Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner

“Everytime I find a film or paper that I like, they discontinue it.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“All good art is abstract in its structure.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“Objectivity is of the very essence of photography, its contribution and at the same time its limitation…”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“I’ve always wanted to be aware of what’s going on around me, and I’ve wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“The material of the artist lies not within himself nor in the fabrications of his imagination, but in the world around him. The element which gives life to the great Picassos and Cezannes, to the paintings of Van Gogh, is the relationship of the artist to context, to the truth of the real world. It is the way he sees this world and translates it into art that determines whether the work of art becomes a new and active force within reality, to widen and transform man’s experience. The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer in The World on My Doorstep, the Years 1950 to 1976

“Honesty no less than intensity of vision is the prerequisite of a living expression. This means a real respect for the thing in front of… the photographer… this is accomplished without tricks of process or manipulation through the use of straight photographic methods…”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“The decision as to when to photograph, the actual click of the shutter, is partly controlled from the outside, by the flow of life, but it also comes from the mind and the heart of the artist. The photograph is his vision of the world and expresses, however subtly, his values and convictions.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“I read the other day that Minor White said it takes twenty years to become a photographer. I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. I would say, judging from myself, that it takes at least eight or nine years. But it does not take any longer than it takes to learn to play the piano or the violin. If it takes twenty years, you might as well forget about it!”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you. If you are alive, it will mean something to you, and if you care enough about photography, and if you know how to use it, you will want to photograph that meaningness. If you let other people’s vision get between the world and your own, you will achieve that extremely common and worthless thing, a pictorial photograph.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

Paul Strand (1890 – 1976)

Paul Strand was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century. His diverse body of work, spanning six decades, covers numerous genres and subjects throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Born in New York City to Bohemian parents, in his late teens Strand was a student of renowned documentary photographer Lewis Hine at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. It was while on a fieldtrip in this class that Strand first visited the 291 art gallery – operated by Stieglitz and Edward Steichen – where exhibitions of work by forward-thinking modernist photographers and painters would move Strand to take his photographic hobby more seriously. Stieglitz would later promote Strand’s work in the 291 gallery itself, in his photography publication Camera Work, and in his artwork in the Hieninglatzing studio.

Some of this early work, like the well-known "Wall Street," experimented with formal abstractions (influencing, among others, Edward Hopper and his idiosyncratic urban vision). Other of Strand’s works reflect his interest in using the camera as a tool for social reform. He was one of the founders of the Photo League, an association of photographers who advocated using their art to promote social and political causes.

Early Years…

During the 1920s he mainly photographed urban sites, continued with the machine forms begun earlier, and turned his attention to nature, using 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 inch view cameras and making contact prints on platinum paper. In these works, acknowledged as seminal in the evolution of the New Objectivity, form and feeling are indivisible and intense. In addition, Strand’s writings, beginning in 1917 with "Photography and the New God," set forth the necessity for the photographer to evolve an aesthetic based on the objective nature of reality and on the intrinsic capabilities of the large-format camera with sharp lens.

“The camera machine cannot evade the objects which are in front of it. When the photographer selects this movement, the light, the objects, he must be true to them. If he includes in his space a strip of grass, it must be felt as the living differentiated thing it is and so recorded. It must take its proper but no less important place as a shape and a texture in relationship to the mountain tree or what not, which are included.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

After service in the Army Medical Corps, where he was introduced to X-ray and other medical camera procedures, Strand collaborated with Sheeler on Manhatta, released as New York the Magnificent in 1921. Shortly afterward, he purchased an Akeley movie camera and began to work as a free-lance cinematographer, a career that he followed until the early 1930S when the industry for making news and short features was transferred from New York to the West Coast. Aware of the revolutionary social ideas being tested in Mexico through his visits to the Southwest, Strand sought the opportunity to make still photographs and to produce government-sponsored documentary films; Redes, or The Wave, released in 1934, depicted the economic problems confronting a fishing village near Vera Cruz.

“Your photography is a record of your living – for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”
— Paul Strand, Photographer

Following a futile attempt to assist the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union in 1935, Strand worked with Pare Lorentz on The Plough that Broke the Plains, following which he and other progressive filmmakers organized Frontier Films to produce a series of pro-labor and anti-Fascist movies. Their most ambitious production, Native Land, which evolved from a Congressional hearing into anti-labor activities, was released in 1941 on the eve of the second World War, at which time its message was considered politically divisive.

Sojourn to France…

In June 1949, Strand left the United States to present Native Land at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in Czechoslovakia. It was a departure that marked the beginning of Strand’s long exile from the prevailing climate of McCarthyism in the United States. The remaining 27 years of his life were spent in Orgeval, France where, despite never learning the language, he maintained an impressive creative life, assisted by his third wife, fellow photographer Hazel Kingsbury Strand.

“The documentary photographer aims his camera at the real world to record truthfulness. At the same time, he must strive for form, to devise effective ways of organizing and using the material. For content and form are interrelated. The problems presented by content and form must be so developed that the result is fundimentally [sic] true to the realities of life as we know it. The chief problem is to find a form that adequately represents the reality.”
— Paul Strand, The Best of Popular Photography by Harvey V. Fondiller

The timing of Strand’s departure to France is coincident with the first libel trial of his friend Alger Hiss, with whom he maintained a correspondence until his death. Although he was never officially a member of the Communist Party, many of Strand’s collaborators were either Party members (James Aldridge; Cesare Zavattini) or were prominent socialist writers and activists (Basil Davidson). Many of his friends were also Communists or were suspected of being so (MP DN Pritt; film director Joseph Losey; Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid; actor Alex McCrindle). Strand was also closely involved with Frontier Films, one of more than twenty organizations that were branded as ‘subversive’ and ‘un-American’ by the US Attorney General.

Strand also insisted that his books should be printed in Leipzig, East Germany, even if this meant that they were initially prohibited from the American market on account of their Communist provenance. De-classified intelligence files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and now lodged at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, reveal that Strand’s movements around Europe were closely monitored by the security services.

His Books…

Although Strand is best known for his early abstractions, his return to still photography in this later period produced some of his most significant work in the form of six book ‘portraits’ of place:

• Time in New England (1950)
• La France de Profil (1952)
• Un Paese (featuring photographs of Luzzara and the Po River Valley in Italy, 1955)
• Tir a’Mhurain / Outer Hebrides (1962)
• Living Egypt (1969)
• Ghana: an African portrait (1976)

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Paul Strand that can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Strand

Also, an article on Paul Strand found in: 
Peter Stepan. (2008) 50 Photographers You Should Know. New York: Prestel.

by Gerald Boerner

“The successful operation of the Manchester Mark 1… who used the phrase "electronic brain" to describe the machines”
— The British Press

“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any of the fields normally covered by the human intellect and eventually compete on equal terms.”
— Alan Turing

“The Manchester Automatic Digital Machine (MADM) Mark I Prototype (1948) was constructed primarily to test the use of Williams Tube memory technology. As such it was a very small machine with only 32 words of memory and only 7 instructions. However, despite its small size, it was a complete stored program computer capable of performing any computing task, limited only by the size of its memory.”
— Brian Shelburne, Wittenberg University

“Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No machine could feel pleasure at its success, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or miserable when it cannot get what it wants.”
— Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, Professor of Neurosurgery at Manchester University

“I am the son of mathematicians. My mother and father were part of the team that programmed the world’s first commercial stored-program computer, the Manchester University ‘Mark I,’ which was sold by Ferranti, Ltd. in the early 1950s.  They were excited by the idea that, in principle, a person could program a computer to do most anything.”
— Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the Web”

Manchester Mark 1 Computer

The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest electronic computers, developed at the University of Manchester from the Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or "Baby", the world’s first electronic stored-program computer. It was also called the Manchester Automatic Digital Machine, or MADM. Work began in August 1948 and the first version was operational by April 1949, when a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949.

The machine’s successful operation was widely reported in the British press, who used the phrase "electronic brain" in describing it to their readers. That description provoked a reaction from the head of Manchester University’s Department of Neurosurgery, which began a long-running debate as to whether an electronic computer could ever be truly creative.

The Mark 1 was initially developed to provide a computing resource within the university, to allow researchers to gain experience in the practical use of computers, but it very quickly also became a prototype on which the design of Ferranti’s commercial version could be based. Development ceased at the end of 1949, and the machine was scrapped towards the end of 1950, replaced in February 1951 by the first installation of a Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer.

The computer is especially historically significant because of its pioneering inclusion of index registers, an innovation which made it easier for a program to read sequentially through an array of words in memory. Thirty-four patents resulted from the machine’s development, and many of the ideas behind its design were incorporated in subsequent commercial products such as the IBM 701 and 702 as well as the Ferranti Mark 1. The chief designers, Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn, concluded from their experiences with the Mark 1 that computers would be used more in scientific roles than in pure mathematics. In 1951 they started on the development of a successor to the Mark 1, which would include a floating point unit. The resulting machine, known as Meg, ran its first program in May 1954.

Background…

Design of the von Neumann Architecture (1947)

In 1936, mathematician Alan Turing published a definition of a theoretical "universal computing machine", a computer which held its program on tape, along with the data being worked on. Turing proved that such a machine was capable of solving any conceivable mathematical problem for which an algorithm could be written. During the 1940s, Turing and others such as Konrad Zuse developed the idea of using the computer’s own memory to hold both the program and data, instead of tape, but it was mathematician John von Neumann who became widely credited with defining that computer architecture, on which the Manchester Mark 1 was based.

The practical construction of a von Neumann computer depended on the availability of a suitable memory device. The University of Manchester’s Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), the world’s first stored-program computer, had successfully demonstrated the practicality of the stored-program approach and of the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory based on a standard cathode ray tube (CRT), by running its first program in June 1948. Early electronic computers were generally programmed by being rewired, or via plugs and patch panels; there was no separate program stored in memory, as in a modern computer. It could take several days to reprogram ENIAC, for instance. Stored-program computers were also being developed by other researchers, notably the National Physical Laboratory’s Pilot ACE, Cambridge University’s EDSAC, and US Army’s EDVAC. The SSEM and the Mark 1 differed primarily in their use of Williams tubes as memory devices, instead of mercury delay lines.

Development and design…

Functional schematic showing the Williams tubes in green.
Tube C holds the current instruction and its address,
A is the accumulator, M is used to hold the multiplicand
and the multiplier for a multiply operation, and B
contains the index registers, used to modify instructions.

The SSEM had been designed by the team of Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill. To develop the Mark 1 they were joined by two research students, D. B. G. Edwards and G. E. Thomas; work began in earnest in August 1948. The project soon had the dual purpose of supplying Ferranti with a working design on which they could base a commercial machine, the Ferranti Mark 1, and of building a computer that would allow researchers to gain experience of how such a machine could be used in practice. The first of the two versions of the Manchester Mark 1 – known as the Intermediary Version – was operational by April 1949. However, this first version lacked features such as the instructions necessary to programmatically transfer data between the main store and its newly developed magnetic backing store, which had to be done by halting the machine and manually initiating the transfer. These missing features were incorporated in the Final Specification version, which was fully working by October 1949. The machine contained 4,050 valves and had a power consumption of 25 kilowatts. To increase reliability, purpose-built CRTs made by GEC were used in the machine instead of the standard devices used in the SSEM.

The SSEM’s 32-bit word length was increased to 40 bits. Each word could hold either one 40-bit number or two 20-bit program instructions. Main store consisted of two Williams tubes each holding an array of 32 x 40-bit words – known as a page – backed up by a magnetic drum capable of storing an additional 32 pages; the capacity was increased to 128 pages in the Final Specification version. The 12-inch (300 mm) diameter drum, initially known as a magnetic wheel, contained a series of parallel magnetic tracks around its surface, each with its own read/write head. Each track held 2,560 bits, corresponding to 2 pages (2 x 32 x 40 bits). One revolution of the drum took 30 milliseconds, during which time both pages could be transferred to the CRT main memory, although the actual data transfer time depended on the latency, the time it took for a page to arrive under the read/write head. Writing pages to the drum took about twice as long as reading. The drum’s rotational speed was synchronized to the main central processor clock, which allowed for additional drums to be added. Data was recorded onto the drum using a phase modulation technique still known today as Manchester coding.

The machine’s instruction set was increased from the 7 of the SSEM to 26 initially, including multiplication done in hardware. This increased to 30 instructions in the Final Specification version. Ten bits of each word were allocated to hold the instruction code. The standard instruction time was 1.8 milliseconds, but multiplication was much slower, depending on the size of the operand.

Perhaps the machine’s most significant innovation was its incorporation of index registers, commonplace on modern computers. The SSEM had included two registers, implemented as Williams tubes; the accumulator (A) and the program counter (C). As A and C had already been assigned, the tube holding the two index registers, originally known as B-lines, was given the name B. The contents of the registers could be used to modify program instructions, allowing convenient iteration through an array of numbers stored in memory. The Mark 1 also had a fourth tube, (M), to hold the multiplicand and multiplier for a multiplication operation.

Programming…

Section of punched tape showing how one 40-bit
word was encoded as eight 5-bit characters

Of the 20 bits allocated for each program instruction, 10 were used to hold the instruction code, which allowed for 1,024 (2¹⁰) different instructions. The machine had 26 initially, increasing to 30 when the function codes to programmatically control the data transfer between the magnetic drum and the cathode ray tube (CRT) main store were added. On the Intermediary Version programs were input by key switches, and the output was displayed as a series of dots and dashes on a cathode ray tube known as the output device, just as on the SSEM from which the Mark 1 had been developed. However, the Final Specification machine, completed in October 1949, benefitted from the addition of a teleprinter with a 5-hole paper-tape reader and punch.

Mathematician Alan Turing, who had been appointed to the nominal post of Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University in September 1948, devised a base 32 encoding scheme based on the standard ITA2 5-bit teleprinter code, which allowed programs and data to be written to and read from paper tape. The ITA2 system maps each of the possible 32 binary values that can be represented in 5 bits (2⁵) to a single character. Thus "10010" represents "D", "10001" represents "Z", and so forth. Turing changed only a few of the standard encodings; for instance, 00000 and 01000, which mean "no effect" and "linefeed" in the teleprinter code, were represented by the characters "/" and "@" respectively. Binary zero, represented by the forward slash, was the most common character in programs and data, leading to sequences written as "///////////////". One early user suggested that Turing’s choice of a forward slash was a subconscious choice on his part, a representation of rain seen through a dirty window, reflecting Manchester’s "famously dismal" weather.

Later developments…

Tootill was seconded from Manchester University to Ferranti for four months from August 1949, to continue work on the Ferranti Mark 1′s design. The Manchester Mark 1 was dismantled and scrapped towards the end of 1950, to be replaced a few months later by the first Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first commercially available general-purpose computer.

Between 1946 and 1949 the average size of the design team working on the Mark 1 and its predecessor, the SSEM, was about four people. During that time 34 patents were taken out based on the team’s work, either by the Ministry of Supply or by its successor, the National Research Development Corporation. In July 1949 IBM invited Williams to the United States on all expenses paid trip to discuss the Mark 1′s design. The company subsequently licensed several of the patented ideas developed for the machine, including the Williams tube, in the design of its own 701 and 702 computers. The most significant design legacy of the Manchester Mark 1 was perhaps its incorporation of index registers, the patent for which was taken out in the names of Williams, Kilburn, Tootill, and Newman.

Kilburn and Williams concluded that computers would be used more in scientific roles than pure maths, and decided to develop a new machine which would include a floating point unit. Work began in 1951. The resulting machine, which ran its first program in May 1954, was known as Meg, or the megacycle machine. It was smaller and simpler than the Mark 1, as well as much faster for maths problems. Ferranti produced a version of Meg with the Williams tubes replaced by the more reliable core memory. The resulting design was sold as the Ferranti Mercury.

Summary…

"The capacity of the store is at present only 32 ‘words’, each of 31 binary digits, to hold instructions, data, and working. Hence only simple arithmetic routines devised to test the machine can be run. Examples of problems that have been carried out are: (1) Long division by the standard process. (For (2^30-1)/31, this took 1 1/2 seconds, the quotient being given to 39 significant binary figures of which the 13 least significant, to the left of the binary point, were zero, since 31 is a factor of 2^30 -1.) (2) H.C.F. by the standard process. ( For 314,159,265 and 271,828,183, which are co-prime, approximately 0.5 seconds). (3) Factoring an integer. For (3) the method was deliberately chosen to give a long run the result of which could be easily checked. Thus the highest proper factor of 2^18 was found by trying in a single routine every integer from 2^18 – 1 downward, the necessary divisions being done not by long division, but by the primitive process of repeated subtraction of the divisor. Thus about 130,000 numbers were tested, involving some 3.5 million operations. The correct answer was obtained in a 52-minute run. The instruction table contained 17 entries."
— F.C. Williams and T. Kilburn: Electronic digital computers. Nature 162, 487 (Sept 1948).

Background and biographical information is from the Wikipedia articles on:

The Manchester Mark 1 Computer that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_1

Frederic C. Williams that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Calland_Williams

by Gerald Boerner

“He lived for others. 1774-1845.”
— Johnny Appleseed

“It’s really wonderful to be here and see all of you. I know that Todd would love being here himself. Even though he’s not here physically, he is here among us. I brought a few things I thought might remind you,”
— Johnny Appleseed

“One very extraordinary missionary continued to exert, for the spread of divine truth, his modest and humble efforts, which would put the most zealous member to blush.  We now allude to Mr. John Chapman, from whom we are in habit of hearing frequently.  His temporal employment consists in preceding the settlements, and sowing nurseries of fruit trees, which he avows to be pursued for the chief purpose of giving him an opportunity of spreading the doctrines throughout the western country.”
— Swedenborgian Church, Beginnings and Becomings, 1

Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman)

John Chapman was born at Leominster, Massachusetts on this day in 1774. A younger brother was born and died in 1776, his mother died soon afterward. His father fought for independence as a member of the Minutemen, so Johnny was probably raised by his grandparents. John headed west in 1797, just ahead of a wave of westward expansion, planting apple orchards in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Ohio – some of which are still bearing fruit. He didn’t just throw the seed on the ground as sometimes depicted, he bought land and started nurseries. He did give away a lot of trees, but mostly sold them as many homestead grants required that fifty apple trees be planted in the first year.

Chapman was also a minister with the Church of New Jerusalem (Swedenborgian), and was able to mediate disputes between farmers, and between settlers and the native Americans. He spent almost fifty years growing apple trees, it’s said that the only time he ever was sick was when he died, but there are a lot of legends of Johnny Appleseed.

Heading to the frontier…

In 1792, 18-year-old Chapman went west, taking 11-year-old half-brother Nathaniel and his sister with him. Their destination was the headwaters of the Susquehanna. There are stories of him practicing his nurseryman craft in the Wilkes-Barre area and of picking seeds from the pomace at Potomac cider mills in the late 1790s. Another story has Chapman living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Grant’s Hill in 1794 at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion.

Land records show that John Chapman was in what is today Licking County, Ohio in 1800. Congress had passed resolutions in 1798 to give land there, ranging from 160 to 2,240 acres (65-900 hectares), to Revolutionary War veterans, but soldiers did not actually receive letters of patent to their grants until 1802. By the time the veterans arrived, John’s nurseries, located on the Isaac Stadden farm, had trees big enough to transplant.

Nathaniel Chapman arrived with his second family and sister in 1805. At that point, the younger Nathaniel Chapman rejoined the elder, and his sister had gotten married. John spent the rest of his life as an itinerant planter and sometime-preacher.

By 1806, when he arrived in Jackson County, Ohio, wading down the Ohio River with a load of seeds, he was known as Johnny Appleseed. He had used a pack horse to bring seeds to Licking Creek in 1800, so it seems likely that the nickname appeared at the same time as his most famous event: Licking the "Path to The West." Once John Chapmen arrived and got out of the river, he was said to actually bend and lick the ground for more than six yards. This actually encouraged animals to follow his path on this long journey, yet nobody knew why this attracted so many animals.

Attitudes towards animals…

Johnny Appleseed’s beliefs made him care deeply about animals. His concern extended even to insects. Henry Howe, who visited all 88 counties in Ohio in the early 1800s, collected these stories in the 1830s, when Johnny Appleseed was still alive:

One cool autumnal night, while lying by his camp-fire in the woods, he observed that the mosquitoes flew in the blaze and were burnt. Johnny, who wore on his head a tin utensil which answered both as a cap and a mush pot, filled it with water and quenched the fire, and afterwards remarked, “God forbid that I should build a fire for my comfort, that should be the means of destroying any of His creatures.”

Another time he made a camp-fire at the end of a hollow log in which he intended to pass the night, but finding it occupied by a bear and cubs, he removed his fire to the other end, and slept on the snow in the open air, rather than disturb the bear.

Attitude towards marriage…

When Johnny Appleseed was asked why he did not marry, his answer was always that two female spirits would be his wives in the after-life if he stayed single on earth. However, Henry Howe reported that Appleseed had been a frequent visitor to Perrysville, Ohio, where Appleseed is remembered as being a constant snuff customer, with beautiful teeth. He was to propose to Miss Nancy Tannehill there—only to find that he was a day late; she had accepted a prior proposal:

On one occasion Miss PRICE’s mother asked Johnny if he would not be a happier man, if he were settled in a home of his own, and had a family to love him. He opened his eyes very wide–they were remarkably keen, penetrating grey eyes, almost black–and replied that all women were not what they professed to be; that some of them were deceivers; and a man might not marry the amiable woman that he thought he was getting, after all.

Now we had always heard that Johnny had loved once upon a time, and that his lady love had proven false to him. Then he said one time he saw a poor, friendless little girl, who had no one to care for her, and sent her to school, and meant to bring her up to suit himself, and when she was old enough he intended to marry her. He clothed her and watched over her; but when she was fifteen years old, he called to see her once unexpectedly, and found her sitting beside a young man, with her hand in his, listening to his silly twaddle.

I peeped over at Johnny while he was telling this, and, young as I was, I saw his eyes grow dark as violets, and the pupils enlarge, and his voice rise up in denunciation, while his nostrils dilated and his thin lips worked with emotion. How angry he grew! He thought the girl was basely ungrateful. After that time she was no protegé of his.

Legacy…

Dies…Mr. John Chapman (better known as Johnny Appleseed).  The deceased was well known throughout this region by his eccentricity and strange garb…He is supposed to have considerable property, (Note: It took ten years to fully finish the task of settling his property because it was so scattered and not even Johnny himself kept full track of it.)  yet denied himself almost the common necessities of life; not so much perhaps from avarice as from his peculiar notions on religious subjects…He submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter… He always carried with him some work on the doctrines of Swedenbough (Note: This is the actual spelling from the obituary) and would readily converse and argue on his tenets, using much shrewdness and penetration.

Despite his altruism and charity, Johnny Appleseed left an estate of over 1,200 acres (500 ha) of valuable nurseries to his sister, worth millions even then, and far more now. He also owned four plots in Allen County, Indiana, including a nursery in Milan Township, Allen County, Indiana, with 15,000 trees.^[15] He could have left more if he had been diligent in his bookkeeping. He bought the southwest quarter (160 acres) of section 26, Mohican Township, Ashland County, Ohio, but he did not record the deed and lost the property.

The financial panic of 1837 took a toll on his estate. Trees only brought two or three cents each, as opposed to the "fip-penny bit" (about six and a quarter cents) that he usually got. Some of his land was sold for taxes following his death, and litigation used up much of the rest.

March 11 or September 26 are sometimes celebrated as Johnny Appleseed Day. The September date is Appleseed’s acknowledged birthdate, but the March date is sometimes preferred because it is during planting season, even though it is disputed as the day of his death. Other sources report that he died on February 18.

Johnny Appleseed Elementary School is a public school located in Leominster, MA, his birthplace.

A large terra cotta sculpture of Johnny Appleseed, created by Viktor Schreckengost, decorates the front of the Lakewood High School Civic Auditorium in Lakewood, Ohio. Although the local Board of Education deemed Appleseed too "eccentric" a figure to grace the front of the building, renaming the sculpture simply "Early Settler," students, teachers, and parents alike still call the sculpture by its intended name: "Johnny Appleseed."

Other Events on this Day

• In 1774…
  John Chapman, a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, is born in Leominster, Massachusetts.
• In 1777…
  British troops occupy Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War.
• In 1789…
  George Washington names Thomas Jefferson as the first secretary of State.
• In 1950…
  During the Korean War, American-led UN troops recapture Seoul, South Korea.
• In 1960…
  In Chicago, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon square off in the first televised presidential election debate.

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Johnny Appleseed that can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed

Attention: All Facebook users… New Worm is spreading… Take a look at this and be alert for this type of message if you are a Facebook user… This is important! Pay attention! Have you encountered this yet? Let me know…

WARNING: Facebook Worm Spreading via News Feed 
Source: mashable.com

Malware and spam are finding new ways to spread across social media. A few days ago, a nasty Twitter Worm spread through DMs. Today, we have received multiple reports that a new worm is spreading via Facebook wall posts and status updates.

The worm makes a post on walls and updates. … [MORE]

This is definitely a new translation of the creation story… For laughs, take a look at this article… It might be interesting to today’s teens who understand this language. Strange how 140 characters will change the expression of one’s ideas… Let me know what you think…

Tom McNichol: The Story of Creation (via Twitter) 
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Day One

Let there B-lite. OMG! Or shld I say Oh Me! It’s so much easier 2-C now. WTF was I thinking B4? Spent the rest of the day dividing lite from drkness. It is good.

Day Two

Made a firmament (sort of a dome thing) to divide the waters under firmament from the waters above. Assigned firmament the file name <heaven>.  +<:-) … [MORE]

When will banks become responsible for their own goof-ups… One bank sent sensitive data via non-secure channels to the wrong Gmail account. The bank then sought a court order requiring Google to reveal the ID of the account holder. Read on to see how this worked out and how it threatens the rights of users on the net. Let me know what you think…

Judge Rules Against Gmail User After Bank Screws Up 
Source: mashable.com

In a highly troubling ruling from U.S. District Court Judge James Ware, Google was ordered to deactivate the Gmail account of an innocent user whose only crime was receiving the results of a bank screw-up.

Earlier this week an employee at a Wilson, Wyoming-based Rocky Mountain Bank inadvertently sent confidential information including names, addresses, social security numbers and loan information for more than 1,300 customers to the wrong Gmail address. Realizing its mistake, the bank sent a follow-up email asking the recipient to destroy the information. When it received no reply, the bank asked the courts to force Google to disclose the recipient’s identity and deactivate the account. Judge Ware, remarkably, agreed. … [MORE]

Cyber bullying through a fake FB page… This is a truely disturbing article about four teenagers (who may have thought themselves beyond the reach of the law) who set up a FB page in the name of the boy to be harassed. They they proceeded to make him appear both gay and racist. These teenagers are being sued. Hopefully this case will not turn out like the recently dismissed MySpace suit in LA. Take a look and let me know what you think…

4 Teens Sued for Obscene Fake Facebook Profile 
Source: mashable.com

Imagine this: four teenagers take to Facebook to create a fake profile that continually misrepresents your son as a gay racist. Then consider that profile amasses 580 plus friends. You’d be pretty pissed off, right?

For one mom in particular, Laura Cook, this nightmare is a reality for her and her athlete son. Fighting back, she’s now suing the four teenagers, on behalf of her son, on five separate counts including defamation and emotional distress. She’s seeking compensatory and punitive damages for amounts not yet disclosed. … [MORE]