Plantation of the Atlantic: The City of Regret

By Jerzy Strzelecki - Own work,
CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2998955

Al-Idrisi (1100--1165) tells us that the city of Safi is so-called from "Asafi," the local pronunciation, which is from Arabic "Asaf," meaning "regret." It gets this name, the illustrious geographer tells us, from the sorrows of a ship's crew of "wanderers" [mughrarin] of Lisbon in al-Andalus, who sailed in search of the ends of the Atlantic Ocean, only to end up at Safi. When told that they were two months sail from their homeland, one of the crew said that he had regrets. 

It's generally not a good idea to take a twelfth century geographer's word on etymology, even if he was the official geographer to Roger II of Sicily, a man of a certain reputation even setting aside his assumption of the title of (Norman) King of Africa and a 1926 opera.

(Never let it be said that I wouldn't go the extra mile and do a Youtube search for you!)

"Asafi,' we're told, is the Berber word for river estuary. And while I'm tolerably certain that there's no such language as "Berber," I have the complete confidence of an ignoramus that "fey/sfi/sfey" is the common root for the verb "to flood" in the Afro-Asiatic languages of Morocco. 

So what I can salvage from all of this is that the name of this town on the central Moroccan coast is linked by a distinguished medieval scholar with one of many stories anticipating Columbus. You cannot sail directly from al-Andalus to the end of the Atlantic, but I can certainly see you ending up in the mouth of the Chaabi River if you try. Rounding out the Wikipedia-reading, Safi is historically a centre of the Moroccan weaving industry and sardine fishery. (The Chaabi isn't mentioned in the skeletal Wiki. I add value!) 

Given that Marrakesh itself was only founded about this time, it is unlikely that the city settlement of Safi is much older than the mention in al-Idrisi, so it is unfortunate that the enthusiasm for plumbing the depths of the Atlantic in southerly latitudes apparently lapsed at the mouth of the Chaaba. Had Asafi been founded on the Draa, instead, we would have been getting somewhere. 

A Technological But Also Pure Science Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January, 1944, II: The Secret Life of Stars

I was not quite 19 when Ronald Reagan made his "Star Wars" speech on 23 March 1983, perfectly prepared by far too much libertarian science fiction to be convinced by his case that it was about time that scientists stopped working on MAD and started working on ABM, on defending civilisation against the atomic horror instead of exacerbating it.  In its immediate wake, the argument against "Star Wars" that got the most attention, seemed ludicrously pessimistic. Computer scientists emerged to argue that it was just too hard to programme ABM guidance  software. 

It turns out, as we saw in February, that ABM wasn't something that people just thought of in 1983 after seeing Star Wars IV. The first ABM proposal was put on the table before WWII even ended, and involved shooting down V2s with antiaircraft guns. This week, it turns out that ABM efforts are intimately tied to the H-bomb debate. If the Communists are going to shoot down a large proportion of the atomic bombs aimed at them, the ones that get through should be corkers, and also much cheaper. 

This is why, as January comes to an end, President Truman is hearing conflicting advice from his experts. Some believe, correctly as it turns out, that the H-bomb will be significantly cheaper, in bangs for the buck, than atom bombs. This argument does not, however, get anywhere near as public play as the "corker" argument. It is, admittedly, in part because the arguments are related. if only one in ten weapons get through, better that Moscow be targeted with 10 H-bombs, so that one can level it, than with 100 atom bombs, etc. 

For the scientists that object to this second argument, it was mostly to the grotesque barbarism of aiming to hit "Moscow" with a 10 megaton bomb, in order to destroy all Moscow-related strategic targets, but  also, of course, well, Moscow. The fact that, in the background, there are some goulish rumblings about bombs of unlimited yield --the gigaton bomb-- underlines this. But there's a reason that Edward Teller is talking about a gigaton bomb that, it seems to me, gets obscured in the rearview mirror. Nuclear physicists had a lot to learn about atomic physics in 1950.

The January 1950 argument flows from the fact that Teller is still arguing for his "classical super" H-bomb. Others believe that the classical super is highly problematic. We have two accounts. One is that the difficulty is economic and industrial. There is not enough tritium for the classical super. The other is that the classical super is seen as physically impossible. It is here that we have to ask ourselves how so many physicists are ranging themselves against one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the day. The usual explanation is that Teller was a colossal, raging asshole. And this is true! Moreover, he is quite likely being driven by all kinds of motivated reasoning. But that doesn't mean that he can't defend the classical super, however weak his argument actually is! So what is going on, in January of 1950, months before the Teller-Ulam design surfaces?  This is a very interesting question, because it invites us to peer through telescopes and into cloud chambers with Bit Science, and investigate the way that "pure science" is wrapped up with big booms. 

Postblogging Technology, January 1950, II: Isolate and Sterilise

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

As I'm stationed at the edge of the world, no gossip this time round! Except, well, you may not have heard that Sarah has come down with diphtheria just at the end of the incubation period, extending Ronnie's quarantine.  It's still a bit uncertain what's going to happen to her magazines. The books will be saved, but the magazines are cheap enough to burn? Doesn't seem like the way to stop a plague ot me, but what do I know?

The mood here in Formosa is febrile, with all eyes on Hainan Island. The crossing to Hainan is much less of a challenge to the Communists than the Strait of Formosa, but, in the end, the outcome of the fight would seem to come down more to defections on the Koumintang side than the strength of the Communists, which has everyone eyeing everyone else suspiciously. I find that my Mandarin has more of a Hakka lilt than I ever expected, which gives me a bit of an in with the old revolutionary crowd. I try to be discrete, given that a follower of Dr. Sun might turn out to be a followed of the Soongs. But the point is, I'm hearing more rumours and gossip than  you'd believe. Basically, everyone is talking to the Reds --according to everyone else.

I'm almost tempted to list everyone I've heard denounced. That way, when the Communists come, I'll be able to say, "I told you so," no matter whose sector they land in.   

Your Loving Son,
Reggie

Postblogging Technology, January, 1950: Straight out of Quarantine

(In honour of True magazine, some old time science fiction.)

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada


Dear Father:

I bet you were wondering who this letter would come from this month, what with Uncle George saying "no," Auntie Grace and James in Singapore, Ronnie in quarantine because of Susan's diptheria, and me waiting on orders.

Well, it's me. I was hoping that this would be coming to you from Tampa, and I could tell you about what it's like flying straight into a  Florida rain squall with the most giant radar the combined Navy and Air Force could dig up blasting into the thick of it to see what comes back. But, I'm not. I'm in the backwoods of Formosa, "advising" the Koumintang Air Force on the delicate subject of Stop Doing What You're Doing And Do Something Else Instead. I can't say very much about that, apart from the obvious, which is that the Communists are using Russian equipment, and don't seem to be doing it well, so maybe we'll go some way towards cracking their communications, which will be helpful for finding the B-29skis before they blow up Seattle (which would be bad, and we're against it even though it'll help Wichita pick up some contracts, which would make the President happy).

On the "bright" side, this is the back end of God's creation, and all of Ronnie's mail is being burned, because the Post Office doesn't know how to fumigate diptheria germs and quarantine is quarantine.   So all I've got for this project is the post's subscription to Aviation Week, Time, and (for some reason) The Engineer.  Or, well, I would, but some horse's rear end cleared out all this issues since 1930 and diverted the new subscription to an office in Taipei three months ago, and so much for that. (The post still gets to pay for them, though, so not all is lost! Or, no, wait, that means even more is lost.) 

Onward and ever upwards!

Your Loving Son,

Reggie

The Bishop's Sea: The Hawk of the Atlantic

A bit of an exercise in dilettantism here, but worth it because this stuff does seem to be neglected in the historiography of the "Reconnaissance."

Some 4000 meters above sea level in the High Atlas are the springs of the Oued Sous, which falls into the Atlantic near Agadir after only a 112 mile run. The Sous is well known as the home of the Argan tree, something of a sensation in the cutthroat world of hair products for the last few years. 

Timmel mosque at the ribat of Timmel in the Nfis valley.

It was in this fertile and well-irrigated region, in the otherwise unidentified village of Igiliz, a bit more than 500km south of Casablanca, that, perhaps in 1080, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Tumart was born, in the nation of the Hargha, part of the Masmuda Confederation. His given name is something of a mystery, for he is known to history as the "Son of Delight," perhaps from his father's nickname, although  numerous Sufi saints of Morocco bear the same name.

Perhaps unlike them, Ibn Tumart climbed towards the wisdom of God, like a goat  after an argan nut, travelling first to Cordoba in al-Andalus, and later to Baghdad, in search of Islamic learning. Which he found, it is said, at the feet of al-Ghazali. (The hagiographers really aren't that helpful.)

This map, which I scraped from an online thesis on colonial
Morocco, does a good job of capturing the scale.

Be that as it may, Ibn Tumart returned to the Maghreb by ship from Alexandria in 117/18. At Igiliz, at the end of Ramadan in 1121, he preached a fiery sermon in which he pursued weighty theological issues as well as the gravely immoral Almorad practice of veiling men and unveiling women, something with reverberations for our modern, masking times. Properly wound up, he proclaimed himself the right-guided one, the Mahdi, which implied levying revolt against the Almoravid regime. Promptly decamping to the high fortress of Timmel, in the midst of the Masmuda country. His cause united six nations of the Masmuda, closing the passes from Marrakesh into the Sous anticline. 

The anticline between the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas contains not only the watersheds of the Sous, but of the Draa valley, which rises only a little to the east of the Sous, but runs at first east and then south to reach the Atlantic below Tagounite, falling into the Atlantic north of Tan-Tan, marking the former border between Morocco and the Spanish Sahara in its lower course.  At its westward bend, far inland, lies the tell identified as old Sijilmasa, and, near it, the spectacular hillfort of Jebel Mudawwar now a regular movie location.

At this time, Sijilmasa was the major northwestern terminus of the caravan trail from Ghana, and also a way station on the east-west route to southern Morocco from Tunis via Tlemcen. Although drawing itself apart from Almoravid power, it was a crucial waypoint on the trans-Saharan route to the Empire of Ghana and its gold, and the blockade was an existential threat to the Almoravids, although before the economic effects could be felt, ibn Tumart had led his tribesmen down to besiege Marrakesh and been ignominiously killed. It therefore fell to

By Walrasiad - Own work, based on Morocco relief location map
.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34733373

an Algerian named Abd al Mu-min to become the actual first Almohad caliph after extinguishing the Almoravid regime under its last leader, Reverter, Count of Barcelona, father of  Berenguer of Barcelona and of Abu-l-Hasan Ali ibn Ruburtayr. Abd al Mu-min would ultimately rule from the Guadalquivir to Cyrenaica, but he died while building a city at Agadir and an arsenal at Rabat, and so did not live to see his seapower roll back Christian conquests in the Atlantic. 

Which is my point. The timing and context of the founding of Agadir, a Moroccan porty city that lies far to the south of anywhere I would had imagined.

If you were wondering. Well, that, and I had the Almohads confused with the Almoravids.

An Economic-Technological Appendix to Postblogging, Winter 1947: Shutdown

UBC Library is currently closed, 'cuz there's nothing that says social mingling and contagion like old books. The decision will be "revisited" on 8 April, and although I expect I know what the decision is going to be, I will wait before I take steps that I'll regret, such as subscribing to Aviation Week to get access to their online archives. 

That's if the apocalypse hasn't got me by then. Since a considerable number of my customers seem determined to keep on paying for bananas, the Sing Tao, and other random old person goods with small change hauled out of the crevasses of their outer wear (and probably can't pay any other way), that does remain a worrying possibility. At least, to this point, I don't have to worry about the other apocalypse, when people can't make rent in April, leaving the poor, honest rentier no alternative but to evict, foreclose, liquidate, and otherwise shut down our entire civilisation. You know. Just like what happened in China. 

Speaking of historical analogies, this is a historical blog, and I perhaps didn't give the total shutdown of the British economy in the winter of 1947 as much time as it deserves. That's especially true considering that it has largely gone down the memory hole. (Just like poor Edmundo Ros, then reigning supreme on the BBC's Third Programme.)

So the winter of 1947 was when the  British economy shut down (well, the "non-essential bits") to save coal. Depending on the particular business, the shutdown lasted for most of the month of February and into March. BBC television, for example, was off the air from 10 February 1947 to 11 March, while The Economist missed its 22 February and 1 March issues in perhaps the gravest blow to press freedom and English values since ever. (Says The Economist, which managed to get its point across in an insert in the Financial Times.) 

(Look! It's the economy not going!)

An Epidemiological-Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, 1943--49: The Iron Lung

I'm not a medical kind of guy, so I've mostly stayed away from the human sciences side of things in these technological appendices. Although I do see, looking back, that I promised a Technnological Appendix on iron lungs at some point. When I did so, I had 2022 more in mind, but the pandemics of 2022 will have to take care of themselves.

Also, the doctors can't be entirely immune, if only because we've met so many awful, awful surgeons in the pages of the old Medicine sections. I'm going to have to hit the right balance between body horror and humour, but the various maniacs experimenting on maniacs deserve some notoriety. Especially when the guy who was treating polio by jackhammering kids wound up as a President of the Los Angeles AMA in later years. Again, though, it looks like I can wait and do a long, long checklist of doctors doing brain surgery on mental patients just because they can. (Or bisecting King George to relieve his stutter or possibly cold sweats, as they actually did.)

So. Iron lungs. Yes, they are a very technological solution to a very real epidemic. But there's more to it than that. I'm old enough to remember the detritus of the popular culture of the 1950s,. Joke books were a thing, and beside the still-acceptable "Polack jokes" and "dumb blonde jokes," there was a genre of "sick jokes" that included  "iron lungs." For a child of as early as 1964, the iron lung had become a mysterious phenomena of a forgotten age. The jokes, not so much.

 Hard as it is to imagine, even believe, in this modern age of the triumph of science, between 1952 polio had gone from a seasonal terror to a historical artefact. An age in which children still died of disease had ended, overnight. At which point it seems as though we decided that we could do without children, and thus this modern age of pandemics that kill the elderly.