Catseye: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1955

 

This cover is credited to Richard M. Powers, and is so beautiful that I decided that I couldn't just stick the credit in a subtitle. Cat's Eye is a 1961 Andre Norton novel, relatively early in Norton's career, and the first appearance of The Dipple, the sprawling refugee camp from which many of Norton's socially alienated protagonists originate. It has been a very long time since I read the novel, but as far as my limited recollection go, the title isn't a reference to cat's night vision, but the cover art is another matter. 

The crucial thing about cat's eye vision is that, in contrast to the night vision equipment of the 1950s that turned infrared input into visible-light images, cat's eyes work by focussing ambient visible-spectrum radiation to give better imaging, at the expense of loss of losing the kinds of visual information that are less relevant to crepuscular predators. People like cats, so there are lots of explanations and reconstructions on Youtube. Here's an older one that doesn't have AI narration. 

 

Postblogging Technology, December, 1955, II: Peace On Earth and Sick Presidents. (In 1955!)

We've done this before, but Pogo has never been more relevant.

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Once again I am writing to the man downstairs. It seems a bit silly, but I also feel blue and somber and like somehow marking the occasion of Victor's death, which has hit James even harder than it has me. 

Test flying is dangerous work, and we have lost friends before, but this is the first of them to be killed on a plane that James was not sparing in describing as a pointless death trap. You have to swallow a certain amount of bile when your warnings go disregarded, and it is not like Victor is the last man this silly contraption will kill. 

I suppose this what we deserve for living in a country that turns out not to need a President at all, after apparently living through almost two centuries labouring under the illusion. At least as long as the Cabinet consists of good Republicans, the country flies autopilot!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December 1955: A Heart-Warming Christmas Time

R_. C._,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Hopefully this, and the Christmas post accompanying, will reach you before you leave for Santa Clara, where I will see you for our a dinner which I'm sure will be as jolly as the Geneva Conference. (If I can b be Molotov, Grace has to be Dulles!)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Minesweeping: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1955

 In a perfect world where everyone spent their time following the paparazzi who follow me around, you all would have learned not to take my complaints about my work schedule too seriously. The last time I did this, I was getting ready for a grueling week that did not, in fact, emerge, thanks to the timely deployment of my entire paid time off bank. But! In the last week I had split days off, always bad for my productivity, and an exciting variety of shifts that made it worse. I ought to be reporting this in a "view from thirty thousand feet" sort-of tone, in that the reason that I'm not posting my December technology postblogging this morning is that I started a new Baldur's Gate 3 run yesterday instead of working on it. But my excuse for that is tired, etc. 

On the bright side, I'm a little over half done, and have a long weekend for Easter followed by a vacation week. So! Don't cry for me, post-Peron Argentina set on a bright course of democracy for all.

Our current King reached the apex of his active naval career as the commander of a "Ton-"class minesweeper, one of the enormous class of minesweeper/minehunters built in the mid-Fifties. Timing is right for the ships, and the Prince is in the  news, even if it's hard to get a picture of him in his service uniform that isn't camped by Getty Images. Relevance, 1955-style! 

Shiny!

Or so I say, holding a poker face. In fact, as hard as it will be for visitors to this blog from the distant future to believe, we're in the middle of a global crisis brought on by an American attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran conducted in spite of four decades of acknowledged American naval mine warfare deficiencies. The Persian Gulf is narrow and shallow, its entrance strait particularly so, with Iran controlling its northern shore, and vast quantities of shipping, and in particular, oil tankers, pass through it. Warhawks in Washington have been pushing for an attack on Iran for this entire period, without much self-awareness in general (at this very moment as I write, an interview with John Bolton is up at Vox to the effect of "But not like this!"), but historically very conscious of these deficiencies and a solid record of trying to solve the problem with magic battleships. That is, "Littoral Combat Ships," and not "battleships," but "magic battleship" is more euphonious. 

How did we get here? Mine warfare is hard is how we got here.

Gathering the Bones XXIII: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Manifest Destiny, and The Reality of 19% Grades

 

Lana Del Rey? I'm so old I remember when "Lana Del Rey" was an ironic comment on "Lana Del Rey." But I guess she decided not to go away, and I'm grateful because that means I can post  an original version of the John Denver chestnut: 

Almost heaven, West Virginia/
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze

The story, as I have it, is that at some vague point in the Eighteenth Century, vast numbers of Scotch-Irish migrated  from, you know, Scotland or Ireland or around about there, to the crestline of the Appalachians. For it was at this clear, geographic line that they were barred from going further by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. George III by this action set himself against the westward drive of the American people that is such a large part of its essential nature, a Western drive bound up in the natural progressiveness of the American spirit, about which I can no longer even. The drive naturally soon resumed after the matter of the Revolution was dealt with, but by this time the Scotch-Irish had settled into the "Appalachians," where their Elizabethan accent persists unchanged to this day, denoting the antiquity of their origins and the oldness of their nature, as otherwise indicated by their charming habits of old time country music, square dancing, and making and consuming illegal alcohol products.

Line Scanning: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1955

 My familiarity with all of this begins with vignettes in Charles Stross novels in which Concordes and the like demonstrate that there's something to high Elizabethan British aviation technology by penetrating American air defences. Since sourcing pastiche science fiction novels is no basis for a system of historiography, I remained agnostic until I arrived at OPERATION SAGE BRUSH, which I find pretty fully summarised online here with respect to land operations,  and with respect to air superiority operations by Not A Pound For Air to Ground at Youtube.

SAGE BRUSH opened with 9 Aggressor B-57s crossing the Exercise's "Truce Zone." The Canberras of the attacking force easily evading defending interceptors and nuked 18 air bases as far north as Tennessee. Our narrator summarises the lesson of the Exercise as the one about the bomber always getting through and goes on to talk about the upcoming generation of American fighter bombers, blaming the Great Mistake of the Vietnam War on an excessive emphasis on atomic warfare (275 simulated atomic bombs with 15 simulated megatons was used by Aggressor forces alone in an exercise area consisting basically of Louisiana, a rather smaller area than, say, West Germany). This being a judicious combination of strategic velleities and hobby horses, I will defer to Newsweek, which focussed on the transient technological aspects, successful jamming and the unstoppable speed of the B-57. I mean, general atomic war is a bad thing, but they actually built F-111s and Buccaneers, and tried to build TSR-2s, so in some sense this part is more important. No-one, apparently, gives a shit about backward-wave oscillator, aka the "carcinotron," for reasons unknown to the author

As the electrons travel down the tube, they interact with the RF signal. The electrons are attracted to areas with maximum positive bias and repelled from negative areas. This causes the electrons to bunch up as they are repelled or attracted along the length of the tube, a process known as velocity modulation. This process makes the electron beam take on the same general structure as the original signal; the density of the electrons in the beam matches the relative amplitude of the RF signal in the induction system. The electron current is a function of the details of the gun, and is generally orders of magnitude more powerful than the input RF signal. The result is a signal in the electron beam that is an amplified version of the original RF signal.

Just kidding. Let's talk about Latin grammar next! But Concordes dropping James Bond pastiches on Cthulhu-occupied Washington (spoilers I guess) is a bit more graspable than analogue electronic circuits. Just one aspect of all this is tactical reconnaissance to find atom bomb targets, which you don't want to waste, there being only 300 of them to spare. (On the bright side, the defending side in SAGE BRUSH had twenty-five bombs to spare  for not-Louisiana at the end of the exercise.) The line is very pithy: The TSR-2 was to carry sidescanning "line scan" optics, which previously had gone into a pod on the Buccaneer. So what was that thing they did with the lines and the scanning?

Postblogging Technology, November 1955: Even the Moderate Adlai Stevenson

The Ballad of Davy Crockett hit the Top 10 twice in 1955, by two different artists. Leaving the historic Crockett aside (JFC he was a Shawnee, deal with it). "Justice was due every Redskin band." What do you even do? RIP Estes Kefauver.

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

The idea was good, but the material wasn't up to 
it and they took it too far. 

Fall is here, and I have to say that, as materialistic as it sounds, it is very nice to be making good money and not from a family allowance. James had leave, and we took the family up to Napa in our very nice new 405. (Fortunately the neighbours take it for granted that it is family money, and I don't correct them, because I am a liberal, but I am also a hypocrite, because it is just safer that way.) 

We saw the Ks for the first time since their return from Europe. I regret to say that all does not look entirely happy on the domestic front, but there is the thought that they will do it for the children, and one might hope that misery will lead to a great novel. One's fingers are crossed. We also saw, in a more bohemian way, V., who is making quite the splash on the science fiction literary scene, if not precisely the money. He pretends Bohemian diffidence, but I'm sure that he would be more comfortable being diffident with more money! On the bright side he introduced us to some friends, wild-eyed vintners, if you can imagine, and leaving us half-convinced that there's a reason to be wild-eyed about California wine. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Jordan River Is Deep and Wide: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1956

 

So we are sorted at work about how this humble blogger is going to be plugged into our current workplace "the retail emergency is forever" scheme:

Saturday: 6-230; Sunday, 10-6:30 "Need experienced people in the mid shift on our busiest day," until Saturday at 3PM, at which time it was changed by text message to 6-2:30: Monday, 6-2:30: Tuesday: 6-2:30: Wednesday, 1:30-10 "The DM will visit tomorrow, we need the department in good shape." It's good to be wanted at work, but if I asked you to guess what I did on Thursday, and you answered, "Managed to sleep for six hours, then sat on the couch eating stale chips and watching Youtube clips, taking a break every hour to nap," you would be right! As it turns out, I wouldn't have been able to finish it on Sunday morning, either.

And this is why this post is largely in response to things Newsweek will cover in our next installment of postblogging, which was about one quarter done Saturday afternoon when I gave up and went out for dinner.  

Math time:

+

=

The point of this week's technical appendix is that some people say that British Airways ruined the British aviation industry by rejecting British planes, and some people say that British aviation ruined British aviation by forcing the Britannia on British Airways. In the spirit of the Internet these days, I'm going to present the case that it's actually "both"! And along the way I'm going to drag in some infrastructure projects of the mid-Fifties that are also having a continuing impact in a little part of the world that I like to call "the Middle East," which you probably haven't heard of. We're very geographically educational around this blog! 

Postblogging Technology, November 1955, I: The Path of Duty

First week at Number 1 started 26 November. Princess Margaret isn't exactly a working class hero, but I bet she's vibing to this right now!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

After the excitement of playing secret agent for a few weeks, I am afraid that my life has turned into that of a junior associate doing her best to get her billable hours up and having to watch her children being raised by someone else. 

Since elsewhere I'm on about the history of Route 40 and the French and Indian
War, here's another reminder that there is no such thing as the crest of the 
Appalachians. This is about a day's walk from Gnaddenhutten. 

I have to confess that the thought of turning in some masterpiece of corporate "raiding" and half-retiting on my laurels was very attractive. Otherwise, it will be hard for James and I to spend anywhere near as much time together as we would like. Hawaii and San Francisco aren't that far apart, at least for dashing airmen, but trans-Pacific dashes can be wearing for any of us. At least he is not in Washington flogging the SeaMaster on. And, yes, if we want to give little James-James and Vickie a little brother or sister, it would be best to do it before James is put aboard an atomic aircraft!

We are not thinking about moving from Palo Alto, although thank you for your offer. The house is nice, and the train is punctual and a good time to do some paperwork --at least in theory!  


Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Fiasco: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1955

 i)

ii)

iii)

(Photo credits are Navy, Air Force, and a Vickers-sourced advertorial that  I consider to be public domain. Look, you pretend that it's journalism, I pretend that it isn't proprietary.) 

Three technological objects, three fiascos, two countries, two lessons, one post!

Postblogging Technology, October 1955, II: Boom boom!

According to  Reddit User WeirdWings, this is the  Bartini A-57, a supersonic V/STOL delta
wing flying boat nuclear bomber, with a supersonic recon plane piggyback. "It was never put 
into production" says Wikipedia, which proceeds to speculate on why it was cancelled in 1957.

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

With this one you find me back to work, in the office, and missing my children, whom I got to see a lot more when I was running around the Santa Clara Valley. As exciting as making sure you aren't followed on the way to a secret rendezvous and passing coded messages is, it was not to be. The young men who want to leave Dr. Schockley's employ have neither a patent case nor money, and there's not very many of them. We might be able to turn around the money. There are investors out there, but Shockley will have to get a lot worse for the rebellion to spread across the office, and, I don't know, tell them he doesn't want their work. It is hard to believe any of that is going to happen. 

Your son, if he hasn't written you separately, is settling into squadron life again. As he says, being in charge of planes at least means that he doesn't have to be in Washington championing the SeaMaster. He will be back in town next weekend, and we will go see Oklahoma!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXV: Company's Calling

 The rhythms of an industry devoted to hospitality are a bit at odds with a society that treats hospitality as, not unreasonably, a social thing. I have worked very hard for the last three months and skipped holiday travelling. It is time for a well-earned vacation, which started this Thursday, and in which in a world where everyone lived my life, I would have rested on Thursday and Friday and postblogged on the weekend. This is not that world, and I write from my mother's kitchen on Sunday morning,  bound for Campbell River later today. (I also have a dog poking her nose in my leg, undeterred by the fact that it is still pitch black out.)

So let's talk about visitors, instead. I'm working my wage through the Cambridge Early Iron Age volume right now. Archaeology is great, and, impressively, is getting close to being able to tell stories about a very select group of Early Iron Age individuals --vase painters. There is, however, a larger argument about visitors in archaeology, namely, were there any? We have stories about Early Iron Ag visitors, and an argument that they were central to the phenomena by virtue of sharing important technologies (like vase painting). On the other hand, there is a robust counter-argument to the effect of "Show me!" Which is fair, because our stories about visitors are, just that, stories (except we can now hope, for vase painters). Stories are for poets, and, well, you know, poets. 

So lets make up a story: Assur-uballit II and Thales are the same person. Just to be clear here, this is 200% unmotivated, a Robert E. Howard-level historical fiction that, if presented seriously by someone who wasn't me, I could tear apart in a million different ways. (Just to start, he was at least a generation too old.) But it sure does invent one heck of a dinner guest, and a wanderer and a rambler, as someone's poking nose reminds me I should be, too. 

(For the lack of proper diacriticals I make no apologies. I'm on a laptop and a deadline here.)

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, I: It's Just A Cardial Infarction! Walk It Off!

R_., C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Here I am, your favourite daughter-in-law, dashing off a late one from an undisclosed location in our dear very own Santa Clara County. It's so convenient being a native daughter when you have to propose a very private meeting place in a very public setting! I have just had a lovely discussion with some very nice, if awkward, engineers, about the troubles they are having with a manager whose initials might or might not be "Shockley."

Honestly! I took this job to do patent law. (But, then, the President didn't take the the job to be heartless, unlike his Vice-President, and look who is going to be our President now!) Unless I am being unnecessarily about Ike's "mild" heart attack. At least my dark humour gives you a bit more of a sense of how we are feeling right now down in these United States. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Believing Because It Is Absurd

 

I did the Axial Age five years ago from the perspective of the relationship between religion and technological change. Let's come at the issue of learning, literature, scripts, and the problem of finding the "there," there. 

Wikipedia's article on the individual it designates as Siddharta Guatama is entitled "The Buddha."  in Buddhist theology, Prince Siddharta is one of a number of soteriological figures designated as "Bodhisattvas." I hesitate to refer to him as the first among equals, but that's the sense of the concept that I am going with, and one of the most important things that distinguish him from other Buddhist saviour figures is that he is considered to be a historical figure, "a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE." One of the odder things about this conversation is that their is a tradition that places his life a century before Ashoka, who is fairly firmly dated to c. 250. Given that archaeologists have suggested that the picture of the state of civilisation in this region in the biographical stories of the Buddha more nearly fits 350BC than 550BC, you would think that the conversation would take this tradition more seriously. The introduction goes on to point out that the Buddha is first attested in c. 250, but this turns out to depend on the Ashokan attribution of the Lumbini Pillar, which refers to the Emperor in the third person and past tense, undermining the dating claim. It was also a discovery of  notorious fraud Anton Fuhrer. As a practical matter, the Buddha's existence is first affirmatively asserted in Greco-Roman literature by Clement of Alexandria. One would think that he would be a fascinating figure in early Christian Alexandria, well worth discussion.  

If, however, the Buddha lived in "the 6th or 5th century BCE," he was contemporary with . . . well, here's another level of difficulty. Per no less an authority than Plato, this was the age of Zoroaster, but Wikipedia, intending to present the consensus of scholarship, or as close to such as can be achieved, puts Zoroaster at 1500BC. The argument is that the Avestas (not attested before c.1200AD) have linguistic parallels with Vedic literature, and on the argument that the Indo-European languages arrived in India about 1500BC, this must be Zoroaster's flourit, not withstanding the authority of Plato and various etymological problems, of which the historian of technology must insist on the claim that "Zarathustra" means "Manager of Camels," and that camels were domesticated once and for all during the Iron Age. To this (non-)contemporary we add Laozi, almost certainly a fictional character and unlikely at best to have been a pre-Confucian figure if real, but certainly claimed as such in the Daoist tradition, and the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and let's not even get started on them! 

It seems as though arguing about the historicity and dates of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Laozi in the same breath is a bad thing to do. It is weird that the traditional historical dates of the spread of Indo-European should be on the same level, but they are, and at the end of the day we launch into yet another realm of mystery by noting that these contested claims of contemporaneity (and more besides, as the Wikipedia account shoehorns in Jainism and "Second Temple Judaism") are in service of Karl Jasper's axial age, which cannot be better summarised than as this . . . 

But in the Iron Age. 

Has Anyone Mentioned That Einstein Was Jewish? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1955

 

If you are of a certain age and a nerd, you may have encountered the idea that the "spindizzy" reactionless drive of James Blish's City in Flight novels were actually a real thing that Norman Dean was demonstrating to various smart people in the science fiction world. It was probably someone about that age who wrote Spindizzy for MobyGames, which was a big release in 1986 and drives nostalgic interest in its theme music that blends into electronica more generally and dominates an internet search for "spindizzy." 

I did eventually sort out what Newsweek's nonsense about variations in the speed of light was about, and the link between this pseudoscience and the Dean Drive was made, although not until the early Sixties. Some of the people involved then went on to promote the Reagan Administration's SDI. Fun times!

Even some of the crackcpots hat John W. Campbell promoted
in Amazing were embarrassed to be associated with him,
but Norman Lorimer Dean was not noe of those guys.

 

But before it derailed, there was real science, and to make it even more fun, the real scientist who did the real work eventually derailed himself and became a big Einstein critic of the "relativity is like moral relativism," which used to be bad and opposed to Western Civilization, which is maybe not where we are right now, I can't keep track of the ongoing "start a new car wreck to distract people from the old car wreck" approach to politics they've got going on down there these days. 

Maybe in the interest of sanity I can expose some long-gone unsavouriness in the course of discussing some actual history of science and technology, after the jump. 

Postblogging Technology, September, 1955, II: Ike in '56!

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

You might be happy to hear that I have been branching out from pouring over patent tenders to wining and dining Bill and David. While it might seem as though the partners are taking advantage of my connections, I see it as me taking advantage of the partners! It is nice to be working a bit closer to home, though, as I am feeling more than a little guilty about how little I am seeing my children. 

You'll notice a lack of aviation journals. The Farnborough issues of Flight have vanished into the postal never-neverland. On the bright side, an October number of Aviation Week has managed to track me down at the Palo Alto address in defiance of all probabilities. Maybe circulation remembers our long correspondence the last time I couldn't get my magazines here?

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Ray Milland's last directorial effort?