Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
Where in some boring parts of the world the story is having to book a last minute flight into Vancouver because of catastrophic and avoidable flooding in northern California and Oregon, we needn't lose focus on the real news, which is that someone is talking Tony Eden down in London, and the President's latest appearance in Key West implies that the GOP might have to run Nixon against Adlia, eww. And while it might seem as though Fortune has gone political in an even more unhinged way this month, it is actually the fact that there has never been so much progress, and we'll lose it all the moment we vote for "groupocracy."
On the bright side, we're currently not invading Jordan or atom bombing Peking, and ElectroData has landed on my desk because I am known to have an interest in the College Boy. Sybil Rock is a delight! On the bright side, I'm not going to have any trouble making my hours. On the less bright side, I think I have children?
The real story of the week is that I finally dragged my ass out to the library on Wednesday, cleared my account, and placed my next batch of requests Thursday morning. The other story is this stupid ass war with Iran that someone is having. The robots at ASRS have so far agreed to hand over Fortune out of all my requests. Flight and The Engineer usually take longer to surface, and Aviation Week, The Economist, and Newsweek come from PARC, the new facility on the former experimental farm at the south end of campus that was built after it was realised that "tearing all the old magazines apart and putting them online" was not actually going to happen. Ha ha, enshittification, watchagonnado. This is a pretty long walk from the holding shelves or something, which is why I expect delivery on Monday or whenever. So postblogging is next week, and given a slack week, how about some "public engagement?" Obviously no one is talking about the war any more because it's boring and we want to focus on the high cost of produce. Which, we have to admit, is related to this stupid war, but we can't do anything about the war, and we can complain that there's no out-of-season corn on the cob.
I've already put some markers down. The story of two weeks ago was the rescue of the crew of an F-15E downed over Iran, which was very reminiscent of EAGLE CLAW, which provoked a safety review of the practice of having pilots wear night vision goggles, which gave us a tiny tiny bit of light(!) on the development of night vision equipment in U.S. service, a topic which is super obscure because of physicists making terrible historians. I made a heroic effort to avoid topical references last week, and also in a Quora answer I wrote on the subject of Third Century Gothic seapower, which is such a bizarre sentence to write even though it's absolutely a thing.
So, now, what the hell, time to go all in. It's hard to stress enough how the world is getting fucked up over all of this, so some comment is surely warranted, and as far as the state of the research goes, I'm not sure I've blogged about the history since Gunther Martin's working group in Vienna promulgated the most recent of the fragments of what is probably Dexippus' Scythia Vindobonensia, they have recovered, which was 2017, per the Internet. But we all know the real reason is that ever since I talked about the subject on Quora, I've been thinking about the hapless twats who occupy the Trump White House and the Roman Emperor Valerian,
(Exactly like that)
who was captured by Shapur I some time between 257 and 260 (David S. Potter thinks that 260 is pretty secure, but I remain completely gobsmacked that the sources don't allow us to assert the year with complete confidence). Per Lactantius, Shapur treated his captive with great cruelty, while the early Muslim historian, Abu Hanifa Dinawari says the reverse. Neither historian seems impeccably credible, but there's a strong energy of Valerian effectively defecting from a hapless Rome in Dinawari's account, and that's definitely in the spirit of the times. Potter, intrestingly, points out that the story that Valerian and his troops/staff were put to work building dams in the new Roman masonry tradition. The dams traditionally associated with Valerian do survive, and how could I possibly pass up a topical aside about Harvard failing its students by omitting civil engineering from the law school curriculum?
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.
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!
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!)
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.
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.
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