Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Fin del Mundo
Digital Liberation vs. Office Drudgery
From The Baffler:
Utopian reveries spill forth almost daily from the oracles of progress, forecasting a transformation of Information Age labor into irrepressible acts of impassioned fun. But we know all too well the painful truth about today’s ordinary work routines: they have become more, not less, routinized, soul-killing, and laden with drudgery. The contrast between the glum reality of cubicle labor and the captivating rhetoric of Internet liberation, which once seemed daft and risible, doesn’t anymore; now it’s only galling. . . . Such are the perverse rewards we reap when we permit tech culture to become our culture. The profits and power flow to the platform owners and their political sponsors. We get the surveillance, the data mining, the soaring inequality, and the canned pep talks from bosses who have been upsold on analytics software.A bit over the top, but I certainly don't see any evidence that computer technology has made work more liberating for more than a tiny minority of people.
Losses
Of Aeschylus' eighty or ninety plays and the roughly one hundred twenty by Sophocles, only seven each have survived; Euripides and Aristophanes did slightly better: eighteen of ninety-two play by the former have come down to us; eleven of forty-three by the latter.
These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace. Scientists, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and statesmen have left behind some of their achievements -- the invention of trigonometry, for example, or the calculation of position by reference to latitude and longitude, or the rational analysis of political power -- but their books are gone. The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria earned the nickname Bronze-Ass for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from a few fragments, all have vanished. At the end of the fifth century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world's best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works are now lost.
In this general vanishing, all the works of the brilliant founders of atomism, Leucippus and Democritus, and most of the works of their intellectual heir Epicurus, disappeared. Epicurus had been extraordinarily prolific. He and his principal philosophical opponent, the Stoic Chrysippus, wrote between them, it was said, more than a thousand books. Even if the figure is exaggerated or if it counts as books what we would regard as essays and letters, the written record was clearly massive. That record no longer exists. . . .
There was a time in the ancient world -- a very long time -- in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
--Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Fighting Lyme Disease by Vaccinating Mice
Twelve years ago there was a promising vaccine for Lyme disease, but GlaxoSmithKline withdrew it, primarily because it had too many dangerous side effects. Too many dangerous side effects to use in humans, that is; but what about using it in some other animal? People mostly get Lyme disease from tick nymphs that pick up the bacteria by biting mice, especially white-footed mice. So biologist Maria Gomes-Solecki set about developing a Lyme vaccine for mice. Of course you can't vaccinate millions of mice by giving them all shots, so it had to be an oral vaccine.
Gomes-Solecki spent the next decade developing her vaccine. By 2006 she had formulated oatmeal pellets laced with OspA. Those pellets reduced the number of infected ticks lab studies, and research published earlier this year shows they can also be effective in the field. Gomes-Solecki and her colleagues selected seven football-field-sized plots in Dutchess County, New York and planted them with live traps. Traps on four of the plots were laced with OspA vaccine. The other three plots contained only placebo pellets. By the second year, the vaccine had slashed number of infected ticks by 23%. By the fifth year, the researchers saw a 76% reduction. White-footed mice live about a year, and ticks live about two. So with each passing year, “you keep on taking more and more bacteria out of the ticks,” Gomes-Solecki says.Interesting. I can see this being used in places where lots of people go into the woods and encounter ticks, like busy woodland parks. Maybe I could talk the Marines into using it at Quantico, since half my crew gets Lyme every time we have a project there.
Medieval Graffiti from English Churches
Crepe Myrtle, Dupont Circle
Monday, July 21, 2014
Beachcombing for Legos
These days the holy grail is an octopus or a dragon. I only know of three octopuses being found — and one was by me — in a cave in Challaborough, Devon. It's quite competitive. If you heard that your neighbor had found a green dragon, you'd want to go out and find one yourself.We humans love to search and find, especially bright pretty things. As an archaeologist, I ought to know.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Oh, the Weirdness of the Moche
Big cats and deities with feline characteristics played an important role in Moche cosmology. They are frequently depicted in figurines, murals and painted on ceramic vessels. One of the painted friezes at the Temple of Moon, as a matter of fact, depicts large felines attacking and killing human victims, and a feline features prominently on what may be the most important artifact discovered in the tomb: a pyramid-shaped copper scepter which is topped with the face of a feline, fangs bared. The four sides of the scepter are also decorated, three of them with warriors displaying their weapons and the fourth with a large cat that has just killed a nude prisoner.
Medieval People Drank Water
The idea that Medieval people drank beer or wine to avoid drinking bad water is so established that even some very serious scholars see no reason to document or defend it; they simply repeat it as a settled truth. In fact, if no one ever documents the idea, it is for a very simple reason: it's not true.And so on.
Not only are there specific – and very casual – mentions of people drinking water all through the Medieval era, but there seems to be no evidence that they thought of it as unhealthy except when (as today) it overtly appeared so. Doctors had slightly more nuanced views, but certainly neither recommended against drinking water in general nor using alcohol to avoid it. . . .
Gregory of Tours (sixth c.) writes that when one man "arrived at a village by the road, he went into a small habitation and asked there for water." He even favorably mentions a pond – that is, still water – as a source of drink: "In the middle is a large pond with water that is very agreeable to drink". And in one tale a merchant uses river water from the Saone to dilute wine. Gregory also tells of a crowd finding the marks where a hermit had knelt to drink water from the river. St. Lupicin is said to have drunk the water of a local stream. When a child restored to life miraculously speaks, he tells his mother "Run quickly and bring me a cup of water."
One piece of evidence that medieval people drank water is the great prominence of wells; would people have given so much prominence to something that was mainly for the livestock?
Saturday, July 19, 2014
The Harvest
Cut Paper by Bovey Lee
The Four Pillars of Liberalism
Edmund Fawcett lists the main tenets of liberalism:
Fawcett's list cuts against a big part of traditional moral and political thinking. There are no philosopher kings or benevolent dictators, no priestly elites or aristocracies that can be trusted to rule. There is no golden age, either in the past or in the future, only constant pursuit of a somewhat better alternative. There are few rules we can hold each other to, few beliefs that we can expect our neighbors to hold; the divine order plays no part here. There are no heroes, only fellow humans in better or worse degree. Most cruelly, there is no chance of living in a world where we all get along and are never confronted by neighbors whose beliefs we find despicable. We can never feel like we truly belong in and are accepted by a tribe of people just like ourselves. This last seems especially hard for our social species, primed by evolution to always divide the world into us and them and attribute all good things to us. The recent battles over the tolerance of homosexuality show that even many people who call themselves liberals actually can't stand to live with those who disagree with them.
Liberals love justice; the great movements of modern liberalism from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights era have been crusades for justice. Yet to be a liberal in a profound sense is to recognize that justice is no pure thing, no shining monument, and that we will never achieve even our dim human understanding of it. As Learned Hand put it, justice in a liberal world is "the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society;" better than that we cannot do, and if we push too hard for it we wander into illiberal acts and thoughts.
Liberalism as I understand it is a cool philosophy, a philosophy of limits. It concerns the possible and the practical, not the ideal or the amazing. It has neither the warm, beloved past of conservatism nor the shining future of socialism; it celebrates mistrust and dismisses holy mystery. When I imagine a story, it is set in a world of kings and wise women, but when I vote I live in the unromantic suburbs. There is the word I was looking for -- Romantic. That is what liberalism is not. Revolution, God, the Queen, these are things to sing about, but designing a better health care system will never be the subject of an epic tale. What is great about this vision of life is the accumulation of small blessings. In a liberal society we can think, believe, and say whatever we want, go where we please, work where we choose; we can indulge our curiosity to the limit; we can work to make our communities and countries better places to live, or just stay home. We can enjoy the fruits of science, technology, and business creativity; we can eat food from around the world, appreciate or scorn every sort of art, dance to whatever moves us and ignore the rest. To live in this way we give up many dreams. I believe, though, that in our world those dreams are faulty illusions that lead to disappointment, cruelty and bad policy. I believe that in the modern world, liberalism is the best we can do.
The first is that the clash of interests and beliefs in society is inescapable. Social harmony, the nostalgic dream of conservatives and the brotherly hope of socialists, is neither achievable nor desirable – because harmony stifles creativity and blocks initiative. Meanwhile conflict, if tamed and put to use as competition in a stable political order, could bear fruit as argument, experiment and exchange.Interesting. I am on board with all of this, although I regard disharmony as more of a cold reality than something to be celebrated. Obviously the citizens of modern states are not going to get along, so we might as well celebrate the benefits rather than moon over the impossibility of universal brotherhood.
Secondly, human power is not to be trusted. However well power behaves, it cannot be counted on to behave well. Be it the power of state, market, social majorities or ethical authorities, the superior power of some people over others tends inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked. Preventing the domination of society by any one interest, faith or class is, accordingly, a cardinal liberal aim.
Liberals also hold that, contrary to traditional wisdom, human life can improve. Progress for the better is both possible and desirable. . . .
Finally, the framework of public life has to show everyone civic respect, whatever they believe and whoever they are.
Fawcett's list cuts against a big part of traditional moral and political thinking. There are no philosopher kings or benevolent dictators, no priestly elites or aristocracies that can be trusted to rule. There is no golden age, either in the past or in the future, only constant pursuit of a somewhat better alternative. There are few rules we can hold each other to, few beliefs that we can expect our neighbors to hold; the divine order plays no part here. There are no heroes, only fellow humans in better or worse degree. Most cruelly, there is no chance of living in a world where we all get along and are never confronted by neighbors whose beliefs we find despicable. We can never feel like we truly belong in and are accepted by a tribe of people just like ourselves. This last seems especially hard for our social species, primed by evolution to always divide the world into us and them and attribute all good things to us. The recent battles over the tolerance of homosexuality show that even many people who call themselves liberals actually can't stand to live with those who disagree with them.
Liberals love justice; the great movements of modern liberalism from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights era have been crusades for justice. Yet to be a liberal in a profound sense is to recognize that justice is no pure thing, no shining monument, and that we will never achieve even our dim human understanding of it. As Learned Hand put it, justice in a liberal world is "the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society;" better than that we cannot do, and if we push too hard for it we wander into illiberal acts and thoughts.
Liberalism as I understand it is a cool philosophy, a philosophy of limits. It concerns the possible and the practical, not the ideal or the amazing. It has neither the warm, beloved past of conservatism nor the shining future of socialism; it celebrates mistrust and dismisses holy mystery. When I imagine a story, it is set in a world of kings and wise women, but when I vote I live in the unromantic suburbs. There is the word I was looking for -- Romantic. That is what liberalism is not. Revolution, God, the Queen, these are things to sing about, but designing a better health care system will never be the subject of an epic tale. What is great about this vision of life is the accumulation of small blessings. In a liberal society we can think, believe, and say whatever we want, go where we please, work where we choose; we can indulge our curiosity to the limit; we can work to make our communities and countries better places to live, or just stay home. We can enjoy the fruits of science, technology, and business creativity; we can eat food from around the world, appreciate or scorn every sort of art, dance to whatever moves us and ignore the rest. To live in this way we give up many dreams. I believe, though, that in our world those dreams are faulty illusions that lead to disappointment, cruelty and bad policy. I believe that in the modern world, liberalism is the best we can do.
Friday, July 18, 2014
My View of the Airliner Shot Down in Ukraine
Josh Marshall notes that up until now, Vladimir Putin has mostly made the chaos in Ukraine work to his advantage, and the seizure of Crimea may come in the long run to be seen as a major victory. But now:
For months Putin has been playing with fire . . . Find extremists and hot-heads of the lowest common denominator variety, seed them with weaponry only a few militaries in the world possess - and, well, just see what happens. What could go wrong?From Putin's perspective it might turn out to be worse if this really was a screw-up and not something he planned; I am sure he would rather be seen as wicked than incompetent. Neither Europe nor America cared enough about Crimea to make an issue of it, but shooting down planes full of European civilians is a way to really piss people off.
While Politicians Squabble over Carbon, the Ground is Shifting Beneath their Feet
What is the cheapest source of energy in the upper Midwest? Wind. Cheaper than natural gas, cheaper than coal:
The notion that moving away from fossil fuels would cripple our economy is nonsense. We already have the technology to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, if we ever decide to do it.
“We’re adding 750 megawatts of wind in the next couple of years, and we’re getting that for a price that’s below the competing alternatives,” said Frank Prager, the vice president for environmental policy at Xcel Energy.In Minnesota, which has taken a multipronged approach to reducing carbon emissions -- higher energy efficiency standards for buildings, a requirement that utilities purchase renewable power, etc. -- the electric power industry has been decreasing its carbon emissions by 1.5% per year since 2000.
The notion that moving away from fossil fuels would cripple our economy is nonsense. We already have the technology to drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, if we ever decide to do it.
Wet Season Flowers
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Human Self Domestication, or, the Feminization of Wild Men
Domestic animals are different from wild ones in certain consistent ways. Domestic animals are more like babies -- neoteny, this is called -- with more rounded heads and so on. This is pretty much the same way that we differ from our Paleolithic ancestors; in fact a recent highly mathematical study showed that the differences between dog skulls and wolf skulls exactly parallel the differences between modern humans and those of 100,000 years ago.
The famous Belyaev fox experiment showed that you can produce all the various aspects of domestication by breeding for a single trait, the willingness of animals to be approached and touched by humans.
So the theory of self-domestication would be this: humans changed because as our population grew we had to interact more often with each other, and those individuals who were best able to interact with a wide variety of other humans had a selective advantage. Those who could not tolerate living in a group, or were too prone to violent outbursts, were cast out of the group, or killed, or just had fewer offspring. We bred ourselves in just the way we bred dogs or pigs, and the result is humans who are more like babies than our ancestors.
Or more like women. A new study by Robert Cieri et al., just published in the Current Anthropology, argues that the differences between ancient and modern humans represents the feminization of our species:
The past 200,000 years of human cultural evolution have witnessed the persistent establishment of behaviors involving innovation, planning depth, and abstract and symbolic thought, or what has been called “behavioral modernity.” Demographic models based on increased human population density from the late Pleistocene onward have been increasingly invoked to understand the emergence of behavioral modernity. However, high levels of social tolerance, as seen among living humans, are a necessary prerequisite to life at higher population densities and to the kinds of cooperative cultural behaviors essential to these demographic models. Here we provide data on craniofacial feminization (reduction in average brow ridge projection and shortening of the upper facial skeleton) in Homo sapiens from the Middle Pleistocene to recent times. We argue that temporal changes in human craniofacial morphology reflect reductions in average androgen reactivity (lower levels of adult circulating testosterone or reduced androgen receptor densities), which in turn reflect the evolution of enhanced social tolerance since the Middle Pleistocene.Their measurements show that the reduction in hyper-masculine facial characteristics took place gradually over the past 100,000 years. Their explanation is that this was linked to the decreasing importance of testosterone, either because we produced less or became less sensitive to it. (Both characteristics vary a great deal among contemporary humans.) So as we have become more civilized, we have become more feminized.
It cannot be emphasized enough that the remarkable thing about modern humans is the culture we build up by communicating with each other. Alone, our intelligence is useful but hardly revolutionary. We dominate the planet because we share information with each other; language is our salient achievement. The larger the group we can share information with, either in our own time or stretching back in time, the more we can achieve. The loner, the hermit, the wild man -- these are throwbacks to the Middle Pleistocene, dead ends leading nowhere.
I might also note that while different racial groups today vary in how domesticated we seem -- the most domesticated are certain East Asians, the least certain sub-Saharan Africans, with most European groups in the middle -- these differences are small compared to the difference between us and our distant ancestors. All modern humans are feminized domesticates.
Silos Apocalypse
The Boardroom Optimist
I was just reading the press release about the merger of two giant American engineering firms, AECOM and URS, and I noticed that one of the subheads is
Seamless Integration ExpectedIf the writer of those words is not a sublime ironist, he or she is in for a rude shock.
John McWhorter Will Pass on Your Conversation about Race
There is in America a distinctive tradition of black conservatism quite different from the usual white variety. I am thinking of people like Bill Cosby who are regularly heard denouncing ghetto culture and hip hop music from a position within the black community. Like many white conservatives, they are big on church, family, and self help and dubious about welfare and pop culture. They differ most strikingly from white conservatives in their thinking about racism. Whereas white conservatives generally play down racism as a factor in American history, black conservatives play it up; one reason they distrust welfare is that it comes from the white-dominated government, and they want black Americans to solve their own problems rather than waiting for white people to do it for them. Black conservatives of this type revere the leaders of the Civil Rights movement and celebrate its achievements; they demand full legal equality for blacks and will not tolerate segregationist excuses. They often vote Democrat. But they are estranged from much of what has happened in black culture and politics since 1970, and as conservatives they generally despise showy radicalism. Another way they differ from white conservatives is in their attitude toward Barack Obama; he is their guy, a churchgoing black family man who embodies their admiration for self discipline, educational excellence, and achievement.
I bring this up because it is as a statement of black conservatism that I understand John McWhorter’s new essay, “The Case for Moving on.” McWhorter is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a long-time commenter on black culture; one of his books is subtitled Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America. McWhorter has been arguing with Theodore Johnson III, who wrote that there is something disturbingly racist about ice cream trucks using “Turkey in the Straw” in their jingles, since the same tune was used for numerous racist songs like the minstrel show favorite “Zip Coon.” Many other American pop songs of that era had racist versions or verses, from “Oh, Susanna” to “Camptown Races.”
I believe that our government could be doing a lot more to help poor people of all races, but the plain fact is that as long as anti-poverty measures are presented as something to help oppressed minorities they will never command majority support. Compare American attitudes toward Social Security and Medicare, for which every American qualifies, with attitudes toward food stamps. If what you want from politics is concrete actions that help people, you have to think like a Leninist: what is the objective outcome? The objective outcome of talking about America's racist past is to sour white people on the whole project of helping the poor, and to reinforce their belief that poor people (and criminals and welfare recipients and so on) are them, not us, and therefore not people we should care about. Of course achieving concrete results is not the only purpose of politics, and historical grievances can do a lot to create community solidarity and reconcile people to bad situations. But there comes a time when you have to ask, is it more important to understand our situation or to change it?
Poverty, racism, and injustice are not engineering problems with clear solutions. They are evils against which we are called to struggle. Even if all Americans suddenly agreed that our racist past was a terrible burden on African Americans, it is not obvious what we ought to do about it, and Americans would certainly disagree violently. I have written here before about the widespread belief that if only other people knew what I know, they would agree with what I want to do: this is a fantasy. It is perfectly possible to be very well informed about American history and the situation in poor black neighborhoods and still completely oppose government action to help; consider the career of free-market activist Jack Kemp, to take just one example. (Or Bill Cosby.) To the extent that reflecting on past injustices makes us more compassionate, by all means, let us reflect. But really we have no right to tell other people what to think or how to think about it, and it is simply foolish to imagine that America will have some magical moment of agreement and come together to heal our history. There is a real case for moving on.
I bring this up because it is as a statement of black conservatism that I understand John McWhorter’s new essay, “The Case for Moving on.” McWhorter is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and a long-time commenter on black culture; one of his books is subtitled Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America. McWhorter has been arguing with Theodore Johnson III, who wrote that there is something disturbingly racist about ice cream trucks using “Turkey in the Straw” in their jingles, since the same tune was used for numerous racist songs like the minstrel show favorite “Zip Coon.” Many other American pop songs of that era had racist versions or verses, from “Oh, Susanna” to “Camptown Races.”
But the question is how much we need to “consider,” eternally, the history of things like ice cream jingles. We should reflect often on slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining, yes. But ice cream? It’s that purse-lipped, “eat your vegetables” brand of reflection that is Johnson’s larger project. We are not simply to live in the present; lord forbid we look ahead with anything but wary caution and, most importantly, an endless consideration of the past. . . .Like Bill Cosby, McWhorter has had enough of waiting for white people to somehow free black Americans from their burdens. No conversation or conversion is going to “heal” black America; there will be no magical moment of catharsis. There is only life, and getting on with it. It is a position, I think, with much to recommend it. As a historian I am quite certain that everything about our world has roots in the past, and I spend much of my own time reflecting on how we got where we are. But in a political and psychological sense I believe that too much reflecting on the past can be destructive. All the studies about attitudes and success show that optimism about the future, especially irrational optimism, can help people get ahead. That is how our brains work, for whatever twisted evolutionary reason. So far as I know, no study has ever shown that meditating on how bad our ancestors used to have it has ever helped anyone achieve anything. Nurturing grievances, I am certain, is psychologically and spiritually destructive. Like McWhorter, I am cynical about the potential of a national “conversation on race,” which I think would only lead to ever uglier finger pointing; are you really eager to engage in a dialogue about race with Rush Limbaugh and Ted Cruz?
Johnson’s position is akin to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s in his Atlantic piece, “The Case for Reparations,” which was greeted with something approaching religious rapture in certain corners. Just as Johnson suggests that we lick the popsicle amid reflection, Coates wants us to enlighten the person “scarfing their hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage.” He wants an America where our racist history is not just something taught in school and commemorated in museums and Oscar-winning films and hit plays, as it currently is. To Coates, none of that is enough; America remains a country that “turns away” from acknowledging racism. In line with that perspective, Johnson classifies critics of his first article as the sorts who “don’t get it,” who “don’t want to talk about race.” Coates seems to want America’s racist past to constitute an eternal, gnawing background awareness for all citizens, analogous to Serbs’ communal memory of Kosovo Polje. Well-meaning Americans will savor neither ice cream nor hot dogs without a daily reflection on these weightier matters.
The typical statement in this vein is, “America needs to have a conversation about race,” now a keystone of educated black discourse. Is the proposal about reality? Who seriously thinks any amount of argument about “collective responsibility” could ever convince today’s diverse American populace that it owes black people for slavery and Jim Crow? Some even insist that this new American understanding would be necessary before any real change can happen, but the logic is unclear. Once all Americans could recite basic information about race riots and redlining, then somehow, wealthy and influential people would open the financial floodgates and heal black America? In most other contexts, one is to dismiss cynically the possibility of this ever happening, since whites, as the thinking goes, are determined to hold on to their privilege. How would a national history lesson or conversation change that? And if we all know it wouldn’t change anything, then what is the goal of having the conversation?
I believe that our government could be doing a lot more to help poor people of all races, but the plain fact is that as long as anti-poverty measures are presented as something to help oppressed minorities they will never command majority support. Compare American attitudes toward Social Security and Medicare, for which every American qualifies, with attitudes toward food stamps. If what you want from politics is concrete actions that help people, you have to think like a Leninist: what is the objective outcome? The objective outcome of talking about America's racist past is to sour white people on the whole project of helping the poor, and to reinforce their belief that poor people (and criminals and welfare recipients and so on) are them, not us, and therefore not people we should care about. Of course achieving concrete results is not the only purpose of politics, and historical grievances can do a lot to create community solidarity and reconcile people to bad situations. But there comes a time when you have to ask, is it more important to understand our situation or to change it?
Poverty, racism, and injustice are not engineering problems with clear solutions. They are evils against which we are called to struggle. Even if all Americans suddenly agreed that our racist past was a terrible burden on African Americans, it is not obvious what we ought to do about it, and Americans would certainly disagree violently. I have written here before about the widespread belief that if only other people knew what I know, they would agree with what I want to do: this is a fantasy. It is perfectly possible to be very well informed about American history and the situation in poor black neighborhoods and still completely oppose government action to help; consider the career of free-market activist Jack Kemp, to take just one example. (Or Bill Cosby.) To the extent that reflecting on past injustices makes us more compassionate, by all means, let us reflect. But really we have no right to tell other people what to think or how to think about it, and it is simply foolish to imagine that America will have some magical moment of agreement and come together to heal our history. There is a real case for moving on.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Computer Forensics and the Moon
In 1966 and 1967, NASA sent five robotic spacecraft, the Lunar Orbiters, to photograph the moon’s surface to help find safe landing sites for the Apollo astronauts. The [1500 magnetic] tapes, which recorded the original high-resolution images, and the tape drives ended up in the garage of a former NASA employee, and Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing embarked on a quixotic mission to retrieve the images. . . .
For the Lunar Orbiter project, Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing in 2007 rented a couple of trucks and drove the tapes and tape drives to NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., setting up shop in a former McDonald’s, which they nicknamed McMoon’s. . . .
From there, they conducted a long-odds hunt for old manuals and data and fortuitous connections that put Mr. Wingo and Mr. Cowing in touch with people who knew how the tape drives worked. “It’s like having one wing of the Library of Alexandria suddenly dropped in your lap,” Mr. Cowing says in the film. “And you just have to figure out the card catalog. That was the hard part.” The old electronics were hosed down and refurbished. In the film, Mr. Wingo demonstrates how he has to stop the spinning tape with his finger, because the tape drive’s braking mechanism no longer functions.
And yet everything worked. They got the images over several years starting in 2008 — much sharper than earlier versions that had been photographed off television screens as the data was beamed back to Earth.
People, Not Climate Change, Caused the Last Great Extinction
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
