Humanity is made in God's image, and shares 96 percent of its DNA with chimpanzees. Does that mean that the Supreme Being is even hairier than most of us imagine Him? No. These are two incompatible points of view, the extremes in the tug-of-war over our species' self-image: half angel, or wholly animal.
There is an interesting third option: men and women as “the most competent machines in the world.” That point of view was pretty popular just under a century ago in Central Europe. It gave us the word "robot," the movie Metropolis, and this map.
Der Mensch als Industriepalast ("Man as an Industrial Palace") was a free insert in Dr. Fritz Kahn's best-selling series of books, entitled Das Leben des Menschen ("The Life of Man"). The five-part series, published between 1922 and 1932, was a success not just in Kahn's native Germany — it was translated in many languages and published the world over. Check your attic for a mint-condition copy of the map: In 2013, Christie's auction house in London sold one for £3,750 (app. $4,800).
Measuring 37½ x 19 in. (95 x 48 cm), the poster uses the industrial processes of the early 20th century as a metaphor for the workings of the human body. Kahn's diagram in effect shows us the body as factory: The head is staffed with decision makers and switchboard operators, who dispense orders to the workers, who operate the heavy machinery in the body.
The two top offices are for Verstand, where a solitary figure is studying, and one for Vernunft, in which three operators are conferring on urgent and/or important matters. Both concepts can be translated superficially as "reason," but Verstand connotes a more general, abstract common sense, whereas Vernunft implies a cleverness to solve practical problems. At least, that's my understanding (Arthur Schopenhauer seems to disagree).
One floor down are the Drüsenzentrale ("Glandular control room"), where six dials and needles tell an operator whether the organs are up to snuff; the Muskelzentrale ("Muscular control room"), a switchboard for managing arms, legs and hands; and Wille ("Will"), another meeting room where three executives are trying to decide whether to go out for Bratwurst or stay in and heat up yesterday's Eintopf.
Another floor down, an Atemzentrale ("Breathing control room") keeps check on breathing, heartbeat, and coronary function; the operator of the Gehörorgan ("Ear") is trying to make sense of the static coming in from outside; and the Auge ("Eye") looks at the world through an old-fashioned folding camera. The Nervenzentrale ("Nerve center"), at the bottom of the head, relates all commands to the workforce via the Rückenmark ("Spinal cord").
A fantastic array of shiny pipes and tubes, conveyor belts, and storage tanks make the lungs (Lunge), liver (Leber), stomach (Magen), kidneys (Niere), spleen (Milz), and other organs and glands look like the moving, clanking parts of a factory. Two main processes animate the workfloor: respiration, with the intake of oxygen (Sauerstoff) and the expulsion of carbonic acid (Kohlensäure); and nutrition, i.e., processing food (Nahrung) into ingredients that can be used to keep the factory humming and the lights burning.
In January 1927, around the time this map was drafted, Fritz Lang's film Metropolis premiered at the UFA Palast, not far from Kahn's Berlin gynecology practice. The parallels between map and movie are striking, and not just because both their creators are called Fritz. Both were influenced by Futurism, the early-20th-century artistic movement that celebrated technological progress. Both used the cogs and gears of contemporary industry as prominent elements of their creation. Those creations were both utopian — one corporeal, another social.
The capitalist society in Lang's movie is also vertically structured, like a body: Those in charge are physically at the top, and the workers are down below. Only the middle is missing — and that is the central theme of the movie. One of the protagonists is the Maschinenmensch — one of the earliest cinematic depictions of a robot. That word, by the way, was first used just a few years earlier, in 1921, by Czech author Karel Čapek, for an anthropomorphic machine designed to work (robota is Czech for hard labour).
Kahn's mechanical allegory of the human body, repeated throughout his various books in many other drawings, was in step with the spirit of the time. His works were very popular, but he slipped into obscurity, at least in his homeland, with the rise of Nazism.
Kahn was born in Halle in 1888 into an orthodox Jewish family. He studied medicine at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelm University, specialising in microbiology. Kahn worked as a German army doctor in the First World War. Overworked and undernourished, he was invalided in 1918 while in Italy, and cared for by local farmers. After the war, he spent some time revalidating in Algeria.
Returning to Berlin, he worked as a surgeon and a gynecologist and in 1920 married Irma Glogau. Kahn was interested in a wide range of scientific and philosophical subjects, wrote articles for the popular science magazine Kosmos, and later expanded into a series of popular scientific books, mostly about medicine.
Kahn is credited with founding conceptual medical illustration. Earlier medical illustrations were purely realistic, and used mainly by medical students. Kahn wanted his work to be educational beyond purely academic circles. His work was aimed at popularising a scientific understanding of the workings of the body.
Kahn was one of the world's first writers who aimed scientific knowledge specifically at as large an audience as was possible. He was a terrible draughtsman, though, so he instructed the artists in his atelier to design the drawings for him, to his very precise specifications. Those drawings did go on to inspire Walter Gropius, the architect and founder of the Bauhaus school.
As a committed Zionist, Kahn bought land on Mount Carmel and in Jerusalem in 1921 in what was then still Palestine. Back in Berlin, he founded a Jewish lodge. His travels, both for science and for his health, took him from the Polar Circle to the Sahara desert.
The rising tide of antisemitism forced Kahn from his job, and led to the burning of his works, which were placed on the list of "harmful and undesirable books." One, Unser Geschlechtsleben ("Our Sex Lives") was singled out for an active ban, with all available copies sought out for destruction. Some of Kahn's drawings were "recycled" by Gerhard Venzmer, a medical writer favoured by the Nazis.
In 1933, Kahn emigrated to Palestine, where he got married for the second time, to Erna Schnabel, in 1937. They later returned to Europe, settling in Paris. When the Germans invaded France, he fled to Bordeaux. He was interned as an enemy alien by the French, but Erna secured his release and fled with him across the Pyrenees. In 1941, with help from Albert Einstein, they obtained a U.S. visa.
Kahn settled in Manhattan, but eventually moved back to Europe after the war, living mainly in Switzerland – with his Danish collaborator Ellen Fussing, after Erna had left him. In 1960, Kahn survived a major earthquake in Morocco — by sheltering in a sarcophagus. In 1962, he settled in Denmark, setting up an atelier in Copenhagen. He died in 1968 in Locarno.
Der Mensch als Industriepalast has become Kahn's most influential work. In 1951, Barbara Jones selected the poster as part of her exhibition of popular art in the Whitechapel Gallery in London, inspiring Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi to some of his best-known works.
But, doubtlessly due to the burning of his books, and also to the diminished appeal of his post-1945 work, Kahn remained largely unknown in post-war Germany; until 2010, when the Berlin Medical Historical Museum, attached to the famous Charité hospital, mounted an exhibition entitled Menschmaschine, focusing on his work and that of the other Fritz. Der Mensch als Industriepalast had a central place in the show, and the poster would also figure prominently in subsequent exhibitions in the New Museum in New York (Ghosts in the Machine) and London's Wellcome Collection (as part of Superhuman).
The wave of Futurism that propelled both Fritzes upward has long since crested and broken, but the human-controlled-by-tiny-humans trope survives in popular culture. One of the funniest examples is in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, when sexual arousal and performance is presented as an industrial effort by the 'little men' operating the human body. A more recent, but rather less funny example is the Eddy Murphy vehicle (in more ways than one) Meet Dave.
Dr. Kahn's map of the Menschmaschine found here on Industriepalast, a website hosting the fantastic animation made by Henning M. Lederer based on the map.
Strange Maps #741
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Ash deposits of some of North America's largest volcanic eruptions.
The end of the world as we know it
Panoramic view of Yellowstone National Park
Image: Heinrich Berann for the National Park Service – public domain
Of the many freak ways to shuffle off this mortal coil – lightning strikes, shark bites, falling pianos – here's one you can safely scratch off your worry list: an outbreak of the Yellowstone supervolcano.
As the map below shows, previous eruptions at Yellowstone were so massive that the ash fall covered most of what is now the western United States. A similar event today would not only claim countless lives directly, but also create enough subsidiary disruption to kill off global civilisation as we know it. A relatively recent eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia may have come close to killing off the human species (see further below).
However, just because a scenario is grim does not mean that it is likely (insert topical political joke here). In this case, the doom mongers claiming an eruption is 'overdue' are wrong. Yellowstone is not a library book or an oil change. Just because the previous mega-eruption happened long ago doesn't mean the next one is imminent.
Ash beds of North America
Ash beds deposited by major volcanic eruptions in North America.
Image: USGS – public domain
This map shows the location of the Yellowstone plateau and the ash beds deposited by its three most recent major outbreaks, plus two other eruptions – one similarly massive, the other the most recent one in North America.
Huckleberry Ridge
The Huckleberry Ridge eruption occurred 2.1 million years ago. It ejected 2,450 km3 (588 cubic miles) of material, making it the largest known eruption in Yellowstone's history and in fact the largest eruption in North America in the past few million years.
This is the oldest of the three most recent caldera-forming eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot. It created the Island Park Caldera, which lies partially in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming and westward into Idaho. Ash from this eruption covered an area from southern California to North Dakota, and southern Idaho to northern Texas.
Mesa Falls
About 1.3 million years ago, the Mesa Falls eruption ejected 280 km3 (67 cubic miles) of material and created the Henry's Fork Caldera, located in Idaho, west of Yellowstone.
It was the smallest of the three major Yellowstone eruptions, both in terms of material ejected and area covered: 'only' most of present-day Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, and about half of South Dakota.
Lava Creek
The Lava Creek eruption was the most recent major eruption of Yellowstone: about 640,000 years ago. It was the second-largest eruption in North America in the past few million years, creating the Yellowstone Caldera.
It ejected only about 1,000 km3 (240 cubic miles) of material, i.e. less than half of the Huckleberry Ridge eruption. However, its debris is spread out over a significantly wider area: basically, Huckleberry Ridge plus larger slices of both Canada and Mexico, plus most of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Long Valley
This eruption occurred about 760,000 years ago. It was centered on southern California, where it created the Long Valley Caldera, and spewed out 580 km3 (139 cubic miles) of material. This makes it North America's third-largest eruption of the past few million years.
The material ejected by this eruption is known as the Bishop ash bed, and covers the central and western parts of the Lava Creek ash bed.
Mount St Helens
The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 was the deadliest and most destructive volcanic event in U.S. history: it created a mile-wide crater, killed 57 people and created economic damage in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
Yet by Yellowstone standards, it was tiny: Mount St Helens only ejected 0.25 km3 (0.06 cubic miles) of material, most of the ash settling in a relatively narrow band across Washington State and Idaho. By comparison, the Lava Creek eruption left a large swathe of North America in up to two metres of debris.
The difference between quakes and faults
The volume of dense rock equivalent (DRE) ejected by the Huckleberry Ridge event dwarfs all other North American eruptions. It is itself overshadowed by the DRE ejected at the most recent eruption at Toba (present-day Indonesia). This was one of the largest known eruptions ever and a relatively recent one: only 75,000 years ago. It is thought to have caused a global volcanic winter which lasted up to a decade and may be responsible for the bottleneck in human evolution: around that time, the total human population suddenly and drastically plummeted to between 1,000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.
Image: USGS – public domain
So, what are the chances of something that massive happening anytime soon? The aforementioned mongers of doom often claim that major eruptions occur at intervals of 600,000 years and point out that the last one was 640,000 years ago. Except that (a) the first interval was about 200,000 years longer, (b) two intervals is not a lot to base a prediction on, and (c) those intervals don't really mean anything anyway. Not in the case of volcanic eruptions, at least.
Earthquakes can be 'overdue' because the stress on fault lines is built up consistently over long periods, which means quakes can be predicted with a relative degree of accuracy. But this is not how volcanoes behave. They do not accumulate magma at constant rates. And the subterranean pressure that causes the magma to erupt does not follow a schedule.
What's more, previous super-eruptions do not necessarily imply future ones. Scientists are not convinced that there ever will be another big eruption at Yellowstone. Smaller eruptions, however, are much likelier. Since the Lava Creek eruption, there have been about 30 smaller outbreaks at Yellowstone, the last lava flow being about 70,000 years ago.
As for the immediate future (give or take a century): the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone is only 5 percent to 15 percent molten. Most scientists agree that is as un-alarming as it sounds. And that its statistically more relevant to worry about death by lightning, shark, or piano.
Strange Maps #1041
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
Stoicism can help overcome anxiety
Are you a worrier? Do you imagine nightmare scenarios and then get worked up and anxious about them? Does your mind get caught in a horrible spiral of catastrophizing over even the smallest of things? Worrying, particularly imagining the worst case scenario, seems to be a natural part of being human and comes easily to a lot of us. It's awful, perhaps even dangerous, when we do it.
But, there might just be an ancient wisdom that can help. It involves reframing this attitude for the better, and it comes from Stoicism. It's called "premeditation," and it could be the most useful trick we can learn.
Practical Stoicism
Broadly speaking, Stoicism is the philosophy of choosing your judgments. Stoics believe that there is nothing about the universe that can be called good or bad, valuable or valueless, in itself. It's we who add these values to things. As Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Our minds color the things we encounter as being "good" or "bad," and given that we control our minds, we therefore have control over all of our negative feelings.
Put another way, Stoicism maintains that there's a gap between our experience of an event and our judgment of it. For instance, if someone calls you a smelly goat, you have an opportunity, however small and hard it might be, to pause and ask yourself, "How will I judge this?" What's more, you can even ask, "How will I respond?" We have power over which thoughts we entertain and the final say on our actions. Today, Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
One of the principal fathers of ancient Stoicism was the Roman statesmen, Seneca, who argued that the unexpected and unforeseen blows of life are the hardest to take control over. The shock of a misfortune can strip away the power we have to choose our reaction. For instance, being burglarized feels so horrible because we had felt so safe at home. A stomach ache, out of the blue, is harder than a stitch thirty minutes into a run. A sudden bang makes us jump, but a firework makes us smile. Fell swoops hurt more than known hardships.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, how can we resolve this? Seneca suggests a Stoic technique called "premeditatio malorum" or "premeditation." At the start of every day, we ought to take time to indulge our anxious and catastrophizing mind. We should "rehearse in the mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck." We should meditate on the worst things that could happen: your partner will leave you, your boss will fire you, your house will burn down. Maybe, even, you'll die.
This might sound depressing, but the important thing is that we do not stop there.
Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
The Stoic also rehearses how they will react to these things as they come up. For instance, another Stoic (and Roman Emperor) Marcus Aurelius asks us to imagine all the mean, rude, selfish, and boorish people we'll come across today. Then, in our heads, we script how we'll respond when we meet them. We can shrug off their meanness, smile at their rudeness, and refuse to be "implicated in what is degrading." Thus prepared, we take control again of our reactions and behavior.
The Stoics cast themselves into the darkest and most desperate of conditions but then realize that they can and will endure. With premeditation, the Stoic is prepared and has the mental vigor necessary to take the blow on the chin and say, "Yep, l can deal with this."
Catastrophizing as a method of mental inoculation
Seneca wrote: "In times of peace, the soldier carries out maneuvers." This is also true of premeditation, which acts as the war room or training ground. The agonizing cut of the unexpected is blunted by preparedness. We can prepare the mind for whatever trials may come, in just the same way we can prepare the body for some endurance activity. The world can throw nothing as bad as that which our minds have already imagined.
Stoicism teaches us to embrace our worrying mind but to embrace it as a kind of inoculation. With a frown over breakfast, try to spend five minutes of your day deliberately catastrophizing. Get your anti-anxiety battle plan ready and then face the world.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
How to get people to want to give you money, literal balls of cash not gaurenteed.
Even the best charities with the longest records of doing great fundraising work have to spend some time making sure that the next donation checks will keep coming in. One way to do this is by showing potential donors all the good things the charity did over the previous year. But there may be a better way.
A new study by researchers in the United States and Australia suggests that appealing to the benefits people will receive themselves after a donation nudges them to donate more money than appealing to the greater good.
How to get people to give away free money
The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, utilized the Pick.Click.Give program in Alaska. This program allows Alaska residents who qualify for dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, a yearly payment ranging from $800 to $2000 in recent years, to donate a portion of it to various in-state non-profit organizations.
The researchers randomly assigned households to either a control group or to receive a postcard in the mail encouraging them to donate a portion of their dividend to charity. That postcard could come in one of two forms, either highlighting the benefits to others or the benefits to themselves.
Those who got the postcard touting self-benefits were 6.6 percent more likely to give than those in the control group and gave 23 percent more on average. Those getting the benefits-to-others postcard were slightly more likely to give than those receiving no postcard, but their donations were no larger.
Additionally, the researchers were able to break the subject list down into a "warm list" of those who had given at least once before in the last two years and a "cold list" of those who had not. Those on the warm list, who were already giving, saw only minor increases in their likelihood to donate after getting a postcard in the mail compared to those on the cold list.
Additionally, the researchers found that warm-list subjects who received the self-interest postcard gave 11 percent more than warm-list subjects in the control group. Amazingly, among cold-list subjects, those who received a self-interest postcard gave 39 percent more.
These are substantial improvements. At the end of the study, the authors point out, "If we had sent the benefits to self message to all households in the state, aggregate contributions would have increased by nearly US$600,000."
To put this into perspective, in 2017 the total donations to the program were roughly $2,700,000.
Is altruism dead?
Are all actions inherently self-interested? Thankfully, no. The study focuses entirely on effective ways to increase charitable donations above levels that currently exist. It doesn't deny that some people are giving out of pure altruism, but rather that an appeal based on self-interest is effective. Plenty of people were giving before this study took place who didn't need a postcard as encouragement. It is also possible that some people donated part of their dividend check to a charity that does not work with Pick.Click.Give and were uncounted here.
It is also important to note that Pick.Click.Give does not provide services but instead gives money to a wide variety of organizations that do. Those organizations operate in fields from animal rescue to job training to public broadcasting. The authors note that it is possible that a more specific appeal to the benefits others will receive from a donation might prove more effective than the generic and all-inclusive "Make Alaska Better For Everyone" appeal that they used.
In an ideal world, charity is its own reward. In ours, it might help to remind somebody how warm and fuzzy they'll feel after donating to your cause.
