Postblogging Technology, January 1955: Phreaking Over Fallout

R._C._.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

So, nothing much has changed in that I am back in glamorous London. (Joke! Rose Dolores is in the news. It turns out that Dolores Del Rios also used the "most beautiful girl in the world" tagline, though.) The letter is a bit different in that I am finally reunited with my magazines. I hope that you don't mind that I'm a bit shorter with Aviation Week than I have been in the past, but two things have changed. The first is that Aviation Week's editor since 1945 has just disappeared. Robert H. Wood's departure from the publisher's chair was announced by his deputy in the 21 January issue, effective 2 February, but Wood did not contribute an editorial for the next issues and I have no idea what became of him. I have no idea why this matters to me, but I feel sad. Second, I am very tired of treating advertising-disguised-as-editorial content seriously.

I've continued to read to James-James before bed, since it was such a hit at Christmas. After some experimenting I've hit on a book he likes, a wartime fantasy in which some siblings romp around on a flying bed. It's marketed above his age, but he seems to be enjoying it, and I am thinking about The Hobbit when we are done. Best to get him started on fantasy and science fiction early considering the work his mother is doing. (And by that I mean patent law, and not helping out around the studio.) Too bad about the old job. I know if I were at the desk I'd make sure those Australians buy the Avro Vulcan!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS: I guess we know how the world ends now: With clouds of Cobalt-60.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXI: The End of Migration?

Oh no, demonetisation!

 The Continental versions of Penguin Classics are allowed to have naughty covers. Ooh la la! I like the single name author credit. This is a classic, not smut!  

So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week! 

The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)

Postblogging Technology, January 1955, I: The Crash of '55

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Well, here I am, a young mother and unemployed, like, apparently, very few other women in London right now. I do miss my job selling turboprop airliners to Canadians, but the higher calling of secret diplomacy to stop WWIII was more important, I suppose, even if the actual work was done by the American voter, who seems to have been more motivated by the recession than the atom bomb's red glare. 

You shouldn't worry that I will get bored, though, because a good economy turns out to be a good time to  make movies. The lads in Bray have the rights to a movie version of that runaway BBC serial. After some going around and some waving of the latest Economist talking about the difficulties exhibitors are having finding non-pornographic "X" rated films to show, they have decided to do the movie version as an "X" release. Given the fuss over the BBC 1984 adaptation, it's pretty clear that  you don't have to be get very gruesome by old Hollywood standards to warrant an "X," and it is hoped that it will bring in the teenagers, who apparently have time on their hands from all quitting school at the stroke of sixteen. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Under the Ice: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954

 

The British Greenland Expedition has been over since the summer, and since I'm not going to bother going through the archives, I'm just going to say that it's been a few months since the announcement of the existence of the Lomonsov Ridge, an "unusual ridge of the continental crust in the Arctic Ocean" that emerges as the New Siberian Islands in the Eastern Hemisphere, and maybe Ellesmere Island or Greenland in the Western. 

There might be some people on the New Siberians mining ivory. Otherwise, God just made them to amuse himself. Which is also something you can say about the Lomonsov Ridge. It made a desperate play for relevance in the Cold War because the Americans and Soviets were playing at keeping the drift patterns in the Arctic Basin secret so that they couldn't find each others' Apocalypse Ice Station Zero airbase that no-one built because, come on, seriously. Though on the other hand "come on, seriously" was a scarce commodity in the Cold War and the Reverse Bungie Cord air pickup system, which is also relevant this month on account of it trying to start WWIII by getting two CIA operatives put on trial in for espionage in Beijing, appears in one story about those ice floe bases.

But that's not the story holding everything together this week. That would be the story about the Oklahoma oil field services company doing boat drills off New York. 

What Light? A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954

 

Brazilla Carroll Reece was  born in 1889 in Butler, a town in the far  northeast of Tennessee that was inundated by the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watauga Dam, begun in 1942, and completed in 1948. He attended a small Baptist college in town, and somehow made the transition to city life well enough to complete a master's in economics, and work at NYU until he completed a law degree. Or perhaps he didn't, because the next line in his Wikipedia biography says that he "also studied at the University of London.

He ran in the Republican primary in his home district in 1920, campaigning on his war record, term limits, and against "exempt profit taxes on corporations." Having won the nomination, he cruised to victory in the general, but lost in 1930 over what the biography characterises as TVA politics, even though the TVA was still two years away. (Hoover vetoed a precursor plan.) He recovered his safely Republican seat in the wipeout of 1932 notwithstanding accusations of voter fraud, retained it until 1948 when he resigned to run for a Senate seat, and recovered it in 1950, holding it until his death, still fighting for the TVA and against the New Deal.

A photogenic man and a longterm politician, it isn't surprising that there are a great many Google Images hits for "B. Carroll Reece," the one chosen here making his high colour (creepy affect, great performance) and homeboy shavecut particularly obvious. (One-sixteenth Cherokee, I'm sure, although to be fair he was consistently pro-civil rights.) So here I am, amplifying colour again. But that's only a part  why  he's in the introduction to this here "Technological Appendix." The rest is his ridiculous performance leading on from being slapped down in the 1952--54 United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The chairman launched an attempt to discover how tax-exempt foundations were promoting "anti-American values" but gave up under pushback. leaving Reese to continue a lone campaign to prove that the Kinsey reports were promoting socialism and communism via sexual deviance in the form of an attempt to "reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science." The mix of legitimate concerns --for example, the way that the foundations were promoting oligarchy-- with right wing craziness is fascinating, but, hey, what about R&D? 

Postblogging Technology, December 1954, II: The Big Gamble

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada


Dear Father:

As is by now my tradition of many years, I am writing a "letter" that I will be leaving on my pillow at the knock on the door. And because it is a tradition, I don't even have to apologise any more! I should probably put something embarrassing in here that you can read when I am already halfway to Kelowna, and if I can think of anything embarrassing, it will certainly go in!

Your Loving Daughter,


Ronnie

PS: Please call Bill Radford and tell him not to start WWIII, since for some reason we seem to have decided that the chain of command runs from the senior senator from California to the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and apparently only Matt Ridgeway stands in the way, President be damned.  It's not that World War III won't be terrible. It's that it will be so embarrassing to explain how it happened to the children of a future generation. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: In The House of the Sea Lion

 The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):

(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientist on John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)

Time to say goodbye to migration in history?

This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In  my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade. 

The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology.