tracing the network’s resolution
Because seeing things you haven’t seen before, imagining structures outside of one’s usual scale, has the tendency of increasing conceptual elasticity and being generally salubrious and delightful, this Flickr microscopy pool might be of interest:
A spec of pollen
Transverse section of an orchid root with large fungal masses in the cells.
then god must be in the nanoparticles:
Stained glass windows that are painted with gold purify the air when they are lit up by sunlight, a team of Queensland University of Technology experts have discovered.
Associate Professor Zhu huai yong, from QUT’s School of Physical and Chemical Sciences said that glaziers in medieval forges were the first nanotechnologists who produced colours with gold nanoparticles of different sizes.
Professor Zhu said numerous church windows across Europe were decorated with glass coloured in gold nanoparticles.
“For centuries people appreciated only the beautiful works of art, and long life of the colours, but little did they realise that these works of art are also, in modern language, photocatalytic air purifier with nanostructured gold catalyst,” Professor Zhu said. [link]
The ‘Working Computer Museum‘ is an organization run by a group of net artists in Sicily. The Museum “is an interactive permanent exhibition where visitors can not only look vintage computers, but also try them, ‘put their hands on them’ using their old Operating Systems, softwares or reading their original manuals.
Most interestingly, however, for those of us not able to arrange a visit at the moment, is their online museum. From SPARCStation 5’s to VAXStation 4000’s running Unix System V to Solaris 9, visitors are welcome to telnet into a whole cadre of terminals to compile and explore to their hearts content. If you do login, do not miss the Star Trek text adventure game installed in the lobby. A list of machines and login addresses can be found here.
In an old brief case, I came across a map of Western Europe published by National Geographic in 1929. One of the plates published in the margin included a map of the passenger airline service as it existed at the time.
I imagine that the Budapest –> Vienna flight must have featured a rather marvelous bevy of passengers… Most of the flights in Europe at this point were conducted in re-purposed WWI planes, with rather rough conditions that were, apparently, best endured for less than two hours at a stretch.
Commercial aviation in France was not a serious prospect until after World War I. Because of widespread damage to railroads all over Europe, air travel offered a convenient alternative means of transportation. The cross-channel route from London to Paris also offered a tempting opportunity for enterprising entrepreneurs. Near the end of the war, on February 8, 1919, a group of French businessmen had remodeled the Farman Company’s twin-engine Goliath biplane and began flying routes across the English Channel between Paris and London. By August 1919, Farman was offering daily service on this route for as many as 14 passengers. To attract passengers, the interior of the fuselage was arranged much like a railway coach. The early burgeoning private services, however, proved not to be financially viable because of high operating costs, high fares, and low passenger turnout. French commercial aviation, like aviation in Britain and Germany, would not have survived without strong support from the government.
The French government took an active role in fostering a domestic commercial aviation industry. French officials believed that aviation would be an important part of the country’s economic growth. They also believed that a strong air presence would extend French political and diplomatic influence to the new postwar world. Passenger comfort was not high on many of these services. As one aviation official noted in a report from 1922, “In some airplanes, the passenger cannot stand conditions for more than two hours.”
Farman Goliath F 150 - Original Usage: Reconaissance / Bomber/ Torpedo-Bomber.
Potez 7, a commonly used passenger aircraft by the French airline Franco-Roumaine in the 1920s
The Ford Trimotor 5-AT, nicknamed “The Tin Goose,” was used by almost all the U.S. airlines. Introduced in 1928, these planes could carry 14 or 15 passengers in its corrugated fuselage. It was produced through 1932, but these planes stayed in use much longer. One Trimotor 5-AT, built in 1929, was still being used in Las Vegas for sightseeing in 1991.
Interior of Ford Trimotor with “club” type cabin furnishings
The Archimedes Project, an online library under the auspices of the Max Planck Institute, has made available a searchable database of machine drawings from their digitizing efforts:
The database DMD is part of the research project The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science: Mental Models in the History of Mechanics, a project pursued by Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, headed by Jürgen Renn. In its context, a large number of original sources concerning the history of mechanics have been made available on the Internet as a digital research library, the Archimedes Project. In this broader context the database DMD is especially devoted to studying the practical knowledge of early modern engineers. The aim of the database DMD is the provision of new ways of investigating early modern machine drawings. These documents are important not only for historians of technology but also for historians of science and art and more generally for scholars of Renaissance studies.
Anonymus of the Hussite Wars c. 1475
Perpetual Motion Project, 1496
Anonymus of the Hussite Wars c. 1475
The two images below, interestingly composing the interiors of household appliances, are part of a larger thesis project by Brittney Badger.
Picture above: an iron
Picture above: an electric mixer
Perhaps we can imagine a sort of parallel continuum of the world, a type of google-maps overlay to the condensation of this historical moment, where Badger’s meticulous dissections provide a zenith to the perception of the consumer-industrial system that grows upon the world. The display of naked artifact upon a stage without boundary: a light upon which they will be able to fix their gaze in all of tomorrow’s museums. It presents the viewer with a space of repose, clinical contemplation.
If this is so, perhaps we may find the nadir of our continuum in the work of the photographer Edward Burtynsky.
Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #17, Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, 2005
Burtynsky takes the moments that buttress the pristine and glistening perfection of the consumer object as his focus. Documenting where our raw materials come from and where our material objects go, he contributes the sublime and the gritty to our continuum. It his through his eyes that the extraordinary scale of consumption, the amplitude of this moment’s engine.
“Bao Steel #8” Bao Steel in Shanghai, China. Photo by Edward Burtynsky
Opening Shot from Burtynsky’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes
See also: Manufactured Landscapes offical site with more stills from the documentary
Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has drawn up the first ever ‘Arctic Map‘ to show the disputed territories that states might lay claim to in the future. The new map design follows a series of historical and ongoing arguments about ownership, and the race for resources, in the frozen lands and seas of the Arctic. The potential for conflicts is increasing as the search for new oil, gas and minerals intensifies.
The move to comprehensively map the region illustrates the urgent need for clear policy-making on Arctic issues – an area rich in natural resources. The Durham map shows:
1. where boundaries have been agreed
2. where known claims are
3. the potential areas that states might claim
Director of Research at the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), Martin Pratt says: “The map is the most precise depiction yet of the limits and the future dividing lines that could be drawn across the Arctic region.
“It’s a cartographic means of showing, and an attempt to collate information and predict the way in which the Arctic region may eventually be divided up. The freezing land and seas of the Arctic are likely to be getting hotter in terms of geopolitics; the Durham map aims to assist national and international policy-makers across the world.”
It’s a year since Russia planted a flag on the seabed, underneath the North Pole, highlighting its claim to a huge chunk of the Arctic.
The Russian demands relate to a complex area of law covered by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS). Under that law, any coastal state can claim territory 200 nautical miles (nm) from their shoreline (Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ) and exploit the natural resources within that zone. Some coastal states have rights that extend beyond EEZ due to their continental shelf. Areas of the seabed beyond the continental shelf are referred to as ‘The Area’ and any world state – landlocked or not – has equal rights in this area.
The continental shelf is the part of a country’s landmass that extends into the sea before dropping into the deep ocean. Under UNCLOS, if a state can prove its rights, it can exploit the resources of the sea and the seabed within its territory.
Russia claims that its continental shelf extends along a mountain chain running underneath the Arctic, known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Theoretically, if this was the case, Russia might be able to claim a vast area of territory.
From Scientific American:
As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems. In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.
Just before noon the following Thursday, September 1, English astronomer Richard C. Carrington was sketching a curious group of sunspots—curious on account of the dark areas’ enormous size. At 11:18 a.m. he witnessed an intense white light flash from two locations within the sunspot group. He called out in vain to anyone in the observatory to come see the brief five-minute spectacle, but solitary astronomers seldom have an audience to share their excitement. Seventeen hours later in the Americas a second wave of auroras turned night to day as far south as Panama. People could read the newspaper by their crimson and green light. Gold miners in the Rocky Mountains woke up and ate breakfast at 1 a.m., thinking the sun had risen on a cloudy day. Telegraph systems became unusable across Europe and North America.
The news media of the day looked for researchers able to explain the phenomena, but at the time scientists scarcely understood auroral displays at all. Were they meteoritic matter from space, reflected light from polar icebergs or a high-altitude version of lightning? It was the Great Aurora of 1859 itself that ushered in a new paradigm. The October 15 issue of Scientific American noted that ‘‘a connection between the northern lights and forces of electricity and magnetism is now fully established.” Work since then has established that auroral displays ultimately originate in violent events on the sun, which fire off huge clouds of plasma and momentarily disrupt our planet’s magnetic field.
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul;whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
E-texts of Melville’s works from Project Guttenberg
A portion of Melville’s passport application
