All of the following bits of Zen-like wisdom are derived from David M. Bader’s book, “Zen Judaism”. Some of these (in italics) have been modified by me. I’ve posted several other examples of zen-wisdom/ humor, e.g this. Most every piece of real wisdom appears as a joke, IMHO.
I bought a copy, then modified some as I saw fit. He’s holding a bagel.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, show him pictures of the grandchildren.
One may take a vow of fasting, or of celibacy, a vow of silence or to avoid sleep is out of the question.
Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.
Be here now, be someplace else later; is that so complicated?
Accept misfortune. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?
Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, Danish.
Self abnegation is not easy. It takes much effort, and then what have you got?
The words, “there is no self,” can be terrifying. Still they’re not as bad as, “may you grow like an onion with your head in the ground.”
Bring the Buddha to your table, and on Passover, the prophet Elijah. That’s about as many invisible guests as anyone needs.
If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy.
The world does not speak. It does not blame or take sides. The world has no expectations, and it demands nothing of others. The world is not Jewish.
Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.
Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.
To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.
Seek not the outer enticements. Dwell not in the inner strife. Try to find a nice place in the suburbs with good schools.
Practice a livelihood that does not harm yourself or others, choose an occupation furthering love and compassion. Ask about the health plan, too. No freelancing.
Let go of pride, ego, and opinions. Admit your error and forgive those of others. Relinquishment will lead to calm and healing in your relationships. If that doesn’t work, try small claims court.
For the wary Pilgrim, a Zen poem: thousands reach the gateless gate from many paths; once through, they dwell serenely between heaven and earth; enjoying golf, line dancing, Yiddish lessons, and aquacise. Come see our model units at Century Village.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Do this and achieve peace. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.
Go then and wander for the good of the many, for the welfare of the many, out of compassion for the world. Teach what is good in the beginning, good in the middle, and good in the end. Don’t forget to write, and always wear clean underwear. You never know when you could end up in the emergency room.
Robert Buxbaum, March 24, 2025. Other books by David Bader include “Haikus for jews”, “The book of Murray”, and “How to be an extremely Reform Jew”. Bader claims to have achieved complete and perfect emptiness, although two hours later he often feels full again.
Shown below is the second shortest published math paper; it’s the shortest published math paper, except for this one. This paper relates to an extension to Fermat’s last theorem. That’s well known math, though I think a few words of background would help the educated lay reader.
By way of background, Fermat’s last theorem states that there is no set of integers for which An + Bn = Qn, where n is an integer larger than 2. Thus, there is no set where A3 + B3 = Q3 or A5 + B5 = Q5, etc. This theorem was really a conjecture until recently though Fermat claimed to have proven it in 1695.
The Euler conjecture of the title here, is related to Fermat’s conjecture/theorum: Either conjectured that the smallest collections of A, B, C, D.., whose power to the n, summed, will equal some whole number to the power n, Qn , must have at least as many components (A,B,C,D,..) as the exponent value, n. Thus, while you might find a set of five numbers, A, B, C, D, E where A5 + B5 + C5 + D5 + E5 = Q5, you can’t find a set of four numbers where A5 + B5 + C5 + D5 = Q5. The paper above disproves this conjecture in a most clear way; it shows a counter-example where A5 + B5 + C5 + D5 = Q5.
This is, in a sense, the ideal math paper: clear, short, important, and true. For background to this conjecture, the authors merely reference a page of a math history book.
Shown below is the shortest math pater ever published. It appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly, 2004, and would have appeared in a more honored journal if the authors were willing to add more words as an editor requested. You’ll see that the paper itself has only pictures and one sentence with one English word: n2 + 2 can:, I thought I might as well try to explain it because as the editor commented, this is too few words for most readers.
The trick to understanding this at all is that most of the background is in the title, which is in the form of a question. The text of the article is in the form of an answer with the diagrams serving as proof. Even with this insight, you’ll likely need more background, but that’s the start.
Here’s the background: Most folks notice that you can make a big equilateral triangle of side-length n, out of n2 unit subtriangles, that is of subtrangles where the side lengths =1. For example, to make an equilateral triangle with length 10, requires 100 unit equilateral triangles, n2.
Now the question in the title involves what happens if all these n2 component triangles are made slightly larger, the sides of each becoming 1+ε/n, where ε is some very small amount. The side of the new big triangle is now n+ε. The question in the title now is can you cover this bigger, super triangle with n2+1 unit triangles. The authors provide two, half answers to this question by their drawings, suggesting two different ways that you can cover the bigger super-triangle with n2+2 unit triangles. That would be 102 for the case where you start with 100 unit triangles and expanded each by ε/n.
The first solution is the bottom of figure 1. This shows what happens if you add two more unit triangles to the bottom row of the old super triangle, and squish a bit from the sides so that the top of the new row matches the bottom of the old row. Doing this leaves you with a row that’s n+ε long at the bottom with wings at the top that expand the sides to n+ε as well. The drawing shows that this new row has effective height, 1+ε.
Now, take every other row and push them together slightly from top-down so that the height becomes (1-ε) but the length expands to n(1+ε). Adding rows like this, you’ll be able to cover the entirety of the bottom space of the new, larger super triangle. Notice that the thickness of each line now 1-ε as shown. Use these longer lines to cover the rest of the bigger super triangle. And that’s the end of the paper. Once again you needed n2+2 unit triangles to cover the bigger super-triangle.
An extension to the above paper was discovered since the original paper. It’s shown in the figure below. Here the original requirement of equilateral triangles is relaxed. For highly elongated triangles, you still find that a normal super-triangle requires n2 sub-triangles. But now, from this figure, you see that an expanded super-triangle (each side expanded by 1+ε/n say) can be covered using only n2+1 of the original size subtriangles.
The proof is clear enough that no words are needed. It’s conceivable that the authors could have published this as an even shorter paper, if it were ever published, but it was not. Instead, I saw this extension as a result from a math competition, here. These insights of geometry come from Princeton University, a top notch place where I was a grad student (in engineering). The school has gone somewhat to seed, IMHO, because of political correctness.
The SS United States is in the process of being towed to its final resting place, on the sea floor near florida, to be a scuba-diving reef. She is the largest ocean liner to be entirely constructed in the United States and was the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic Ocean in either direction, 36 knots or 41 mph average speed. She won the Blue Riband for this on her first voyage, in 1952, and retained that title till today. There was a faster crossing in June, 1990 by the Hoverspeed Great Britain, 36.6 knots, 42.1 mph average speed, but the Hoverspeed was a 76 meter channel catamaran, not an ocean liner.
The SS United States was half-paid for by the US government. Its purpose was fast passenger transport across the Atlantic. The government contributed because it might be used as a troop ship if needed in times of war. In terms of speed, she handily beat the luxurious British liners, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Ann, but the compromises for speed and military use made the SS United States unsuited for use as a luxury cruise ship.
Designed by William Francis Gibbs, one of the greatest ship designers, the high speed was achieved, in part, by making the ship very light. He used aluminum for the entire superstructure, the stuff above water level, making it the largest aluminum construction when built, 1951. Though larger than the Titanic, the United States is thinner and more pointy. Much lighter than the Queen Elizabeth or Queen Ann, she could go as fast backward as the Titanic could forward. The hull is doubled, with fuel stored between the layers as a protection from collisions and canon; the interior is highly compartmentalized too, to make her fairly unsinkable. This was confirmed when she survived a sea collision shortly after launch. Making the ship light on the top made the SS United States stable in wind and rough seas despite its narrow shape. There were two engine sections, divided into four engine rooms, done to increase the chances that the engines would survive an explosion or torpedo attack.
The interior design was American modern, and fire-proof, with few weighty decorations. Furnishings were fiberglass, steel or aluminum, for the most part, see picture below. The red, white, and blue stacks added to the American look. Both are used (recall that there are two engine rooms), and both have aluminum wings. These shield the deck from any sparks that might come out the stacks.
In the end, it was the crossing speed not the comfort level that doomed the SS United States. Even at a top speed of 44.1 mph, crossing the Atlantic took 3+ days. That could not compete with jet planes that travelled at 500 mph. I’ve argued that long range, “high speed” passenger trains make little sense for the same reason. Even at 100+ mph, few Americans will be willing to spend 36 hours traveling from Chicago to Seattle. Fast boats are useful, I think, but only in smaller size foreshorten trips, similar to the Hoverspeed.
5 blade propeller on display at Throg’s neck. Paired with a 4 blade propeller it reduced vibration and wear at high speed.
Also helping it reach the speeds it did, the SS United States benefitted from innovations in the engines and in the propellers. There were four engines, in two engine sections. These were modern, light weight, compact, steam turbines running at high pressures and temperatures: 975°F and 925 psi. Each turbine delivered 60,000 shaft hp to a variable-speed, geared shaft. The inboard propellers had 5 blades and the outboard (end of ship) had four. This difference in blade number was a secret, design innovation that allowed faster speed, without vibration and cavitation. The 5 blade propeller shown on display at left, accelerated the water, while the 4 blade accelerated it faster. At the time, this was secret technology. We now have some better propellers, though no faster ocean liners. The Hoverspeed uses water jet for propulsion, by the way.
Leaving the Delaware River heading to the Gulf of X
On its way to the bottom of the sea, the ship will first stop at MARS. That is not the planet Mars, but at an engineering firm, “Modern American Recycling Services” in Mobile Alabama, on The Gulf of X. There the MARS folks will prepare the ship to sink in an even way, where its supposed to; a way that works for scuba divers.
Robert Buxbaum, February 28, 2025. My sense is there is still room for steam power. I also think the US government should return to investing in US ship-building, especially for double-use, military and commercial, like this one. A new favorite phrase, from Ovid, Metamorphosis: “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit”. Everything changes, but nothing passes away. RIP, old friend.
Cardiac death rates vary by a factor of six or more across regions of the US, from very low rates in Arizona, Utah, Washington, about 1/1000/year, to well over 6/1000/year in the US southeast. This is shown in the map below based on CDC data from 2013, mapped by Dr. Robert-J using ArcGIS Pro in 2015, Source here.
The author of this graph humorously(?) overlayed the cardiac death data with yellow dots showing the location of all US waffle houses. I infer from this something that Dr. J. denies: that waffle houses, or waffle eating is a significant contributor to these cardiac deaths. Other possibilities (my own list) include opioids, pollution, low exercise, depression, and poor healthcare. Still, I can’t help thinking that diet is a big contributor.
Here is a more up-to-date map, by county, showing that cardiac deaths still concentrate in the southeast, but now they are joined by Nevada and eastern California. I downloaded this map directly from the CDC, but this time, the map is in terms of Age Adjusted Mortality Rates, that is lives lost per 100,000 persons, relative to some ideal, people living in Minnesota, Colorado, and Massachusetts, I suppose. As before, the red areas are those with a higher cardiac death rates. Why are West Californians healthier and folks in Minnesota and Colorado, perhaps because they exercise more, and exercise is a good thing, but these could also be areas with better healthcare, or fewer opioids. Some cities are healthier, some are worse. Why?.
Things have been getting worse in recent years. From 2019 to 2022, the national Cardio-vascular disease caused AAMR increased by 9.3%. Some of this may be COVID or the COVID vaccine, I suppose, or depression. Men seem to be hit harder than women, with the same regional differences. As shown in the map at right, southeast rural men have a lifespan more than 4 years shorter than the national average, or about 7 years shorter than that for women. And this is on top of their already significantly shorter lifespan compared to other developed countries. There’s no obvious reason.
As a marketing thought, assuming that the cause of cardiac death is that people eat high-carb, high fat meals, then the owners of Waffle House might have noticed, and chosen to build there. If so this would be a case where apparent causation is reversed: the relationship between Waffle houses and death is that Waffle houses were built where people were dying of heart disease. It’s a scary thought, but not unlikely. I’d expect new Waffle houses would appear in mid-Michigan, mid Georgia, northern New Jersey, and NW Indiana. These are places where people will likely like the food and ambiance. I’ve taken a light hearted view here because the alternative is too depressing. These rates are dramatic and horrible. I hope RFK Jr. will help increase US lifespans, but have no great faith in him. Trump gave him two years to show significant improvements.
We’ve become accustomed to buying cheap products from China: items made of glass, plastic, and metal come to the US by the ship-load, approximately $600 B worth last year, the highest from any country. Labor isn’t cheaper in China, certainly not when compared to Mexico or India, nor are the machines that make the products more advanced. What’s behind China’s ability to produce at their low prices is cheap energy—specifically, coal and nuclear-based electricity. While the US and most western countries have shut down coal plants to stop global warming, and have even shut working nuclear reactors for no obvious reason, China has aggressively expanded coal and nuclear energy production. The result? They are the largest single source of CO2, and have some of the lowest electricity prices in the world, Chinese electricity prices are about 1/4 of European, and 2/3 of U.S.
In recent years, the U.S. and Europe have increasingly relied on renewable energy sources like wind and solar. While these can work in certain areas, they require far more land than nuclear or coal, and expensive infrastructure because the power is intermittent, and generally not located close to the customer. The UK and Germany, countries with long periods of cloudy, windless conditions, have switched to solar and wind, leading to soaring electricity prices and a moribund industrial sector. Germany shut down all of its nuclear plants, 17 of them, largely to rely on electricity imported from its neighbors, and coal-fired sources that are far more polluting and unsafe than the nuclear plants they shut. The UK shut 5 nuclear reactors since 2012.
Meanwhile, China continues to build nuclear and coal plants. China is the largest user of coal power, and is planning to build 100 more coal-fired plants this year. Beyond this, China is building nuclear power rectors, including the world’s first 4th generation reactor (a pebble bed design). China has built 20 nuclear plants since 2016, and has 21 under construction. With this massive energy advantage, China produces things at low price for export: appliances, clothes, furniture, metal and plastic goods, all at a fraction of our cost. By selling us the things we used to make, China imports our jobs and exports pollution from their coal plants.
Many people instinctively understand that outsourcing production to China is harmful to both US employment and world pollution. Yet, until recently, US politicians encouraged this transfer through trade agreements like the TPP. Politicians bow to high-spending importers, and to environmental activists. It seems we prefer cheap goods to employment, and we’re OK with pollution so long as we don’t see the pollution being made. But, by outsourcing production, we’ve also outsourced control over critical industries, we’ve limited out ability to innovate, and we make ourselves dependent on China. Likely, that was part of China’s intent.
Russia has followed a similar path, keeping electricity costs mostly through low through coal, but also nuclear power, exporting their goods mostly to the EU. Before the Ukraine war, Germany in particular, relied on Russian gas, electricity, and fertilizer, products of Russian cheap power. By cutting off those energy, Germany has dealt a severe blow to its economy. Not everyone is happy.
Transfer of electricity, GWh, between European countries, 2023. Energy is most expensive in importer-nations, and GDP growth is slowest.
The incoming Trump administration has decide that, to compete with China’s manufacturing power, we need to develop our own through tariffs, and we need to increase our energy production. Tariffs can help balance the budget, and bring production back home, but without more energy, our industries will struggle to produce. I’m generally in support of this.
US production is more energy efficient than Chinese production, and thus less polluting. Besides, making things here saves on transport, provides jobs, and helps to build US technology for the future. I’m happy to see us start to build more nuclear power reactors, and restart some old plants. Solar and wind is good too, but is suited to only in some areas, windy and sunny ones, and even there, they need battery storage so that the power is available when needed.
What makes something elite? For elite colleges and academic journals, a large part is selectivity, the lower fraction of people who can go to your college or publish in your journal, or earn your credential, the more selective, thus the most elite. Harvard, boasts that “the best” apply, and of these, only 3% get in. Thus Harvard selects for the top 1%, or so they claim. These are not selected as the brightest, or most moral or motivated, but by a combination: they are the most Harvardian.
The top 20 most selective US colleges, 2022-23 according to Nathan Yau, FlowingData.com
Selectivity is viewed as good. That this 1% can get into Harvard makes the students elite and makes Harvard desirable. Some lower-class Ivy colleges (Columbia, for example) have been found to cheat to pretend higher selectivity; they’ve exaggerated the number of people who apply so they can inflate their rejection rate, and justify a high tuition, and presumably a high salary for their graduates. And it’s self-sustaining. Generally speaking, college professors and high-powered executives are drawn from elite institutions. Elite grads pick other elite grads as their way to get the best material, with the best education.
By this measure, selectivity, The Journal of Universal Rejection is the most elite and best. It’s the journal you should definitely get. The reject every article submitted on every subject. They are thus more elite than Harvard or Cal Tech, and more select than the quorum of US presidents, or Olympic gold winners, or living Chess champions, and they got there by just saying no. Many people send their articles, by the way, all rejected.
My lesson from this, is that selectivity is a poor metric for quality. Just because an institution or journal that is select in some one aspect does not mean that it will be select in another. Top swimmers and footballers rarely go to Harvard, so they have to pick from a lower tear of applicants for their swimming and football teams. It’s the same with the top in math or science, they apply to Cal Tech, with the rejects going to Stanford or Princeton. As for top chess players or US Navy Seals, a Harvard degree does nothing for them; few seals go to Harvard, and few Harvard students could be Seals. Each elite exists in its own bubble, and each bubble has its own rules. Thus, if you want to be hired as a professor, you have to go to the appropriate institution, though not necessarily from the top most selective.
From Nature, 2024. 20% of all academics come from just 8 schools, 40% come from the top 21.
As for journals to read or write in, an elevated reader like you should publish where you can be read, and understood, and perhaps to change things for the better, I think. Some money would be nice too, but few scientific journals offer that. Based on this, I have a hard time recommending scientific journals, or conferences. More and more, they charge the writer to publish or present, and offer minimal exposure of your ideas. They charge the readers and attendees such high fees that very few will see your work; university libraries subscribe, but often on condition that not everyone can read for free. Journal often change your writing too, sometimes for the better, but often to match the journal outlook or style, or just to suggest (demand) that you cite some connected editor. JofUR is better in a way, no charge to the author, and no editorial changes.
Typically, journals limit your ability to read or share your work, assuming they accept it, then they expect you to review for them, for free. So why do academics write for these journals? They’re considered the only legitimate way to get your findings out; worse, that’s how universities evaluate your work. University administrators are chosen with no idea of your research quality, and a requirement of number-based evaluation, so they evaluate professors by counting publications, particularly in elite (selective) journals, and based on the elite (selective) school you come from. It’s an insane metric that results in awful research and writing, and bad professors too. I’ve come to think that anyone, outside of academia, who writes in a scientific journal is a blockhead. If you have something worthwhile to say, write a blog, or maybe a book, or find a free, open access journal. In my field, hydrogen, the only free, open access journals are published in Russia and Iran.
And just for laughs, if you don’t mind the futility of universal rejection, there’s JoUR. Mail your article, with a self addressed return, or email it to j.universal.rejection@gmail.com. You’ll get a rejection notice and you’ll join an un-elite group: rejected, self effacing academics with time on their hands.
ROBERT BUXBAUM, January 16, 2025. If, for some reason, you want to get your progeny into an elite college, my niece, a Harvard grad., has a company that does just that, International College Counselors, they help with essays, testing, and references, and nudge your progeny to submit on time.
The Mythbusters dimpled Taurus, and a diagram meant to show how drag is reduced. On a golf ball, at low NRE, vortex separation is moved back to 110°, the mechanism on a car is different, I suspect.
The dimples on a golf ball reduce air-drag resistance, so why don’t we put dimples on planes or cars? Perhaps because it’s ugly, or that cars are much bigger and than golf-balls, so we expect the effect of skin effects to be smaller. Finally, a Reynolds number analysis suggests that dimples on cars should increase drag, not reduce it.
In 2009, the Mythbusters decided to test the conjecture. Hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage ran careful gas usage tests on a Ford Taurus that was first covered with smooth clay. They drove the car repeatedly (5X) on a track at 65 mph (about 100 km/h), and measured “slightly over 26 mpg,” 9.047 l/100km, a respectable value. They then carved dimples into the clay to simulate the surface of a golf ball. See picture at right, and put the removed clay into the trunk so there would be no decrease in weight.
Underneath a Porche GT4, smallish dimples.
They then drove the dimpled car over the same course, five times as before at exactly 65 mph, and found the car got 14% more mpg, 29.6 mpg, or 7.946 l/100 km. See video excerpt here. They considered it their most surprising Mythbuster episode.
As it happens, dimples had been put on some production cars, even before the episode. They are just located underneath where most people don’t see them. The VW “Golf” had dimples even before the episode, and the Porsche Cayman GT4 does today, see picture above left, but most experiments find little or nothing. Car dimples are typically smaller than those used on Mythbusters, so that may be an explanation. Dimples have been found to help on soccer balls (the stitching acts as the dimples), and bicycle wheels (less advantage).
PHYSICS OF FLUIDS 18, 041702 (2006) Mechanism of drag reduction by dimples on a sphere, Jin Choi, Woo-Pyung Jeon, and Haecheon Choia.
The graph at right shows the source of confusion for cars and the great advantage for golf balls. It’s a plot of the drag coefficient for smooth and dimpled golf balls, as a function of the Reynolds Number, where NRE = Vdρ/µ. In this formula, V is velocity, d is the diameter of the car, ball or whatever, ρ is the density of the fluid, and µ is viscosity. NRE can be thought of as the ratio of the inertial to viscous forces acting on the object. It’s a way of describing the combined effects of speed and size for different objects in motion.
We see, above, that dimples reduce golf-ball drag by more than 50%, but only at speeds/ Reynolds numbers that are much lower than for normal cars, NRE between about 4×104 and 3.5×105, as are typical of golf balls during play. A typical car at 65mph will have a NRE.CAR = 3×106, suggesting that there should be no advantage for dimples, or possibility a disadvantage, that dimples should increase drag. A side note one sees, above, is that it is only the dimples on the front of the golf-ball that reduce drag: other dimples do nothing. If one were to add dimples to high-speed trains and airplanes I’d suggest them only on the front, so far I have not seen them.
I think that the Mythbusters did a good job with their experiments, and find their 14% improvement significant. So why do so few other cars see and advantage. One thought I had was to note that the Ford Taurus is a remarkably round car, providing ample space for front dimples to help, most cars today are more angular. I also note that the production cars have smaller dimples, as on the Porsche, above. Then again, the Mythbusters folks may have made some non-obvious experimental error.
Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2024. An important side issue in this is that Google’s AI was awful, a handicap in researching this article. It lies continuously and convincingly, and did so here. I’d asked it for the year of the episode, and the AI lied, and said 2012. I asked for the type of car, the AI said an SUV, and it gave a misdescription of the tests. Lying AIs appear as villains in science fiction, e.g. HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey, now in real life.
Jewish tradition requires certain holy items that have to be written on parchment with kosher, opaque, black ink. These items are abbreviated, STAM, books of the Torah (Sifre Torah, in Hebrew), Philactaries (Tefillin in Hebrew), and Mezzuzos for the doorpost. To be kosher the ink must be made from kosher sources: plant matter, soot, water, and/or inorganic chemicals. That leaves a lot of options, and it is likely that black Sharpie would be kosher, at least after the fact. Ideally, the ink should wash off in water too, based on Numbers 5:23 (Also, Rambam, Hilchos Tefilin 1:4, and Shulchan Aruch, YD 271:6).
There are ancient recipes, and I decided to semi-follow one, using walnuts instead of the classic gall nut and copper vitriol instead of iron. The aim was an ink that’s dark, long lasting, compatible with animal-skin parchment, and dissolvable. Some vegetable inks rot or fade, and most iron-based inks become permanent, like paint, they do not re-dissolve in water. If you don’t want to go through all this, you can buy kosher iron ink, e.g. here, knowing that this ink isn’t ideal, but it’s the type most people use for the practical reason that it looks nicer and permanent is a comfort.
The classical recipes for STAM ink is based on using the shell of gall nuts, a tree-growth (not really a nut) found in the Mid-east. As an experiment, I’ve tried to make a respectable, kosher ink with walnuts instead. Walnut trees grow readily in the midwest. I collected a dozen walnuts with their husks from a tree near my home. The outer husk had been green originally, but had turned black by the time I picked them (mid November). Rather than extract the inner shell, I used the walnuts as I found them, and tried boiling them in denatured alcohol, and also in water. Boiling in alcohol didn’t work well, producing the weak ink shown below, left. Boiling in water (below right) produced a much darker liquid. I used this as the basis of my ink.
Boiling walnuts in water produced a dark liquid, walnut water.
I boiled walnuts in alcohol. The water-ink runs and isn’t dark.
The traditional recipe begins by boiling gall nuts in water to produce a brownish ink-wash that looks hardly darker than my alcohol-wash ink. You then add soot and “green vitriol”. Perhaps that is copper sulphate, or perhaps iron sulphate. Copper sulphate is a dark blue, while iron sulphate is a light green. With gall nut water, it turns out that iron vitriol works ‘better’, reacting with tannin in the gallnut water to make a nice, black color that becomes a permanent ink. When tried the two types of vitriol with my walnut water, I saw no color advantage to iron over copper, and no real color change.
I put the walnuts in a beaker as shown, nearly covering them with water, and put a piece of foil on top. The longer I simmered the darker it got. In the end, I left the mix on a hotplate, on low for nearly a day as shown above. The ink-wash, by itself is a reasonably good ink, as shown below left.
The traditional recipe that I’ worked off o’m modifying includes three more ingredients, so I experimented with them. These were vitriol, soot, and gum Arabic, in proportions shown below, in the form of a poem in Arabic written about 900AD. The first of these additions I tested was vitriol. I first tried copper sulphate, half as much as walnut water, and found that it darkens the color a little and makes the combination a bit thicker thought the ink is still watery. Copper sulphate is an antimicrobial too, so even without changing the color much, I imagined this was a worthwhile addition. I also tried making the walnut ink with iron sulphate. This makes the ink slightly darker too, perhaps, but not thicker. I have less confidence about iron’s antimicrobial properties, and there were concerns that it could harm a parchment over time. I also worried that it would make the ink permanent.
Ink made from walnut water, copper sulphate, and soot. Perhaps better?
The next ingredient was soot. It’s used to make the ink darker, and perhaps thicker. Traditional soot is made from burning olive oil. One collects the soot by placing a plate over the smoky oil fire. I tried a bit of this, but it was slow, and I had some chemically produced soot in my lab, bought from MER corp, leftovers from making buckminsterfullerene. I added as much soot as vitriol as in the poem below, and as expected found it increased the blackness of the ink. It also changed the texture, making the ink gritty and harder to write with. I had trouble dissolving the soot into the ink too, and apparently I’m not the first to have this trouble. Some suggested heating, and some suggested honey. I tried both, and heating helped more than honey. I also tried using a drop of dish soap. The result, above left, was blacker than the original, but the writing is not professional grade, IMHO. The ink does not write well, and it still doesn’t cover 100%. I moved on to the next ingredient, gum Arabica.
The mixing ratios in this poem are not exactly clear. The amount of soot is the same as of vitriol, and half that of gall, but is this the weight of the gall nuts, or volume, or the weight of the dried extract. I used volume of walnut water and volume of soot, and have the sense that this is too much soot. Also soot is messy and hard to dissolve; use gloves and a lab jacket. the soot does not come out easily.
My final ingredient is gum Arabic, the gum of the acacia tree. This seems to be used as a thickener. Gum Arabic is available in the US, on Amazon as an edible “candy”, so I bought some. It wasn’t expensive, but took about 10 days to get here. In the meantime, I tried honey as a thickener. It appears in some ancient recipes, but didn’t really help here, and left the page sort of sticky. Gum arabic is solider, so I hoped for for lasting product. When the Gum Arabic came, I found that it was solid, crystalline, with has hardly any taste. Maybe Arabs add sugar? I figure there might be a mystical advantage to gum Arabic since it comes from the Acacia tree, the type of tree used to make the Ark of the Covenant. My expectation was that it might also make the ink darker, and that it might help dissolve the soot.
As it happens, gum Arabic doesn’t dissolve in cold water. But it did dissolve in hot water if I mixed it in and stirred for 5 minutes. The gum helped dissolve the soot too; gum Arabic seemed to do a better job than honey in this respect. Once the gum ink dried it was nice and solid, with the dried letters standing off the page a bit; they’re raised letters, and I really like that. The ink was still sort of grainy, perhaps from the walnut bits. I then tried dipping a written on parchment into some water and found the ink-letters dissolved easily. My understanding is that the ink I’d made was highly kosher for STAM, but as a follow-up experiment, I’m carrying some inked parchment in my breast pocket to see if it rots or fades. So far, no change. Some samples of writing are at left. The upper words are with the iron-vitriol version (iron sulphate), the lower with the copper vitriol (copper sulphate). You can sense why scribes might prefer the iron ink.
Robert Buxbaum, December 22, 2024. Scribes of 2000 years ago used wooden pens, it seems, as feather quills and fountain pens hadn’t been invented. I used a wood pen on some samples above, made by carving a popsicle stick. The better-looking letters, and longer passages, were written with a metal, calligraphy “quill.”
A remarkable book by Christopher Clark on WWI posits that WWI was an accident, entered into, by sleepwalk. That is, it was not brought on by the elaborate plan of an evil aggressor, Germany or Britain, acting for dominance or economic gain, but rather that many individuals precipitated the deadly conflict through a series of ever-more dangerous, unplanned steps. The great diplomats went on vacation following the June 28, 1914 assassination, and each minor actor felt a need to push for a previous status quo, emboldened by the certainty that nothing bad would happen, since none of the last acts had caused any serious harm, at least not to them. There was, in Clark’s view, a general numbness caused by earlier wars: in China and Russia, in Serbia and Albania, and by Italy’s invasion of Africa, and the fact that there had not been a major, deadly conflict since the Crimean war. In this environment, one nation shoving another was seen as normal conflict until a war broke out that killed millions and toppled four empires: the Russian, Austrian, German, and Ottoman.
Princip shoots Count Ferdinand, June 28, 914. Getty Immage.
Clark points out, too that the Serbs, the folks who started the war, benefited from it. They escaped from imperial control by Austria and from The Ottoman Empire. Self determination was the motivation for the assassination, and it worked too, for the Czechs, Croats, Poles, and communists. In just a few years, the former group got their own countries, and the communists took Russia, something that no one saw coming in June, 1914.
The key sleep-walk steps to war were as follows: In response to the assassination, and a decade of earlier insults, Austria-Hungary, demanded harsh cocessions from Serbia that Serbia found unacceptable. Austria Hungary, backed by Germany and Italy, declared war on Serbia. Russia then mobilized its troops for war with Germany, so Germany declared war on Russia. France, an ally of Russia, then mobilized for war with Germany, so on August 2 – 3, Germany declared war on France and invaded Luxembourg and Belgium. Why Luxembourg and Belgium — because they would not allow free transport of German troupes to attack France. This forced Great Britain to declare war on Germany, which, finally, on August 6, brought Austria-Hungary to declared war on Russia, and effectively on the rest of the Allies. Over the next few years, we (the US) were dragged in along with Japan, on our side.
What a mess, but I fear we may be sleepwalking to the same, grim altercation via our wars in Ukraine and Syria. As at the beginning of WWI, there are two big power alliances: NATO including The US and most of Europe, versus a BRICS alliance of Brazil, Russia, India, Iran, China, and South Africa, along with a few minor others. The alliances are now three years into a proxy war in Ukraine, and another one in Syria. So far the declared combatants are Russia vs Ukraine, and Turkey vs Syria, but both sides keeps harassing the other at a higher and higher pace. So far, the sleep-walk steps were that Russia invaded Crimea, in response to some insult, and then attempted to take Kiev. The NATO alliance responded provided limited weapons to Ukraine. But, as these proved insufficient, we (NATO) provided greater and more deadly weapons, plus some volunteer troops. Meanwhile Russia’s BRICS allies are selling drones and missiles into the conflict in return for Russian gold, wheat, and raw materials. One of us, perhaps Ukraine, then cut the RussianGerman gas pipeline, while China seems to have cut important communications cables in the Baltic Sea.
North Korea began sending troops, 12,000 apparently, to fight on the Russian side, while Biden has sent long-range missiles to be used for strikes deep into Russian territory, on logistic centers, train depots, food stores, airports, etc. Putin has threatened a nuclear response, but has done nothing so far beyond sending a few long range, hypersonic missiles against civilian targets and against Ukraine’s power grid. He’s lost some 600,000 Russians, and has lost control of Syria and Armenia, so he has reason to be upset. Ukraine has lost some 400,000, and is still losing territory, but is still demanding total victory, the removal of all Russian forces, including those in Crimea.
The fight has spread to Syria, where the US, Israel, and Turkey have bombed in recent days, something I would call an act of offensive war against a sovereign unstable government. It’s not totally unprevoked, of course. Syria and Iran had been attacking Israel for years from Lebanon, by way of Hezbollah jihadists. Recently Israel took out a major fraction of Hezbollah, and the jihadists (Sunni) seems to have gone back to Syria, and have removed Assad, Syria’s Shia president for life, with help from Turkey, another Sunni Moslem country. This too is an act of war. Assad retains a sliver on the coast where the Russian bases are, the red areas in the map below, but he isn’t popular with anyone at the moment. The rebel leader, Abu Mohammed al Jolani, was a member of Al Quada till 2006, and then member of ISIS (ISIL) under Abu Baghdadi till 2016 at least. He’s still on our terrorist list, though he now claims to be a progressive Moslem. Not everyone is convinced, or happy with him. Syria is divided into seven (or more) control zones, shown on the map below. He could bring peace to Syria, but his path to peace is clearly further war.
On the legal and PR front, we’ve called Russian president Putin a madman and war criminal, we support Turkey’s efforts to overthrow Assad, but complain about his attacks on the Kurds, the yellow areas, and dark green at right, and we both applaud and condemn Israeli President Netanyahu for attacking Syria in the south, and in the red sliver, destroying Syria’s navy. Meanwhile, we (the US) have taken it upon ourselves to attack ISIS (ISIL) camps in central Syria, the grey areas, as well as attacking troops (Iranian Shia) entering from Iraq. By normal definition, this would put us at war with Syria, and perhaps with Turkey since we support the Kurds in their war against Turks.
Recently we’ve decided that the rebel leader, al Jolani, might be taken off the terrorist list subject to a few conditions (I wonder which). We (Biden, Shumer) along with the International Criminal Court have called for the arrest and imprisonment of Israel’s PM Netanyahu. The Turks too have join in on this, while somewhat cheering Israel’s destruction of Assad’s navy. The Druze, allies of Israel (and us?) seem to be at war with al Jolani, and likely the Turks and Iran. They’re in south-east Syria, near Deraa, not shown by a color on the map. Meanwhile, Russia is trying to make peace with al Jolani, to secure their military bases, while Iran (Shia) has reached out to al Jolani (Sunni) in an effort to join with him in a war against Israel. It’s not quite tipped into world war, but it seems awfully close.
One possible peace maker might be the incoming US president, Trump, but the outgoing president, Biden, has done his best to tie his hands, branding him as a felon and seditionist, as well as claiming he’s a Russian asset. European leaders don’t like him either. France’s Macron might a peacemaker, but Macron’s government has fallen. The Germans or Turks might be peacemakers, but the government of Germany has nearly fallen, the economy of Germany is hurting, and Turkey is a combatant, at war with the Kurds and Druze. Iran, and Russia, though not combatants, are directly involved in the fighting, and both countries are under sanction by the US and EU, and the UN is discredited from it’s years helping Hezbolla. I thus see no clear path to peace and no peacemaker who will dial back the drama before we sleep-march into WWIII.
