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]
Tag Archive for 'archeology'
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]
Next nature featured one of those discoveries to emerge out of archeology that cannot help but give one a smile of pause and a thought that this too, indeed, will pass.
Doggerland is the name of a vast plain that joined Britain to Europe for nearly 12,000 years, until sea levels began rising dramatically after the last Ice Age. Taking its name from a prominent shipping hazard—Dogger Bank—this immense landbridge vanished beneath the North Sea around 6000 B.C.
Like all landbridges, Doggerland seems to have been a pretty busy thoroughfare for ancient hunters and gatherers. But archaeologists hardly gave it a thought until 2002, when a small group of British researchers laid hands on seismic survey data collected by the petroleum industry in the North Sea.
It is thought that the sea level rose no faster than about one or two meters per century, and that the land would have disappeared in a series of punctuated inundations. According to marine archaeologist Nic Flemming, a research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre of University of Southampton, UK. “It was perfectly noticeable in a generation, but nobody had to run for the hills.”
Although hunter-gatherers usually have any sense of ownership, land would have become an increasingly precious resource as the sea rose, which according researchers Clive Waddington & Nicky Miller might have led directly to the development of sedentism and territoriality.
Shortwave radio must have been an extraordinary technology to really have been in the capture of. You order plans, build a ham radio, and suddenly, as if you have been imbued with some occult power, you become aware of these stratosphere-bouncing conversations that encircle the globe. This when there was much more of a global expanse to imagine — distant, exotic lands and all of the like.
These QSL cards a really quite beautiful — they seek to give visual form through one, light-stock, piece of card board: a terrestrial marker of an ethereal enterprise. To wit,
QSL cards (or letters) are exchanged to acknowledge ham radio contact between stations. Broadcast stations (mediumwave and shortwave) also offer colorful QSL cards to listeners who send in reports of reception. These souvenirs of the radio listening hobby (or “DX’ing,” as it’s sometimes called) are slowly vanishing as the radio hobbies shrink. Nowadays hams often “QSL” contacts via the internet, bypassing the cost and postage of physical QSL cards. Many international shortwave broadcasters have either drastically cut back services or closed down altogether as their target audience migrates to the internet and satellite radio. Thus, most of these QSL cards are echoes of stations long gone, and a knob-twiddling pasttime whose glory days have passed. [link]
An assortment of science and technology ads from the 1950s and 60s has been collected on this flickr page. Many of the modernist illustrations used by the ad agencies are quite fantastic. I suppose that thoughts of intercontinental ballistic missiles, vacuum tubes, thin ties and cigarettes lend themselves to this sort of thing:
In 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin published an Atlas of Cyberspace, described by Vint Cerf as “explor[ing] a remarkable universe of visual representations of the Internet’s diversity, structure and content.” The atlas locates cyberspace along many dimensions: geographic maps of core fiber optic back bones, logical maps of network organization and hierarchy, social maps showing the relationships between individual users in virtual worlds, hierarchy trees of web page design, world maps from 3-d shooters, etc. While some of the visualizations, designed to shock and awe through their graphical sophistication, have become curious artifacts in their own right, almost like a first generation iPod, harkening back to simpler times, the book itself promises not to disappoint. The good news is that it has been re-released under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. There is a 20MB low-res version and a 200+MB high-res version.
Arpanet’s geographical configuration, 1975
Submarine fiber optic cables in the Caribbean
“Great Circle” map designed as a bit of marketing ephemera for the Cable and Wireless Company, showing the global connectivity of its telecommunications network, with Britain centered representing its position as “hub of the world”, 1945
The huge and dense mesh of connections shows the social geography of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimension, by mapping how over half of the 4,800 or so players related to each other. LambdaMOO was a well-established and well-known virtual environment created at Xerox PARC in 1990. The map was created using social statistics gathered by Cobot, a software agent that “lived” in LambdaMOO, sitting in the “living room” and observing the social interactions of players. 2000
Accompanying the recent military action on the ground in Georgia was a cyber campaign that took down many government sites and generally impeded the dissemenation of information throughout the country. Shortly after things cooled down in Georgia, a collection of security researchers in and around the intelligence community got together under the banner of “Project Grey Goose” in an attempt to see if open source information, particularly through semantic analysis of Russian hacker forums, could be used to unmask those responsible. The team drew widely from the community:
- Lewis Shepherd – former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; CTO, Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
- Bob Gourley – former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; founder, Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm
- Matt Devost - former Senior INFOSEC Engineer at SAIC; Security Consultant to foreign governments and corporations; President, Total Intelligence Solutions
- Preston Werntz – Project Manager, Newbrook Solutions, currently engaged at DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis
- Derek Plansky – former Director, Lexis-Nexis Risk and Information Analytics Group; President, Informatic Ideas Consulting
- Andrew Conway – former analyst performing classified work for a three letter agency analyzing leadership emergence in covert networks; currently a Ph.D candidate in Politics, NYU
- Jeremy Baldwin – Analytic Tradecraft Developer, The Analysis Corporation [source]
Following 56 days of investigation the group has published its findings [pdf] [intelfusion blog]. The conclusions?
- We assess with high confidence that the Russian government will likely continue its practice of distancing itself from the Russian nationalistic hacker community thus gaining deniability while passively supporting and enjoying the strategic benefits of their actions.
- We assess with high confidence that nationalistic Russian hackers are likely adaptive adversaries engaged in aggressively finding more efficient ways to disable networks.
- We judge with moderate confidence that a journeyman-apprentice relationship will continue to be the training model used by nationalistic Russian hackers.
- We estimate with moderate confidence that hacker forums engaged in training Russian cyber warriors will continue to evolve their feedback loop which effectively becomes their Cyber Kill Chain.
- After analyzing over 200 posts in the Xakep.ru and StopGeorgia.ru forums, as well as Georgian network server data, Grey Goose analysts were able to discern a cyber kill chain which is comprised of the following steps:
- 1) Encourage novices through patriotic imagery and rhetoric to get involved in the cyber war against Georgia
2) Publish a target list of Georgian government Web sites which have been tested for access from Russian and Lithuanian IP addresses.
3) Discuss and select one of several different types of malware to use against the target Web site.
4) Launch the attack
5) Evaluate the results (optional step)
- We assess with high confidence that all visitors to Russian hacker forums which originate from U.S. IP addresses will be monitored.
This past weekend, at a flea market, I came across a Kodak Instamatic 800 manufactured in 1964. From the aspect of design and material culture, I rather liked the aesthetic packaging that the camera came in. There was something very classic, very tasteful and not at all kitschy about it. So, I thought I would post scans here. The Instamatic was a huge product for Kodak during the 1960s. They sold over 50 million of them, and it was arguably The Camera that popularized amateur photography as a fixture of healthy, modern middle class life.
Thinking about the manufactured objects of life more generally, Edward Burtynsky [a photographer I posted about earlier] is working with the Long Now Foundation to put together an exhibit of contemporary material culture. Not so much the stuff one would find in the design section of a contemporary art musuem, but surely some of that, but more so the sorts of things that one would expect to find doing an archeological dig of mid-century America. Burtynsky gives a 5 minute presentation on it with many a slide.
This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.
But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.
[link]
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]