Systems that help men make decisions and exert control

Despite the epistimological drift away from master systems and centralized command and control, the rhetoric surrounding large scale data mining projects has changed remarkably little:

The first five minutes of an attack on the North American continent would require the swift response of widely deployed forces. Millions of informational inputs would be automatically channeled into various command headquarters. The assimilation and use of this information for decision and control would depend on vast systems which provide automated information processing assistance to military and governmental leaders. Acting in the public interest, we at System Development Corporation have helped create this new information technology. In developing these systems, we are specifically concerned with the analysis and synthesis of these systems, training men in their use, the instruction of the great computers on which the systems are based — and research into future generations of these systems. The SAGE air defense system is one example involving extensive SDC effort. The new SAC Control System, now in development, is another. Two other extremely large systems are in their initial stages. Our approach to these systems projects is interdisciplinary, spanning Operations Research, Engineering, Human Factors and Computing Programming. To staff our rapidly expanding programs in Santa Monica, Calif., Lexington, Mass., Washington, D.C., and Paramus, N.J., we are seeking scientists and engineers in all these fields. Address Mr. R. W. Frost, 2430 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, California.

The Soviet Program for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions

Above: Drilling for oil; Or, how and learned to stop worrying and nuke the subsurface

A history of the USSR’s nuclear geo-engineering programs produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. [link]

Dispatched from the fantasies of an information interface

Regarding the voice of a microwave and other transcendental confusions

playfair-wheat1

William Playfair (1759-1823) bar/line chart: price of wheat and wages

It is sometimes said that the 18C, a time of rationalization and the birth of nations, saw the dawn of an obsession with measurement and quantification. The world, whether social or natural, required only application and genius to unlock. So how to visualize, let alone hold in the head, the world of two centuries hence?

Visiting the Paris Exhibition in 1900, the American writer Henry Adams saw something so remarkable he compared its influence to that of the Virgin Mary. It was a hall filled with machines – early power generators known as dynamos. Watching them at work, he “began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” he wrote in The Education of Henry Adams. “The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring.” Adams wondered if he should pray to it. [link]

The hertzian space of RFID

field-drawing-oyster-small

In order to study the readable volume around an RFID reader, we built experimental probes that would flash an LED light when they successfully read an RFID tag. The readable volume is not the same as the radio field, instead it shows the space within the field in which an RFID tag and an RFID reader will interact with each other. [link] + [discussion]

With the right geometry, one can tangle into near anything

Public-radio-7

Above: AM Radio made from everyday materials that requires no power supply. The radio is powered from the energy in the radio waves themselves and utilises public spaces by latching onto the nearest pole, tree or lamppost, in order to give it structure and a place to be listened to. (How this actually works I am not sure, but if we cannot take an artists’ word for it, then where would be?) [link]

For other DIY projects, consider the following:

A vague subterranean world reveals itself, little by little, and there the pale, grave, immobile figures that dwell in limbo loosen themselves from shadow and darkness. And thus, the tableau shapes itself, a new clarity illuminating and setting into play these bizarre apparitions; the world of spirits opens itself to us.

Tools required:

1 comfortable chair, preferably of the cushy recliner variety
1 metal spoon
1 metal bowl or large ceramic plate
notepad and pencil
time – about half an hour depending on current state of alertness

[link]

Searching for the bottom

Supercave

A delightful little interview with the author of “Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth”. Even though I do not get the sense that Talbor, the author, is himself an explorer of caves, there is a bit or two for the imagination to alight upon for a moment.

Most people think caves are dead holes, but they are alive in many ways. For one, they breathe. There are pressure changes at the surface, and as the pressure increases it forces air down into the cave, so it’s inhaling, as it were. When the surface pressure decreases, that cave starts to exhale. They have clocked the exhalations at Lechugilla cave in New Mexico at over sixty miles per hour. So they can really roar.

If you should like to take further subterranean gambols, perhaps with a sober and captivating dash of political economy, The Road to Wiggan Pier may hold some interest:

When you have finally got there—and getting there is a task in itself: I will explain that in a moment—you crawl through the last line of pit props and see opposite you a shiny black wall three or four feet high. This is the coal face. Overhead is the smooth ceiling made by the rock from which the coal has been cut; underneath is the rock again, so that the gallery you are in is only as high as the ledge of coal itself, probably not much more than a yard. The first impression of all, overmastering everything else for a while, is the frightful, deafening din from the conveyor belt which carries the coal away. You cannot see very far, because the fog of coal dust throws back the beam of your lamp, but you can see on either side of you the line of half-naked kneeling men, one to every four or five yards, driving their shovels under the fallen coal and flinging it swiftly over their left shoulders. They are feeding it on to the conveyor belt, a moving rubber, belt a couple of feet wide which runs a yard or two behind them. Down this belt a glittering river of coal races constantly. In a big mine it is carrying away several tons of coal every minute. It bears it off to some place in the main roads where it is shot into tubs holding half a ton, and thence dragged to the cages and hoisted to the outer air.

Curating the globe, Part 1

western australia

Off the coast of Western Australia

01 - Screen shot 2009-09-16 at 10.33.12 PM

Container port, Long Beach, CA

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Nile River Delta, Egypt

03 - oil fields

Oil fields (left), near Odessa, TX

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Oil tanker disgorging, Long Beach, CA

05 -farmland outside of odessa

Farm land in Ukraine

My other tounge is a Cymothoa exigua

Radiolab this week treats the ever fascinating topic of parasites. In the hour long podcast, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich diffuse into the wondrous world of zombie cockroaches and cordyceps ladden ants (really this one is a must see!). Cordyceps is particularly surreal because, of its hundreds of varieties, each has evolved to commandeer the neural functions of a different species in order to hop another link of the biosphere.

See also:

Brainwashed by a neuroparasite

Discover Magazine Gallery – Zombie animals and the parasites that control them

Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 cm long. This parasite attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue, entering the fish’s mouth through its gills. It then proceeds to extract blood through the claws on its front three pairs of legs.

As the parasite grows, less and less blood reaches the tongue, and eventually the organ atrophies from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish’s tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host’s blood and many others feed on fish mucus. They do not eat scraps of the fish’s food.This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ.

There are many species of Cymothoa, but only C. exigua is known to consume and replace its host’s tongue.

[More]

Trance states and ethnographic film

NeuroAnthropology rounded up a discussion on the Medical Anthropology listserve that collected suggestions about examples of trance states in ethnographic film. Some captivating links came out of it:

“Holy Ghost People” by Peter Adair, which shows folks in Appalachia (in what very much looks like trance-like states) handling snakes. You can also get this documentary in a series of six YouTube clips starting here

Thaipusam Ritual: Pain & Trance.

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