ERDNASE

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lybrary
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 8:58 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:And even the tail end of your procedure doesn't align with reality. As Bill pointed out, your formula implies that Trump's height (from his hand measurements) is 5' 2 1/2" vs his actual 6' 3". This should set off alarm bells and alert you to the fact that this kind of calculation is loaded with HUGE error. Maybe the hands were measured wrong. Maybe the formula is wrong. Maybe both. And with Erdnase, the set of uncertainties is much larger.
It is not wrong. All it means is that there are exceptions, there are outliers for which these proportions do not work well. But the vast majority of people do conform to these proportions with reasonably small variations. Since you are making an outlier argument, that Sanders was 5'9" but had hands of a typical 5'4" man, you would have to provide some evidence that he indeed was. There are photos of Sanders. Do any show his hands?
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 8:58 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:Also, as I've mentioned several times, different footwear can substantially change the perceived size differences. I notice this myself all the time. This adds additional uncertainty since it's unlikely the two men were barefoot in the middle of the winter on a chilly Chicago day. :-)
I am sure Bob you are with Bill that Sanders was able to modify his spine to lower his height from 5'9" to 5'4" on will while the 6'2" Smith walked on stilts into the hotel room and wondered why Erdnase is that damn small.


In 1911, Sanders talks about pirhouetting on his "nether pegs", so I'm sure your stilt scenario is what he is referring to or at least inspired it :-)

He hez wondrous grace in hiz nether pegs, when he pir-hoo-etts on hiz rear hind legs

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 9:00 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:In 1911, Sanders talks about pirhouetting on his "nether pegs", so I'm sure your stilt scenario is what he is referring to or at least inspired it :-)

He hez wondrous grace in hiz nether pegs, when he pir-hoo-etts on hiz rear hind legs
If you are arguing that Sanders walked in on stilts you are going the wrong direction. That would make Sanders even taller than he already was.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Mahdi Gilbert » April 8th, 2018, 9:01 pm

This discussion is akin to one you would hear in a loony bin.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 9:11 pm

Mahdi Gilbert wrote:This discussion is akin to one you would hear in a loony bin.
Oh cool, Mahdi knows how tall Erdnase was. Please enlighten us.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 9:18 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:And even the tail end of your procedure doesn't align with reality. As Bill pointed out, your formula implies that Trump's height (from his hand measurements) is 5' 2 1/2" vs his actual 6' 3". This should set off alarm bells and alert you to the fact that this kind of calculation is loaded with HUGE error. Maybe the hands were measured wrong. Maybe the formula is wrong. Maybe both. And with Erdnase, the set of uncertainties is much larger.
It is not wrong. All it means is that there are exceptions, there are outliers for which these proportions do not work well. But the vast majority of people do conform to these proportions with reasonably small variations. Since you are making an outlier argument, that Sanders was 5'9" but had hands of a typical 5'4" man, you would have to provide some evidence that he indeed was. There are photos of Sanders. Do any show his hands?


No, I'm saying Sanders was probably 5' 8", though it doesn't change substantially with 5' 9".

I think the formula and the empirical data have way too much error. With the empirical data you have to be sure it's all measured in the same way in real life as you're approximating it from the pictures. Much easier said than done. If you look at the empirical data, it shows a very wide variation (as the Trump example illustrates in dramatic fashion). In this data set, there seems to be a roughly 8-9 inch height spread for any given hand size that has more than a few samples.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 9:28 pm

Here is an image that shows Sanders' hands. He did not have small hands.

Another problem with Sanders is this statement from Smith
Recalls him as blondish. At any rate, did not have dark hair or eyes.
Sanders is not blondish. He has dark eyes and dark hair.
Last edited by lybrary on April 8th, 2018, 9:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Leonard Hevia » April 8th, 2018, 9:37 pm

lybrary wrote:Here is an image that shows Sanders' hands. He did not have small hands.


Hard to tell from that 1890 photo. It's a long shot, not a close up of the hands, and he's not holding any object to compare it to his hand size. You can see in that photo that he's not a big, stout, heavy guy.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 9:47 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:In 1911, Sanders talks about pirhouetting on his "nether pegs", so I'm sure your stilt scenario is what he is referring to or at least inspired it :-)

He hez wondrous grace in hiz nether pegs, when he pir-hoo-etts on hiz rear hind legs
If you are arguing that Sanders walked in on stilts you are going the wrong direction. That would make Sanders even taller than he already was.


No, when he thought back to Smith with those stilts, he just started confabulating about having his own pair. He's an exaggerator as you know.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 9:51 pm

Leonard Hevia wrote:Hard to tell from that 1890 photo. It's a long shot, not a close up of the hands, and he's not holding any object to compare it to his hand size. You can see in that photo that he's not a big, stout, heavy guy.
Since you argue that Sanders is an outlier, a 5'9" man with tiny hands, it would have to be clearly visible. The fact it is not obvious that he has small hands means he is no outlier and thus can't be the one whose hands Smith illustrated. On top Sanders is not blondish. He has dark eyes and dark hair. Smith remembers somebody with light hair and light eyes.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 10:14 pm

lybrary wrote:
Leonard Hevia wrote:Hard to tell from that 1890 photo. It's a long shot, not a close up of the hands, and he's not holding any object to compare it to his hand size. You can see in that photo that he's not a big, stout, heavy guy.
Since you argue that Sanders is an outlier, a 5'9" man with tiny hands, it would have to be clearly visible. The fact it is not obvious that he has small hands means he is no outlier and thus can't be the one whose hands Smith illustrated. On top Sanders is not blondish. He has dark eyes and dark hair. Smith remembers somebody with light hair and light eyes.


I think you're the one arguing that he has tiny hands based on faulty inferences and measurements from the illustrations. The hands look relatively normal, though on the small side. Definitely not tiny.

And you can repeat all you want that he's 5' 9", but the only 3rd party statement as to his height is the 5' 8" for the rowing team.

Sanders seemed to have fair skin, which would bias Smith's memory toward light hair and eyes. But that's obviously speculation. We can't know exactly what Smith remembered correctly or not. What were Smith's exact words on that?

btw, he describes his fair complexion himself. He must have known Smith would describe him that way to Gardner, and planted the seeds ahead of time:

He air young an' beautifullest an' fair; he hez carroty face an' a freckled hair;

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 10:18 pm

Mahdi Gilbert wrote:This discussion is akin to one you would hear in a loony bin.


Truer words have rarely been spoken!!

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 8th, 2018, 10:22 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:What were Smith's exact words on that?
Recalls him as blondish. At any rate, did not have dark hair or eyes.
Sanders is too tall, and he has the wrong hair and eye color. It can't get any clearer. Eye color and height are two characteristics Sanders could not change. I don't think they had colored contact lenses back then.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Leonard Hevia » April 8th, 2018, 10:39 pm

lybrary wrote:Sanders is too tall, and he has the wrong hair and eye color. It can't get any clearer. Eye color and height are two characteristics Sanders could not change. I don't think they had colored contact lenses back then.


Your final refuge to invalidate Sanders' possible candidacy as author is to use Smith's testimony to bar him as a physical match. You attempted to discredit his writing skills as a poor match for Erdnase, and Bob elegantly pointed out in his PDF on Sanders that you were way off course. You have also insinuated that Sanders was not a prolific reader--until Bill put that to rest with his list of Sanders quotes that he derived from many classic texts. One more piece of evidence favoring Sanders might well put the credibility of your weak case for Gallaway into hazardous waters.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 8th, 2018, 10:42 pm

lybrary wrote: one can measure the length of the illustrated hand in Expert, and then with that derive an estimate of Erdnase's height. Using illustration 79 for the back palm, where the hand is straight,

Why do you assume the hand is straight? If you backpalm a card, the knuckles between the metacarpals and the phalanges (the palm and the fingers) are almost certainly slightly bent. You can hold them straight, if you wish, but then your hand would look tense and artificial, which is antithetical to what Erdnase taught. His had would have been more relaxed, with the hand slightly bent at those knuckles.
And with it bent, the wrist is farther away, and the metacarpals are foreshortened. Which makes the hand measurement artificially short.

one can use the length of the card, which is 88 mm, to derive the length of Erdnase's hand. I have done that and I get 163 mm as the length of his hand.

One could do that only if Smith's drawings were to a consistent and accurate scale, which they are not (which then argues against them having been traced from photographs). If they were accurate:
-In Fig 16, the left edge of the table would be parallel to the left edge of the tabled portion of the deck, since the deck and table are on parallel planes, and their front edges are parallel.
-In Figs 17 and 18, the left little finger would not be so freakishly small, and apparently missing either the proximal or middle phalanx.
-In Fig 22, the thumb would not be so excessively wide compared to the width of the deck.
Further, there's no way to accurately locate the end of the hand where it meets the wrist.
Using DaVinci's human proportions (Vitruvian man) we get the height by multiplying the length of the hand by 10. That means the height per DaVinci would be 163 cm or 5'4".

Da Vinci's ratio of 10 is idealized and is based on his desire for perfection as shown by integer ratios of small numbers. It is based moreso on numerology than biology.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Jonathan Townsend » April 8th, 2018, 10:45 pm

This guy? http://blog.mysentimentallibrary.com/20 ... ction.html
working on independent verification of the data. :)
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 8th, 2018, 10:51 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:What were Smith's exact words on that?
Recalls him as blondish. At any rate, did not have dark hair or eyes.
Sanders is too tall, and he has the wrong hair and eye color. It can't get any clearer. Eye color and height are two characteristics Sanders could not change. I don't think they had colored contact lenses back then.


You haven't shown that he's too tall. The 6 foot Smith would have been much larger than the 5' 8" Sanders. And don't forget that we don't know what shoes they were wearing. Nor the effects of 45 years in trying to remember someone he met once.

As for complexion, we know that Sanders described himself as "fair" with red hair and freckled skin (he actually reversed it for comic effect). And in any case, at a minimum, he definitely looks to be fair skinned in his photos. So it's entirely possible that after 45 years Smith recalled Sanders as "blondish" given his fair skin (possibly freckled) and his reddish hair. We just don't know. That doesn't in any way preclude Sanders.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 8th, 2018, 11:16 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:It's still unclear how you measured the hand in figure 79. There's no way to know where the wrist is located. So my questions are:
1) how are you estimating it?
2) how much additional error do you think that introduces?
In my ebook I have an illustration which clearly shows where I start my wrist measurement from.


All it "clearly shows" is that you picked a spot and declared it to be the end of the hand. There's nothing about that particular location that says it is hand, or wrist.

Look at page 78 of this document, which has real measurements taken by real scientists of real hands. The measurement point is much farther back towards the arm than you have done. The man's hand at the top of the page is measured approximately where the knob of the ulna is on the outside of the wrist (which isn't visible in Fig 79). You could easily add 10 mm to your measurement, and still be consistent with how it's done in the real world.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Brad Jeffers » April 8th, 2018, 11:18 pm

I take the length of the hand and multiply it by ten to get the height of the person.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 8th, 2018, 11:32 pm

I take the length of the hand and multiply it by ten to get the height of the person.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 8th, 2018, 11:33 pm

lybrary wrote:Sanders is too tall, and he has the wrong hair and eye color. It can't get any clearer.


Gallaway doesn't know any sleight of hand, and has no reason to use "Erdnase" as a pseudonym. His writing isn't sprinkled with foreign words and phrases to the extent Erdnase's is. He's too young. He isn't related to Dalrymple. It can't get any clearer.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Zenner » April 9th, 2018, 6:09 am

lybrary wrote: Since we are at it, how tall was Benedict?


I don't know. Can't find any reference to his height anywhere.

But he was capable of showing card tricks to Smith, was trained as a teacher (don't you agree that Expert was didactic?), was capable of writing about magic, had a link to the name Dalrymple, wasn't bald, was the right age, did business with McKinney, needed money in 1902, and knew how to sell books.

Compare all those points with Gallaway, whose candidacy is based on the fact that he nicked a book from work! :-)
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby jkeyes1000 » April 9th, 2018, 8:07 am

I agree with Bill (I think it was Bill) who suggested that the hand depicted in figure 77 might have been slightly bent. The position of the thumb indicates a relaxed (naturally curved) posture. If the hand were indeed flat, the thumb would likely extend to a much greater angle (about 45 degrees).

I am surprised that, with all the engineers we have in this forum, we cannot verify the proportions of a hand represented in excess of a hundred times.

Take figures 77 and 98, and compare the length of the thumb to the length of the card.

In figure 77, the card is nearly as long as the entire thumb, from tip to wrist, but in figure 98, the card is at least an inch shorter!

It is fairly true to say that the length of the thumb (from wrist to tip) in the average (normally proportioned) hand is approximately two-thirds of the length of the whole hand (from wrist to tip of middle finger).

As figure 98 appears to be a more accurate image--the fingers not wider than the thumb, for instance, as they are in figure 77, and the cards in proper aspect ratio)--all one need do is measure the length of the thumb (based on the length of the card), divide that result in half, and add the fraction (two-thirds plus one-third).

I have not measured this precisely, but my guess is that the hand is almost 180mm, which would indicate a man of about 5'9.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 9:16 am

Bill Mullins wrote:Look at page 78 of this document, which has real measurements taken by real scientists of real hands. The measurement point is much farther back towards the arm than you have done. The man's hand at the top of the page is measured approximately where the knob of the ulna is on the outside of the wrist (which isn't visible in Fig 79). You could easily add 10 mm to your measurement, and still be consistent with how it's done in the real world.


This info explains many things. Not just with Chris's measurements, but probably also with the stories about Trump's hand size. I think the Madame Tussaud's hand prints used to measure his hand size only go to near the bottom of the palm, not to the bone at the wrist. So he might still have small hands for his height, but not those of a 5' 2" person.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 10:20 am

Bill Mullins wrote:Gallaway ... He's too young. He isn't related to Dalrymple.
The problem with age and the Dalrymple comment is that they aren't directly observable for Smith. Some folks look younger, some look older. No way for Smith to know if Erdnase was indeed related to Dalrymple. It could have been a lie by Erdnase, or something Smith heard from some other client which he attributed to Erdnase after 45 years. Or as I think, he mixed up Dalrymple with Gallaway, two illustrators for Puck and other periodicals.

Height and complexion are two things Smith could directly observe. Erdnase could not have changed them. As illustrator Smith was trained to make these observations. They are therefore more reliable than other things he remembers. Sanders could not walk into the hotel room and tell Smith that while he looks like 5'9" he is actually only 5'4" and that his dark eyes and hair is just an optical illusion, he is actually blond with light colored eyes.

Gallaway has the right height, he has light colored eyes, and his age does not lie beyond any hard boundaries Smith defined, because Smith only defines an upper boundary, not a lower boundary. In any case, age cannot be observed as directly has height or eye color.

Bill Mullins wrote:Da Vinci's ratio of 10 is idealized and is based on his desire for perfection as shown by integer ratios of small numbers. It is based moreso on numerology than biology.
Empirical data shows a factor closer to 9 than 10. That means my height estimate is too tall for Erdnase not too small. Even if you want to make the hand longer, using more accurate multiplication factor would not materially change the height estimate. You said that one could easily add 10mm to my hand length of 163mm. So lets do that. We get 173mm. Now let's use the data Bob is showing above. It comes out as 160cm which is 5'3". However you slice the pie, Erdnase had small hands, because he was a very small man.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 10:29 am

jkeyes1000 wrote:I have not measured this precisely, but my guess is that the hand is almost 180mm, which would indicate a man of about 5'9.
Using the empirical data Bob has presented above, 180mm would result in 166cm or 5'5".
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 9th, 2018, 11:07 am

jkeyes1000 wrote:I am surprised that, with all the engineers we have in this forum, we cannot verify the proportions of a hand represented in excess of a hundred times.


What is surprising is that someone would look at a single drawing from a set of dozens, in which dimensions aren't consistent from illustration to illustration, then would extrapolate the height from a formula based on numerology, and expect to know with any precision at all the height of the person in question.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 11:23 am

lybrary wrote:Height and complexion are two things Smith could directly observe. Erdnase could not have changed them. As illustrator Smith was trained to make these observations. They are therefore more reliable than other things he remembers. Sanders could not walk into the hotel room and tell Smith that while he looks like 5'9" he is actually only 5'4" and that his dark eyes and hair is just an optical illusion, he is actually blond with light colored eyes.

Empirical data shows a factor closer to 9 than 10. That means my height estimate is too tall for Erdnase not too small. Even if you want to make the hand longer, using more accurate multiplication factor would not materially change the height estimate. You said that one could easily add 10mm to my hand length of 163mm. So lets do that. We get 173mm. Now let's use the data Bob is showing above. It comes out as 160cm which is 5'3". However you slice the pie, Erdnase had small hands, because he was a very small man.


Sanders, at best estimate, was 5' 8" (not 5' 9"). See the rowing team stats.

Smith's recollection was "blondish", not "blond"? Those are different.

Sanders had fair skin and described himself as freckled and having reddish hair. That could be conflated with blondish in Smith's 45 year old memory.

Given the problems with your previous measurements and calculations that have been uncovered, there's little reason to have confidence in these new ones. Do you know, for example, what metric for measuring the wrist was used in that data set? And how much accuracy there is in such measurements? And clearly from the data set, there's a wide distribution of heights for any given hand size. Not to mention the major uncertainties in the accuracy of Smith's illustrations (and trying to measure hand size and wrist positions) that you're basing all this on.

It's necessary to be much more careful and precise (e.g. propagating errors and explicitly stating assumptions and methods) for calculations of this sort to have any credibility. Also, a little common sense would go a long way here -- the illustrations show a relatively normal sized hand, not one that would described as tiny. Trying to prove something wildly different than that is bound to fail.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 11:41 am

Bob Coyne wrote:Sanders, at best estimate, was 5' 8" (not 5' 9"). See the rowing team stats.
His bio from 1911 states 5'9". His passport almost a decade later states 5'8 1/2" when he was already shrinking due to his age. Sanders was 5'9" in 1901.

Bob Coyne wrote:Sanders had fair skin and described himself as freckled and having reddish hair. That could be conflated with blondish in Smith's 45 year old memory.
Sanders had dark hair and dark eyes as the photos clearly show.

Bob Coyne wrote:It's necessary to be much more careful and precise (e.g. propagating errors and explicitly stating assumptions and methods) for calculations of this sort to have any credibility. Also, a little common sense would go a long way here -- the illustrations show a relatively normal sized hand, not one that would described as tiny. Trying to prove something wildly different than that is bound to fail.
My derivation has enough error margins. Using the data you presented yourself Erdnase still comes out about 5'4" even with inflated hand length up to 176 mm. If you want to argue that Sanders was an outlier, 5'9" tall but small hands, then you have to present evidence. The one photo of Sanders with hands visible do not show a man with small hands.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 9th, 2018, 11:49 am

[quote=="lybrary"]But the vast majority of people do conform to these proportions with reasonably small variations.[/quote]

The standard deviation of height from the document I linked to earlier was 2-3/4" inches. The standard deviation of hand size was 1.01 cm. The ratio of height to hand size was (for the means, as measured from adult males male) was 178.5 cm to 19.6 cm, or 9.1
Taking short measurement of the hand Erdnase could have been as short as (16.3 x 9.1)/2.54 - 2.75 = 4' 8". Or using jkeyes' measurement, he could have been as tall as: (18.0 x 9.1)/2.54 + 2.75 = a little over 5'7".

Or apply the variation to hand size, instead of height: Small => ((16.3-1) x 9.1)/2.54 = almost 4'7". Large = ((18 +1) x 9.1)/ 2.54 = 5'8".

Any process which gives a range of over a foot in height isn't analysis, it's reading tea leaves. We know that the 6'1" Smith thought Erdnase was shorter than he was. In 1901, most everyone was shorter than 6'1". We don't know much more.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 12:16 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:Sanders had fair skin and described himself as freckled and having reddish hair. That could be conflated with blondish in Smith's 45 year old memory.
Sanders had dark hair and dark eyes as the photos clearly show.


Why would Sanders describe it as reddish if it wasn't? Reddish hair will look darker than blondish in old b&w photos. Also, if you look at the old class photo in his college reunion book, you can see that Sander's hair overall looks to be a shade lighter than some of those around him (ignoring the highlights from the light). I did a quick check, and the rgb values on the hair on the side of his head are significantly brighter than similar spots on other people. This doesn't prove anything, but in combination with his own statement makes it likely that he didn't have straight dark brown hair. More likely a reddish tint.

https://books.google.com/books?id=pURGAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA84&ots=rPcAdQEVxw&dq=wilbur%20sanders%20columbia%20mining%20reunion&pg=PA4#v=onepage&q&f=false

His eyes look dark and he doesn't describe them, so I'm not disputing that point. However, Smith could easily be conflating light eyes with his fair skin (apparently with freckles) and reddish hair.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 12:27 pm

Bill Mullins wrote:Any process which gives a range of over a foot in height isn't analysis, it's reading tea leaves. We know that the 6'1" Smith thought Erdnase was shorter than he was. In 1901, most everyone was shorter than 6'1". We don't know much more.
Yes we do know a lot more. Smith remembered he was a very small man no larger tan 5'6", which does match estimates derived from the illustrations. Two independent data points that match is a lot more certain than most other things we know of Erdnase. On top the eye color of Sanders is not a match either. Two observables that do not match for Sanders.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » April 9th, 2018, 12:48 pm

Jeez, this is a bizarre conversation.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 12:52 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:Sanders, at best estimate, was 5' 8" (not 5' 9"). See the rowing team stats.
His bio from 1911 states 5'9". His passport almost a decade later states 5'8 1/2" when he was already shrinking due to his age. Sanders was 5'9" in 1901.


You might think it helps your case, but you simply don't know that. People very commonly inflate their heights. And your camp has already said that Sanders is an exaggerator and we shouldn't necessarily believe his claims when it bolsters his overblown ego. i.e. Erdnase's "insufferable conceit" and Sanders' on himself "for he's braggin' yet."

So the most reliable source is the rowing team's value of 5' 8". It's less susceptible to Sanders' trying to make himself appear "big on the bills." Of course, it's possible in various scenarios for his height to be different (including shorter), but you can't blithely ignore that 3rd party data point, which is likely to be the most objective.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 12:55 pm

Richard Kaufman wrote:Jeez, this is a bizarre conversation.


Yes, it was aptly described earlier as being "akin to one you would hear in a loony bin." :-)

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 1:04 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:You might think it helps your case, but you simply don't know that. People very commonly inflate their heights. And your camp has already said that Sanders is an exaggerator and we shouldn't necessarily believe his claims when it bolsters his overblown ego. i.e. Erdnase's "insufferable conceit" and Sanders' on himself "for he's braggin' yet."
Neither is it my case, nor have I stated that Sanders exaggerates. I wrote he is a bit full of himself. All I am pointing out is that the data point we have of his height of 5'9" when he his about 50 years old is a more accurate proxy for his height when he was about 40 years old, then the data point from when he was about 20 years old.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bill Mullins » April 9th, 2018, 1:17 pm

lybrary wrote:If you want to argue that Sanders was an outlier, 5'9" tall but small hands, then you have to present evidence.


The one making the argument that Erdnase had small hands is you, and you are doing it from drawings that aren't accurate enough to support any conclusions along those lines. They are not photgrammetrically accurate. Period. Full stop.

Fig 101 shows cards with 2 indices each. Fig 2 shows cards with no indices. Fig 29 shows cards with 4 indices. This is accurate drawing?

Look at the joint lengths in Fig 37.

Image
The right-hand proximal phalange is 40% longer than the one on the left hand. This is accurate drawing?

Sometimes Smith uses convergence in his drawings:
Image

And sometimes he does not:
Image

These are accurate drawings?

You simply can't rely on the drawings to reflect accurate proportions and measurements. They are illustrations designed to convey important points of handling. The exact size of the hands is not one of those points, and Smith didn't work at making the drawings to scale.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Bob Coyne » April 9th, 2018, 1:38 pm

lybrary wrote:
Bob Coyne wrote:You might think it helps your case, but you simply don't know that. People very commonly inflate their heights. And your camp has already said that Sanders is an exaggerator and we shouldn't necessarily believe his claims when it bolsters his overblown ego. i.e. Erdnase's "insufferable conceit" and Sanders' on himself "for he's braggin' yet."
Neither is it my case, nor have I stated that Sanders exaggerates. I wrote he is a bit full of himself. All I am pointing out is that the data point we have of his height of 5'9" when he his about 50 years old is a more accurate proxy for his height when he was about 40 years old, then the data point from when he was about 20 years old.


The "your camp" remark was just a bit of humor. You can ignore it.

You're ignoring the fact that men commonly inflate their height, on average by an inch. There are studies that have measured that effect, for example this one: http://adc.bmj.com/content/90/9/941

We know a) that we have a presumably objective 3rd party rowing team 5' 8" measurement and b) that men on average over-report their heights, and c) that Sanders was a somewhat full of himself and probably in this respect too. So it seems very likely that he was 5' 8" and inflated it to make himself seem taller.

In any case, you can't present a 5' 9" height an objective fact. It's just your interpretation, and one that is likely wrong for the reasons given above.

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Re: ERDNASE

Postby lybrary » April 9th, 2018, 2:50 pm

Bill Mullins wrote:Fig 101 shows cards with 2 indices each. Fig 2 shows cards with no indices. Fig 29 shows cards with 4 indices. This is accurate drawing?
It is further proof that they were traced from photos once you understand that Erdnase was a lefty. The photos were produced flipped to turn left-hand instructions into right-hand instructions which messed up the indices, which had to be corrected. The discrepancies in the indices are errors of that correction process. More on the handedness in my upcoming newsletter.

Bill Mullins wrote:And sometimes he does not:
Image
Very sloppy drawing, Bill. The right line does not correctly follow the edge. And the left edge is too short to know if it is parallel or not.
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Re: ERDNASE

Postby Richard Kaufman » April 9th, 2018, 2:53 pm

Chris, this is really nothing but wild speculation on your part! You state, as if it's a fact, that the drawings were produced from photographs that were "flipped" (the accurate term is "flopped") and that's why the indices are not standardized.

How do you make this stuff up?
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