Stop-motion Lego documentary about early microbiologists

via boingboing

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Excitement! Drama! Women being good at math!

Historic videos!

Historic Comics!

Historic T-Shirts!

Okay, seriously, a computer used to be a female profession, not a machine. There have been some wonderful histories of computing discussing the images of early computers showing men in uniforms in front of computers who were really the office managers and didn't have a clue as to how the things actually worked. The women were shooed out of the room, or cropped out of the picture because the military thought it would hurt their credibility if computers weren't properly butch. The above linked PDF has one such example. The rise of automated computing removed a significant career path in mathematics from the hands of women and put its tasks in the hands of their (male) managers. And when programming shifted from being the work of mathematicians to the work of engineers, women were not brought along for the ride.

Interesting side note: In the mid-1980s, computer programming was considered a joke degree that you only took because you didn't have what it took to be an engineer. I always wondered how many of those first generation of college-trained programmers were laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh, and links mostly pillaged from boingboing.

Space, Time, and Archeology

The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Echoes of the Past

Interesting to compare this:
Ningbo Urban Snapshots from movingcities.org
to this:
Hakka architecture, which, though I also first saw in a blog, I don't remember which one, so ... Wikipedia it is.

I wonder how many other echoes of the past there are in those snapshots that aren't immediately apparent to the Western eye without side-by-side comparison.

Then and Now

An article on the changing face of a slice of New York City from the New York Times.

However, it is not the article that is interesting. What is interesting is the cool and simple little tool for viewing the then and now pictures.

1870: Dateline Japan

Some interesting woodcuts from the 19th century news in Japan.

This particular set deals with ghosts and hauntings.

Via Pink Tentacle.

The Secret Language of Surface

A short essay on the nature of surface from the good people at strange harvest.

Forgotten Technologies

Forgotten technologies: pigeon houses from Dark Roasted Blend.

McCain a Maverick? That's Gobbledygook!

The Mavericks get annoyed at McCain stealing their name.

Which means the word of the day is "gobbledygook".

Or is it?

And here I was planning on avoiding politics, but I really can't resist.

You Know You Want One

Full-scale, working model of a Roman siege catapult for sale.

I remember that episode!

Word of the Day: Ekranoplan

With fuel costs skyrocketing, and airlines hurting because of it ... maybe this should be the future of trans-oceanic flight.

An article from the BCC on the Soviet Ekranoplan, aka. The Caspian Sea Monster.

This is a salient quote:

What they were looking at was, in fact, an Ekranoplan; a wing in ground effect or WIG craft designed to fly at very high speed a few metres over the top of the sea. It sounds not unlike a hovercraft. But where a hovercraft floats on a skirt of air, the Ekranoplan sits clean above the surface and relies on a well known, if little understood aerodynamic phenomenon called "ground-effect".

In very simple terms the wing produces a dynamic cushion of air when it's close to the ground and the Ekranoplan effectively rides upon this. It's the same effect that pelicans use when flying low over the sea and it's a remarkably efficient way of flying, actually increasing lift by as much as 40%. All of which means the Ekranoplan was far more efficient than conventional aeroplanes.

Now, update the technologies to the modern day ... all the while thinking about a 40% increase in efficiency.

Make Your Own Money

An interesting bit of discourse on the nature of the current economy courtesy of boingboing.

To summarize:

Our current economic system is based on borrowing to pay off debts. Since you have to borrow more than the previous debt to pay it off, eventually the system has no choice but to collapse.

Only more nuanced and well argued than that.

Art Noveau

I was just in Brussels! How could I have missed this!

The Horta Museum

And an amazing staircase from stairporn.org.

1737 Thieves' Cant

Need to know how to talk like a thief 250 years ago ... well here you go.

Hmmm. "School" seemed to mean something else back then. Though you'll be glad to know some of the baser slang hasn't changed a whit.

Where Baby Tardises Come From

Where baby Tardises come from.

Very clever, disguising a Tardis as the London Underground. Very clever indeed.

For those of you who have only ever seen the new Dr. Who, feel free to ignore this reference.

The source: modernmechanix.com

What is the plural of Tardis anyway? Tardii?

Russian Steampunk

Russian Steampunk.

All the more interesting because it is based on a real tank ... thing ... objet d'art from right around World War I.

The image, with more renders, can be found at the Russian site livenet. Sort of makes you want to learn Russian, just so you can know what it is all about.

But never fear, the English version is here! Even better, it is a more detailed writeup by the WW I military history buffs and modellers at Landships.

Nobility

Okay, so what did I mean when I said that:

I think people are becoming so subsumed under their signifiers that their signifiers are becoming more real than they are. This was a category of non-existence that was once reserved for nobility, but is now available, if not actively imposed, on every person dealing with modern society.

More specifically, what did I mean about it being reserved for nobility?

Well, first off, that is not really true, it was reserved for nobility, clergy, and men of note (because, well, it was mostly men back then).

What I mean by a category of non-existence reserved for nobility has to do with the nature of social roles in society. Everyone always has (and presumably always will) played a role in society which labeled them as fitting that role. Historically, most of these roles directly related to the person and who they were: farmer, butcher, baker, beggar, highwayman. These roles described the person and who they were and were tightly integrated into the real being of the individual in a concrete way. A butcher does not represent butcher-ness, but rather is, simply, a butcher. The word butcher relates directly to a vocation. Same for many other social roles.

This was (and is) different for nobility and the clergy. A noble does not engage in in the vocation of nobility, rather they represent that which is noble. They are a signifier of which the signified is nobility. Whether they are an accurate signifier or a mockery of the signified, they are a signifier. They represent a concept.

The same goes for clergy, who signify, at least in Western culture, the word of god with a capital G. Once again their effectiveness as signifier does not change that this is what they are.

This is why, and how, nobility and religious orders could (and still do) stand above the common people. They are not people, they are signifiers of a higher, and purportedly better, state. This is where they metonymy comes in. The noble as person is subsumed under and replaced by the noble as signifier of nobility.

With the rise of the merchant class, and then the middle class, this notion of being subsumed under the signifier spread downward into the masses. More representations came, where people represented social concepts of worth. With the downward spread of the person as signifier, there also developed the increasing need for a clearly defined identity outside of the person through which to identify them.

With the developing notions of human rights, it becomes imperative that all people be given a clear identity that is, ironically, defined by the state. Otherwise rights become unenforceable and are merely dependent on the notoriously fickle goodwill of others. Remember that government systems not driven by any special caste are for and of the people. But to be so, people need to be subsumed into a model where they are defined as participant citizens of the state.

Okay, yes, that glosses over a great deal and makes oversimplification look like a model of intricate delving, but the point is there.

With the development of the welfare state, the notion of state-sponsored identity that represented some ideal moved from the mark of a good citizen to a requirement for anyone who is subject to the system. At the same time, this took the idea of identity through social roles and threw it out the window in favor of a legal fiction, something contrived to allow more effective oversight of the citizenry. So not only an abstract identity, but an entirely arbitrary one as well.

This, of course, raises the question as to whether the modern quest for identity was as much driven by consumerism as people may suggest, or whether it was a pre-existing condition caused by social change that abstracted the person from a concrete identity. This includes the notion of universal human rights, since equality is incommensurable with solidly defined social roles, and industrialization, urbanization, and their impacts on older social patterns. It also creates the expectation that the average person has an identity that represents some ideal that is abstracted from the self.

As such consumerism merely filled the gap, and promised us we could all be nobility if we purchased the trappings of nobility. If we cannot achieve the abstract ideal we are expected to define ourselves through, perhaps we can buy it instead. Without concrete definitions of social order that were tied to the social context of the self, we had to create social order through the trappings thereof.