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.
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.
The US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive recently published a four-part reader as an accompaniment to the lectures they conduct:
Our reader’s three volumes cover counterintelligence’s past and present. Nevertheless they form a whole: the first volume provides material elucidating counter- intelligence’s antecedents from the American Revolution to World War II. Volume two focuses on World War II while volume three begins with the Atom Bomb spies and concludes with the latest espionage cases. History is more than background; it is the framework of the present.
We have taken material from official government documents, indictments from several espionage cases, and articles written by professors, scholars and counterintelligence officers. We have abridged some selections while trying not to change the sense of the original but we have not altered the original usage of the English language.
Each chapter in the three volumes has an introduction, which sketches out the main trends and characteristics of the period in question. There is a chronology with each chapter for volumes one and three, but volume two only has one chronology to cover the entire period. At the end of each chapter is a selected bibliography. We hope this will help you get a sense of the period as a whole. The reader is not all-inclusive and people may disagree with our selections, but at least we hope to have provided sufficient material to entice our colleagues to do further research.
Counterintelligence is a fascinating and challenging discipline. Our response to these challenges is determined, not by the requisites of the immediate situation but by our historical legacy. Thus we urge that the materials presented in the three volumes be read, not as background to the present, but as part of the present itself.
A fourth volume covers recent spying successes, failures, programs and reports.
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]
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
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]
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
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.
