The Fall of Rome, VII: One, Two, Many Irans

 

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?  

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?