tracing the network’s resolution
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.
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:
A rather entrancing article, published originally in the Guardian, meditates on the hidden images of America’s “last good war.” Following the surrender of Japan in WWII, the US issued a strict writ of censorship stating that “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.” Consequently, the atomic bombings in Japan have become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history,” unaccompanied by much of a visual record. The article follows the discovery of an amazing cache of photographs, previously unseen to the public, taken by the US Military’s Physical Damage Division at the end of the war:
One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.
At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima. [link]
Schneier on Security has an interesting bit on identity farming today. The idea essentially runs that one can incubate rock solid fake identities if they have 25 years during which to fabricate the birth of children, open bank accounts in their names, fill out the relevant paper work to have them home schooled, and otherwise scatter little bread crumbs here and there (apparently this is also a premise common in Highlander fan faction as a plot technique through which the immortals continue to stay integrated in human society). It is through these techniques that one creates, as Schneier nicely phrases it, a data shadow for the fictitious identity. This all could work, right, because it is the data shadow itself that is the salient aspect of one’s existence as a citizen-consumer and not really their corporeal person as such.
As a good case in point – one that also reveals the absurdity of the US’s paper tiger homeland security initiatives — a Quebec business man who had his identity stolen, consequentially winding up on a US terror watch list, was ultimately able to circumvent the travails of security check point purgatory by changing his name from Mario Labbé to François Mario Labbé . It seems its created a bit of a fresh start for him: F. Mario Labbé can now pass through airport security unaccosted because of a vulnerability in, what we can perhaps refer to in a bit of biblical sounding legalese. the Several Databases.
It seems that this idea of a data shadow can be potentially quite powerful. It certainly has the ring of one of those buzz phrases that, like a sleak aluminum frame, can house either a powerbook or a fighter jet. Now what is wanting is for the notion to get caught in an updraft and to be transformed into the cynosure of public attention. At least, that would be nice.
Mark Wieczorek wrote an interesting piece a few years back trying to characterize what it is about the ‘sound’ of a certain decade’s popular music that makes it so. He does this by looking at frequency trends common to songs of a particular era, finding that changes in the fidelity of recording technology as well as other innovations seemed to attend the shift. 
Not surprisingly, 300-500hz range where most speech tends to peak when recorded, and where, for instance, many of Edith Paif’s recordings center, is all largely deemphasized from the technically frenetic, ipod headphone optimized tracks of the early ’00s [link]
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.
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
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.
