Postblogging Technology, January 1952, I: We'll Be a Petrostate Some Day Again, Just You Wait

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

It is January and cold here in the Bay and I am back to school and Second Year isn't quite as easy as they promised. At least the trip back from Santa Clara wasn't in a C-46 trying to slip through the Appalachians at treetop height, although there was some black ice that had my heart in my mouth for a moment. 

And why do I say that school is harder than expected? Because I am on the Law Review and am looking for even the slightest excuse to slip a mention into my casual conversation. Look forward to my article about licensing secret patents! You will like it or you will get SUCH a glare from me!!!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December 1951: So. Watching Severance. You?

 

So I guess the story of the cubicle is that the Greatest Generation, Silents and early Boomers grew up and went to work in a paradise of grand corner offices; but by the time of the late Boomers/Gen X, a new business culture shoved everyone into cubicle farms where everyone has dwelled ever since. Dilbert premiered in 1989, so I guess it checks out. At some level. There's just not enough space to give everyone the Daylight Walls experience.

So, anyway, true story: The University of British Columbia's Automated Storage Retrieval System went into operation in 2005, and has been showing signs of wear and tear for years. At some point during the pandemic shutdown, it failed entirely, leaving the university's main library collection and its high-demand storage collection buried in a hole in the ground with no means of access. (Newsweek was sent to the low demand PARC storage facility when it was culled from the open shelves, which is why I still have access to it.) 

All ASRS collections will continue to be inaccessible for the foreseeable future, and since there is still some residual demand for "books" in the educational process, UBC has begun rebuilding its undergraduate collection. 

Unfortunately, all the library shelf space that was liberated by the ASRS has been repurposed for administrative offices.

Since the pandemic, and again with no end in sight, most university administrative personal have been working from home, and all of those offices are vacant. 

I'm not going to try to draw a moral here, although I'm really tempted.

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Revelations of St. John of the Cross

My employer is serving fresh, hot turnover again, so if you tuned in this week to hear about the prehistory of the cubicle, I'm sorry. That would take too much organising time. Instead, we're going to go up on Mount Carmel and receive a revelation from St. John. Not the author of Revelations, notwithstanding my link, the other one. St/ John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila's disciple in the  Camelites Without Hats movement. Okay, okay, "Discalced Carmelites," which turns out to be a reference to footwear, hence "barefoot at the head," for those into New Wave science fiction. 

The story, as I have it, is that the Carmelites were one of a number of mendicant orders founded in obscurity in the 1100s, or, more likely, early 1200s. Claiming to be descended from eremitical monks living in isolation on Mount Carmel and preserving pre-Christian traditions going back to the Prophet Elijah, they plugged into a line of thinking in Christian natural philosophy that traced Plato back through the Seven Sages, some of whom studied in "the East," taken for these purposes to be Mount Carmel, and linking Greek philosophy -okay, okay, Neo-Platonism-- to the wisdom passed down from God to Adam and so on through the Hebrew tradition.

Hardly content within themselves as between raging debates over how much masochism to allow in the order, the Carmelites were thus possessed of one the weaker and more outrageous origin stories of a major Catholic institution in the age of intense controversy that followed on Luther. Cesare Baroni, one of the great names in ecclesiastical history, ruthlessly cut the cord, freeing Catholic apologists of the liability of defending the Carmelite account, at the expense of leaving the order without a history, and natural philosophy short one Christianity-friendly epistemology in the bargain.  He also, unintentionally, engaged the ongoing dispute within the community. The upshot is that a Calched Carmelite named Paolo Foscarini took indirect aim at Baroni via his colleague, Roberto Bellarmino, in an arcane, ostensibly natural philosophical debate over the nature of the solar system, but, in fact, about possession of a Carmelite church in Rome, and a clause in the Tridentine reforms pertaining to the amount of plate a church was allowed to have. The dispute then drew in a Tuscan courtier, himself no stranger to artfully fanned pseudo-controversies bridging politics, Holy Writ, and natural philosophy, named Galileo Galilei, which is where yours truly, wearing his old historian of science, came on the scene, arriving via Biagioli's Galileo, Courtier, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, the 525m high, 39km-long, 7km wide "mountain range"  along the north coast of Israel, cradling the city of Haifa and also the archaic site of Tel Dor.

Postblogging Technology, December 1951, II: Home for the Holidays

 

R_.C_.,

Arcadia,

San Jose,

California

Dear Father:

It was good to see you, thank you for everything, everyone was fine, and I would spend all day chatting with you if I did not have to be out the door to see and be seen at Bill and Dave's New Year's shindig half an hour ago. Happy New Year!

Your Loving Daughter, 

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIII: For the Bible Told Me So

 

(Richard Gere is only fifteen years older than I am, and was in a BBC show as recently as 2019. I find that I am extremely jealous so I'll repeat the gerbil insinuation)

It has been a while since I visited this topic, but interesting things have come up, so I thought I would write about them. Oh, I can hear you thinking, "But, Erik, weren't you just working on Postblogging Technology, December 1951, II, yesterday?" And I can firmly answer that I don't know where you heard that, but it must be wrong. I would never bail on a postblogging entry after realising that this was a three-issue-month and that I was running out of time even before realising that I would have to cover three issues of Newsweek and Aviation Week, and that next week I have three days off in a row instead of single days split up, like this week. You can hear more about the rise of the cubicle next week! (There's already been an ad for cubicles in the series, which is why I say, "more." It's going to involve another Illinois university experimental house, State, this time, and the guinea pigs are going to be a select nuclear family and not undergraduate engineers.)

So. Ahem. The general thesis around here is that, the end of the Late Bronze Age was, sometimes, at least, a "successful collapse" responsive to the breakdown of inter-regional exchange, involving a systemic reorientation of economic exploitation from the coastal lowlands to upland niches that were more productive at a subsistence level but less able to generate agricultural and craft exports, albeit still able to take part in exchange via livestock. For lack of surplusses, these polities were necessarily non-state entities, but as they succeeded and grew, economic activity pushed downslope to the lowlands to exploit biotically productive lacustrine environments, giving rise to what I think I dubbed "lagoon states" on the model of Carthage, in particular. 

In all of this, I have been neglecting what might be the paradigmatic case, the Land of Israel. 

Postblogging Technology, December 1951, I: Christmas Truce

 

R_. C_.,

Arcadia,

Santa Clara,

California

Dear Father:

In the end, Reggie did decide to go to the memorial, so your phone call did some good, after all.  I hardly knew the 124283 crew, so I was sentimental for a completely different reason. Wong Lee came down to drive us to the club, and not only did we catch up, I got to watch him practice his "evasionary driving!" I have no idea what ONI makes of the crash at this point, but I have to note that they  haven't released a flight number, so it was probably best to make sure we didn't lead the Examiner to the ceremony!  I don't think it would be good for anyone's career to have a Hearstling crash the memorial! the memorial!  Reggie was pretty blue until the band struck up "Ghost Riders in the Sky," which really broke the ice! In the morning, well, no, in the afternoon, by which time he'd finally begun to shake his hangover, he went down to see Bill and Dave. (I think they're cooking up something in the electric guitar way.) 

So I think we are over the hump as long as the Hungarians are nice and release their Dakota. (And, no, I have absolutely nothing on the grapevine about that. There's talk it might have been dropping spies for Tito? Which would be a bit of a hot tamale, let me tell you!)

Looking forward to seeing you on Christmas Eve, and also to handing this to you in person, which is why I am being a dreadful security risk and writing it in English.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging July 1951, II With Some Public Engagement, Even: MiG Alley

 

In the course of a bit more than a century of aviation, the air has seen its share of  the ancient tradition of deniable war. For example, the Condor Legion and Republican aircraft smugglers in Spain, the AVG in China, and the American volunteers of the Ethiopian air force. Probably the single most currently relevant example is one I have been postblogging: The clandestine participation of the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps in the Korean War.  Clandestine, in that Soviet pilots flew aircraft with North Korean and Chinese insignia. Everyone knew what was going on. The secret existed only because  it was in everyone's  interest to pretend that it was secret. Although I do not find numbers for the personnel side of the Russian auxiliaries, the Wikipedia account says that there were 297 Sabres available in theatre facing 950 MiGs at the time of the 27 July 1953 ceasefire, flown by Chinese and North Korean as well as Soviet pilots. 

So that's an occasion when the pilots of one nuclear power faced off against another under a convenient veil of ignorance and also with the pilots of one of the powers further insulated from the brute realities of great power politics by a collective action system in which there was some guarantee that, between a provoked American President and a final nuclear confrontation, there would interpose an angry Clement Attlee or avuncular Winston Churchill. 

We have seen UN pilots playing the numbers game in the contemporary press, with a final claim of 792 MiG-15s shot down against 78 Sabres. A more recent estimate indicates a kill ratio closet to 1.3 to 1 in favour of American F-86s.This is, however, exclusive of other Allied jets and piston planes, and the point of the fighting was to drive off the B-29s bombing the Communist staging area on the Korean side of the Yalu around Sinanju, a name I cannot type without free associating.Which I probably should have repressed harder, since it turns out I was reminiscing about a yellowface performance.. 

It was the failure of the B-29, and not the F-86, which proved to be the crisis of the air war, since it was deemed necessary to maintain pressure on the airfields around Sinanju to prevent the Red Air Force from contesting air superiority over the battle front. The fact that the crisis did not eventuate does not change the fact that there was a bit of a "Fokker panic" going on in Korea in the fall of 1951. The USAF needed a new bomber, urgently. And while the aircraft in question was not ready in time for Korea, the USAF did get one, and that is the story on which this little technological appendix hangs.