. Since it's going to be a commercial book, and since there's a chance the subject is actually fascinating, I can't talk about too many details.

Let's use generic phrases so I can talk to you about one part of the research for this book. A long time ago, a Rocket Ship Company hired a Famous Director to make a movie about rocket ships. The Rocket Ship Company donated the movie to a Not Very Famous Museum.

Next, the Rocket Ship Company submitted a copyright notice to the US Copyright Office. Meanwhile, the Rocket Ship Company didn't notice that the Famous Director had put a copyright notice ("copyright (c)Famous Director") under the title of the movie - - right *in* the movie! 

Later on (but still back in the 1970s) the Not Very Famous Museum decided to toss the movie (and all materials related to the movie) into a dumpster. The only existing, complete copy of the film resided at the Library of Congress vault in Culpepper, Virginia.

Decades fly by, and now it's 2012, and I want to get a digital copy of this Library of Congress copy of the movie to finish writing my book. In order to get a copy of this movie (by a Famous Director), I'll have to pay several hundred dollars for a transfer to HD video. But FIRST... I have to determine: who holds the copyright?

Turns out there are agencies in and around the Copyright Office who handle this kind of stuff. So I hired a copyright private eye to figure it all out.

Here are the possible scenarios:

1) The film has no parents - so it's an orphaned film in the public domain (best thing evarrr!)

2) The Rocket Ship Company holds the copyright - could be okay, because I know some people who run the Rocket Ship Company's museum and maybe they'll sign a quitclaim for me. Hooray!

3) The estate of the Famous Director (in this case, a University library) - could be HUGE trouble, because the folks who work at the University archive think everything the Famous Director made must be worth MILLIONS, I tell ya! MILLIONS! (possible worst-case scenario).

4) Not Very Famous Museum holds the copyright - unlikely (they never filed with the Copyright Office) but if they get ownership, it's going to be a big problem because nobody, and I mean NOBODY there understands the slightest thing about quitclaims or intellectual property or making decisions about stuff they didn't know they had. I think I worry about this one more than Option 3.

So, hopefully I'll have a handle on this by Friday. If not, it'll be a very long weekend.

Some things never change

One of the best parts of living in The Future is that things I'd normally have to go to a library to do I can now do while couch-surfing on my laptop at home.

When I was a kid, I used to haunt the basement of my local public library, perusing the stacks of old magazines and newspapers. It was fascinating to read the letters columns of popular science magazines such as, well, Popular Science, and see what the subscriber base at the time thought of Things to Come.

I remember reading this particular letter to the editor from October of 1949, and I managed to find it again, online!

Not sure what R. Klingbeil's life was like after 1949. A Google search shows a "Klingbeil Shoe Labs" from Queens doing quite a healthy business in ice skating equipment today. I hope Klingbeil got to see Sputnik flash overhead only a decade after this note was published.

Funny, or maybe sad - - I had a similar discussion with someone about this same topic on a pier at the Banana River in Florida. We were both waiting for the final launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. I was amazed that the concept of how orbits work still evades the minds of many people currently living in the Space Age. How is this possible?

Old Space Books

It's an obsession: I read every bad space book from the 60's I can find. Church bazaars, library sales, used book stores - - all are rich hunting grounds for some of the worst science writing ever glued between book covers. Based on the sheer mass of these awfully written "true-life" space novels, the 60's seemed to have an exemption for publishing houses who wanted to print books without the typical expectations of plot, characters, or storyline.

Last week, The Captain and I visited a great antiquarian bookstore in the tiny town of North Hatfield, Massachusetts. Whately's Antiquarian Book Center has become my new favorite place to burn an afternoon rummaging through old hardcovers and paperbacks.

A major find for me was "Apollo at GO" by Jeff Sutton. Written in 1963, just after Lunar Orbit Rendezvous was settled upon by NASA as the way to land on the Moon, this novel tries its best to be the most exquisitely precise, pedantically literal story about the first three men to visit the Moon.

The book is a classic yawner: the astronauts are all rock-steady test pilots, each the top of his graduating class. The wives are weepy but patriotic and understanding about why their men have to go to the Moon. The flight is described endlessly, with every course correction and sleep cycle explained until it's difficult to tell where the storytelling ends and the cutting-and-pasting from the Apollo Spacecraft Operations Guide begins.

Apollo at GO sold tens of thousands of copies. People actually paid to read this book. Allow me to give you a random selection from the story:

The timer hand moved on. At T minus 6 minutes he issued a brief order. Closing his faceplate and inflating his suit, he spoke into the radio: "Apollo calling Cap. Com..." He repeated the call several times.

"Roger, we read you." The voice, faint but clear, unmistakably was Burke's.

"Beginning attitude correction preparatory to retrothrust," he reported.

"Roger, keep in touch."

"Will do."

183 PAGES of this stuff.  And yet, it still manages to be fascinating, but for reasons entirely unintended by the author.

These books are like mini time capsules: reading them  (while keeping an eye on the copyright date) gives a great chronology about how science writers viewed the technology of the Moon voyage at given points in time. Apollo at GO presupposes that the first manned trip to the Moon on a Saturn V would naturally be the first attempt at a Moon landing. The astronauts, although trained in the operation of the spacecraft,  have no familiarity with each other and somehow never bothered to talk with each other about the spacecraft in which they're flying to the Moon. It's as though they never used simulators or attended construction meetings with the prime contractors. The author apparently  believed that it was a necessary conceit to allow for exposition, but the personal distances placed between crew members seem to be very odd to us in the post-Apollo, post-Shuttle world.

There's also a curious lack of foresight in the book. Although the author knew that Project Gemini would occur before Apollo ever launched, he failed to realize that most of the Apollo astronauts would not be rookies in space. Instead, he writes the characters as though they were newbies, reliving John Glenn's flight while they were in Earth orbit, right down to watching for the lights of Perth on the first pass over Australia.

Another blind spot is the role of the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston. By 1963, Houston was established as what would be the new home of Mission Control -  a role that it took over during the Gemini IV mission. However, the author still wrote the book as though all mission planning and operations were still controlled from Cape Canaveral. I'm not sure why he missed this, unless he had written portions of the book before the proposed role of  Houston was approved.

I'm not quite done with the book - - it's quite a slog to read more than a dozen pages at a sitting, but I'll post more when I get to the (hopefully dramatic) conclusion.

Bye Bye Borders

When I was growing up, my family rarely visited stores that sold books. We went to the library semi-weekly and were regular subscribers to the Readers' Digest Condensed Books series (a sort of bulk-rate way of keeping up with the best sellers that EVERYONE in North America read to keep pace with their neighbors in the literature world.)

The only books I can recall purchasing were those offered by the Scholastic Book Service, with offices listed on the back of each book as "New York, Toronto, London, and Sydney." The world-wide reach of SBS always indicated to me that English-speaking kids on the other side of the planet were also reading "Double Trouble for Rupert" and "Ghosts Who Went to School."


Once shopping malls became more common in the 60's, I began visiting bookstores like Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble. I also started traveling to the powerhouse booksellers of Manhattan, where publishing houses like Simon & Shuster actually owned their own stores! They'd even invite authors I'd heard of, like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, to sit at tables and sign their own works. It was an amazing world.

It wasn't until the final decade of the 20th Century that the Big Box bookstores started appearing in my neighborhood. First, Books-a-Million turned up in a renovated Wal-Mart, hawking oddball hardcovers in bulk. The books all seemed to be slightly dated, or misprinted, or generally unwanted castoffs of the other national chains. I'd visit several times, but never really found anything I'd want to cart home, or actually pay for.

Next, Barnes & Noble began building steroid-enhanced versions of its typical mall store - - the inventory tripled, or quadrupled; the aisles were furnished with oversized couches and reading lamps, and small coffee shops were erected in the corners of the cavernous stores. At first it seemed like a fantastic idea: if people were comfortable, maybe they'd buy more books! After a while, though, it became obvious that this layout was a huge mistake. People would camp out at the B&N store for hours, poring over bestsellers, taking notes while reading technical manuals, or guzzling coffee while pawing through an unpurchased magazine.

Then came Borders. Borders was an offshoot of Waldenbooks, and seemed to be a knockoff of the B&N Big Box model. The Borders configuration, though, was rapidly redesigned to be less "literate" and more gimmick-filled. Books took a back seat at Borders. The center shelves were filled with Harry Potter trivia games, Blu-Ray action movies, Twilight lunch boxes, and assorted magic kits from Klutz Press. Borders expanded the coffee shop, devoting up to 1/3 of the storefront to its Seattle's Best coffee shop. They also provided free Wi-Fi, so that legions of decaf-slurping campers could park themselves at tables for hours of web surfing, gratis.

A bookstore that didn't sell many books, and gave away electricity, air conditioning, computer connections, and chairs for free doesn't last long, and that's why Borders is shuttering its entire chain the Saturday after next.  I took a stroll through the Providence Place Mall Borders today before they sold everything back to the bare walls.

I'm not kidding about selling *everything* - - they've got price tags on the bookshelves, the cash register, the coffee urns, even the bathroom's towel dispensers. When this place is gone, there's going to be nothing in that building except maybe a bunch of bright yellow  "Going Out of Business" signs.



I am most tempted by these blond oak bookcases. They're down to $100/piece, some even as low as $50. If the rain keeps up this week, I may be the only bidder. Still pondering.



This is the kiosk that displays what's still available in the back room. I don't think I'd want an industrial sized freezer for $1500, though.




Not exactly sure how I could repurpose those sign holders (currently priced at a ridiculous $75). Maybe a reminder sign by the front door -- "Did You Feed Flash This Morning?"



They want  $600 for that cash register counter. Don't know how I'd wrestle it into the bed of my pickup truck.


Sic Transit Gloria Jeff. :(




Did they really need to invest in this much paper inventory in a world of GPS phones?




Shelves of all the little things that killed Borders.




If I do buy an Official Borders bookshelf, I want this one. I'll put all my space books on it.




Nothing held back! Make an offer on the carpet! The paper banners! The leftover cash register tape!





Requiem for a Barista station. $600 for a place to sort your Splenda packets.



The support structure for all the nonsense Borders thought people wanted.


What's left of Seattle's Best. That hutch on the left is fascinating, but $1200? No thanks.


The Children's section was tastefully decorated with whimsical space art of flying books and planets. Couldn't find a price on the artwork - - it seems to be glued to the walls.


If not for the impossibility of trying to detach this carpet from the cement floor, I wish I could take it home.


The ladder is $600, the rail the ladder rides on is also $600. Sorry, no. I would like the "Literature" signs, though.



A blur, and it'll be gone next week. The library is back to its 7-day-a-week schedule for September, though. Hooray!