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hilaryrakestraw · 5 years

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“ We are all tired of being stuck to this cosmical speck, with its monotonous ocean, leaden sky, and single moon that is useless more than half the time, while its size is so microscopic compared with the universe that we can traverse its great circle in four days. Its possibilities are exhausted; and just as Greece became too small for the civilization of the Greeks, and as reproduction is growth beyond the individual, so it seems to me that the future glory of the human race lies in exploring at least the solar system, without waiting to become shades. ” John Jacob Astor IV, Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future, published 1894 (via The New Atlantic)

THE RETURN OF THE SPACE VISIONARIES || THE NEW ATLANTIS

Against the context of the more measured NASA aspirations we’re familiar with — the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moonwalks, astronauts tinkering in low Earth orbit for decades, and far-reaching but uncrewed planetary probes — O’Neill’s vision may sound like a pie-in-the-sky aberration. That was indeed how it struck many of his post-Apollo-era contemporaries. Asked about the possibility of federal funding for O’Neill’s ideas, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire famously said, “Not a penny for this nutty fantasy.”

Yet O’Neill’s vision is strikingly similar to the ones being offered by today’s aspiring space tycoons, most notably Elon Musk, founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), and Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin. Musk, though focused like a laser on Mars, talks about “Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species,” as the title of a technical article he published last year put it. Bezos, for his part, doesn’t confine his ambition even to settling other planets. His stated long-term goal is to get millions of people off of Earth, where they can pursue their own dreams, whatever those may be, whether on other planets or in permanent settlements in space itself. This May, he received the Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for Space Settlement Advocacy from the National Space Society. In an interview given just after accepting the award, he expounded on his O’Neillian vision of a trillion people living in the solar system….

Despite some differences in approach, Musk and Bezos together represent a sharp departure from the conventional approach of America’s public space program, which has always been more limited, focused on science and exploration, not human settlement, and has operated on the assumption that only big-government funding and organization could send humans to space. But a look at the history of ideas about space travel, going back much further than O’Neill and Dyson, shows that Musk and Bezos are in fact returning to a longer tradition of dreaming about humanity’s future in space — a tradition that, fittingly, is now coming to fruition in America. Musk and Bezos are on the cusp of fulfilling the dreams many others have had of settling space, and of making space travel commercially viable — neither of which Apollo, much less its middling low-Earth-orbit successors, were able to achieve, despite the tragically failed attempt to do so with the space shuttle. Indeed, Bezos and the foreign-born Musk, combining personal dreams with technical prowess and bold entrepreneurship, are much more thoroughly American in their visions than even America’s own government-run space program.

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WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO KEEP A CLASSIC MAINFRAME ALIVE? || IEEE SPECTRUM

Restoring a decades-old mainframe to working condition is impressive enough, but keeping it running is even more impressive. Back in 2004, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley acquired an IBM 1401 mainframe, a workhorse of the 1960s. After years of effort, volunteers triumphed over broken wires and corroded parts to restore the machine, along with a second 1401 acquired in 2008.

IEEE Spectrum covered the restoration back in 2009, but it turns out this was just the beginning of the volunteers’ labors: Maintaining the two mainframes, along with critical peripherals such as the 1403 printer, has proved to be an ongoing saga. Every time something breaks down, the result is typically a fascinating flurry of physical forensics, historical research, and crafty fixes.

Leaked Images Show Kamov’s Advanced Combat Helicopter: a winged coaxial-rotor, twin-turbofan compound helicopter reportedly capable of up to 700 kph (Aviation Week).

“ When it comes to the United States, my opinions are more calcified…. The best M&M: peanut butter. Hands down. Milk chocolate over dark; white is not right, and the only correct way to eat a Kit Kat is to nibble off the enrobed edges and pry the wafer layers apart. Fight me. ”

Mary H.K. Choi, Candy Crush

She is 100% accurate about the only correct way to eat a Kit Kat. I do like dark chocolate, though.

IN JAPAN, THE KIT KAT ISN’T JUST A CHOCOLATE. IT’S AN OBSESSION || NEW YORK TIMES

A Kit Kat is composed of three layers of wafer and two layers of flavored cream filling, enrobed in chocolate to look like a long, skinny ingot. It connects to identical skinny ingots, and you can snap these apart from one another intact, using very little pressure, making practically no crumbs. The Kit Kat is a sweet, cheap, delicately crunchy artifact of the 20th century’s industrial chocolate conglomerate. In the United States, where it has been distributed by Hershey since 1970, it is drugstore candy. In Japan, you might find the Kit Kat at a drugstore, but here the Kit Kat has levels. The Kit Kat has range. It’s found in department stores and luxurious Kit Kat-devoted boutiques that resemble high-end shoe stores, a single ingot to a silky peel-away sheath, stacked in slim boxes and tucked inside ultrasmooth-opening drawers, which a well-dressed, multilingual sales clerk slides open for you as you browse. The Kit Kat, in Japan, pushes at every limit of its form: It is multicolored and multiflavored and sometimes as hard to find as a golden ticket in your foil wrapper. Flavors change constantly, with many appearing as limited-edition runs. They can be esoteric and so carefully tailored for a Japanese audience as to seem untranslatable to a global mass market, but the bars have fans all over the world. Kit Kat fixers buy up boxes and carry them back to devotees in the United States and Europe. All this helps the Kit Kat maintain a singular, cultlike status.

U.S. NATIONAL LABS TEAM UP TO BUILD A QUANTUM NETWORK || IEEE SPECTRUM

Two U.S. national labs plan to build a new quantum network bridging a distance of 48 kilometers (30 miles) between their facilities. The project could advance U.S. efforts in the global race to develop unhackable communication technologies.

The Chicago-area network aims to explore a more reliable way of harnessing quantum entanglement: a phenomenon that allows a pair of entangled particles acting as quantum bits (qubits) to instantaneously share changes in their quantum states even if separated by many miles.

It won’t be the longest quantum network in the world, but the Chicago initiative will pioneer a unique approach by creating qubits through solid-state materials. If successful, the project could pave the way to larger quantum networks that transmit information through solid-state qubits….

Some of the largest quantum networks in China and other countries rely primarily upon qubits based on photons, or particles of light. These varieties often act as mobile “flying qubits” that travel through fiber optic cables. A common scheme in quantum key distribution networks is for entangled photons to serve as messengers that carry secret keys between nodes within the network. But the longer such photons travel, the greater the chance they will either get absorbed or scattered, and fail to reach their destination.

By comparison, the Chicago Quantum Exchange’s project would use the photon “flying qubits” to initiate entanglement between solid-state qubit nodes located at either end of the quantum network. Once the solid-state qubits at either end of the network share entangled quantum states, they could transmit information directly between each other via quantum teleportation.

[Any sufficiently advanced technology, right? All of this read like magic to me, even knowing the history of spooky action at a distance.]

WHAT ANCIENT MAIZE CAN TELL US ABOUT THOUSANDS OF YEARS OF CIVILIZATION IN AMERICA || SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

Consider this ancient ear of maize, which Walter Hough pulled out of a New Mexico cave more than a century ago.

Hough worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (the repository of this artifact) from 1886 to 1935. …[I]n September 1905 he spent 12 days in what he called an “interesting cave.” It was in a bluff 150 feet above the Tularosa River, in New Mexico, about 30 miles east of the Arizona border. Because the climate there is extremely dry, virtually nothing in the cave had decayed. Formerly used by early colonists as a donkey corral, the cave was full of “rubbish and the droppings of animals, to a depth of 8 feet,” Hough wrote. Just walking around kicked up a choking cloud of dust that forced researchers to wear goggles and cover their faces.

Despite the terrible conditions, the researchers made an impressive haul: dried turkey cadavers, mammal bones, broken crockery, a brush made from grass, incense pipes, stones for grinding, cigarettes made from reeds, yucca-leaf sandals—and about a dozen maize cobs, some with kernels intact. (Archaeologists typically call the grain “maize,” rather than “corn,” because multicolored indigenous maize, usually eaten after drying and grinding, is strikingly unlike the large, sweet yellow-kernel cobs conjured up by the word “corn.”) Hough was working before archaeologists had the tools to accurately date artifacts, or even, pre-GPS, to note their exact location. He simply recorded the locale of his finds and carried them back to Washington, D.C.

SO WHAT IS YOUR NEXT BOOK ABOUT? || VIRGINIA POSTREL

The short answer is that it’s called

The Fabric of Civilization

and is about the history of textiles, technology, and trade or, as I sometimes put it, the history of textiles as the history of technology and trade….

The story of technology is the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global exchange. The origins of chemistry lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth, the beginning of binary code—and perhaps mathematics itself—in weaving. The belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology….

“The spindle was the first wheel,” Elizabeth Wayland Barber tells me, gesturing to demonstrate. “It wasn’t yet load-bearing, but the principle of rotation is there.” A linguist by training and weaver by avocation, in the 1970s Barber started noticing footnotes about textiles scattered through the archaeological literature. She thought she’d spend nine months pulling together what was known. Her little project turned into a decades-long exploration that helped to turn textile archaeology into a full-blown field. Textile production, Barber writes, “is older than pottery or metallurgy and perhaps even than agriculture and stock-breeding.”

The ancient Greeks worshiped Athena as the goddess of technē, the artifice of civilization. The word derives from the Indo-European word teks, meaning “to weave.” The Greeks used the same word for two of their most important technologies, calling both the loom and the ship’s mast histós. From the same root, they dubbed sails histía, literally the product of the loom. Athena was the giver and protector of both ships and weaving.

To weave is to devise, to invent—to contrive function and beauty from the simplest of elements. In The Odyssey, when Athena and Odysseus scheme, they “weave a plan.” Fabric and fabricate share a common Latin root, fabrica: “something skillfully produced.” Text and textile are similarly related, from the verb texere, to weave. Order comes from the Latin word for setting warp threads, ordior, as does the French word for computer, ordinateur. The French word métier, meaning a trade or craft, is also the word for loom.The Chinese word jī, which now means “machine,” was the ancient word for loom; the word zuzhi, meaning “organization” or “arrange,” is the word for weave, while chengji, meaning “achievement” or “result,” originally meant twisting fibers together.

Cloth-making is a creative act, analogous to other creative acts. It is a sign of mastery and refinement, a mark of civilization. “Can we expect, that a government will be well modelled by a people, who know not how to make a spinning-wheel, or to employ a loom to advantage?” wrote the philosopher David Hume in 1742.

To Hume, the connection was obvious. The same creative ferment stimulating the period’s great works of politics, philosophy, and literature was advancing textile technology. The year Hume’s essay appeared, the first water-powered cotton-spinning mill opened in Northampton, its roller technology anticipating the refinements that would soon launch the Industrial Revolution. Before railroads or steel mills or automobiles, fortunes were made in textile technology.

Voyage of the Moons (taken by Cassini, NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS; animated by Kevin M. Gill)

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WE HAVE SATELLITES ORBITING OTHER PLANETS!!!

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ROME'S HEROES AND AMERICA'S FOUNDING FATHERS || JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Throughout the course of history, the ancient civilization of Rome has been widely discussed, praised, and emulated by writers, statesmen, and philosophers alike. Rome has no shortage of admirers, and arguably some of its most enthusiastic supporters were the American Founding Fathers who were enamoured of the Roman past largely because of Rome’s unique form of government,which had supposedly preserved liberty for hundreds of years. The Founders lavished praise upon the Roman republican heroes who defended their government from tyranny in the turbulent final days of the Republic.

… The American Revolution further intensified interest in the Roman world. By anchoring those arguments for freedom to ancient precedent, Revolutionary American authors aimed to demonstrate that their arguments were timeless and firmly embedded in history….

Many of the educated American Revolutionaries not only read about the Romans as a scholarly pursuit, some actively tried to emulate their behaviour and virtues. Above all else, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Livy’s History of Rome provided many models of virtuous and hardy Roman citizens and counter examples of licentious and indulgent tyrants.Among the former were Cicero and Cato, two of the most famous paragons of Roman virtue. These men, who defended the ailing Republic until their deaths, became moral exemplars for the founding generation.

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