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Making semi-traditional STAM ink using walnuts.

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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 recipe for ink, musclé, via a poem by Mukla Farsi, 900AD from blog of the Bodlieian Libraries at Oxford.

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.”

Sleepwalking into WWI, and WWIII

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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.

Robert Buxbaum, December 11, 2024

This is not the most important election, 1860 was

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Every year we hear the same claim: that this the most important election of America’s history. This year is among the more contentious than most, but the issues dividing the candidates are few. Both, for example, claim they will protect the border and spur the economy. In lieu of issues, there’s name calling. Trump claims Harris is as incompetent buffoon and Harris claims Trump is a fascist dictator. The rancor practically guarantees as they’ll be riots whoever wins but, as these things go, the election is less important, and divisive than ’64 and ’68, and in particular, the election of 1860.

Following the 1860 election, election seven states ceded from the union and we had a Civil War. Even the most bleak prediction for 2024-25 is for a more peaceful transfer of power. The election of 1860 had two major issues on the ballot; one was slavery or rather the expansion of slavery to the territories, and the other was implementation of the Morrill tariffs. These import taxes, proposed by Justin Morrill and passed but not yet implemented, would have raised the average agricultural duty from 15% to to 47%. Duties on durable goods wool rise to 65%, with the burden falling disproportionately on the southern states. Duties on durable goods. There was also a price schedule that would have prevented British shippers from minimizing the effect by falsely claiming a price far below market, something China currently does. In September 1860, Republican Leader Thaddeus Stevens told a New York City audience that “the Tariff would impoverish the southern and western states, but that was essential for advancing national greatness and the prosperity of industrial workers.”

Matching the two sides to the two major issues of the day, there were four major candidates for president in 1860. All of them won states. Lincoln carried the greatest number, 18, and won the most electoral votes, 180. He was for high tariffs and against the expansion of slavery. Second was John Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat, who carried 11 states and got 72 electoral votes. He was for the expansion of slavery and against the higher tariffs. Then there was Stephen Douglas, the Northern Democrat, who was for allowing the expansion of slavery, considering it a “states right,” and also for the higher tariffs. Douglas carried only one state, Missouri, with 12 electoral votes. Finally, there was John Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate, who carried three states, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, representing 39 electoral votes. He opposed the expansion of slavery and also the increased tariff, but he generally believed that compromise was always possible. This was the worst vote split in US history. The worst split I’ve seen was 1968, when three candidates carried states.

Had either Bell or Douglas won, I suspect that the Civil War could have been avoided, at least temporarily. Virginia, the most important of the slave states, had shown it was willing to accept an anti-slavery president so long as he did not impose high tariffs — tariffs that benefitted the northern industrial workers and manufacturers at the expense of southern consumers and agricultural producers. Lincoln’s victory precipitated the immediate secession of 3 states. Another 4 seceded after inauguration.

The south imagined they could walk away because that’s how they read the constitution before the 13th amendment. They imagined they could win a civil war because they imagined they had British military support. “Cotton was king,” they claimed. The UK prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had told secretary Adams, “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.” As it was, the British stayed on the sidelines, in part because of diplomacy. Besides, the gunship Monitor showed that the North could sink most any British ship that entered US waters.

As for 2024, I expect there will be riots whoever wins, but nothing more. The parties are realigning significantly, as happened in 1964-68, and neither side much understands the appeal of the other. This seems like less of a wrenching election than in 1964 and 1968, though. In ’64-’68 US boys were dying in Vietnam in numbers, and black folks and their white friends were being lynched in the south. Nothing like that is happening today. Today’s riots have been fueled by nothing more than name-calling, fear, and the occasional assassination attempt. Mild, even compared to 1968.

Robert Buxbaum, November 4, 2024. Justin Morrill is mostly remembered today for the Land-grant college act of 1862. This created an agricultural -technical college in each state. I taught at Michigan State University, Michigan’s land grant university. I’m generally a fan of tariffs, both as an aid to the domestic economy and as a tool of foreign policy. I present these views here. I got these views from Peter Cooper.

Einstein’s theory of diffusion in liquids, and my extension.

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In 1905 and 1908, Einstein developed two formulations for the diffusion of a small particle in a liquid. As a side-benefit of the first derivation, he demonstrated the visible existence of molecules, a remarkable piece of work. In the second formulation, he derived the same result using non-equilibrium thermodynamics, something he seems to have developed on the spot. I’ll give a brief version of the second derivation, and will then I’ll show off my own extension. It’s one of my proudest intellectual achievements.

But first a little background to the problem. In 1827, a plant biologist, Robert Brown examined pollen under a microscope and noticed that it moved in a jerky manner. He gave this “Brownian motion” the obvious explanation: that the pollen was alive and swimming. Later, it was observed that the pollen moved faster in acetone. The obvious explanation: pollen doesn’t like acetone, and thus swims faster. But the pollen never stopped, and it was noticed that cigar smoke also swam. Was cigar smoke alive too?

Einstein’s first version of an answer, 1905, was to consider that the liquid was composed of atoms whose energy was a Boltzmann distribution with an average of E= kT in every direction where k is the Boltzmann constant, and k = R/N. That is Boltsman’s constant equals the gas constant, R, divided by Avogadro’s number, N. He was able to show that the many interactions with the molecules should cause the pollen to take a random, jerky walk as seen, and that the velocity should be faster the less viscous the solvent, or the smaller the length-scale of observation. Einstein applied the Stokes drag equation to the solute, the drag force per particle was f = -6πrvη where r is the radius of the solute particle, v is the velocity, and η is the solution viscosity. Using some math, he was able to show that the diffusivity of the solute should be D = kT/6πrη. This is called the Stokes-Einstein equation.

In 1908 a French physicist, Jean Baptiste Perrin confirmed Einstein’s predictions, winning the Nobel prize for his work. I will now show the 1908 Einstein derivation and will hope to get to my extension by the end of this post.

Consider the molar Gibbs free energy of a solvent, water say. The molar concentration of water is x and that of a very dilute solute is y. y<<1. For this nearly pure water, you can show that µ = µ° +RT ln x= µ° +RT ln (1-y) = µ° -RTy.

Now, take a derivative with respect to some linear direction, z. Normally this is considered illegal, since thermodynamic is normally understood to apply to equilibrium systems only. Still Einstein took the derivative, and claimed it was legitimate at nearly equilibrium, pseudo-equilibrium. You can calculate the force on the solvent, the force on the water generated by a concentration gradient, Fw = dµ/dz = -RT dy/dz.

Now the force on each atom of water equals -RT/N dy/dz = -kT dy/dz.

Now, let’s call f the force on each atom of solute. For dilute solutions, this force is far higher than the above, f = -kT/y dy/dz. That is, for a given concentration gradient, dy/dz, the force on each solute atom is higher than on each solvent atom in inverse proportion to the molar concentration.

For small spheres, and low velocities, the flow is laminar and the drag force, f = 6πrvη.

Now calculate the speed of each solute atom. It is proportional to the force on the atom by the same relationship as appeared above: f = 6πrvη or v = f/6πrη. Inserting our equation for f= -kT/y dy/dz, we find that the velocity of the average solute molecule,

v = -kT/6πrηy dy/dz.

Let’s say that the molar concentration of solvent is C, so that, for water, C will equal about 1/18 mols/cc. The atomic concentration of dilute solvent will then equal Cy. We find that the molar flux of material, the diffusive flux equals Cyv, or that

Molar flux (mols/cm2/s) = Cy (-kT/6πrηy dy/dz) = -kTC/6πrη dy/dz -kT/6πrη dCy/dz.

where Cy is the molar concentration of solvent per volume.

Classical engineering comes to a similar equation with a property called diffusivity. Sp that

Molar flux of y (mols y/cm2/s) = -D dCy/dz, and D is an experimentally determined constant. We thus now have a prediction for D:

D = kT/6πrη.

This again is the Stokes Einstein Equation, the same as above but derived with far less math. I was fascinated, but felt sure there was something wrong here. Macroscopic viscosity was not the same as microscopic. I just could not think of a great case where there was much difference until I realized that, in polymer solutions there was a big difference.

Polymer solutions, I reasoned had large viscosities, but a diffusing solute probably didn’t feel the liquid as anywhere near as viscous. The viscometer measured at a larger distance, more similar to that of the polymer coil entanglement length, while a small solute might dart between the polymer chains like a rabbit among trees. I applied an equation for heat transfer in a dispersion that JK Maxwell had derived,

where κeff is the modified effective thermal conductivity (or diffusivity in my case), κl and κp are the thermal conductivity of the liquid and the particles respectively, and φ is the volume fraction of particles. 

To convert this to diffusion, I replaced κl by Dl, and κp by Dp where

Dl = kT/6πrηl

and Dp = kT/6πrη.

In the above ηl is the viscosity of the pure, liquid solvent.

The chair of the department, Don Anderson didn’t believe my equation, but agreed to help test it. A student named Kit Yam ran experiments on a variety of polymer solutions, and it turned out that the equation worked really well down to high polymer concentrations, and high viscosity.

As a simple, first approximation to the above, you can take Dp = 0, since it’s much smaller than Dl and you can take Dl to equal Dl = kT/6πrηl as above. The new, first order approximation is:

D = kT/6πrηl (1 – 3φ/2).

We published in Science. That is I published along with the two colleagues who tested the idea and proved the theory right, or at least useful. The reference is Yam, K., Anderson, D., Buxbaum, R. E., Science 240 (1988) p. 330 ff. “Diffusion of Small Solutes in Polymer-Containing Solutions”. This result is one of my proudest achievements.

R.E. Buxbaum, March 20, 2024

China won’t invade Taiwan, perhaps Vietnam

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For 2000 years Chinese rulers have either fixed the problems caused by their predecessors, or become the absolute ruler who brings new problems and a war. Eighteen times over the last 2000 years, the absolute ruler has chosen is to invade Vietnam. Chairman Xi Jinping took full power over China five years ago, and as I predicted then, purged the party of all other competent leaders, including his predecessor, Hu. He now has to do something, and that’s typically a war. Xi talks like he’d like to invade Taiwan, but I believe he’ll invade Vietnam instead, as so many others did before him. Taiwan (Formosa) is separated from mainland China by 100 miles of open sea. There’s been only two successful, modern invasions; by the Qing Chinese in 1683 with the help of the Dutch fleet, and in 1895 by Japan against the 5 month old Republic of Taiwan. Vietnam is much easer to invade: you just have to walk in.

Chiang KaiShek with Roosevelt and Churchill. He took power after WWII.Taiwan is now a Republic

Here’s my brief summary of 60 years of cyclical Chinese history: In the last decade of his life, 1966-76, Mao Zedung brought a horrible cultural revolution, killing 100 million or so by violence and famine, targeting anyone who might disagree with him. He was followed by Hua Kuofeng, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang. They removed “the Gang of Four” and brought reform, toleration, and some rapprochement with the west. Hu also returned some autonomy to Tibet. Deng Xiaoping followed, put Zhao under house arrest, removed Hua and Hu (only recently buried), absorbed Tibet, invaded Vietnam, instituted a brutal on-child policy with, forced abortions and sterilizations, and put down the Tiananmen uprising 1989 -an uprising caused by the removal of Hu. Deng was followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao who exited Vietnam, lightened the one-child policy, and brought back some measure of freedom. This lead to Xi Jinping who appears to be in the mold of Mao and Deng. He’s removed Hu publicly during a communist party meeting, has taken absolute control, arrested China’s business innovators, and (likely) caused a pandemic by unsafe research at the Wuhan bio-research facility. His response to the pandemic is worthy of Mao: he welded people into their homes. Xi now needs a war to unify the country, and talks like he’ll invade Taiwan. Xi might do it; he has increased military spending by 2.5 times, to double that of the EU (equal to US spending). His army is likely to be used somewhere soon. But where?

At first glance, it makes some sense to think he’ll invade Taiwan. He has the same justification as Deng had for Vietnam, “to punish the wayward province.” Taiwan is small, 23 million people, and very rich (GDP = $1.3T, 10-15% of China). It’s especially rich in high-tech areas that Xi seems to want, and China ruled the island (Formosa) for 212 years between 1683 and its brief independence in 1895. I expect that Xi will invade Vietnam though, for many of the same reasons that Deng did: it’s easier, and the invasion won’t destroy US trade. Vietnam will not be super easy to conquer, of course, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine looks like it will go on for years, but Xi has 100 million men of military age. Driving these men into Vietnam is a lot easier than an amphibious invasion. Vietnam now, as then, has few friends -perhaps only India -while Taiwan has many (The US and Japan, primarily), and they have naval breakwaters that would make an amphibious landing difficult. Vietnam is only about half as rich as Taiwan (GDP = $650 B), but it has two things China needs more than technology: oil and food.

The Japanese invasion of independent Taiwan, The Republic of Formosa, in 1895. It took 5 months despite lopsided advantages. Plus 7 years to pacify the population.

Japan’s invasion of the Republic of Formosa in 1895 would have to be the model for a Chinese invasion today, assuming that’s the route Xi would take. Japan used a small force of 20,000 highly trained men, and a surprise landing at two sites. The formosan army of 75,000 was hardly armed, but it still took the Japanese 5 months to defeat them. It took another 7 years to pacify the population. Taiwan today is a lot better prepared than it was, with modern missiles and drones, a well-trained army of 500,000, and an active navy. Japan, Philippines, and the US would likely try to resupply Taiwan, and would have to be blockaded to prevent delivery. This is not so easy, since the nearest Japanese island is closer to Taiwan than Taiwan is to mainland China, and the Philippines is not far either. Then there are the sanctions that would follow an invasion of Taiwan, but not an invasion of Vietnam: the freezing of assets and the closing of markets. Susch sanctions have been tough on Russia but they would be devastating to China since China imports most of its oil and half of its food, much of it by sea. Whatever Xi gets from invading Taiwan will not match these losses, and I think Xi know it.

China’s new military bases are located around Vietnam, not around Taiwan

I suspect that Xi has already concluded that Vietnam is the smart place to invade. Supporting this view is a look at his preparations. Xi has not built the landing fleet that he’d need for Taiwan, but has instead militarized Hainan Island, plus four other, newly constructed, illegal islands in the South China Sea. These islands surround Vietnam, and are well suited to cut off the country from western aid. They are too far south to be effective in an action against Taiwan. You can tell a lot about what a person will do from what he has done, and what Xi has done is to prepare for an invasion of Vietnam.

Robert Buxbaum, April 27, 2023.

Of walking sticks, canes, scepters, and wands.

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Franklin’s walking stick, willed to General Washington. Now in the Smithsonian.

Many famous people carried walking sticks Washington, Churchill, Moses, Dali. Until quite recently, it was “a thing”. Benjamin Franklin willed one, now in the Smithsonian, to George Washington, to act as a sort of scepter: “My fine crab-tree walking stick, with a gold head curiously wrought in the form of the cap of liberty, I give to my friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington. If it were a Scepter, he has merited it, and would become it. It was a present to me from that excellent woman, Madame de Forbach, the dowager Duchess of Deux-Ponts”. A peculiarity of this particular stick is that the stick is uncommonly tall, 46 1/2″. This is too tall for casual, walking use, and it’s too fancy to use as a hiking stick. Franklin himself, used a more-normal size walking stick, 36 3/8″ tall, currently in the collection of the NY Historical Society. Washington too seems to have favored a stick of more normal length.

Washington with walking stick

Walking sticks project a sort of elegance, as well as providing personal protection. Shown below is President Andrew Jackson defending himself against an assassin using his walking stick to beat off an assassin. He went on to give souvenir walking sticks to friends and political supporters. Sticks remained a common political gift for 100 years, at least through the election of Calvin Coolidge.

Andrew Jackson defends himself.

I started making walking sticks a few years back, originally for my own use, and then for others when I noticed that many folks who needed canes didn’t carry them. It was vanity, as best I could tell: the normal, “old age” cane is relatively short, about 32″. Walking with it makes you bend over; you look old and decrepit. Some of the folks who needed canes, carried hiking sticks, I noticed, about 48″. These are too tall to provide any significant support, as the only way to grasp one was from the side. Some of my canes are shown below. They are about 36″ tall, typically with a 2″ wooden ball as a head. They look good, you stand straight, and they provides support and balance when going down stairs.

Some of my walking sticks.

I typically make my sticks of American Beech, a wood of light weight, with good strength, and a high elastic modulus of elasticity, about 1.85 x106 psi. Oak, hickory, and ash are good options, but they are denser, and thus more suited to self-defense. Wood is better than metal for many applications, IMHO, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. The mathematician Euler showed the the effective strength of a walking stick does not depend on the compressive strength but rather on elastic constant via “the Euler buckling equation”, one of many tremendously useful equations developed by Leonhard Euler (1707-1783).

For a cylindrical stick, the maximum force supported by a stick is: F = π3Er4/4L2, where F is the force, r is the radius, L is the length, and E is the elastic modulus. I typically pick a diameter of 3/4″ or 7/8″, and fit the length to the customer. For a 36″ beech stick, the buckling strength is calculated to be 221 or 409 pounds respectively. I add a rubber bottom to make it non–scuff and less slip-prone. I sometimes add a rope thong, too. Here is a video of Fred Astaire dancing with this style of stick. It’s called “a pin stick”, in case you are interested because it looks like a giant pin.

Country Irishmen are sometimes depicted with a heavy walking stick called a Shillelagh. It’s used for heavier self-defense than available with a pin-stick, and is generally seen being used as a cudgel. There are Japanese versions of self defense using a lighter, 36″ stick, called a Han-bo, as shown here. There is also the wand, as seen for example in Harry Potter. It focuses magical power. Similar to this is Moses’s staff that he used in front of Pharaoh, a combination wand and hiking stick as it’s typically pictured. It might have been repurposed for the snake-on-a-stick that protects against dark forces. Dancing with a stick, Astaire style, can drive away emotional forces, while the more normal use is elegance, and avoiding slips.

Robert Buxbaum, April 20, 2023.

Comparing Artemis SLS to Saturn V and Falcon heavy

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This week, the Artemis I, Orion capsule splashed down to general applause after circling the moon with mannequins. The launch cost $4.1 Billion, and the project, $50 Billion so far, of $93 Billion expected. Artemis II will carry people around the moon, and Artemis III is expected to land the first woman and person of color. The goal isn’t one I find inspiring, and I feel even less inspired by the technology. I see few advances in Artemis compared to the Saturn V of 50 years ago. And in several ways, it looks like a step backwards.

The graphic below compares the Artemis I SLS (Space Launch System) to the Saturn V. The SLS is 10% lighter, but the payload is lighter, too. It can carry 27 tons to the moon, while the Saturn V sent 50 tons to the moon. I’d expect more weight by now. We have carbon fiber and aramids, and they did not. Add to this that the cost per flight is higher, $4.1 B, versus $1.49 B in 2022 dollars for a Saturn V ($185 million in 1969 dollars). What’s more there was no new engine development or production, so the flight numbers are limited: Each SLS launch throws away five, space shuttle engines. When they are all gone, the project ends. We have no plans or ability to make more engines.

Comparison of Apollo Saturn V and Artemis SLS. The SLS has less lift weight and costs more per launch.

As it happens, there was a better alternative available, the Falcon heavy from SpaceX. The Falcon heavy has been flying for 5 years now, and costs only $141 million per launch, about 1/30 as much as an Artemus launch. The rocket is largely reusable, with 3D printed engines, and boosters that land on their tails. Each SLS is expensive because it’s essentially a new airplane built specially for each flight. Every part but the capsule is thrown away. Adding to the cost of SLS launches is the fuel; hydrogen, the same fuel as the space shuttle. Per energy it’s very expensive. The energy cost for the SLS boosters is high too, and the efficiency is low; each SLS booster costs $290M, more than the cost of two Falcon heavy launches. Falcon launches are cheap, in part because the engines burn kerosine, as did the Saturn V at low altitude. Beyond cost hydrogen has low thrust per flow (low momentum), and is hard to handle; hydrogen leaks caused two Artemis scrubs, and numerous Shuttle delays. I discussed the physics of rocket engines in a post seven years ago.

This graph of $/kg to low earth orbit is mostly from futureblind.com. I added the data for Artemis SLS. Saturn V and Falcon use cheaper fuel and a leaner management team.

It might be argued that Artemis SLS is an inspirational advance because it can lift an entire moon project in one shot, but the Saturn V lifted that and more, all of Skylab. Besides, there is no need to lift everything on one launch. Elon Musk has proposed lifting in two stages, sending the moon rocket and moon lander to low earth orbit with one launch, then lifting fuel and the astronauts on a second launch. Given the low cost of a Falcon heavy launch, Musk’s approach is sure to save money. It also helps develop space refueling, an important technology.

Musk’s Falcon may still reach the moon because NASA still needs a moon lander. NASA has awarded the lander contract to three companies for now, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Dynetics-Aerodyne makers of the Saturn V, and Musk’s SpaceX. If the SpaceX version wins, a modified Falcon will be sent to the moon on a Falcon heavy along with a space station. Artemis III will rendezvous with them, astronauts will descend to the moon on the lander, and will use the lander to ascend. They’ll then transfer to an Orion capsule for the return journey. NASA has also contracted with Bezos’s Blue origin for planetary, Earth observation, and exploration plans. I suspect that Musk’s lander will win, if only because of reliability. There have been 59 Falcon launches this year, all of them with safe landings. By contrast, no Blue Origin or Dynetics rocket has landed, and Blue Origin does not expect to achieve orbital velocity till 2025.

As best I can tell, the reason we’re using the Artemis SLS with its old engines is inspiration. The Artemis program director, Charlie Blackwell-Thompson is female, and an expert in space shuttle engines. Previous directors were male. Previous astronauts too were mostly male. Musk is not only male, but his products suffer from him being considered a horrible person, a toxic male, in the Tony Stark (Iron Man) mold. Even Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are considered better, though their technology is worse. See my comparison of SpaceX, Virgin Blue, and Blue Origin.

To me, the biggest blocks to NASA’s inspirational aims, in my opinion, are the program directors who gave us the moon landing. These were two Nazi SS commanders (SS Sturmbannführers), Arthur Rudolph and Wernher Von Braun. Not only were they male and white, they were barely Americanized Nazis, elevated to their role at NASA after killing off virtually all of their 20,000, mostly Jewish, slave workers making rockets for Hitler. Here’s a song about Von Braun, by Tom Lehrer. Among those killed was Von Braun’s professor. In his autobiography, Von Braun showed no sign of regret for any of this, nor does he take blame. The slave labor camp they ran, Dora-Mittelbau, had the highest death rate of all slave labor camps, and when some workers suggested that they could work better if they were fed, the directors, Rudolph and Von Braun had 80 machine gunned to death. Still, Von Braun got us to the moon, and his inspirational comments line the walls at NASA, Kennedy. Blackwell-Thompson and Bezos are surely more inspirational, but their designs seem like dead ends. We may still have to use Musk’s SpaceX if we want a lander or a moon program after the space shuttle’s engines are used up. As Von Braun liked to point out, “Sacrifices have to be made.”

Robert Buxbaum, December 21, 2022. Here’s a bit more about Rudolph, von Braun, the Peenemünda rocket facility, and the Dora-Mittelbau slave labor camp. I may post photos of Von Braun with Hitler and Himmler in SS regalia, but feel uncomfortable doing so at the moment. I feel similarly about posting links to Von Braun’s inspirational interviews.

My hero, Peter Cooper of New York, 1791-1883.

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Peter Cooper

It’s good to have hero, someone whose approach to life, family and business you admire that you might reasonably be able to follow. As an engineer, inventor, I came to regard Peter Cooper of New York as a hero. He made his own business and was a success, in business and with his family without being crooked. This is something that is not as common as you might think. When I was in 4th grade, we got weekly assignments to read a biography and write about it. I tended to read about scientists and inventors then and after. I quickly discovered that successful inventors tended to die broke, estranged from their family and friends. Edison, Tesla, Salk, Goodyear, and Ford are examples. Tesla didn’t marry. Henry Ford’s children were messed up. Salk had a miserable marriage. Almost everyone working on the Atom Bomb had issues with the government. Most didn’t benefit financially. They died hated by the press as mass-murderers, and pursued by the FBI as potential spies. It was a sad pattern for someone who hoped to be an inventor -engineer.

The one major exception I found was Peter Cooper, an inventor, industrialist, and New York politician who was honest, and who died wealthy and liked with a good family. One result of reading about him was to conclude that some engineering areas are better than others; generally making weapons is not a path to personal success.

Tom Thumb, the blower at right is the secret to its light weight per power.

Peter Cooper was different, both in operation and outcome. Though he made some weapons (gun barrels) and inverted a remote control torpedo, these were not weapons of mass killing. Besides he but thee for “the good side” of the Civil War. And, when Cooper made an invention or a product, he made sure to have the capital available to make a profit on it too. He worked hard to make sure his products were monopolies, using a combination of patents and publicity to secure their position.

Brand management helps.

Cooper was a strong family man who made sure to own his own business, and made sure to control the sources of key materials too. He liked to invest in other businesses, but only as the controlling share-holder, or as a bond holder, believing that minor share-holders tend to be cheated. He was pro monopoly, pro trusts, and a big proponet of detailed contracts, so everyone knew where they stood. A famous invention of Cooper’s was Jello, a flavored, light version of his hide-glue, see the patent here. Besides patenting it, he sold the product with his brand, thus helping to maintain the monopoly.

Cooper was generous with donations to the poor, but not to everyone, and not with loans. And he would not sign anyone’s note as a guarantor. Borrowers tended to renege, he found, and they resent you besides. You lose your money, and lost them as a friend. He founded two free colleges, Cooper Union, and the Cooper-Limestone Institute, plus an inventor’s institute. (I got my education, free from Cooper Union.) Cooper ran these institutions in his lifetime, not waiting till he was dead to part with his money. Many do this in the vain hope that others will run the institution as they would.

Peter Cooper always sought a monopoly, or a near monopoly, patenting his own inventions, or buying the rights to others’ patents to help make it so. He believed that monopolies were good, saying they were the only sort of business that made money while allowing him to treat his workers well. If an invention would not result in a monopoly, Peter Cooper gave the rights away.

The list of inventions he didn’t patent include the instruments to test the quality of glue and steel (quality control is important), and a tide-powered ferry in New York. Perhaps his most famous unpainted invention was a lightweight, high power steam locomotive, “The Tom Thumb”, made in 1840. Innovations included beveled wheels to center the carriage on its rails, and a blower on the boiler fire, see photo above. The blower meant he could generate high-power in a small space at light weight. These are significant innovations, but Cooper did not foresee having a monopoly, so he didn’t pursue these ideas. Instead, he focussed on making rails and wire rope; he patented the process to roll steel, and the process for making coke from coal. Also on his glue/jello business. Since he made these items from dead cows and horses, he found he could also sell “foot oil” and steam-pounded leather, “Chamois”. He also pursued a telephone/ telegraph business across the Atlantic, more on that below, but only after getting monopoly rights for 50 years.

Cooper managed to stay friends with those he competed with by paying license fees for any patents he used (he tried to negotiate low rates), or buying or selling the patent rights as seemed appropriate. He also licensed his patents, and rented out buildings he didn’t need. He rented at a rate of 7% of the sale price, a metric I’ve used myself, considering rental to be like buying on loan. There is a theory of stock-buying that matches this.

The story the telegraph cable across the Atlantic is instructive to seeing how the pieces fit together. The first significant underwater cable was not laid by Cooper, by a Canadian inventor, Frederick Gisborne. It was laid in 1852 between Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Through personal connections, Gisborne’s company got exclusive rights for 30 years, for this and for a cable that would go to Newfoundland, but he didn’t have the money or baking to make it happen. The first cable failed, and Gisborne ran out of money and support. Only his exclusive rights remained. This is the typical story of an inventor/ engineer/businessman who has to rely on other peoples’ money and patience.

A few months after the failure, a friend of Cooper’s, Cyrus Field, convinced Cooper that good money could be made, and public good could be done, if Cooper could lay such a cable all the way to London. One thing that attracted Cooper to the project was that the cable could be made as an insulated iron-copper rope in Cooper’s own factory. Cooper, Field, and some partners (see painting below) bought Gisborne’s company, along with their exclusive rights, and formed a new company, The New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, see charter here. The founders are imagined* with a globe and a section of cable sitting on their table. Gisborne, though not shown in the painting, was a charter member, and made chief engineer. Cooper was president. He also traveled on the boat with Gisborne to lay the cable across the St. Lawrence – just to be sure he knew what was going on. This cable provided a trial for The Trans Atlantic cable.

The founding individuals to lay a transatlantic cable. Peter Cooper at left is the chairman, Cyrus Field is standing, Samuel Morse is at the back. Frederic Gisborne, a founder, does not appear in the paining. Typical.

Samuel Morse was hired as an electrician; he is pictured in the painting, but was not a charter member. Part of the problem with Morse was that he owned the patent on Morse-telegraphy, and Cooper didn’t want to pay his “exorbitant” fees. So Cooper and Field bought an alternative telegraph patent from David Hughes, a Kentucky school teacher. This telegraph system used tones instead of clicks and printed whole letters at a time. By hiring Morse, but not his patents, Cooper saved money, while retaining Morse’s friendship and expertise. The alternative could have been a nasty spat. Their telegraph company sub-licensed Hughes’s tone-method a group of western telegraph owners, “The Western Union,” who used it for many years, producing the distinctive Western Union Telegrams. With enough money in hand and credibility from the Canadian trial, the group secured 50 years monopoly rights for a telegraph line across the Atlantic. Laying the cable took many years, with semi-failed attempts in 1857, 1858, and 1865. When the eventual success came in 1866, the 50 years’ monopoly rights they’d secured meant that they made money from the start. They could treat workers fairly. Marconi would discover that Cooper wrote a good contract; his wireless telegraph required a widely different route.

I should also note that Peter Cooper was politically active: he started as a Democrat, helped form the Republican Party, bringing Lincoln to speak in NY for the first time, and ended up founding the Greenback-Labor Party, running for president as a Greenback. He was strongly for tariffs, and strongly against inflation. He said that the dollar should have the same value for all time for the same reason that the foot should have the same length and the pound the same weight. I have written in favor of tariffs off and on. They help keep manufacturing in America, and help insure that those who require French wine or German cars pay the majority of US taxes. They are also a non-violent vehicle for foreign policy.

Operating under these principles, through patents and taxed monopolies, Peter Cooper died wealthy, and liked. Liked by his workers, liked by much of the press, and by his family too, with children who turned out well. The children of rich people often turn out poorly. Carnegie’s children fought each other in court, Ford’s were miserable. Cooper’s children continued in business and politics, successfully and honorably, and in science/ engineering (Peter Coper Hewitt invented the power rectifier, sold to Westinghouse). The success of Peter Cooper’s free college, Cooper Union, influenced many of his friends to open similar institutions. Among his friends who did this were Carnegie, Pratt, Stevens, Rensselaer, and Vanderbilt. He stayed friends with them and with other inventors of the day, despite competing in business and politics. Most rich folks can not do this; they tend to develop big egos, and few principles.

Robert Buxbaum, November 30, 2022. I find the painting interesting. Why was it painted? Why is Gisborne not in it and Morse in the painting — sometimes described as vice President? The charter lists Morse as “electrician”, an employee. Chandler White, holding papers next to Cooper, was Vice President. My guess is that the painting was made to help promote the company and sell stock. They made special cigars with this image too. This essay started as a 5th grade project with my son. See a much earlier version here.

John Kennedy’s Nazi spy lover

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Photo and biographical background from Julian Wiles

Kennedy was a well-liked president with several character flaws. The most famous were his sexual dalliances. One these was with a Nazi spy, Inga Marie Arvad, “Inga Binga”. He continued with her, on and off, from his days in Naval Intelligence through his election to congress in 1946 despite being informed of her background by the navy and the FBI. When they began their relationship, Inga Marie was beautiful, 28 and married. That didn’t seem to matter, as she was beautiful, the ex-Miss Denmark, charming and instantly in love with Kennedy. She was also a close friend of Hitler, Goring, and Göebbels, and in the employ of both The Washington Times-Herald and of Axel Wenner-Gren, a suspected Nazi spy master who owned the largest private yacht in the world. It was suspected that the fuel Wenner-Gren bought for his yacht was used to refuel German U-boats in the area.

Before becoming involved with Kennedy, Ms Arvand had married Kamak Abdel Nabi, an Egyptian diplomat, and then Paul Fejos, a Hungarian film-maker. She traveled the world with Fejos, financed by Wenner-Gren, meeting, greeting, and film-making. Still married, she left Fejos in 1936 to move to the US and study journalism at Columbia University. Getting a job at the Washington Times-herald, she wrote light hearted articles based on interviews with the movers and shakers of DC, supported by $5000 checks from her friend, Wenner-Gren.

The affair with Kennedy began in the fall of 1941. Kennedy was working at the Office of Naval Intelligence, a post he’d gotten with influence from his ambassador father, “Big Joe Kennedy”. Joe was an opponent of going to war. Ms. Arvand heartily agreed. She met Jack Kennedy through his sister, Kathleen, “Kick”.

The office of Naval Intelligence had rules against adulterous relationships. Kennedy ignored them. In this case it was particularly problematic as Inga was married, Protestant, and an associate of Hitler. The navy told Kennedy to stay away, and transferred him to Charlestown with orders to stay there, “not to venture more than 50 miles”. Ms Arvad visited him there often under an assumed name, Barbara White. They stayed together, took in movies, plays, and golf. The FBI watched as Arvad was thought to be a spy. Kennedy was again told to stay clear; he did not. Eventually, Hoover intervened and got Kennedy transferred to the South Pacific despite his bad back and other health problems. Inga broke off with Kennedy though he continued to write love letters. She ignored them. Perhaps she thought Kennedy was no longer interesting, even a liability. She was trying to get a job with US overseas intelligence, the forerunner of the CIA.

Inga with husband, and two children. Note that the older, Ronald, looks like J. Kennedy. Photo from Geoffrey Gray.

When Inga didn’t get the job, she moved to Los Angeles where she continued in journalism, working for Harpers Bazar, interviewing the movers and shakers in LA and New York, generally pushing for peace. In January, 1944, she started writing to Kennedy again. He was a hero with political ambitions. She reunited with Kennedy in LA, for a private interview, published, about the sinking of his PT boat. They continued dating well into 1946, after Kennedy was elected to congress. Inga got pregnant from someone (Kennedy?) and left to marry an actor she’d been dating, Tim McCoy. Some months later, Inga gave birth to a boy who looks a lot more like Kennedy than like her husband, see photo.

While Inga no longer contacted JFK, nor JFK her, it seems that Inga was a major factor influencing Kennedy to go into politics — where he could make the world more peaceful. Inga died of Colin cancer in 1973. She only revealed her part of the affair to her eldest son, the Kennedy look-alike, near the end of her life.

The FBI’s knowledge of this story this emerged from the private files of J. Edgar Hoover, recently unsealed, reported by investigative writer, Geoffrey Gray. He speculates that Hoover used his knowledge of Kennedy’s affairs to keep from having to retire, though well past retirement age. Hover was eventually removed by Nixon, and FBI got back at Nixon by leaking as much negative as they could to the press, and more-recently helping the Democrats bug the Trump campaign, then helping spread Russian collusion documents. Also, according to the BBC they were behind the plot to kidnap MI governor Whitmer — a crime they immediately “solved”. I’m not convinced that the FBI, isn’t more of a danger than a protection. See a previous essay, “who will protect us from our protectors?”

Regarding John Kennedy, I’m less-bothered by his sexual dalliances, than by his tendency to suddenly reverse himself. Kennedy called for an attack on Cuba, then reversed while the attack was in progress, dooming the attackers. He reversed again in South Vietnam, first first supporting the government then overthrowing it, and on civil rights. Vigorous persistence, even in the face of criticism is a good trait in a president, something I liked about LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, and Reagan.

Robert Buxbaum, October 14, 2022.

A great modern artist, Duchamp becomes a great modern chess player, and returns to art.

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I’d written previously about Marcel Duchamp’s early work as a founder of the Dada school of modern art, a school that aims to say nothing about anything except about itself. Duchamp hung a urinal as art and called it “fountain.” It was comic, insulting, and engaging — an inspiration for many modern arts to follow , and much bad modern art, too — the collections of string and found objects and paintings of squares or squiggles. But the story of Duchamp is interesting. In 1925, M. Duchamp gave up on art, at least this type of art and became a chess player. As with art, he was very good at it, and became the French chess champion. Now that’s an unexpected turn.

What sort of chess did Marcel Duchamp play? Modern. Very modern. While tradition chess had focussed on the center. He developed at the sides, a strategy that was called an “Indian attack”, named (I assume) after American Indians attacking a stage-coach. Instead of attacking directly, the popular image of an Indian attack is attack from the sides, or behind trees. In chess, it involves typically a “fianchettoed bishop.” Other modern chess players of the time attacked from the side too (Réti, Alekhine) but they generally worked form one side or the other with some central presence. Duchamp worked from both, often with no center.

Position after white’s 13th move

Here is a dramatic example, a position from a game with an American great, GM George Koltanowski. It’s 13 moves in, with Duchamp, is black, generally considered the weaker side. He has fianchettoed both of his bishops, and given up the center to Koltanowski. It’s Duchamp’s turn to move/ He will win in three moves.

Notice that Koltanowsi’s bishops point outward, as a cowboys guns might point, or as from a British fighting square. Meanwhile, Duchamp’s bishops point inward, with his queen -bishop almost directly at the white king. The game proceeded as follows. 13…, Nxd5 14.Nxd7, Nxf4 15.Nxf8, Bd4, 0-1..

The full game, seen here,. It might prove instructive if you want to explore in Duchamp’s footsteps. While I play traditionally, I sometimes fianchetto, and do not find it racist that such side-attacks are called “Indian attacks.” Perhaps that’s because I’m old and used to such things, or because they very often work.

Please Touch. M. Duchamp 1947
Self-portrait, M. Duchamp, 1957 (torn paper on black velvet).

As M. Duchamp’s chess skills waned, he returned to the art world, going in the opposite direction of Dali. Duchamp’s last works are small, and simple. They are still arresting but more dream-like. Dali’s works grew bigger and busier as he got older.

That Duchamp could be both a great artist and a great chess-player suggests there is such a thing as general intelligence. It’s a touchy subject, I’ve pondered on here as intelligence appears to be inheritable.

Robert Buxbaum, September 23, 2022.