Summer Road Trip 2026: Apocalypsing Outside

 

So I’m taking a day in Hope for various reasons not limited to the hellacious wildfire smoke and I’ve ended up sitting down for dinner for one in what I expected to be a quiet restaurant and proved anything but. I’m going to sit out on the deck, which is empty, but my waiter is properly sceptical. It’s apocalypsing outside, you see.

To finish the day I watched the latest episode of Silo and learned that, as of this point the eponymous hole in the ground was built, not against the thread of imminent apocalypse, but rather in a “come at me, bro” spirit of taking on any and all potential apocalypses. We’ll see if that holds up in the show. In the real world it seems pretty assholish.

Look, we used to have a pre-gasoline infrastructure, because we used to not have ICE vehicles. Yes, we blew it up, and there were many more consequences than are visible. (Not enough commutable small town jobs for young people, for one.) But little towns like Princeton (shown here being Princeton, and, yes, that’s approximately the heart of downtown) are doing their best to put it all back together again.

Is it daft? Sure. But every journey of a thousand years starts with taking ownership of being “the bronze sculpture capital of Canada.” We need to be in this together, for the long haul, not hiding in a hole in the ground.

A

Missile Gap? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1956

 

Long time readers will be tired of me bleating about how I was sold a bill of goods in high school about how "we," meaning of course the United States --and, by the way, those Latin American whiners complaining about how "America" has been recently appropriated to mean just the U.S. are 100% correct, to my surprise, but it was the British press that led the pack-- were surprised by the unexpected space technology gap signaled by the shocking surprise of Sputnik. (That was as shocking surprise.) For me, the takeaway point, twenty-four years later, was that it was still necessary for every bright child in a provincial high school to major in the physical sciences if "we" were to have any chance to catch up. 

And you will of course heard from me that this is not true, that the satellite launches undertaken for the International Geophysical Year were scheduled years in advance. Sputnik was no more of a surprise than the T-34's appearance on the battlefield, the first Soviet atomic test in 1949, or the defection of Kim Philby, to name three. It turns out that our received history of the Fifties has been sucked of nuance and detail for any number of reasons. In the case of Sputnik, and the missile gap in general, we can even see the explanation. The Eisenhower Administration's attempt to rein in military spending in the 1956-57 fiscal year led to an industry response that was coordinated with congressional Democratic majorities to produce an  airpower-centred arms race. (Much to the disappointment of those wanting an infantry-centred arms race.) 

But that isn't the limit of my disillusionment. Missile programs might be a silly starting point, but I am, er, beginning to doubt the value of the American experiment.

 

Supplementary Postblogging: What Did Happen in Late January 1955?

 To Whom It May Concern:

The total archive of these papers, in their tiny parchment and cribbed family code, covers almost a hundred years and five correspondents, is packed in two-and-a-half steamer trunks, and has been moved back to Arcadia now that the roof is fixed. They would not fit in even that much if the scheme of writing monthly, semi-monthly, or sometimes even weekly letters had been carried on continuously, so I shouldn't feel ashamed of myself for getting mixed up last month, but I do. At some point we will know just how important the last two weeks have been, perhaps once the Fourth Republic has fallen or Dwight Eisenhower, or, any of Adlai Stevenson or Estes Kefauver or Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy (I refuse to believe that the American electorate will pull the lever for Bill Knowland after a full campaign) are elected President. On the other hand, I'm not sure the reader will care. This is supposed to be a kind of investor's newsletter, highlighting the Progress of Science, as our first correspondent was wont to capitalise.  Well, some of the most important technology of the last ten years has involved the projection of motion pictures and the recording of music, and the most important technology news has pertained to Air Force budgets, so it is hard to set hard and fast limits.

On the other hand, now I'm just going to give you a quick rundown of what was in Newsweek, because it's the weekly with the best pictures. (Which will go into the trunks as photographic flimsies bleached of all interest for the future reader, but at least you, the reader of 1956, if any, will see the clipped originals, or, better yet, get your own copy.)

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?  

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.

"Power To Cheap To Meter:" A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 

The now-closed Dounreay fast breeder reactor in Caithness, Scotland

I had to watch one of those "You should totally buy AI because it can actually do stuff" ads to get to this clip. 

Anyway, the experience of postblogging technology is always weird because it's the most direct and easiest way to encounter that classic historian's disconnect between the popular history that solidifies around an event, and the actual events. Guys! There was no Sputnik surprise! Everyone  knew that the Americans and Soviets were going to launch satellites during the (eighteen month) International Geophysical Year and that the Soviets were talking about an earlier launch date than the Americans. I don't think I've come close to unpacking why it was said to be a surprise, but we've got two years to go on that one. 

 "Power too cheap to meter" is a quote from Lewis Strauss, speaking in 1954 to the National Association of Science Writers. Strauss has not been well treated by history, and I am not here to be contrarian, but he went on to offer water as an example of something that progress had made "too cheap to meter," and from that perspective it's at least a plausible bit of prediction. Had he chosen to talk about about long-distance telephony, he would come across a regular prophet! For that matter, he turns out to have been a lot more wrong about predicting extended lifespans. Unmetered power turns out to be further away than ever, but at least there's a road to this outcome. The Wiki goes on to explain that the "statement was contentious from the start . . ." pointing out that, even in 1954, the AEC was not boundlessly optimistic about the future costs of nuclear power, and that one researcher found "dozens of statements" to that effect. Strauss' son seems to have hijacked the conversation by proposing that Strauss was talking about fusion power, something that we've seen as problematic at the Geneva Atomics for Peace conference, where Strauss comes out with a more typical blunder, trying to keep American fusion research secret for no particular reason. But, of course, "power to cheap to meter" comes out of Geneva very directly in a way that has nothing to do with either conventional atomic power or fusion: Breeder reactors. 

Satellites, Satelloons, and Golf: A Technological Prologue to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 

"Dirk Boh-Garde"

So I discovered, while trying to re-order some of my requests from the library, that the ASRS definitely doesn't have my email address, or isn't bothering to send me, specifically, emails, by the simple expedient of noticing that the catalogue was listing my Flight retrievals as being held for pickup. I have physical copies of Flight, Newsweek, and The Economist in hand, and I may have missed the pickup windows for retrieval requests for Fortune and The Engineer, so God knows when I'm getting those. (Online subscription for the Aviation Week archives seems to be re-enabled, although I'd prefer to have physical copies for image quality and because it is cheaper.) More importantly, due to my boss getting his three-times postponed vacation this week, I worked 6-2:30, 1:30-10, 8:30-5, and 5-1:30 schedules this week, and was either washed out or lazy this weekend. 

Anyway, here is a  technological prologue instead, because between Eisenhower revisionism and post-revisionism and the announcement of a planned IGY American satellite launch on 29 July 1955, there's a pretty good reason to run one!

Source: https://www.original-political-cartoon.com/cartoon-gallery/buy/caption-displayed/385/

Historians' views of the Eisenhower Administration have . .  . evolved. Better known as a late-era Modesty Blaise-relief cartoonist, Neville Colvin, a newly-arrived refugee from the "stifling atmosphere of Fifties New Zealand," captures the contemporary view of Eisenhower for Fleet Street. Uninterested, or even lazy, but with a lashing of malice barely under control. This is a thoroughly worthless First Executive. While the Britain, having given the world a senile dotard and a meth-head in succession, is not the country to point fingers, there's a sense that the United States has lost eight years. In contrast, writing in 1986, Robert J. MacMahon reviewed a decade of "Eisenhower revisionism" as being most successful in overturning "the traditional interpretation of an inept, bewildered President overwhelmed by his formidable secretary of state." Although "it can be fairly said that the majority of case studies have not sustained Eisenhower revisionism," because the revisionists "have elevated process over policy," we can at least agreed that foreign policy, at least, was "orderly and rational." I'm a bit surprised that MacMahon never gets into the President's health, but, anyway, about that---

 Satellites. 

Disney Cartoons and Some Thoughts About Computing in 1955: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955

 

Lady and the Tramp is that movie with the spaghetti. Per the proffered selection of Youtube shorts, people also remember the Siamese cats. According to the Wikipedia summary, they're the villains. Also, the movie's plot sounds like everything wrong with Disney in the Fifties, but that can't be news to anyone who hasn't been catatonic since before Steamboat Willie. (Ooh, bed sores!) It turns out that it was a technical achievement, though, the first animated movie made with CinemaScope, which is a significant part of why the movie is so well loved today. The plot might be insensitive, sentimental, and shallow, but the whole thing is gorgeous. Gorgeous is what CinemaScope is all about!

Postblogging Technology, June 1955, II: Free Speech and Tolerance Except for CIO Organisers

Yes, it's that movie. 

R_. C_.,
Lake House,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father:

It is my last day in Britain, and I have handed off this letter and other confidential papers to the courier. We are waiting on a taxi to take us to Waterloo, and from there to Southampton to catch our ship providing it hasn't been struck in. Montreal and by rail to Revelstoke, none of the troubles of Atlantic flying with two children in tow, thank you very much! James cannot travel with us as there is some tedious planning exercise in regards ground radar at the East Anglia stations, so he will be flying in by stages, eventually to Kelowna. So we will have a rented car for the vacation, after all! Just as well, since there are probably going to be some trips to Nelson when Nakusp palls.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Le Mans Disaster: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1955

This is a snip: Source is https://www.mike-hawthorn.org.uk/lemans2.html
Discussion below.

There is something to be said, once again, for the idea that there is no historical era a person knows less about than that of the decade before their birth. Searching around after I personally heard of the Le Mans Disaster of 11 June 1955 for the first time last Sunday morning, I discovered that I was the last guy to the party. In fact, I proved to be so ignorant of the biggest story in the history of motor racing that I am too embarrassed to post the first draft of this paragraph, written in a distracted frame of mind based on some half-assed idea of what should have happened. 

One thing that holds from that draft, which, I reiterate, you will never see because it was so dumb, is that it continues a theme from these posts, which is that people were pretty reckless back in 1955.  This week's post could just have easily have been about the Salk vaccine contamination disaster, which still has me shaking my head as the contemporary press brings me further abreast of it. (The modern view, such as it is, being very much of the "Look forward, never back" variety.) On the other hand, there's a lot of America bashing around, here so a bit of a palate cleanser in the form of a look at an all-European fiasco is welcome! Even if I somehow get back to the America-bashing at the end. Sheesh. 

What the heck, though, it's been a week, and I dearly hope that anyone reading this in  a year's time has no idea what I'm talking about. 

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.

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? 

The Comet Inquiry: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1954

 

On 2 March 1954, Tudor I G-AGRI, belonging to a young Freddie Laker's Air Charter, Ltd, was flying 9500ft near Paris on a freight trip from London to Bahrein when it entered cloud. Slight icing was experienced, and the de-icing and anti-icing systems were deployed, due to which the Indicated Air Speed fell from 155 to 135 kt. The captain maintained altitude via electronic control. This capability, built into the Tudor's SEP4 by its now forgotten manufacturer, Smith's Instruments, was developed from the military requirement a bomber's bombsight be able to fly the plane in the targeting run. It was enormously convenient to be able to correct course and altitude via a single knob, or "joystick," as we would say now, but it was also fuel efficient. Taking the plane off autopilot would inevitably lead to course and engine power adjustments, and gas is money. This might, in fact, be why Captain J. M. Carreras did not increase engine power, although the final report notes that "He did not again consult the airspeed indicator." (It is likely that there was no stall warning indicator, as these were facing resistance from the aviation community. At this point, "[n]oticing that the autopilot was applying large aileron corrections and that the directional gyro indicated a turn to port," the captain disengaged the autopilot, with the disruptive results noted, and "the aircraft made a rapid descent in a spiral manoeuvre." The fact that, contrary to regulations, neither pilot was strapped in at the time might explain much of this if we had any clarity about what was going on in the cabin at the time.    

Later in the report, we learn that "[t]his resulted in an increase in the angle of attack until flying speed was lost." Saying things without wasting sentences is why we invent new words, and in this case I am lost as to why the word isn't "stall." The upshot is that Carreras regained control and pulled out at 2500ft and the plane continued on its merry way to its refuelling stop in Malta, a flight distance of 2000km, at which point the airframe was "found to be severely overstressed." The airframe dossier says that it was scrapped "circa October 1956."

The relevance of this anecdote is that the Tudor was originally ordered as an interim long range large airliner for the "charters," that is, BOAC and the short-lived British South American Airlines that was for some reason, probably related to possible dollar earnings, created alongside BOAC. The Tudor I, with grossly inadequate seating, was followed by the stretched Tudor II, of which BOAC ordered 79 before returning it to the shop for poor "hot and high" capability, which, for the British aviation historian, will trigger memories of the VC10, or the Ensign, for us antiquarians. The Tudor IIs were on their way to becoming something like the Tudor IVs improvised out of some of the initial Tudor Is for BSAA when BSAA began losing scheduled services for never-explained reasons over the Atlantic: Star Tiger and Star Ariel in January of 1948 and 1949 respectively, with a total of 51 people on board. The plane was withdrawn from service, BSAA closed up shop, and the remaining Tudor Is/IVs sold off for freight or occasionally chartered passenger service. 

If at this point you're thinking about tapping the screen where the title says "Comet Inquiry," you're just going to have to wait for the break, because all this talk about air disasters is a great excuse to post

 

Postblogging Technology, November 1954: Buy Now, Pay Later!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada



Dear Father:

Since James and I are a bit worried about our letters being intercepted, I will answer a possibly sensitive question here instead of by post. We do not know when we might be going back to London. We expect we will. We have seen no reason to think that the holdup on cooling down the Qemoy crisis was anything but politics, and that a Democratic victory won't mean a prompt cooling of the Straits crisis. At the same time, those poor Russian sailors are not going to be released soon. They've become an issue in internal Koumintang politics. Whether the crisis will be sorted out, therefore, depends on whether Moscow is willing to swallow the insult. I'd like to say that I have a line on Russia's man in Taipei, but I have no idea how much to credit him. He might be some kind of confidence man, so I am being very cautious. The Koumintang is more than ordinarily enthusiastic about shooting each other down by the water at the moment, so everyone is being understandably close lipped except the people being inexplicably garrulous. So all I can say is that if I know anything, Moscow will. If I don't, all I can say is read the papers for yourself.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, October 1954, II: The Miracle of Transistors

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We have had an exciting few weeks as various European diplomatic efforts and one American one have inserted themselves in our little Crisis. We got to show the French the Tuapse detainees, which drew some looks from one fellow, who seems to have been a China hand who  has talked to people who perhaps do not have the family's best interests at heart, but there is some urgency to the action, as the Europeans do not have a feel for American politics and find it hard to believe that a single mid-term election could end the McCarthy era at a stroke. WE can hardly argue the point without raising questions about just who we are, so hopefully someone else has. I wish I could coach them. While Lindley is a nepotism hire at Newsweek, he's perfectly right that any prediction based on historical that Eisenhower will lose in '56 if the Democrats take the Senate is stuff and nonsense. It is hard to see the way that the Democrats are falling in line behind Stevenson as anything as conceding in advance. The idea is that if Kefauver really wants to be President, he needs to be thinking about beating Nixon in '60. But what I want to ask is how likely it is that Ike will even run in '56 given his health. He really doesn't seem to be enjoying being President right now. Sherman Adams might be able to carry the load when the GOP holds Congress,but he is not going to enjoy tussling with the Democratic leadership in the back half of his term, so why try for another? 

Anyway, that's my thought. Hopefully this Crisis wraps up before Christmas.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Fall of Rome, VI: Flying Canoes and Revolutionary Santas

 

There's nothing to discourage a guy from amateur FallofRomeism than the "Men think about Rome a lot" thing of a few years back, for which reason I haven't visited this thread in a long time. I'd like to say that I was into the fall of Rome before it went mainstream, but, yeah, no. Gibbon  might be the most influential historian in history, and I will actually read Pocock's Gibbon if someone can make  a case that he didn't have Seventeenth Century precursors. What brings me back this week is, first of all, a Quora answer about Picts that reminded me of a small bit of loose ends, and second the fact that it's Christmas, and I am off to meet my first great-nephew in Campbell River on Boxing Day, which is anything but a guaranteed day off in my line of work. O. is six months old, so a bit young for Christmas, but soon! I, on the other hand, am totally ready for Christmas, which the visiting and the family reunions and the long walks with dogs and the Baldur's Gate 3 marathons . . .Oops, definitely shouldn't have said that last bit. 

It has also been suggested that for various more widely applicable reasons that we should lighten up and just enjoy a Christmas for a change. And I don't disagree, so here's a Christmas message calling for peace on Earth, good will to all, and a proletarian revolution!

Yeah, Angela didn't say that last bit.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954: Gormenghast

 

Just kidding. Today I'm talking about the pioneering nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, not Mervyn Peake's weird 1950 novel about a giant estate that's a country sort-of-thing. (I'd offer a more insightful summary if I'd ever been able to get into the darn thing. Anyway, here's one of Eleanor Morton's bits. The Mervyn Peake reference is a running gag at the end.) I'm just making a witty (YMMV, as the kids say) literary reference. Somewhat surprisingly I find that I'm the first to do it, maybe because all that "Second Elizabethan Age" stuff is down the memory hole. (Hah! Witty literary reference!) 

Calder Hall actually gets its  debut in the 4 June 1954 issue of The Engineer, exactly a month before the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the British hydrogen bomb, in a not-at-all coincidental development. But we don't cover the first two weeks of the month at The Engineer, so we missed it, and also the ominous foreshadowing that is a picture of a Ruston gas turbine set up to burn methane. "The purpose of the demonstration is to show that natural gas, which is available in almost unlimited quantities on many oilfields, can be burnt with the same efficiency and controls as liquid fuels."

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1953: Transducer Days

 

With the very low key add for the IBM 650,  "the first mass--produced computer in the world,"we take another big step in the direction of home computing. With the bizarre use of a Mark 14 bombsight as a frame to describe the workings of the bellows in a modern pneumatic system points us towards AIRPASS. With all that going on, Aviation Week has a pictorial for us showing how transistors are made, and everyone in avionics seems to have a transducer on ad this month. And something strange is going on. By this I do not mean the Wikipedia article illustration.

According to the Wikipedia Commons credit, is from the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, and I am guessing that it is from the early Sixties. The obvious sociological question I have here is why the two operators in our retrospective view of early computing are male, while at the time operators of complex technological systems consistently code as female. It's a very striking change that I've worn out the electrons commenting on, because I want some smart person who isn't me to do all the hard work of coming up with an analysis of it. 

What I mean, rather, is the default assumption that a "transistor" is made of germanium, in a month in which piezoelectric transducers are being pushed heavily in the advertising space. Only 40 tons of germanium were mined "by the end of the Fifties," per Wikipedia. (Or, in 1998, germanium cost $800/kg, silicon, $10/kg. We are not getting to the Information Age using the 50th most abundant element in missile guidance systems.Crystals of various germanium do appear to have piezoelectric properties, but I'm not sure anyone knew that in 1954, and in any event quartz is a satisfactory piezoelectric material and is as common as dirt, so that would be what we would use here.  

But first, before the jump, something for 1954 from the Paul/Ford studio, although not obviously electronica, which word I apparently can't use because "electronica" is a 1990s music genre and holy shit look at this Wikipedia listicle.