Bench Grass is the research blog of Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
In what I was brought up to call the "Bethe Cycle," but which now requires a whole Wikipedia article to describe the various branchings, a presumed homogenous substrate of deuterium (hydrogen atoms with an atomic mass of 2 due to being composed of one neutron and one proton), combined with two electrons, is fused, after multiple intermediate states and the production of "catalysts" of atomic weight up to oxygen, into an atomic weight 4 helium atoms plus 2 electron neutrons and 7 gamma ray photons, with 26.7 MeV free energy.
The CNO cycle occurs in stars, particularly larger ones. It requires less energy to initiate than the naked fusion of two monoatomic hydrogen atoms (in other words, protons), but is also less efficient. Proton-proton fusions dominate stellar processes in smaller stars, but occur at statistically lower rates, causing these stars to burn less hot than larger stars, where the CNO process predominates. By the late 1930s, these facts were understood in vague outline, although given the fact that the neutrino was still at this point a theoretical particle, and its fundamental properties still obscure, physical science's understanding of the process was obviously still incomplete. Note that this not a question of pure scientific curiosity. Neutrinos can, like neutrons, collide with uranium and plutonium nucleii and initiate atomic fission. This happens at a small fraction of the rate of fission events due to free neutrons in atomic explosions, but given that chain reactions are exponential processes, it is something that a responsible weapon designer might want to keep in mind. Ha ha who are we kidding.
In the IVY MIKE test explosion of 1 November, 1952, the American Atomic Energy Commission released 10.4 MT of free energy and a whole lot of radioactive fallout, plus a lot of politics. Considering that the explosion occurred three days before the 1952 Presidential Election, we might on the one hand say that the explosion occurred in a period of great political uncertainty, on the other hand note that while the media was invested in the idea of the election outcome being open, everyone expected Eisenhower to win; and on the third acknowledge that in fact the composition of the Senate was very much in question, and that while the GOP took a two seat majority in the voting, the defection of Oregon Senator Wayne Morse to sit as an independent, reduced that majority to a potential single vote, with Vice-President Nixon voting to break the tie.![]() |
Nine years ago, so in 2014, some vaguely professional media people up in Nebraska decided that these six young people had something going on, and arranged some venues leading to six (I think?) videos, most with at least slightly wonky sound. No-one watched them, and teenagers grow up quickly, so I assume that these kids quit music, joined a space mission, were exposed to cosmic radiation, gained superpowers, and now fight crime. Or something.
Probably not that, actually. Anyway, point is, the Youtube algorithm proceeded to sit on these videos for eight years while all this was going on before suddenly pushing it into everyone's feeds, leading to 200,000 views and 2000 upvotes in the last year or so. This being a lot, but not, as the kids say, not a lot of a lot, it's possible that no-one involved in making these videos knows that they have been picking up views. It's algorithm archaeology! Also, it's me sharing a video that I enjoyed. (Speaking of which, I speed read through Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries this week. Its good!)Also some more, Sidestone Press, has launched a new initiative where you can read their books for free online. Like, for example, Lorenzo Zamboni, Manuel Fernandez-Goetz, and Carola Metzner-Nebelsick, Crossing the Alps: Early Urbanism between Northern Italy and Central Europe (900--400BC (Sidestone, 2020)! It's got the latest from the Heuneburg excavations, so I'm not going to argue about the financial viability of their business model, even if I'm pretty sure that "giving stuff away for free" does not work.
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Caroline Geoghegan |
So, three things: i) There is no way that I am not posting this ad, especially the week I read Edith Outland on "the Effingham libels." Man, did Horace Greeley know how to stick in the knife! ii) I'm off on a bonus week of vacation to see my Mom, so I'm looking for a blog post that requires more wandering-around-the-Intenet-at-the-kitchen-table than blasting away at the keyboard whilst surrounded by ancient tomes. iii) Lameen has confirmed that "there was no North African Bronze Age" is something people say.
I have academic confirmation of the commonplace that makes it a bit less bizarre, but there is a deeper problem in that there seems to be a lack of communication between research silos. Something isn' t right in the prehistory of the Maghreb.
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These do include plenty of typewriter ads, but none as female-centric or as eyecatching as the long series of ads for NCR's accounting machines. The semiotics of the ads vary from all female casts showing off the machine's features to bosses overlooking the operator who can be read as either admiring or patronising --me not being smart enough at that whole "deconstruction" thing to tell the difference-- and this one, which has four vignettes for the price of one. The one male is the white-coated technician, either advising or receiving operator feedback; and so this is the one I went with.
All of this raises the question which has been implicit all along, but which I just twigged to the other day: What about the electric typewriter? We've been hearing a great deal from the frontiers of aviation about the adoption of powered controls, but here is a very old frontier in automation and disintermediation. How did the manual operation of a 120wpm typewriter turn into the operation of an electric appliance at 10 discrete, controlled operations a second? What's the story?
Queen Dido of Carthage has come up in this blog in two very different contexts. First, "an urn said to contain the ashes of Dido" appears in the main room of Temple Hall in the hamlet of Templeton on the shores of Glimmerglass, in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers: Or, the Source of the Susquehanna. It is part of a set of enigmatic images in a place where we would expect to see ancestral portraits, and is such a ludicrously obvious CLUE that we really ought to be taking it as a hint that this is a puzzle we're being invited to unravel. In this case, not to drag it out at any length, Dido committed suicide on her own funeral pyre in the Temple of Venus at the summit of the Byrsa citadel of Carthage. This is more than enough references to "Temples" (there are more!) to read the clue as saying that one of the author's grandfathers is not who the genealogists say he was (Richard Fenimore), but rather Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin. Whether this is true is another matter.
Dido (click this link for the ear worm song) has also come up in her own right as the mythical Queen of Tyre who fled the oppression of her brother, Pygmalion, and founded the city of Carthage on the Tunisian shore of North Africa in either shortly after the fall of Troy, or, more plausibly, 814BC. This discussion is going to develop the claim that she staged her voyage of colonisation from Cyprus, from which her alternative name, "Elissa" is derived from the name of the Great Goddess of Cyprus, per Marie-Pierre Noel's theory, giving me an excuse to embed a performance that isn't "White Flag" or Purcell's "Dido's Lament:"