Tertiary Source

Oh, Gee - Ostalgie

2011-07-18T22:56:00.005-05:00

More a spelling error than a portmanteau, Ostalgie comes from the German word Nostalgie (nostalgia), cleverly missing the N to begin with Ost, the German word for East. Ostalgie thus refers to a nostalgic attitude towards former East Germany.

As with many formerly Soviet-led countries (including Russia), people yearn for the perceived ease of life under communist rule. State-owned industry meant that everyone could have a job and everyone could have food (when the country wasn't stricken with famine, anyway). In times of high unemployment and with the vestiges of bloc architecture slowly fading from East German cities, Ostalgie has developed into a defining characteristic of East German culture.

The Road to German Reunification

After World War 2, Germany's borders not only shrank, but the Allies split the nation into occupied zones - one each controlled by the UK, the USA, and the USSR (later the US and UK would split their zones and give one to France). Eventually in May of 1949 the western allies (UK, USA, France) unified their occupied zones into the the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland in German). As a response, the Soviet Union had their zone formalized as the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). For 41 years the FRG and GDR existed as separate nations.

In August of 1989 Hungary (a member of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact) opened its border with Austria (not a member of NATO, but pro-West). East German tourists then flocked to Hungary in September...to escape to the West via the opened border. Subsequently, East Germany decided to open its borders, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9th, 1989 and a flood of people to the west.

With free elections in March the following year, East Germany started on the rocky road to unification with West Germany. Despite resistance by many NATO members (most famously Margaret Thatcher), eventually German diplomats secured the reunification of the country. The final step being the formal institution of 5 German states at midnight on October 3rd, 1990 (October 3rd is subsequently celebrated as reunification day istead of November 9th due to some unfortunate implications with that whole Nazi thing).

Who Loves a Trabant?

Ostalgie materializes in a love for the Ampelmännchen - the little traffic signal man. With a hat and powerful strut he adorned many of the Walk/Don't Walk signs in Eastern Germany (vintage signs can still occasionally be seen today). Due to his former ubiquity on every street corner (with a stop light, anyway), the Ampelmännchen has become the dominant symbol of Ostalgie today.

The Trabant from the title of this section is also a prime example of Ostalgie. By far the most prominent car in East Germany, the Trabant was designed and created solely to be a cheap, working man's car. A small two-stroke engine gave the car little power, but the flimsy Duroplast chassis and small frame gave it enough power to push 4 adults around at modest speeds. When the checkpoints to the West opened in the '90s waves of Trabants streamed out of East Germany since few people owned any other brands. To the casual viewer a Trabant looks like a heap, but, the Trabbi remains beloved for its simplicity and its part in history.

Many stores in East Germany mark certain goods with an Ostprodukt label, indicating they were manufactured in (former) East Germany. Ostalgie all but revived Vita-Cola (a sort of citrus-cola mix). Due to import bans on much of what the West had to offer, local products reached a rather large consumer base in the East. The government demanded a non-alcoholic drink to serve the masses, so they had a chemical company whip something together. So East Germans drank Vita Cola instead of Coca Cola or Pepsi (whose products are still very uncommon in Europe, but particularly East Germany).

Old ladies reminisce about how great it was that everyone had work and how the trains ran on time. And in some ways these memories prove correct. In the GDR unemployment ran at nearly 0% thanks to a state-run economy the handed out work details. East Germany exported a large amount of industrial and engineering equipment. By the 1980s they had begun to dabble in computers (essentially the Soviet's equivalent of tech-savvy 80s Japan...except much more expensive and not as successful).

But by the late 1980s the East German government was running a large deficit. In order to maintain the standard of living and import necessary raw materials for the industrial sector, East Germany began amassing large debts.

Black and Blue Tinted Glasses

Soviet-controlled East Germany was no picnic. Understandably upset at the loss of millions of Soviet citizens the Soviet Union was not kind in its occupation of East Germany. After Germany surrendered to end World War Two (in Europe, anyway), the Soviet Union proceeded to take any heavy machinery that wasn't bolted down. And some that was. The GDR (East Germany) came out with a crippled economy, a puppet government and - most notoriously - a brutally repressive secret police.

East Germany had to contend with large amounts of unrest as the population suffered prolonged depression with their weakened industrial base. Party loyalty got you employment much faster than ability, so skilled technicians were often relegated to lower tier jobs. A severe brain drain further stunted the economy as the intelligensia and youth attempted to flee to the West for greater personal freedom and the potential for a higher standard of living.

The GDR eventually attempted to stymie these developments by integrating East Germany into the economic interdependencies of the Soviet Eastern Bloc. As mentioned the GDR became the focal point for the bloc's machinery and computer manufacturing. The GDR erected the Berlin Wall to prevent flight into the West (less famously they also built a barbed wire fence along the entire East Germany-West German border). But the Stasi represented the GDR's efforts to curb unrest in much more brutal ways.

The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, colloquially abbreviated to the Stasi) was created for counter espionage and monitoring unrest amongst the population. Loyalty to the incumbent communist party was paramount and dissenters were brutally repressed. The Stasi had a presence in nearly every town in East Germany (Magdeburg even had a Stasi prison). The Stasi routinely held and interrogated citizens and kept them for prolonged periods in prison-like conditions. Making jokes about the government could keep you there indefinitely.

In My Day We Were Oppressed Only Once or Twice a Day!

For many people Ostalgie just means remembering the good parts of the past.

But for others Ostalgie remains not just a focal point of nostalgia, but a representation of an authentic desired destination. The east still has a lower standard of living and higher unemployment than the west, which breeds resentment. And as the older generation sees the new youth grow up to outrageous modern fads and Western culture they yearn for days of simplicity and respect. Just as they often do in the USA and elsewhere (stress of imminent nuclear war? I don't know what you're talking about).

Every once and a while people yearn for the good ol' days. When behatted men helped you cross the street and your car was made out of plastic and plant fiber.

So, Good Bye, Lenin; hello...Merkel?

The Succulent Succession of Swine Side: A Brief History of Bacon

2010-12-08T22:08:00.004-06:00

Although not the most popular animal in the US, the pig remains a "wonderful, magical animal" and has become a staple of the American diet (and internet memes - some more NSFW than others). It is, in fact, even more popular in Europe. Of course, if you happen to eat the pig it becomes pork - like transubstantiation. Pork just happens to encompass a wide swatch of carnivore favorites, including ham, fatback, soki, porkchops, and - arguably most important of all - bacon. While consumption of pork in general hasn't changed much in the last 50 years, bacon has become more popular than ever.

Depending on how you define bacon, of course.

Defining Deliciousness

Bacon in the US comes from the pig belly, which gives it the distinctive parallel stripes of light fat and darker meat (coincidentally, 80s movies often mention pork belly futures, which seems like an outlandish trading commodity, but is actually a means of alleviating risk for meat packers by helping to stabilize the price). In other parts of the world this bacon takes up the name American bacon or breakfast bacon. The USDA even appetizingly defines bacon as the "the cured belly of a swine carcass." But this is a bit backwards, as etymologically bacon comes from the Old French and Germanic words for "back."

In order to preserve the meat and give it its distinctive flavor, it has to be cured - usually by sitting in a smoke house or in a barrel with a heavy brine. Curing defines bacon, but location on the pig is also important (in fact, the only thing initially separating ham from bacon was that ham came from the legs and bacon came from almost anywhere else). Bacon in general often refers to any portion of meat (non-organ) cuts rear of the front legs and excluding the rear legs. Although modern consensus limits bacon to the belly, sides below (or behind, if you don't want anthropomorphic pigs) the ribs, and the fatty portion of the back.

As noted, American-style or streaky bacon comes from the belly. The back portion is usually called Canadian (or Irish) bacon in the US (when it's not ham) and tends to have much less fat. Side bacon represents a mix of the fatty and meaty American and Canadian associations. The Kevin Bacon tends to have a lot of Golden Globes and SAG awards and isn't considered very edible. These distinctions between different cuts of bacon - and even the difference between ham and bacon - have not existed for long.

A Brief History of Deliciousness

Pigs were one of the earliest domesticated animals. Human diets have included various types of pork for quite a while. Chinese historians often claim the first ancestor of bacon in the form of pickled pork bellies around 1500 BC. While whole animals became the focus of feasts and banquets, armies used cured cuts of meat as a marching staple. Unlike the American association with long strips of smoked pig belly, most early forms of "bacon" likely came in chunks and were heavily salted to prevent decomposition and to remain edible.

The Romans issued soldiers rations with pork (about 2lbs of grain and 1lb of meat when possible, augmented with what was available nearby). They distinguished pig by two types: perna (hind-quarter/ham) and petaso (fore-quarter/shoulder bacon). Soldiers were often given petaso (often just called bacon in English); a contubernium (squad of eight) had its own frying pan to bake bread and fry meats.

During their occupation of Britain they brought numerous Roman foods to the Celtic populace - including soldiers' bacon. Subsequent generations of immigrant Angles and Saxons enjoyed using bacon grease (and pork) in their cooking. Distinguishing bacon from other type of pork has happened in numerous countries recently, but for much of the last few centuries the culinary distinction existed primarily in the Anglosphere.

But the Roman invention of specifying different parts of pork mostly disappeared after the empire collapsed. In the centuries afterward etymological ancestors of bacon simply defined cuts of meat. By the 12th century in England bacon was being used to refer to cuts of meat from the back - initially adopted as a synonym of flicche or flitch (this corresponds to adopting an abundance of Old French words as the Normans came in).

Subsequently, the famous story of the Dunmow flitch has helped solidify bacon's place in history. Supposedly the tale spawned the phrase "bring home the bacon" because a married couple could bring home a flitch of hog (i.e. side of bacon) if they had not quarreled for twelve months and a day. Supposedly the custom was so widespread that Chaucer referenced it. Bacoun (Middle English compared to Old French bacon above) soon referred to any cut of pork.

By the 1600s, bacon referred to a cut of pig meat cured as a single piece (back when slices (or rashers if you're British) were called flitches). By the 1750s bacon was synonymous with the cured side or back of a pig (close to the current general definition now). Northern England (not Scotland) had pickled pork - a close equivalent to modern bacon. By the late 1700s, ranchers and industrialists bred pigs to emphasize particular portions and flavors of the meat (even breeding them for bacon that could more easily be cured).

Although most bacon was heavily salted or smoked in a chimney, more refined curing processes began to develop. Wiltshire curing, one of the oldest styles of modern bacon, developed in the 1860s. As ice became more common, ice houses developed. The cold temperature let butchers cure meat over longer periods of time, requiring less salt - allowing for sweeter, more flavorful bacon.

Now let's see some petaso lingerie.

Which Came First: The Stick and the Egg

2010-10-10T20:02:00.003-05:00

Media featuring WW2 have a flare for the dramatic. Americans wield iconic M1 Garands and invariably drive around in jeeps. Germans sleep at MG42s and will inevitably scrounge up a tank. In movies and video games there is a satisfying duality between the Axis and Allies; not only ideology separated the two, but a dichotomy of technology as well. Americans throw "pineapples," Germans throw "potato mashers" (what Damian Lewis is holding in this picture).

Undoubtedly this is because the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) is a recognizable piece of military equipment from the Second World War unique to the Germans (that whole Eastern Front thing? I don't know what you're talking about). It's unfamiliar design and curious operation evoke a very foreign feeling towards Wehrmacht soldiers. Americans (and - when pictured - British and other Allies) invariably appear with grooved, fist-sized grenades like the Mk II "pineapple" grenade. Never mind the fact that the US had copied the basics of this design from the British Mills Bomb during the First World War.

Depicting Germans exclusively using Stielhandgranaten a convenient avenue of influencing the audience's perception that the Germans were vastly different in culture. The truth, however, is that the favored German grenade was very similar to the Allies' design, with a funnier (yet still food-based) name: the egg hand grenade.

German military production favored two types of grenades: the Stielhandgranate (stick hand grenade) and the Eihandgranate (egg hand grenade). Mass production of the Eihandgranate began in June of 1940 and soon far surpassed the production numbers of the iconic potato masher. Even including production numbers from 1939 and 1940 (before the "egg" grenade came into use), 9 million more egg-shaped grenades were produced during the war (84.2 million to 75.4 million stick grenades). In fact, the only modern movie or video game to actually display the Eihandgranate is The Pianist (where they are never used).

Aside from potential identification errors by the audience, there's a reason Eihandgranaten aren't usually depicted in movies and games. They don't appear in historical photographs as prominently as their stick-y counterparts. This has little to do with their actual prevalence on the battlefield; the grenades tended to be kept in a soldier's pockets until needed (unlike American Mk II grenades, which tended to be clipped on to assault webbing). This gives them much less visibility than Stielhandgranaten, which tended to be tucked into the belt.

Here's another chance to catch a glimpse of these elusive eggs.

In case you're wondering why all these eggs and sticks seem to have roots: explosive German grenades used a friction-based fuze. The soldier would yank on the bead, pulling a cord attached to a wire coated with abrasive, which scraped through the friction-sensitive compound in the detonator...similar to lighting a match (or pulling a stick of sandpaper through a tube of match heads). Like a Rube Goldberg machine, except it explodes. Generally the cord was secured inside the grenade's housing, except when they would need to be used on short notice (instances of exposed cords getting caught and prematurely detonating the grenade happened occasionally).

The Eihandgranate consisted of a fuze and detonator in one convenient package. So convenient in fact that by 1943 the German army had essentially changed its stick grenades to be Eihandgranaten with attached handles. Originally, the stick grenade's detonator was housed in the handle of the grenade. This meant the soldier had to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator into the head of the grenade and then screw the handle back on before the grenade could be used, prompting the famous text on the side of the charge: VOR GEBRAUCH SPRENGKAPSEL EINSETZEN, reminding the soldier to unscrew the handle and insert a detonator before taking the grenade into battle.

(If you think that implies soldiers are incredibly aloof, you probably don't want to know what's printed on the M18 Claymore mine)

Both types of grenades favored concussive force over fragmentation - and for this reason are often dubbed "offensive grenades" (as opposed to passive-aggressive grenades, maybe?). That is, German grenades relied on the raw force of the explosion to incapacitate enemies, allowing soldiers to more safely use the grenades at shorter distances (such as charging an enemy trench). Although the German army had developed fragmentation sheaths for use on stick and egg grenades, it was really the Allies' that preferred fragmentation (the Mills Bomb mentioned earlier had an effective range farther than any soldier could throw it, thus the idea of a "defensive grenade," one a soldier would only want to use in cover). They tended to use a smaller charge of explosive to blast apart a shell of metal, which would break apart into high-speed fragments.

So the next time Band of Brothers is on TV, just imagine that the German soldiers have some Eihandgranaten nestled in their pockets for warmth.

"Speak softly and carry a big egg" just doesn't have the same weight...unless your antagonist has ovaphobia.

Go, Goodman, Go

2010-08-25T11:36:00.004-05:00

I tend to listen to Pandora whenever I happen to be building chainmail, filling out job applications, or if I happen to play a video game with a sub-par or repetitive soundtrack. One of my Pandora channels features the misleading title "Comedy." Originally developed from a Todd Snider song featured on Bob and Tom, a song by Steven Lynch, and a much less well-known song by a much less well-known artist, Cheryl Wheeler (so unknown in fact, that I almost misspelled her name). Pandora works by assessing the musical qualities of songs that you approve to find similar songs. The channel has since developed to favor "folk influences," "melodic songwriting," and much more nebulous things like "major key tonality" and "acoustic sonority" that music majors might be able to explain (as far as I can tell "acoustic sonority" is the equivalent of "sound-like sound").

Regardless, the channel ended up introducing me to an abundance of artists with interesting, lyrically-driven music that tends to feature lots of singer-songwriters playing a guitar. It's also introduced me to John Williamson and Spectrum - a means of letting me talk to Australian women by pandering to their love of 30-year-old Australian music. It also brought me Steve Goodman, who's likely the far more interesting find. He gets a spot on my site because of his sublimely timed birth. Also he died of leukemia in 1984.

Pandora introduced me to Steve Goodman through a medley he spontanteously created, which happened to be recorded during a live concert. During concerts he would ask for a cowboy hat before singing a semi-satirical country song he wrote with John Prine. When no one could produce a cowboy hat, an audience member shouts, "You want a motorcycle helmet?" The result was Goodman playing a medley of "vehicular songs" including 3 wikipedia-dubbed teenage tragedy songs with a humorous edge as he improvisationally plucked away at his guitar (while wearing the motorcycle helmet).

Goodman was well-known for connecting with the audience and keeping a friendly, personable atmosphere. A master of the guitar, he would often play so furiously and so long that a string would break mid-song. Without missing a beat he would continue singing and replace the string.

Goodman sung an abundance of humorous songs like Leroy Van Dyke's The Auctioneer (here for a tenuous YouTube link) or Shel Silverstein's Three-Legged Man - along with his own rendition of I'm My Own Grandpa (without the past-nastification of Futurama). But he also wrote many of the songs he sang, such as Talk Backwards and the afforementioned You Never Even Called Me by My Name.

Despite Pandora's inclination to give me many of his humorous songs, he was also a skilled lyricist. In years past he was actually more well-known as a writer than a singer-songwriter. His best-known song City of New Orleans refers to a 20-hour passenger train route that still connects Chicago and New Orleans (often dubbed "the least glamorous overnight train" due to the fact the majority of its passengers don't travel between Chicago and New Orleans so the train has very few luxury cars). Goodman took a sentimental look at a vanishing piece of Americana: the now-defunct rail network. Even today, it is often considered one of the best train songs ever written (again, here for a ephemeral YouTube video). I guess if we can have "dead girl songs" and "vehicular songs" we can have train songs too.

As a native of Chicago he wrote numerous fan songs for the Chicago Cubs - for the downtrodden team that has not won a World Series title in over a century (In contrast, the Brewers' franchise has been around since 1969 and managed to snag a pennant in the 1980s, something the Cubs last managed in 1945). The most famous of these songs remains Go, Cubs, Go due to its modern resurgence during winning Cubs seasons in 2007 and 2008 (and the fact it has more uplifting lyrics than his other well-known Cubs' song A Dying Cubs' Fan's Last Request).

Unfortunately, Goodman died of leukemia in 1984 at the age of 36. Mere days later the Cubs clinched their division in 1984. In a stroke of posthumous honors, he also won a grammy for songwriting for Willie Nelson's rendition of City of New Orleans.

And they called him Cool Hand Leuk. No, wait...that's what he called himself.

Vituperating Thesaurus Diving with Scurrilous Excoriations

2010-06-30T02:33:00.000-05:00

My desktop houses a rather unassuming file called words.txt. The file - without the fluff on Microsoft Word documents or even WordPad - functions as my own personal dictionary and thesaurus. At fewer than 40 words it's a poor representation of the English language, but it is a great cross section of strange words that have entered my possession through others' misuse or my own curiosity. Unfortunately, It seems lots of people like to finger through thesauruses without double-checking to make sure the words work. I have a great disdain for these thesaurus divers, even if their salvaged treasures fill my dictionary.

Thesaurus diving involves making a piece of writing pretentious ("grandiloquent" if you really will) by replacing common words with longer, rarer or obscure words. There's no problem using a thesaurus to sound a bit more poetic; sometimes blue is just a bit too blue and you need some azure or navy. The problem arises when blue heedlessly becomes something like beryl (beryl is a mineral, which is clear in its pure form, but can take on a multitude of colors).

So I'd like to share a couple of my words and their provenance as part of my dictionary ...No, not scurrilous words (don't ask me why I have so many synonyms for "using abusive, insulting language").

alimentary [al-uh-men-tuh-ree] - adjective
1. concerned with food, nutrition or digestion.
2. providing sustenance or nourishment; nutritious.

This one is fun because it works as a pun for elementary. "Why did the mouse die of starvation, Holmes?" - "It's alimentary, my dear Watson!" (never mind that Conan Doyle never had Sherlock Holmes say "elementary, my dear Watson" in 40 years of stories).

esurient [ih-soor-ee-uhnt] - adjective (esurience - noun)
1. craving food in great quantities; extremely hungry.
2. (often followed by "for") ardently or excessively desirous; greedy.

Not all of my words deal with food, I promise. Anyway, this word fell into my posession from a Monty Python skit involving a cheese shop. The main character played by John Cleese is a bombastic wordsmith and apparent cheese afficionado, and he brings up this rare synonym for hunger almost immediately - along with the more British-sounding "peckish," which makes a nice double entendre since it means hungry and/or irritated. Speaking of double meanings...

excoriate [ik-skawr-ee-eyt] - verb
1. to strip off or remove the skin from; to abrade (scrape off) skin or hide.
2. to denounce or berate serverely; to flay verbally; to censure scathingly.

Who says you don't learn anything watching sports? This word came up during the olympics, when one of the announcers mentioned a hockey coach was excoriating the team for their poor defensive maneuvers. This word is a bit strange etymologically. The core of the word is corium (that's right, I used core just before corium - take that, clarity!), which is Latin for "skin" so the first meaning is apparent, but the figurative meaning requires a bit more imagination.

(Alright there's food again, but that apple snuck into this picture, I swear!)

Double (and triple and quadruple) meanings are the great benefit of a diverse vocabulary. I've enjoyed them ever since mortally wounded Mercutio's pun in Romeo and Juliet: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." Even if Shakespeare's puns were originally an indulgence granted to the humors of the lower classes visiting the theatre. In case we're getting too low-class, next up we've got one of them, whosawhatsits...that's right, $10 words.

pulchritude [puhl-kri-tood] - noun
1. physical beauty - especially of a woman; that quality of appearance which pleases the eye; comeliness; grace; loveliness.
2. attractive moral excellence; moral beauty.

This pops up more often as my favorite word: pulchritudinous (a fancy, long way of saying beautiiful). I hear you say, "I've never seen it before, how much more often could it pop up?" Well, because most spam filters target things like "hot" or "beautiful" or "sexy," pulchritudinous tends to be the generic thesaurus treasure that comes in subject lines like "pulchritudinous Russian virggins redy 4 u."

Beautiful comes from Middle English and Old French, but pulchritudinous derives from fancy, civilized Latin. So how about some more Latin-derived words that are less nice?

scurrilous [skur-uh-luhs] - adjective
1. grossly or obscenely abusive language; vituperative.
2. given to the use of vulgar or coarse language; foul-mouthed.
3. characterized by or using low buffoonery; coarsely jocular or derisive; given to undignified joking as only a buffoon can warrant.

Okay, I lied when I said they weren't scurrilous words. One of the words is literally scurrilous.

I stole this from dinosaur comics, which uses it quite often. Whether or not it's actually being used correctly is arguable (T-Rex hadn't actually said anything mean or vulgar or jocular to warrant the devil's response). This one has fun double meaning since you can clandestinely imply someone is a foul-mouthed buffoon with a single word.

I believe that puts the site 2 years ahead in our "Word of the Year" program. Plus more people will hopefully use pulchritudinous, so my spam inbox won't seem quite so exotic.

I forgot to make a Thesaurus Rex joke, didn't I?

The Importance of Auxiliary Verbs

2010-06-02T23:54:00.000-05:00

The United States officially entered World War II on December 7th, 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Often considered a terrible strategic blunder, Hitler subsequently declared war on the US on December 11th. These actions dragged the United States in the Battle of the Atlantic against Germany's commerce raiding navy - primarily submarines. It also brought us the rhyming phrase "loose lips sink ships." However, the original poster adds a very important auxiliary verb to the mix: "might."

Battle in the West (Atlantic)

Between the fall of France in June of 1940 and the loss of numerous u-boat aces in early 1941 (most famously Günther Prien and his magic torpedoes (like magic fingers, but half a meter wide and explosive instead of tingly)), German submarines and commerce raiding ships proved frighteningly successful. In the four months after the Fall of France German submarines sank 282 Allied merchant ships totalling nearly 1.5 million tons of shipping. Their success was so great that after the war Churchill commented that, "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-Boat peril...It did not take the form of flaring battles and glittering achievements, it manifested itself through statistics, diagrams, and curves unknown to the nation, incomprehensible to the public."

Ever increasing British anti-submarine efforts resulted in wanning commerce raiding opportunities for German submarines in late 1941. However, Hitler's declaration of war allowed u-boats to hunt new targets off the coast of North America ("Canada? What's Canada?"). The first wave of long range Type IX submarines departed as part of Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). For the next 8 months, German submarines saw a resurgence of success (hence the Wikipedia article title "Second Happy Time," from German commander's referring to a period of success as "glückliche Zeit" (meaning "happy time" or "fortunate time").

Germany only had 12 available Type IX boats, so commanders of smaller (more famous) Type VII boats suffered more cramped quarters and meagre rations to risk the journey to hunt down fresh American vessels. They proved so successful that a newly created American Office of War Information began a campaign of information control by mid-1942.

Look at that Ess (c)ar gee-oh

Ironically, the US likely started the campaign to prevent Americans from learning about sinking ships instead of preventing Germans learning information letting them sink ships.

Similar to other propaganda from the period, a large company created the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (LLSS) poster to aid the war effort. The poster came as part of a series of eight drawn in 1942 by the art director at Seagram Distillers' branch in New York (think Pepsi Co., but with more alcohol). Seagram printed the posters for placement in taverns. Apparently they felt bad for liquoring up all those intelligence officers ready to provide vital war information to German spies. Loose lips might sink ships, but lots o' sips loosen lips.

Obscurely signed as Ess-ar-gee, the poster's artist went without much recognition, despite creating one of the most recognizable phrases from World War Two. Ess-ar-gee enigmatically disguises the initials SRG, which refer to the Seymour R. Goff Jr. (some places slip a Henry in there...we could probably throw in a John or William to cover some other common turn-of-the-century names - or maybe he just didn't like hens).

What Might Sink Ships

The American navy and coast guard were initially unprepared for the waves of German submarines that came. The British immediately recommended switching to the Commonwealth's convoy system - the American navy eschewed the perceived burden of the system. The British recommended flying constant reconaissance and sending out available ships for escort duty (sick of that 'fishy' smell, the British had commandeered many fishing trawlers for anti-submarine duty in 1940 and 1941) - the American navy again abstained, unwilling to seize civillian vessels and lacking available destroyers. Ships leaving American ports suffered heavily between January and August 1942. The British recommended blackouts in coastal cities - and yet again the American navy refused the suggession.

At the height of the "Second Happy Time," German submarines were operating within sight of American harbors - identifying ships' silhouettes against illuminated cityscapes and sinking them as they ventured out to sea. The British tanker Coimbra was sunk within 30 miles of Long Island; residents who spotted the wreck's burning load of oil called the authorities. Due to light air patrols and a lack of available escort ships (many having been "lent" to the British in 1941 in Roosevelt's Destroyers for Bases program), occasionally German submarines sank ships during the day as well - such as the Dixie Arrow sunk 12 miles from the Diamond Shoal anchored light buoy off the coast of North Carolina.

Loose lips might sink ships, but a poorly prepared navy, obstinate leadership and an aversion to adopting proven strategic decisions do sink ships.

"Negative Buoyancy Sinks Ships" just didn't rhyme well enough.

Controlled Internet Anarchy

2010-04-19T02:44:00.001-05:00

The internet remains an unregulated sea of anonymity and randomness (even if some politicians would like to revoke Internet neutrality). Internet culture has adopted numerous aphorisms to explain and predict net behavior.

The most prominent of these are:

Rule 1. Do not talk about /b/
Rule 2. Do NOT talk about /b/

Immediately apparent is how these rules were stolen from the rules of Fight Club. Also apparent is how no one adheres to these rules...which is fitting, since /b/ itself essentially has no rules. /b/ refers to the "Random" forum at 4chan (I really recommend you do not visit this site at work). Wikipedia has a brief history and numerous quotes of what mainstream publications have said about /b/.

/b/ is famous for protests against scientology in a spontaneously created movement called Anonymous, creating the rickrolling meme (along with its predecessor - duckrolling), copious amounts of porn (you were expecting a link to porn, maybe?), Boxxy, "trolling for lulz," caturday (which grew into LOLcats), and probably half of the strange things you've seen on the Internet.

The content on /b/ remains ephemeral. It functions as a forum, except only the most recent posts remain active - the rest are purged (never to be seen again...except in the form of screen captures). Although this hasn't stopped other websites from archiving 4chan material.

Rule 34. If it exists, there's porn of it.

As Avenue Q (tangentially) points out, a vast amount of content on the Internet consists of porn (or pr0n, for the uninitiated). However, the Internet's breadth combined with anonymity results in bizarre creations of porn that you're bound to find at least one example either hilarous or disgusting (...or both). Porn itself isn't that surprising; until chaste Victorian society came along there were no qualms about having nudity everywhere (ironically, Victorian society also produced an abundance of nude paintings...but we all know that if you're tastefully nude you're not really naked, right?). The Romans in particular really loved them some nudity; and true to their throwbacks to Roman culture, Renaissance artists embraced the nude...figuratively (...usually).

If you'd like to see a list of typical Rule 34 examples without risking grievous injury to your psyche (or to your internet priveleges at work), I'll recommend TVTropes' list of examples. Relatedly, there's (less common) rule 36.

Rule 36. If it exists, there's a fetish for it.

From coprophilia to vorarephilia (that's scat porn to vore - but more scientific sounding) there's an incredible breadth to the number of fetishes out there. Since the Internet allows people with like interests to easily connect, rare and strange fetishes tend to develop their own communities.

If that's too unsettling, true to its schizophrenic nature the Internet has an alternative Rule 36 for you.

Rule 36. There will always be something worse than what you just saw.

In the low bandwidth days of yore, trolls relied on shock images to harass or disgust potential viewers. In time some websites developed to cater specifically to these sorts of vulgar pornographic or gruesomely graphic shock images.

In a bizarre twist of Internet trends, rickrolling has displaced shock images as the "bait and switch" prank of choice. This doesn't violate the rule, however.

John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
(Hey, that's the name, don't look at me)

A normal person when provided anonymity and confronted with an audience will turn into a jackass.

This theory was created by Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik in 2004. As illustrated in its original conception, this theory has managed to prove itself many times over. Anyone who has played on Xbox Live can attest to its truth. Relatedly, you'll come across plenty of 11 year olds playing M-rated games ready to teabag your corpse while yelling racial slurs into a microphone.

Godwin's Law

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Created by Mike Godwin originally for USENET in 1990, Godwin's Law (or Godwin's Nazi-Corrolary) exists because anonymity allows us all to call other people Nazis with impunity. This trend exists because Nazis are generally considered the worst, most evil thing around. So what other insult could be greater? Subsequently, once someone has been called Hitler or a Nazi, a thread has been "Godwin-ed".

The more recent version of this (or the 1950s version) is to call people Stalin or communist. FOX News and other right wing political institutions like to cover all their bases and call people fascist socialists. Apparently they missed that whole "Soviet Union fighting Nazi Germany for 4 years with 30,000,000 casualties"-part (along with numerous political and economic ideology clashes). So pick one or the other; someone cannot be Nazi-Stalinist.

Poe's Law

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

Eponymously coined by user Nathan Poe on the Christian Forums in 2005, Poe's Law has evolved to mean that parodies of extremist views are indistinguishable from serious posts without some blatant, transparent indication. It originally related to discussions of evolution, but has since branched out to cover fundamentalist and outlandish conspiracy theorists, as well.

Now all you need to do is to fomulate a post on 4chan about how liberals are like Nazi-Communist-Fetishist porno-junkies via a shock photo and you'll have all your bases covered.

Milwaukee Trivia Collection - Back to the Future Edition

2009-07-31T22:07:00.007-05:00

People clamor for shorter articles, so I present the first in a series of Milwaukee-oriented trivia collections randomly organized into arbitrary themes. Today: I link Milwaukee's history with Back to the Future because of a note listing the time and date a building was struck by lightning.

Ten Years Early; One DeLorean Short

Flux capacitor not fluxing and out of plutonium? The Wells Building on Wisconsin Avenue was struck by lightning on July 9th, 1945 at 3:45pm. Unfortunately old ladies won't be handing out fliers asking you to save the clocktower; there aren't any clock faces on the building.

Thinking of speeding down Wisconsin Avenue in order to hit a metal wire at 88 miles per hour? Milwaukee's mass transit might have something to say about that. Not only would you have to contend with an abundance of streetcar wires, you'd also have the streetcars themselves, which would still be around for nearly a decade.

"Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something."

Putting aside the fact that Marty orders a drink marketed towards women, Tab did not exist until 1963. Coincidentally (in the realm of missing beverages), Milwaukee didn't have any taverns on record in the 1920s. Still want to wet your whistle? The Milwaukee city directories can point you to page after page of soda fountains.

Road names? Where we're going we don't need... road names.

There's plenty of dispute over the origin of the city of Milwaukee's name. But many of the streets have unique stories as well. Some changes came through convention, some came through history, and some came because urban planners like trying to confuse Polish immigrants.

As mentioned previously, Milwaukee went through many street renaming phases, but the most extensive happened in 1930. Almost every East-West street in East Milwaukee had a different name before the 1930s. Directional indicators were appended to street names (making something like Wisconsin Avenue into East Wisconsin Avenue and West Wisconsin Avenue - or something more fun like changing Aldrich Street into East Bay Street and South Bay Street). Unfortunately, they also decided to move the numbered streets as well.

View Larger Map

The city of Milwaukee does not have a Main Street (although Brown Deer Road becomes Main Street in Waukesha County). Broadway was formerly Main Street, before the name was changed in 1871.

The only reasonable explanation is that it's the main street to use to get out of the city, right?

Gravity Gone Ballistic

2009-07-27T19:22:00.010-05:00

Some of my paternal grandfather's war stories involved his time in the army. The most action-packed involved a time on patrol when a spent round bounced off his upper chest, and simply fell to the ground because it had effectively lost all of its kinetic energy. More action-packed than stories of siphoning gasoline out of military vehicles, anyway. Strangely, the story has propagated disagreement among people who doubt its veracity. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the story, but I can vouch for its viability.

However, it wasn't enough that people simply believe me on my birthday, so I was forced to break out the W/t of SCIENCE (If I can have a dogion joke I can have a power = energy/time joke). Unfortunately, this led to a point of contention involving the physics of gravity.

Some people are surprised to know that the Aristotelian view of gravity is not true (despite how cool Aristotle is). Heavier objects do not inherently accelerate faster than lighter objects. This belief persists because lighter objects tend to be more buoyant and have more air resistance, and hence drop more slowly on Earth.

Current scientific thinking links gravity with the curvature of spacetime. Unfortunately, quantum mechanics disagrees (but quantum mechanics is like that frizzy-haired uncle no one likes to talk to because he seems to only speak gibberish). Despite all that, most situations still work fine with Newton's "simple" Law of Gravity. Here we also see that laws are meant to be broken, even when they're scientific, since relativity and quantum mechanics have proven that Newton's law does not apply to all possible scenarios. Basically, given a vacuum (to negate air resistance and buoyancy) and objects of negligible mass (relative to a planet), objects will fall to the ground at the same rate (both would fall at approximately 9.8m/s² on Earth).

Astronauts make everything better, so fortunately the concept was illustrated by our good friend Commander David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission.

Transcript for people without video: "Well, in my left hand I have a feather. In my right hand, a hammer. I guess one of the reasons we got here today was because of a gentleman named Galileo a long time ago, who made a rather significant discovery about falling objects in gravity fields. And we thought, 'Where would be a better place to confirm his findings than on the moon?' And so we thought we'd try it here for you. The feather happens to be appropriately a falcon feather...for our Falcon. And I'll drop the two of 'em here, and - hopefully - they'll hit the ground at the same time. [hammer and feather hit the ground simultaneously] How 'bout that? This proves that mister Galileo was correct in his findings."

Returning to our opening statements: people also tend to believe that horizontal motion negates gravity. If an object is shot horizontally and another object dropped simultaneously from the same height, both objects will hit the ground at the same time. Gravity's pull is uniform regardless of horizontal motion. This too, is illustrated by crazy science teachers around the world. Exhibit A:

(I apologize in advance for the lack of more astronauts)

...There is no Exhibit B.

Randomly teaching people about gravity since 2003; just another reason not to follow me when I walk home from school.

This Old House on 1 That Street

2009-06-17T00:58:00.017-05:00

I generally don't drive, which often means that my knowledge of specific street names is limited to my immediate vicinity. My navigation relies much more on landmarks and directions, since I don't bother looking for street signs (I generally don't see them, anyway). But recently I've needed to accustom myself to the lay of the streets a bit more.

So if you're from Milwaukee I'll ask you this: do you know about where in Milwaukee this house was from?

Here's a hint: its address was 519 Astor Street. Not helpful? It's from near the intersection of Biddle Street and Astor Street. Still not helpful? That's because all of Milwaukee's urban planners aspire to be Hunter S. Thompson. The house's description may prove useful in figuring out this problem.

Milwaukee has gone through a series of street name changes, but the largest happened in 1930. Some streets were renamed, but most simply had a direction appended to them. Astor Street became North Astor Street. In addition, people couldn't pick whatever wacky address number they wanted (do you really want to live on 1 Bay Street next to 1 Aldrich Street?). Numbers were assigned according to a property's frontage (every 15' had a new number, every new block increased this number by 100). This house's address changed from 519 Astor Street to 913 North Astor Street.

Unfortunately, even having an address number and street name doesn't help us with this house. Keen visitors that click on my fancy links will already know the other problem. This house neighbored the intersection of Biddle and Astor. The problem being that Biddle Street became Kilbourn Avenue when Cedar and Biddle were widened and connected by a bridge over the Milwaukee river. The intersection of Astor and Biddle now encompasses the intersection of Kilbourn, Prospect and Astor.

View Larger Map

You know what will teach you streets pretty quick? Poring over fire liability maps of a city. Unfortunately, half those streets may not even exist anymore - like Biddle Street. The Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Company (talk about knowing your target market) created detailed, scale maps of thousands of American cities between 1867 and 1970. You can view black and white versions of these maps for Milwaukee online, but you may want the key.

Physically they're giant bound volumes about two feet square. With a scale of 1 inch to 50 feet, this means one page can show about 1000 feet on each side. Milwaukee is a rather large city, and the maps from 1910-1926 come in 6 volumes (about 20 giant bound books of maps). New volumes were ordered for expansions of the city limits, but the index map remains the same (which makes finding page numbers for modern streets not listed on the index that much more fun).

Aside from being unwieldy in size, the individual pages are a bit strange. Directional north is not explicitly at the top of the page; each page has its own compass rose to denote which way is north. Unlike the online versions mentioned above, the actual maps are color-coordinated with the key. Each color indicates a specific building material (and therefore a building's status as a potential fire hazard). And finally, in order to provide up-to-date fire hazard information, the company provided new versions of buildings and streets that could be pasted into the volume on hand. This kept the maps current, but isn't so helpful when you're looking for an older demolished house, since it's bound to be under 3 layers of pasted revisions. In older versions of the map the presence of gas and electrical lines is often marked as well (if I had been around in 1910 I'd get an electrical line to my house just so some lazy surveyor has to pencil in "Electric Line" on some giant map).

So where was that house from? It was located in downtown Milwaukee, where Kilbourn Avenue starts and the Regency House Condos now stand.

And maybe it's still there, like some sort of Morlock house.

Collection of Curiosities - Cynic's Edition

2009-05-29T18:16:00.005-05:00

Hoaxes, practical jokes and confidence schemes have featured in entertainment (and the art of separating people from money) for hundreds of years. Despite massive amounts of cynicism present in today's society, hoaxes still manage to catch quite a few people, but only a select few have impacted entire nations and imprinted themselves on the public psyche.

Of Mars and Men

Substantially famous already, the War of the World's hoax isn't actually so much a practical joke or a hoax as it is a testament to people's tendency to jump to conclusions. Taking place on October 30th, 1938 (and continuing on for a few people in the population), the hoax generated a panic in some of the population in fear of a Martian invasion.

The War of the Worlds hoax was a radio broadcast of a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds directed by Orson Welles. The broadcast followed a format of "breaking news" bulletins interrupting a performance by an orchestra. Each of the bulletins provided the audience with updates that followed the plot of the War of the Worlds - essentially a Martian invasion. Subsequently, portions of the public panicked at the thought that the invasion was real.

You know how some people miss the first five minutes of television shows or movies? Well, most television shows produced today are designed so that audiences can watch them without paying close attention. After all, viewers may be making dinner or folding clothes and they might not be pouring all their energy into watching. This means that many shows (particularly sit-coms) restate the plot or update viewers quite frequently. Unfortunately for listeners to the Welles broadcast, many missed the disclaimer introduction.

The broadcast also functions as a testament to some people's short attention spans. The story eventually switches to one man's narrative of his attempts at survival. This makes it readily apparent the broadcast is not real...but by that time people had ran screaming from their radio sets and were busy stockpiling supplies before the impending Martian invasion force arrived.

You can relive the mystical aura of a panic-stricken 1930s by listening to the broadcast here or here. Just like when you're watching TV, remember to skip the first few minutes.

Nothing for the Spaghetti Weevils

Did you know spaghetti grows on trees? Of course you don't... because it doesn't. That didn't stop the British show Panorama from broadcasting a fake documentary on April 1st, 1957 showcasing the bountiful Swiss spaghetti crop. Panorama happened to be one of the most trusted news sources on British television, so the hoax managed to get two types of responses: people who loved the joke and people who wanted to know how to grow their own spaghetti trees. This was the first - and only - time that the news program decided to air an April Fools joke. This is the benefit of having a cameraman who knows a good practical joke.

Through the glory of the internet you can pretend to be British in the 50s by watching the video here.

Pasta has become so ubiquitous now that everyone knows its secret ingredient: flour. Of course, you can add things like salt and eggs to the mixture, but pasta is essentially flour formed into fancy shapes. Unfortunately for much of the British population in the 50s, who had suffered rationing throughout the 40s, pasta was still considered something of a delicacy and remained relatively rare (I'm guessing their college students must have subsisted off some sort of Dickensian gruel, instead).

As a side benefit, the hoax documentary created and exterminated the adorable spaghetti weevil.

Soaking in Cynicism

Have you heard of the dangerous chemical dihydrogen monoxide that's responsible for thousands of deaths per year? I'm sure you have, but it was probably called something different, like hydrogen hydroxide or hydroxic acid. Or maybe water.

Developed in the 1990s, this hoax plays on a lack of scientific knowledge. Usually the hoax pops up in the form of a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO), with a spokesperson listing off many of the dangerous-sounding aspects of water to persuade someone to sign. At face value all of this information is true, but used in an exaggerated manner (after all, thousands of people die every year to drowning). The hoax even has its own psuedo-advocates with a website listing off the dangers of DHMO.

This hoax ends up a source of amusement for chemists and a source of embarrassment for politicians. The hoax relies on exaggeration and a listener's lack of specific knowledge (or attention). It tells us that pretentious language and specialized jargon can often be used to circumvent people's logic and reasoning. Unfortunately it also showcases people's willingness to generate uninformed decisions. Who would ban water? Plenty of people if they don't know it's water.

Also lava monsters.

Many people might believe that modern hypercyncism may prevent hoaxes from even gaining a foothold anymore, but the case of DHMO shows that people as a whole are as gullible and misinformed as ever. Afterall, there's more information now than ever before, how do you know who to not trust? Unfortunately this results in more work for individuals because it takes even more effort to form factual, informed decisions... many people often don't bother.

The predominant form of the hoax is no longer steeped in April Fools Day jokes and emails that can be disproved with a single Google search. They rely more on confidence schemes and human fallibility. Even in the digital age, con artists still rely on surreptitiously gaining information directly from people more often than through brute force cracking of electronic information. For less criminal misinformation there's plenty of help around. The website Snopes exists to discredit modern hoaxes and urban legends which manage to find their way into chain mailings and conversations.

At least we don't need to worry about spaghetti weevils. Or do we!?

The Low High Brow

2009-04-17T16:37:00.004-05:00

Because I've got exciting papers and projects and presentations due in ever-increasing amounts in April and May, there's been a lull in the quality of writing at the site over here (that is... there hasn't been any). In order to satiate my swooning audiences who desire only the best quality writing and humor, I've decided to release one of my rare (i.e. only) highly-prized, hand-drawn, meticulously-inked comics.

...That is, hand-drawn in MS-Paint with copious amounts of Photoshop blur effects and paint bucket fills.

That's right, I drew croissants instead of crumpets on the plate, what of it?

Arabian Golf

2009-03-05T22:57:00.010-06:00

The Persian Gulf has been a hotspot of contention ever since some Sumerians decided they wanted to live next to each other a few thousand years ago. Recently, Arab dominated lands have referred to the body of water as the Arabian Gulf, which has led to a vehement outcry among Iranians (or Persians, for anyone alive before 1935). This nationalism has evolved to the extent that Iran now has a Persian Gulf Day (on April 29th, in case you planned on taking the day off). You might also notice the rather undiplomatic language that seems to permeate Iranian literature on the subject. To their credit, the UN and some random guy at MIT (someone in Iranian Studies, anyway) have determined that Persian Gulf (or variations thereof) has functioned as the de facto name for the gulf in European circles for centuries and should stay that way. I'm not really sure where the Arabian prompt to change the name is coming from - they have a perfectly fine Red Sea to the west that could do with a spruced up name. Maybe they're hoping the next war in the area to be a more eponymous Arabian Gulf War instead of a Persian Gulf War.

Now, my History 104 course with Professor Wick also featured a bit of discussion on the popular gulf (he also writes a mean introduction to the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides). One of my favorite professors through a mixture of immense topical knowledge with dry wit, his lectures provided an exceptional historical background for future learning and critical thinking. When covering the topic of ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf featured in the topical discussion to a fair extent. (Un)fortunately, we didn't cover any sort of historiography on the subject of the gulf's geography.

The depth of the modern gulf does not exceed 90m, which is helpful since sea levels rose by about 90m when the glaciers from the last ice age melted. The Persian Gulf of the time was likely a fertile valley, but there was no recorded history at that point. The Sumerian great flood (an early analogue to the Biblical tale of Noah) is likely unrelated to the inundation (or Deluge, if you're still going all Biblical on me) of the Persian Gulf. The gulf sits at the collision zone of the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates which still periodically undergo tectonic activity related to orogeny (that is: mountain upheaval and usually accompanying subsidence somewhere else).

For quite a while the historical coastline of the Persian Gulf was believed to have been between about 200 kilometers to the northwest of its present position. An archeological geologist named Jacques de Morgan theorized around 1900 that the Persian Gulf had slowly been filling in with sediment deposited by the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karun rivers. He suggested that the Tigris and Euphrates emptied into the gulf without forming a confluence (the Shatt al-Arab estuary (or the Avrandrud, if you're Persian - not to be confused with the Evinrud)), and that the Karun river's sediment formed a series of shoals, which eventually built up into the modern shoreline. Through an in-depth survey of archeological sites in Mesopotamia, de Morgan hypothesized that the coast of the Persian Gulf would have been near Baghdad in the 4th millennium BC... Never mind that his use of historical sites relied on his own survey of historical voyages whose point of origin we still don't definitively know (turns out you can say you've found anything if no one knows the actual location).

There are a few problems with de Morgan's assertion (besides his mélange of potentially made-up historical sites). Much of the rock in the area appears to be from freshwater sediment. There's also the problem of Lake Hammar in southeastern Iraq which miraculously hasn't really filled with sediment and wasn't there six thousand years ago. While sedimentary accretion is an accepted geological phenomenon, de Morgan was missing a few important bits of information (mostly the geology of his archeological geology).

The predominant theory behind the coastline of the Persian Gulf seems to still be Lees and Falcon's subsidence theory. With their fancy use of geological sampling, they hypothesized that the Persian Gulf had intermittently undergone (and continues to undergo) subsidence, which counteracts the silt deposits to a great extent. Iraq collides with Persia building mountains, but the creation of mountains requires a complementary subsidence zone. So, the story of Noah had it wrong: the land wasn't being flooded by water, the water was being flooded by land (...and was slowly sinking to cover it up, like some geologist-fantasized episode of CSI). Sure, Noah's flood is supposed to be from rain and rivers overflowing, but you can't have quality jokes and accuracy, what do you think this is the Daily Show?

Through the use of aerial photography and charts from the 1800s, Lees and Falcon determined that the primary coastal change was a migration of the Shatt al-Arab's output further to the northeast. Subsidence and silt deposits have resulted in some ancient sites buried under a substantial depth of sediment (and occasionally water) as the shoreline meanders northeast. Or maybe Sumerians were just subterranean, Tolkien-esque dwarves with gills. So maybe in a few millennia the main river outlet into the Persian Gulf will be in Iran and we can avoid squabbles about preferred geographic names. Or half of the region will be buried under ten meters of silt, and everyone will turn into Morlocks. Either way I see a great future for the science fiction community and historians. I preemptively dub it historical futuristic science fiction.

Now we just need to work on renaming Lake Michigan to Lake Wisconsin.

Primer up to Primers

2009-02-19T17:13:00.006-06:00

The modern concept of an arms race is almost exclusively tied to the proliferation of nuclear weapons between the USA and USSR and the attempts at building bigger, longer-ranged weaponry. Or to anyone who's ever played Civilization: racing Ghandi to nuclear weapons before he destroys the world. Like the nuclear arms race and the related idea of the Red Queen theory, history is populated by arms races. Just like the light bulb or personal computer (or even modern firearms), inventions stand on the innovation that came before them.

Firearms constitute a prime example of a technological race. Now, through the miracles of etymology, firearms might be either "flaming arms" or "arms that make use of fire". Although early firearms may have lead to plenty of conflagrated limbs (and torsos), the concept of arms here ties in with weapons (Old French armes from Latin arma (weapons)) and not arms (Old English earm from Latin armus (shoulder/upper arm)) - both of which are from the Indo-European root of ar- (too fit or join). Firearms have three separate components that influence their effectiveness: the gunpowder, the bullet, and the design. These three factors facilitate faster firing rates, more range, cheaper manufacturing, more mobility, and easier use - all of which were desired since firearms were invented.

General consensus lands the discovery of gunpowder sometime in the 800s in China. The use of recognizable guns in China dates to the 1100s (occasionally Arabic scholars argue this point). This often leads to the misconception that early gunpowder use focused on fireworks or the idea that the peace-loving Chinese couldn't find a use for it in wartime. The advent of gunpowder coincides with the downfall of the Tang dynasty (not to be confused with the Tang dynasty - easy way to differentiate them: only one is "orangey") and the emergence of the war-filled Wudai and Shiguo (Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms - wu (五) being five, shi (十) being ten) period and the warfare that accompanies more than ten states in an area less than half the size of modern China. Recognizable firearms developed during the subsequent Song dynasty (not to be confused with the, uh...song dynasty?), but despite the empire's relative stability, they weren't any strangers to war either. Turns out Chinese people were all about burninating the countryside.

Early gunpowder in all spheres of influence around the world (Chinese, Arabian, and European) lacked explosive force. Gunpowder functioned more as an incendiary in the early years of its adoption in each area. Before the arrival of black powder to European armories, naphtha (think pitch or oil) occasionally filled this role. Soldiers filled small ceramic or glass pots with the flammable liquid. When lit and thrown, the pot would break and the liquid would splash out and engulf an area in fire. Greek fire (or liquid fire) occasionally pops up alongside naphtha and pitch, but writers and transcribers often used the term carelessly (...let me paraphrase: "Holy crap, guys - we just got our asses handed to us by those Saracens. They totally used Greek fire on us."). The primary users of Greek fire consisted of the Byzantines (Greeks to the rest of Europe) and the myriad Arabian states around the Mediterranean.

Ingredients and Processing

Early incendiary mixtures consisted primarily of sulfur and charcoal. These mixtures wouldn't provide any explosive punch, but worked well enough for burning things (I'll avoid linking non-Trogdor again...for now). The third essential ingredient of medieval gunpowder was saltpeter (or potassium nitrate, KNO₃). Mined from areas of China and India, Chinese alchemists had relatively easy access to the chemical. In Europe, saltpeter remained elusive until alchemists uncovered suitable amounts of the chemical in a more obscure form. The initial source for saltpeter in Europe came from ~~Batman~~ bat caves in the form of guano. Disgusting you say? The larger scale (far more odoriferous) production of saltpeter inevitably required copious amounts of aged urine (or by LeConte's recommendation: dung-water) or manure.

Here's another fun fact: saltpeter often functioned as a food preservative in the middle ages. Hopefully you're not reading this during lunch. The historical reenactors among you may be happy to know that the modern production of black powder does not rely on urine.

The basics of effective black powder had finally arrived by the early 14th century. Recipes proliferated, offering a variety of additives and proportions. The theoretically most effective ratio nears 75% saltpeter, 12% sulfur and 13% charcoal, however medieval chemists tended to use far less saltpeter (the hardest component to produce). Recipes usually took a form of basic ratios, such as 7 parts nitre, 5 part brimstone and 5 part charcoal. The standardization of black powder in a form close to its theoretical explosive limit didn't occur until the late 18th century.

Beyond the evolution of the formulas, methods of transporting and mixing the constituent components developed as well. Engineers discovered that mixing the saltpeter into the sulfur and charcoal just before firing resulted in a more reliable explosive force (although it tended to produce a lot of powder dust which was prone to ...exploding). Gunpowder was often milled as a function of the mixing process, providing relatively consistent powder (compared to mortar-and-pestle mixing, anyway).

One of those major lightbulb-esque developments came about in the 1420s with the advent of corning. Also known as granulating, corning is the process of wetting the gunpowder and forming it into kernels or grains. Initial liquids for corning were spirits, vinegar, and - that old nedieval standby - urine (apparently urine was medieval duct tape). Turns out water works best. It helps the saltpeter fill in the pores of the charcoal, allowing for a very consistent and more powerful propellant (it's also mentioned in Timeline, in case you're interested). Subsequent developments focused on standardizing grain size and providing additives to stabilize the powder (like the addition of graphite to avoid static discharges setting off the powder - if you go back in time bring a pencil).

Materials and Shapes

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that gunpowder developed into a general purpose explosive. Arriving sometime after 1250, firearms developed relatively quickly into projectile weapons but saw other uses as well. Black powder was used in civil engineering (mining, canal building, etc.), but proved especially dangerous due to the inconsistency of the powder and the lack of reliable fuses. Besiegers also used the explosive mixture to great effect. The most famous of these for us now are petards, which come to us with the phrase "he was hoisted by his own petard" as in "he was foiled by his own plan". But, like our contemporary association with the word firearms, the most common weapons to make use of fire were guns.

European ventures into projectile firearms began with cannons. Walter de Milemete's illustration in De Nobilitatibus, Sapientii, Et Prudentiis Regum (On the nobility, wisdom, and prudence of kings) features the first picture of a European cannon (on the left). This type of cannon and gonne were referred to as a vaso (ingeniously, Italian for vase). It is unlikely that de Milemete had actually seen the cannon fired at this point due to the ambiguity of the gun's carriage (despite how stable putting a cannon on a sawhorse may be).

During the early centuries of gunpowder use, siege engineers favored cast bronze cannons. Leaders preferred forged or cast iron guns for their economical price. Metallurgical processes of the period meant that it was easier to cast bronze (or much more expensive brass), than iron. The pliability of bronze also made it easier to notice when a bronze cannon had undergone too much stress due to a large bulge that would form. Iron cannons tended to just explode due to their brittleness (this tends to be the reason why the operators preferred bronze guns). Although generally stronger as a metal, iron metallurgy and refining processes slacked behind bronze. The picture in de Milemete's depiction is a cast piece, probably of bronze or brass (due to the color). Forged iron cannon consisted of a tube (often of wood covered in metal slats) held together by rings of iron. This lead to the idea of a gun barrel since the weapons originally resembled barrels (a cylinder of wood slats held together by iron rings).

The Part That's Supposed to Hurt People

Projectiles came in a variety of shapes and sizes. De Milemete's depicted cannon fired a dart (or shortened arrow). Early ammunition often came from rock, something that tended to be rather plentiful. Round bullets or shot became the preferred standard (as round as you can make a rock, anyway). As gun calibers became standardized, metal ammunition began to readily replace stone. Shot, darts, and bullets all had separate tactical applications and saw use as their production processes became more refined. This is the part where the euphemism of a cannon as a big hard tube with balls comes in.

Until the advent of the cartridge and primer, the vast majority of firearms were muzzle-loaded (loaded down the barrel and then rammed into position). Only very small cannon tended to be breech-loaded (loaded into the rear of the weapon, right into the firing position). Until machining caught up, these required a removable chamber held in place by a wedge to make them nearly air-tight for firing.

Bullet makers (generally lead casting metal smiths) spent time perfecting the art of shot dropping - the act creating spherical rounds for use in firearms. Molten lead would be dropped from the towers through a sieve so that it could cool into a nearly perfect sphere as it fell. This resulted in a vast assortment of shot towers dotting the countryside. This didn't work quite as well for artillery rounds, which needed to be cast and hand corrected. Spherical rounds remained the standard until the advent of inexpensive manufacturing processes for conical bullets such as the Minié ball in the early 1800s (never mind that something called a Minié ball wasn't a sphere). The combination of a rifled gun barrel and a more aerodynamic bullet provided greater accuracy and a more damaging impact.

Hand-held Firearms and Locks

Hand-held firearms took off when someone decided to make a cannon small enough to be held by one person (one crazy person, these things often exploded when firing after all). So it's no surprise that early handguns (or handgonnes or whichever phonetic spelling you prefer) looked like miniature cannons. Like their cannon-y counterparts, these weapons required their operators to insert a charge of powder, ammunition, and then light the whole thing off with an open flame. The flame would ignite the priming powder (held in a small receptacle called a flash pan), whose flame would travel through a touch hole and fire the weapon.

Turns out even people who ran at each other with big knives thought this was dangerous. In early artillery and handcannons, a linstock (essentially a big fork) held the match so that the weapon operator could try not to die when he fired his weapon. Eventually safer and more useful firing mechanisms (or locks) developed.

The first of these - the matchlock - appeared in the mid-15th century, and was essentially a burning wick that clamped down when a lever was pulled (igniting the flash pan, going through the touch hole and so on). The first lever, or trigger, came in the form of an S-shaped piece of metal called a serpentine (because an S is always a snake). The matchlock remained the primary firing mechanism during the early years of gunpowder, when arquebusiers ran around the battlefields of Europe with arquebuses. Well, without the running part, anyway.

Early firearms like the arquebus and the later, heavier musket often required soldiers to rest their weapon on a window sill or a Y-shaped fork in order to aim. The word arquebus, like its shotgun-like partner the blunderbuss, comes from Dutch. Arquebus - and its counterparts harquebus, hackbut, hagbut and the like - comes from the Old Dutch hākebusse and German hakenbuchse or hook gun (due to hooks that were originally cast onto the barrel so that it could connect to the Y-shaped firing stand). While blunder may be an appropriate word for a weapon prone to blowing up in the operator's hand, it was most likely named for its loud, thunderous report (so, thunder gun).

The addition of these intricate parts encouraged developments in the shape of the weapon into something we could reasonably call a gun today. And because running around with a flaming wick was considered dangerous, development towards safer and more reliable locks proceeded.

The next advancement in the early 1500s, called the wheellock (or German lock), allowed the operator to carry the weapon loaded and fire it without an open flame dangling about. Using a piece of fool's gold (or iron pyrite, FeS₂), a spark would be created by having the mineral snap against the flash pan's cover, pushing it out of the way, where it would fall on a rotating wheel and create a spark. The mechanism required the operator to fire the weapon gangsta-style so that the spark would actually ignite the powder in the flash pan (...and because medieval soldiers were gangsta, yo). It also took longer to fire than simply touching a match to the flash pan, but avoiding exploding oneself is probably preferable.

Further advancement brought us the familiar firestarting trick of snapping flint against steel. Coincidentally enough, this type of firing mechanism is referred to as a snaplock. The snaplock functioned much like the wheellock, except the flash pan had to be opened manually (and it was cheaper to produce with fewer moving parts). The flintlock (or French lock (or even English lock, depending on who's doing the shooting)) solved this problem, by combining the flash pan cover and the steel target for the flint into one simple L-shaped piece of steel called a frizzen. The simplicity of the flintlock lead to its dominance in weapon manufacturing for over three centuries until the implementation of percussion caps and primers in the 1860s.

Firearms: proving the versatility of Urine™ since 1326.

Subways Without Sandwiches

2009-01-13T10:45:00.024-06:00

Public transportation in the United States leaves much to be desired. Due to a confluence of factors, the US has a much higher reliance on personal motor vehicles than other nations. This is unfortunate not only because mass transit can be efficient and more environmentally friendly than congested motor vehicle traffic, but because mass transit networks often feature interesting infrastructure and engaging station designs. For me, subway systems are the pinnacle of quality mass transit, but there are many options available to the inquisitive urban planner within all of us.

Trams (or streetcars or cable cars or trolleys, whichever name you're going for) suffer the most from a culture infatuated with cars. Their rail placement in streets can potentially hamper traffic flow and cause accidents with unwary drivers, which makes them more undesirable in American cities despite numerous advantages. After the 1970s many tram networks in the US saw hard times as the economic boom of the 1980s decreased passenger counts - even Milwaukee used to have streetcars. Buses tend to be the mode of choice now, due to their ease of integration into traffic patterns and their comparatively low initial cost (compared to trams which require a hefty preliminary investment in infrastructure, but are supposed to be cheaper to maintain).

Another alternative is an independent transportation network that doesn't share infrastructure with private traffic. Building a separate network for mass transportation can be expensive, but also avoids traffic problems and allows the transport of more passengers per operator. Light rail falls into this category and includes trams with a dedicated rail network or elevated trains like Seattle's monorail or Chicago's 'L'.

This is also where subways come in.

Due to their sleek infrastructure and efficiency, I enjoy subways as aesthetic and functional components of modern transportation. Of course, subways have varied reputations and qualities around the world. As a good starting point for this we have Berlin.

Berlin's transportation network is a combination of buses, trams, light rail (S-Bahn, or Stadtbahn - city rail), and subways (U-Bahn, or Untergrundbahn - subterranean rail). All of these together are run by BVG - the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe - the Berlin Transportation Company (as you might notice the acronym doesn't make any sense unless you spell with imaginary Gs; it's a holdout from the company's older name, the Berliner Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft - the Berlin Transportation Corporation). The BVG works in conjunction with the German national rail company, Deutsche Bahn, because the individual S-Bahn trains travel beyond Berlin and Brandenburg and run on track dedicated to intranational rail traffic. The Berlin-Brandenburg network is divided into three sections called - conveniently enough - A, B, and C.

For a majority of visitors to Berlin the A-section will suffice. It includes all stations within the ring created by the S41 and S42 S-Bahn trains (the well-defined octagon in the picture here). Colloquially the ring is called the S-Bahn Ring (conveniently enough) or Ringbahn (circle line) or the Hundekopf (dog's head) due to its true geographical layout (it's not really an octagonal shape). The B-section contains Berlin's suburbs, and a few tourist-worthy sites. The C-section is in fact not Berlin (or a Cesarean), but Brandenburg (the city of Berlin sits in an administrative island surrounded by the German state of Brandenburg). The C-section is also useful for visitors to Berlin, because it includes travel to Potsdam (see things like World War 2 or Prussian history for more information).

One of the pitfalls of such a vast network is the difficulty in determining your route (still, probably easier than the MTA's map for New York City). This results in stations with their own passenger help kiosks and shopping malls, like Friedrichstrasse which sees the convergence of six lines, a collection of trams and buses, and a regional train station. There's also the more famous Alexanderplatz which saw a bit of action in the Bourne Supremacy due to its size and complexity (the triple-layered Alexanderplatz subway station is pictured here with entry level (top) and two train platforms (middle and bottom). However, this vast number of stations also allows for great variation in station architecture and design, as well as great opportunities for exploration. The enjoyment of sights, sounds, and smells is subjective for each individual station, but it's hard to not like at least one.

There's quite a bit you can glean about a country just by examining some of its network layout and stations. For example: the Berlin subways are remarkably clean - this cleanliness being maintained by a legion of custodial staff who seem to constantly make rounds. Most stations have clearly posted electronic signs displaying the time until the next train's arrival, as well as timetables for other trains. Those that don't have fancy signs usually at least have clocks (which some may tell you exemplifies German punctuality - those people are liars). Most trains run on 10 or 15 minute intervals during peak hours, and usually arrive on time. Most transportation shuts down around 2AM and has a few hours of downtime before starting up for morning commutes.

Riding on the trains of Berlin is incredibly easy, due to the fact that there are no turnstiles or transit authority personnel checking tickets at every station entrance. Passengers purchase tickets (coincidentally) at ticket vending machines or at passenger help kiosks. The process is highly automated and simple if you know where you want to go. You might think this setup would be prone to passengers riding without a ticket - known as Schwarzfahren in colloquial German (or if you want to brush up on your German legalese: Beförderungserschleichung - essentially "avoidance of paying a fare") - but it seems most people are fine buying a 3€ ticket instead of paying a 50€ fine.

This results in a number of ticket controllers going from train to train checking tickets like Indiana Jones (except with fewer people getting thrown out of blimps). This means buying a day ticket gives you free reign over riding whatever you want, to and from wherever you want, whenever you want (...in a day), with minimal hassle. A day ticket for all sections is 6.50€, which isn't bad for having hundreds of destination options and the span of two major cities. Compare it to New York City's 1-day Fun Pass MetroCard at $7.50 (half of that price is probably paying for the ink to print the name of the card).

Just like in New York, that ticket will also net you some public entertainment in the form of people that cannot abstain from playing music in public.

English - Enemy of the State

2009-01-08T08:05:00.001-06:00

Americans - beyond a small enclave of Texans - will not need to listen to George W. Bush speak after January 20th, 2009 (although I'm sure quite a few haven't been listening recently, anyway). His mastery of the English language has brought us gems like "rarely is the question asked 'is our children learning?'", along with a rendition of Sunday Bloody Sunday. To be honest, his gaffes are minor compared to the illustrious James Danforth Quayle, who served as George H. W. Bush's vice president (maybe that's where Bush Jr. picked up some of those speech habits...). Many of the comedic, misspoken quotes ascribed to Bush are, in fact, Quaylisms. I suppose these sorts of things are going to crop up every once and a while if half the populace is voting for a guy they could "have a beer with."

But let's not be too hasty in judging their eloquence and use of English. Although it is relatively easy to be understood in English, the language is difficult to master. So, I'd like to point out a few factoids and interesting usage nuances in the English language. First up:

Factoid
Contrary to its common usage in news broadcasting, a factoid is not a "little fact". The suffix -oid is not used to form diminutives. That is: adding -oid to the end of a word does not make it tiny or small. The suffix "-oid" means "resembling" (often "imperfectly resembling"). Proper diminutive suffixes would be -ette or -let, like cigarette or piglet (so, factette or factlet).

Compare factoid with cuboid (resembling, but not quite a cube) and humanoid (resembling, but not quite a human) and the problem becomes immediately apparent. A factoid resembles a fact, but is not quite a fact. The term was coined in the 1970s referring to a bit of misinformation that was repeated so often that it appeared to be factual. Apparently trivia is a much too trivial word for many news anchors.

Discreet and Discrete

Not a factoid: the robots in Futurama almost exclusively have square pupils (Hedonismbot and others have circular ones on occasion).

That's right, I jumped right into the homonyms. While less common than their/there/they're, to/too/two, and for/fore/four, discrete and discreet are exciting words that even Microsoft Word won't fix. Discrete means separate or distinct; discreet means prudent or unobtrusive (the more usual meaning). Just to confuse the Romans in the crowd: both words derive from the Latin descretus (separated/discerned). Discreet entered common speech and developed into 'prudent', while discrete stuck with the more intellectual groups that used Latin and retained something closer to its original meaning.

Ado About Adieu
Let us discreetly separate these two out into their discrete uses.

Adieu, like many English words, is stolen from French (technically a parent language of modern French - Occitan...but let's see you try to find a school that teaches it). Its original meaning - now buried under a husk of modernism and evolved connotations - was "(I/we commend you) to God". Convention in English was that when one party departed from another they would say "adieu" to those that remained, while those that remained would say "farewell" to the departing group ("fare thou well" if you want to get all Middle English on me). I don't think that convention lasted all that long, but it may be important to note that English was not the primary language of much of the the nobility in England until around at least the 1360s. Now "adieu" just functions as a fancy way of saying goodbye.

Adieu exchanges positions with ado quite frequently - particularly in "without further ado". Ado is a fancy northern Scandinavian contraction for at do or "to do". It has also developed more into a noun meaning "trouble" or "fuss". "Without further ado" announces that the speaker has said everything necessary and the ceremony/play/whatever may continue unhindered.

Without further stalling for time...

Going Farther (or Further) with Farther (and Further)
The most subjective of the group here, some people don't bother acknowledging a difference between "farther" and "further". Technically farther should only refer to physical or spatial distance ("That field is farther away than this one."), while further should refer to the extent or degree of something ("Further understanding will require a lot of work."). That said, the use of either is fine for most people...unless they are a grammar Nazi - in which case you'll probably want to avoid using affect and effect, too.

Just trying to effect understanding of English.

Collection of Curiosities - Nuclear Edition

2008-12-31T16:24:00.022-06:00

What better way to end the year than with a look at some of the most bizarre, crazy, and world-ending nuclear weapons that have been created in the past 60 years? Sure, there's alcohol, but I'd like to see you fit that through an Ethernet cable.

So, why not start small?

The M-28/M-29 Recoilless Rifle loaded with the M-388 Davy Crockett

Featuring a 76 pound nuclear device (including 51 pound warhead) atop a recoilless rifle, the Davy Crockett was the smallest nuclear weapon deployed by the US. In service from 1961 to 1971, the weapon was provided to a number of units in Europe during the Cold War with the goal of warding off a potential Soviet offensive. With a variable yield between 10 tons and 250 tons, the damage output for a nuclear weapon may seem relatively small, but imagine the simultaneous detonation of 10 tons of TNT and we're on our way to a deadly bazooka equivalent.

The weapon had two potential recoilless rifle mounts (a recoilless gun allows the gases from the propellant to escape out the rear of the weapon and not out the barrel with the projectile, reducing recoil). A 120mm variant called the M28 and a 150mm variant called the M29, the difference being their 1.25 and 2.5 mile range, respectively (the US military does love the letter M). The US army also looked into a variety of other warheads and weapons platforms.

At such a small yield the danger from heat and flash are minimal; even electromagnetic problems would be trivial compared to the amount of radiation output. Unfortunately even at the standardized 20 ton yield the weapon would be relatively lethal up to 400m from the blast center. That's assuming there's no wind carrying all of the fallout into the firing team in the first place. The weapon's minimum range setting was 300m, and at a 20 ton yield that's a bit of a sick joke since all of the operators would get lethal doses of radiation at that distance. The rifles' purported ranges of 1.25 and 2.5 miles are a bit misleading as well; neither rifle was especially accurate in test firings. The weapon's maximum yield also effectively negates its firing range.

There's also the chance that one slip up could lead to this.

'Atomic Annie' (11 inch gun) firing the only test-fired W9 nuclear artillery shell

As part of the US Army's love for all things nuclear in the 1950s they started research into nuclear artillery. Two decades saw the creation of numerous artillery and warhead pairs, but the W9 is the only warhead to ever be successfully test-fired from an actual artillery piece (the W33 warhead was tested twice without being fired from a gun).

Part of the US military's first foray into nuclear artillery testing, the W9 shot pictured above was from the Grable shot in the Upshot-Knothole series of nuclear tests. I have no idea who names these things, but they are probably crazy. Operation Upshot-Knothole's objective was to investigate a variety of nuclear weapon designs and begin combat operations testing for the US military, including the proofing of tactical nuclear weapons.

The explosion was a 15 kiloton yield - viewable above at 6 miles away from the artillery piece. The small white lines (which pop up in many photos of nuclear weapon tests) are for blast wave analysis and aren't part of the explosion. The US deployed some form of nuclear artillery up until the denuclearization of the armed forces in 1992... Never mind that an assortment of nuclear test ban treaties prevented the military from actually testing the viability and functionality of those weapons.

The RDS-220 'Big Ivan', also known as the Tsar Bomba

The Tsar Bomba weapon series consisted of a single 50+ megaton nuclear weapon dropped on Novaya Zemlya archipelago on October 30th, 1961. Developed within a 16 week timeframe at the behest of Nikita Khrushchev, the bomb derived from a 100 megaton design far too heavy for deployment (the 50 Mt variant that was tested required a modified Tu-95N bomber to get it into the air). Only one functioning weapon was built, with a replica housed at the Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum in Sarov (the center of Soviet nuclear weapons design, near Novgorod - called Kremlyov until 1995).

The weapon's detonation ended a two year voluntary US/USSR nuclear testing cessation, and prompted the US to redouble its nuclear development program.

Dropped from a height of 4000m the explosion reached to the ground before convection currents lifted the fireball and mushroom cloud 64km into the atmosphere. The blast leveled the sole settlement 55km away and knocked over buildings and broke windows further than 100km away. The flash was visible more than 1000km away (where high-ranking Soviet observers ...observed). At 50 Mt the Tsar bomba is easily the largest built and detonated nuclear weapon.

At the very least, woo, nuclear fireworks for New Years.

An die Freude

2008-12-21T16:49:00.009-06:00

Often cited as a 'symphony within a symphony', Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 "Choral" is arguably one of the greatest pieces of classical music. It's also one of only a few symphonies to have vocals. I'll refer to it as Beethoven's 9th Symphony because I am not musically inclined. The fourth movement, named after Friedrich Schiller's poem An die Freude or "to Joy", is often the most recognized portion of the entire symphony. Because the word ode exemplifies the lyrical content of the poem we usually end up with the name "Ode to Joy". The piece has some musical flourishes that I really like, but since my musical talent is limited to knowing which violin strings are which through a clever mnemonic device (G'Day, or GDAE) I can't really tell you much about the in-depth musical facets of the piece.

The European Union took its anthem from one of the more famous musical portions of Ode to Joy. The German national anthem, on the other hand, consists of the same piece it has for the last 90 years, Haydn's Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser (God save Franz the emperor) set to lyrics by Augustus Hoffmann in 1841 and picked as the anthem for the Weimar Republic in 1922 (and subsequently adopted by Western Germany). After 1945 they just took out that whole "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles" bit that dominated the first stanza and kept the rest. This is probably for the best because the first stanza also mentions the boundaries of the Empire of Germany based on a collection of rivers that don't actually border Germany anymore.

As many are well aware, the American national anthem takes its musical foundation from a British drinking song popular during the early 1800s. It also happens to stem from the War of 1812, and not the revolutionary war. We've all heard plenty of renditions of people holding notes just a bit too long, so perhaps I could interest you in an instrumental version without singing.

Since it's Christmas time I figured I'd present (hah!) a simple analysis of the German lyrics in Ode to Joy. The primary theme of the piece is universal brotherhood (results may vary). Concert versions of the entire symphony, separated by movements can be found here. Ode to Joy is the fourth and final movement (directly linked below if you want to save a click). Don't worry, it might seem half an hour long, but five minutes of that is the applause. Plus it's cool music. I apologize in advance to all of the unfortunate cube-dwelling people who don't have speakers; I can hum along with you, but humming comes with a no-money-back guarantee.

Symphony No. 9, in D minor, Op. 125, 'Choral'-IV. Finale: Ode to Joy
Music by Ludwig van Beethoven
Lyrics by Friedrich Schiller (with additions by Beethoven)
(original German is in italics, loose translation is underneath)

Performed by the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra here.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!
Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen,
und freudenvollere.
Freude! Freude!

Oh friends, not these notes!
Instead let us sing more pleasant
and joyful songs.
Joy! Joy!

The first few minutes of the movement recycle musical themes from the first three movements. The movement finally settles on a definitive theme just before this first lyrical interlude. The music starts getting more tense and less joyous before the first singing starts. So the baritone's all, "please stop playing somber music - let's keep it a bit more happy, eh?" (translated to Canadian for the recording linked above).

Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Joy - beautiful divine spark
Daughter of Elysium -
Filled with fire we enter,
Holy one, your sanctuary.
Your magic mends again
What tradition has sternly parted;
All men become brothers,
Wherever your gentle wing descends.

The common interpretation for the lyrics, but particularly this stanza, is mostly literal. The joy and happiness provided by God elates mankind and overcomes the troubles of history and unites everyone. God imbues mankind with the capacity for joy, which is a commonality between all men. Of course, if Schiller (the lyricist) were talking about beer, this would explain a lot too (why the chorus happens to be feuertrunken or 'drunk/filled with fire' for starters). Here it would also imply Germans are a lot friendlier once they've been liquored up a bit.

A common interpretation that starts from this portion of the lyrics is that pure joy presents a divine replacement for the Christian god (which Schiller devoutly followed), although Some Christians combined God with the concept of hedonism as early as the 1700s. This derives from the addition of Götterfunken ("divine spark" or, even more heathenish, "spark of the gods") and Elysium. Elysium - as astute viewers of Gladiator or students of mythology may know - was the Roman resting place for the heroic and virtuous (an evolution of the Greek Elysion).

Wem der große Wurf gelungen,
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer's nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Whoever has had the fortune
To be a friend's friend;
Whoever has won a fair woman,
Add in your cheer!
Yes, even he who has but a soul
To call his own in this world!
And he who is unable, let him steal away
Weeping from this band!

So apparently the only ones that don't get to join in this cheerful celebration are those without souls. Guess that means Faust is out. People with wives or friends seem to still be in though. Wem der große Wurf gelungen, eines Freundes Freund zu sein literally means "for whomever the great dice roll has succeeded, to be a friend of a friend"...Proving that Schiller loved to gamble his friends in games of chance.

There's a tendency with modern German to explain away the use of masculine nouns here as male chauvinism (where gender neutrality for nouns is even more of a pipe dream than in English). I guess his stipulation that you can join in if you have a nice wife limits it to heterosexual males and the occasional lesbian, but he sort of overrides that with "or if you've got a soul come on in." That's one of the problems with noun genders (the other problem annoys foreign speakers by forcing them to memorize genders). This is also one of the reasons why Freude is a daughter of Elysium, since die Freude is feminine.

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küße gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben,
Und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

All creatures drink joy
At the teat of nature;
All good, all bad
Follow her trail of roses.
Kisses she gave us - and wine -
A friend, proved in death;
Pleasure was given to the worm,
And the cherub stands before God.

The idea is that nature is part of life and every creature experiences joy and pleasure (hence the 'pleasure was given to the worm', meaning 'even the lowly can experience pleasure'). The exception here are angels (the cherub), who don't get a choice and need to hang out with God. Maybe Schiller is the original inspiration for Dogma. Schiller's apparent love for alcohol pops up again here. It may be important to note that Reben is the plural of die Rebe - the vine (often translated as grapes or wine here).

This is where that 'Joy as a god' thing comes back too, with the deification of nature. Coincidentally, it also features the anthropomorphization of nature. There's probably something about the uniformity of death buried in there too (what with everything following the path ordained by nature and all). Or it could just be a bunch of worms having sex and angels standing in front of God for no discernible reason.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt'gen Plan,
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.

Jubilantly, as his suns fly
Through the heavens' glorious design,
Run, brothers, on your way,
Joyfully, like a hero on to victory.

Schiller wrote his poem during the Age of Enlightenment, so it may be important to note that die Bahn also means orbit (relating to the suns). This could be read as an absolution in all things, or that every day should be lived joyously. Or both. Unfortunately, the alcohol thread from earlier stanzas doesn't fit so well in this one.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt
Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muß er wohnen.

Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the entire world!
Brothers - above the canopy of stars
A loving father must dwell.
Are you penitent, millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek him above the canopy of stars!
He must dwell beyond the stars.

The first portion of this song has probably been translated best by Chet Powers. This stanza diminishes the 'Joy as a god' concept a bit, although we might assume that Schiller mentions 'above the stars' as a euphemism for 'being high'...but that construction didn't really exist in English or German in the 1800s.

The symphony recycles the rest of its lyrics from earlier (Beethoven apparently loved him some Götterfunken). It may be a bit heavy in the religious department, but still has a universally functional theme.

At the very least I think we can all enjoy the God full of peace and friendship from the Age of Reason over the God full of Providence and Original Sin from the time of the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials and such. A song about embracing joy and all of mankind is a bit more touching than a song about flagellating yourself and burning all of the women in your village for having mind powers.

Proving Englightenment Age German poets and lyricists are drunks since 2008.

Don't Nuke the Fridge Just Yet

2008-12-11T15:58:00.022-06:00

My adventures on university buses and having to listen to people talk on their cellphones present me with innumerable stories. I could, for instance, mention that: D&D nerds don't like it when they're DMing a game and their players use anime as a basis for their avatars' archetypes; that Algerian-born Americans still require a visa and an American passport at least six months old in order to visit Algeria; and that someone got a job as an exotic dancer to get money to bail her boyfriend out of jail. Another conversation, coupled with the relatively recent release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on DVD, has led me to a more subjective topic. One scene in the movie considered too far out there for suspension of disbelief and the setting of Indiana Jones for many people...

That's right, ~~the Witch and the Wardrobe~~ the Nuke and the Fridge. And because internet culture isn't content with the euphemisms of old (even if they're very young), "Nuke the Fridge" has partially taken up the mantle of "Jump the Shark".

Now, "Jump the Shark" is supposed to indicate that something has passed its prime, but it specifically refers to an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie literally jumps a shark water skiing. Despite the episode airing on September 20th, 1977 the coinage of "jump the shark" didn't happen until around 1985 - and only entered normal parlance around 1998. Never mind that 1977 involved the fifth running season of Happy Days, which continued on for another 7 years. Aside from pointing out the fact that drawing parallels between "jump the shark" from Happy Days and "nuke the fridge" from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may lead to some dubious conclusions indicative of another four or five IJ movies, I'd like to illustrate a few reasons why nuking the fridge wasn't so bad.

The Fridge, Reality, and Physics
The movie's scene is an effort to replicate the discomforting nature of the US government's Operation Cue and its preoccupation with discovering how nuclear weapons affect residential infrastructure. Like the movie, the real bomb site was a short distance away from Area 51 in the Nellis Air Force Range (a bit northwest of Las Vegas). The actual detonation site is visible via satellite (the bright circle with the 1.5 mile diameter in the middle of the map below...unless the map is centered on the wrong place - in which case the FBI will be at your building within the hour (and you're probably using Google Chrome)). The small collection of 'roads' and 'structures' on the right are actually a collection of craters.

View Larger Map

Comically enough, put Area 51 into Google maps and you'll end up with a rather large airstrip, bomb testing ground, and collection of hangars about 15 miles northeast of the Operation Cue detonation site. On a completely unrelated note, it seems that the USAF pays a few million in taxes on the area for its contractors, but won't allow a tax assessor on to the secret military testing grounds to corroborate the assessment.

More importantly with regards to the movie, the small collection of buildings would have been out of the bomb's most devastating blast range (the closest housing was put outside the 0.75 mile immediate blast radius in the actual test). The most unrealistic facet of the scene is that the refrigerator is thrown an appreciable distance from the blast in the first place (it would have been knocked over or pushed a few meters). On the plus side, the air-tight nature of the fridge would protect him from the drastic changes in overpressure that results in a shock wave (and consequently, popped eardrums, bruising, and potential lung collapse - among other things). It would also protect him from the intense thermal radiation (the kind where dark clothing may cause the heat to 'bleed-through' and burn the tissue underneath).

Despite the unrealistic nature of the refrigerator's trajectory, it's still not the worst situation. From a physics standpoint the refrigerator comes to a gradual stop, which is related to the concept of impulse. Impulse is the change in momentum over time (or the change in velocity over time with regard to mass). The longer a collision takes the less force is applied at any individual instance (this is the reason cars have crumple zones, but you're still more likely to survive in a car rolling down a hill than one that smashes into a concrete barrier). The material inside the fridge makes a difference too, but maybe Jones' hat isn't just for show.

Audience Perceptions and Presumptions
People tend to expect certain things in action movies. Survivability in a nuclear blast usually isn't one of those things. The middle ground of nuclear destruction lies somewhere between Duck and Cover and vaporizing every bit of matter within the blast zone. Tangentially: if you ever do find yourself outside in the midst of a nuclear holocaust, ducking and covering your head while hiding behind the tallest immediate sturdy obstacle between yourself and the explosion is the best way to go.

Many of Indiana Jones' previous stunts are arguably more deadly, but the association with nuclear weapons as the ultimate destructive force in the world can blur judgement. There are far less survivable things than a rolling refrigerator and a nuclear explosion.

Freefalling from a plane in a raft.

Very few people have survived a freefall at terminal velocity. Vesna Vulović is one of those select few. She survived a 10km freefall above Czechloslovakia when a bomb detonated and broke apart her plane in midair. She survived because the wreck landed on a steep incline that allowed for a gradual change in acceleration instead of an abrupt stop. Additionally, the -60°C air outside at 10km caused hypothermia, which - coupled with her chronic low blood pressure - prevented her from bleeding to death and suffering brain death before she could be rescued. Indiana Jones (along with Shortround and Willie) survives freefall approaching terminal velocity unsecured on a raft...twice (remember impulse from earlier? Jones' raft hits so hard it bounces).

Leaping from a tank as it drives over the edge of a cliff.

Heroes always seem to be saved by dried-out roots laying casually over the side of a cliff. This trope is so common that people tend to instantly ignore it whenever it pops up in movies. Apparently soil is best at holding dry desert weeds after it has been compacted by a tank...I guess?

Boarding a diving submarine in rough waters.

Swimming in the ocean isn't all that dangerous (German submariners in WW2 would often be granted time to swim when they were in the middle of the Atlantic, out of Allied aircraft's range). Swimming in choppy open ocean tends to be a bit more dangerous. Now, boarding a diving submarine is downright impossible, considering the fact that submariners trained to accomplish this maneuver in a matter of seconds. Turns out Indiana Jones is a time traveling Michael Phelps with a PhD in archeology...and a cloak of invisibility because where the hell did he hide once he got on that submarine?

Stopping a speeding mine cart with flat-soled shoes.

I'm not sure what kind of description this one merits. Perhaps this cat sliding in a box can exemplify some of the properties of friction forgotten here. At the very least the cat sliding in a box is a cat sliding in a box.

That should cover some aspects from all the previous movies (doubly so for Temple of Doom and its craziness). These two aspects all pale in comparison to the big Indiana Jones kicker.

Parody and Satire
One of the hallmarks through the series is the parody of conventional expectations of contemporary events, culture and attitudes. From the rocket engine test site to the lead-lined refrigerator, the parody is far more consistent than the original three movies. At first this might seem strange, but if you've got a keen eye for history, you'll notice that many of the same satire and parody is present in the earlier IJ films as well. From the luger that manages to shoot through an entire line of Nazi soldiers (this one is partially ironic as well, since some SS officers in various camps tried expeirments of seeing how many people could be killed with a single bullet); to the Middle Eastern royalty more impressed by a car than gold; to Nazi experimental aircraft (a decade early); to apathetic British occupying forces in India; to "I'm an American!" - the satire and parodies are everywhere, they're just less apparent because it's more expected. Nazis are evil - it's amusing when they're shot and fall over. Indian people are strange - a boy emperor and monkey brains for dessert fits right in with our expectations.

There are quite a few satirical elements at work here, some more subtle than others (and we've already covered "Duck and Cover" and nuclear testing). For instance: did you know that death by refrigerator was alarmingly frequent from the 1950s to the 1970s? Turns out many of the models couldn't be opened from the inside...and apparently refrigerators were child magnets. The fridge Jones climbs into happens to be lead-lined, which is a convenient way to avoid having your protagonist die of radiation poisoning. But it also happens to coincide with the '50s fascination for lead-based everything. From paints to toys, lead was everywhere (along with other dangerous things, like dagger-tipped lawn darts). Lead was known definitively to be a poison since at least the 1800s, but recognized by some Roman scholars as a source of maladies (and occasionally noted as a poison). Maybe people in the 1950s figured it'd be an easy way to weed out some of the dumb ones.

These sorts of things are present throughout the movie, but particularly in the first half (maybe this is a subconscious reason why many people thought the first half was better). From greasers and socs to CIA spooks, the film covers a vast variety of 1950s culture. I think one of the reasons people are willing to associate more with the first three IJ films is the fact that the 1930s presents a clear dichotomy - the Nazis are the definitive historical villain (this is also likely a reason why Temple of Doom sees a bit of a dip in popularity too). The 1950s are bit more blurred. High School history classes tend to have two things to say about the 1950s: they came after World War Two and before the Civil Rights movement (okay, they probably mention the baby boomers, too).

So what have we learned? The refrigerator isn't any less plausible than some other insane stunts in Indiana Jones movies. The monkeys though... I cannot reconcile the monkeys.

We've also learned people shouldn't talk on their cellphone on the bus.

Thyme for Time

2008-12-04T01:24:00.054-06:00

My sister knows I make a lot of bad jokes. One of my favorites is "Thyme? I prefer Space!" whenever she happens to be cooking something and I see the jar of thyme leaves in her spice cabinet (...I told you they were bad). Unfortunately, thyme isn't very exciting, so let's talk about time instead.

Time, as is to be expected, is a very old concept. Time measurements have undergone very little change in the years since the Sumerians created them with their whacky base-60 numerical system and they were subsequently stolen by the Babylonians. Interestingly, it's called a second because it's the second division of the hour by 60 (sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute). The hour was historically defined as 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset (again, due to the fancy base-60 system). Today we use a 1/24 division of the mean solar day (a solar day being the time from noon on one day to noon on the next day). Days and years are both related to the sun (one for the Earth's revolution, the other for its orbit) - months and weeks are more lunar-related time measurements.

The year is a bit older, and stems from the creation of calendars and astrology, although most early civilizations reckoned years in regnal time (i.e. the duration of a monarch's reign). Years are bunched into decades, scores, centuries and millennia - but it gets a bit hazy after that (agricultural civilization only has twelve millennia under its belt, after all). After a millennium we've got non-standard geologic divisions - epochs, periods, eras, and eons.

And since the history of all time would make this post far too long (especially since my picture is to scale), let's talk about Earth's geologic time.

The most recent history of the Earth saw the rise of mammals and birds in the Cenozoic era (and humans specifically in the Quarternary period). Unfortunately the easily remembered term "Tertiary" for the penultimate part of the Cenozoic portion of the geologic timescale has been replaced by a few harder to remember (and harder to pronounce) periods. Because geologists hate people.

This relatively recent time is also when we had cool dinosaurs, and less exciting conifer trees. This period saw an explosion of life forms - from crocodiles and jellyfish to trilobites and crazy jawless fish (and a bunch of annoying insects in the Permian period). This is also the time period people usually associate with supercontinents like Pangaea.

In contrast to the Phanerozoic eon - the period of diverse, complex life on Earth - there's the Precambrian supereon (the vertical black line in the picture). The last portion of the Precambrian was the Neoproterozoic era, which was marked by the first appearance of animals, as well as an abundance of glaciation (a completely ice-covered 'snowball Earth' is thought to have occured during the Cryogenian period).

The Mesoproterozoic era is probably far more interesting for many people, since sexual reproduction (and much less exciting cell specialization) first appeared then. Geologically these periods saw lots of orogeny (mountain building). Algae has a field day (field period?) during the Ectasian period - with green algae forming oceanic colonies and the emergence of new and improved red algae. The supercontinent no one cares about - Rodinia - formed during the end of this era (in the Stenian period).

The Paleoproterozoic era has a lot of interesting happenings - unfortunately none of them appear interesting enough to merit a song by Bloodhound Gang. During the Statherian period the supercontinent Columbia formed (early complex single-celled organisms are rushed to the hospital ODed). In an effort to quell the mounting mountain deficit, the Earth creates a bunch of mountains during the Orosirian period (in a striking change from usual naming conventions this one is relatively normal, from the Greek for 'mountain range').

Mountains tend to be formed either from volcanoes or plate tectonics. Mountains on land are the result of two continental plates colliding at a convergent plate boundary (see the Himalayas for a modern example). The process takes millions of years, but eventually the mountains are built, only to be taken down by the natural forces of erosion.

This era saw the development of chloroplasts and normal photosynthesis as a development from algae's earlier foray into making deadly poisons. For millions of years the Earth's atmosphere had minimal amounts of oxygen. Early life produced oxygen as a byproduct, and inadvertently pumped out large amounts of a poisonous chemical. Oxygen is a very deadly element (flammable, reactive, and originally poisonous to all existent forms of life). This mass-production of oxygen resulted in fine layers of rust in rocks from the Rhyacian period. The oxygen bound with iron dissolved in seawater to form insoluble iron-oxide (also known as rust), which settled on the ocean floor and eventually became part of a rock layer.

The large amounts of this new-fangled oxygen also resulted in the major extinction which defined the Siderian period. Many geologic periods are bound with palentology and biology, in that the boundaries correspond to major extinction events. The K-T extinction is usually the most famous of these (K for Cretaceous period, T for the now defunct Tertiary period - take that easy understandability for future generations!) for killing off everyone's beloved dinosaurs. The most devastating extinction event happened at the end of the Permian period (the P-T or Permian-Triassic extinction), which killed off nearly 90% of all species on Earth. Nobody cares about it though, because it's hard to love a trilobite...plus it killed off a bunch of insects, and I think we can all do without squirrel-sized mosquitoes.

The Archean eon (or eon of origin) featured the development of simple singled-celled organisms and bacteria. The Neoarchean era here is the time when life started pumping out oxygen into the atmosphere to kill off their descendants. On a completely unrelated note, the lack of oxygen during this era should result in a dead Captain Picard in some random episode of Star Trek. The Hadean and Archean eons are usually divided by the occurrence of abiogenesis (the origin of life). The bacteria often left small fossilized imprints in rocks, which allows us to date the origins of life - but not yet definitively how it formed. The large collections of bacteria also resulted in some interesting features called microbial mats and stromatolites, which are cool looking little bulges of bacteria and accretioned material (...cooler and less disgusting in fossilized form). Many of these formed during the Mesoarchean era, but have become increasingly less common throughout Earth's history due to increases in the number predators (although they can still be found in a living form in a few special environments). Most of the oldest rocks on Earth date to the Paleoarchean and Eoarchean eras.

During late Hadean and early Archean eons (especially the Eoarchean era), the oceans began to form. The Earth's atmosphere - like much of the matter in the early solar system - was probably made of hydrogen and helium. These elements easily escaped Earth's gravitational pull and left the planet's surface bare. The subsequent atmosphere would be created from volcanoes expelling gases trapped during the solidification of the molten planet. Volcanoes expelled mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide (and they still do), which provided a basis for the atmosphere and oceans. Oceans developed from rain and condensation in cloud cover along with comet and meteorite collisions over millions of years (the moon is also theorized to be a result of a large collision). Most comets and meteorites hold an appreciable amount of ice, which likely added substantially to the amount of water in the oceans.

At the time there were far more things flying around the solar system. This is one of the reasons most of the impact craters in the solar system date back 3.5 to 4.0 billion years. Before that time they would impact molten Earth. Due to erosion and geologic processes, most craters don't remain visible on Earth like they do on the moon and other planetary bodies without an atmosphere (...and acne-ridden teenagers). Heavy elements like iron and nickel sank to the center of the molten Earth, while lighter elements like silicon and carbon (and compounds like sodium chloride - salt) drifted to the surface.

The proto-Earth was likely created by a nearby supernova which expelled a tremendous amount of hydrogen and helium, along with trace amounts of other elements (trace being a relative term, considering a vast majority of the Earth is made out of them).

And there we have an abbreviated history of the Earth. It turns out dinosaurs aren't important enough to warrant more than a sentence in the whole affair. This is unfortunate, because dinosaurs are sweet.

The Quarternary is the only part of my picture that's appreciably off; it's slightly too big - it should be 1/40 of the first 100 million years (or about 1.25 pixels tall). The image is 3456 pixels tall, for reference.

...Yes, I did waste a lot of time making that picture.

Hydrogen Hydroxide or Hydroxic Acid?

2008-11-20T16:53:00.012-06:00

"You know when you go to a concert and it's like punk rock and the kids get on stage...and they jump into the crowd, stage diving? People think that's dangerous - but not me. Because humans are made out of 95% water, so the audience is 5% away from a pool."

The esteemed, late Hedberg may be a few percentage points off (adult humans are closer to 60% water), this is just one reason why water is one of the most consistently awesome chemicals that exists.

Structure of Water

One of the first chemical formulas many people learn, H₂O is a common name for water. A more fitting chemical formula is HOH. H in this case is an ion of hydrogen, often called hydron, and is a positively charged ion (also called a cation). OH, also called hydroxide, is a negatively charged ion (also called an anion). Unfortunately there are no dogions (I can't guarantee there won't be other bad chemistry jokes later).

This combination of a cation and an anion results in a polarized molecule (the oxygen ends up negatively charged, the hydrogen ends become positively charged). This relatively unique structure is one of the primary reasons for all of water's awesomeness.

So, what is cool about water?

Properties of Water

Water is amphoteric, which means it is both an acid and a base (hence the title of this post). Contrary to what the Simpsons would like you to believe, mixing acids and bases doesn't cause massive explosions that turn you green (unless they're very concentrated...but they still won't turn you green). You'll get a salt and water. The most common chemical formula you'll see for illustrating this concept is the reaction between hydrochloric acid (HCl) and lye (sodium hydroxide - a base, NaOH) to get table salt (sodium chloride - NaCl) and H₂O. I was never good with chemical formulas written out in prose, so here's what it looks like:

NaOH + HCl → NaCl + H₂O

Water can be superheated above its normal boiling point. If distilled water is cooked in a container without deformities or dirt (no scratches and no dust) it can surpass its normal boiling point. It also tends to instantaneously boil when an impurity is added to the water (a spoon, sugar, etc.). This is where the idea of 'explosive water' comes from...although it's not so much exploding as it is simultaneously boiling everywhere.

Water has a high heat of fusion (energy needed to freeze) and high heat of vaporization (energy needed to turn into a gas). This gives it great thermoregulatory properties. This is the reason for warmer temperatures near lakes during winter (the water gives heat to the surrounding air in order to freeze), and why sweat cools the body (the water takes heat from your body in order to evaporate). Any liquid could perform this action, but water does it particularly well due to the large amounts of energy needed to overcome the attraction between individual molecules. This is also why water is a preferred coolant in many engines and industries (it takes a lot of heat to boil water). IUPAC standards require that this paragraph maintain an excitment level of 6.0 ±0.5 exciteograms. How about a picture of Schwarzenegger as Mister Freeze to meet this quota?

Ice floats in water. As it cools from 4°C to 0°C, water expands. When water freezes normally it forms a crystal lattice which has more volume than its watery counterpart (same mass in a larger space). This is why ice cubes (...and icebergs - take that Titanic) float. Another side effect from freezing is that icebergs end up mostly freshwater. Although saltwater has a lower freezing point than freshwater, the formation of ice crystals slowly presses out salt and other impurities in the water.

Water has the highest surface tension of all non-metallic liquids (not including solutions with water as the solvent like saltwater or sugar water). Surface tension is an aspect of all liquids, but the polarity of water increases its surface elasticity. Surface tension is the result of intermolecular forces trying to pull the liquid into the smallest possible volume (if gravity didn't exist this would be a sphere). Since the liquid is as compact as it's going to get (liquids aren't easily compressible), this means things need a certain amount of force to penetrate into the liquid. This is also why water forms spherical droplets when falling and people urinating on electric fences aren't electrocuted.

Pure water doesn't conduct electricity. Unfortunately this property isn't as useful for swimmers as it might seem. If exposed to the atmosphere the water will disolve some of the air (and won't be pure anymore). Thus we have electrocuted swimmers.

Electrolysis separates water into its consitutent parts - diatomic hydrogen and diatomic oxygen. Running an electric current through water seperates the water into the natural state of its two component elements (hydrogen gas and oxygen gas). Unfortunately this isn't a good way to make hydrogen as a fuel since it takes more electrical energy to create the hydrogen than you'd get from burning it.

Water, like its constituent parts, is transparent, odorless and tasteless. All the crappy tasting water you've ever drank is due to impurities (I don't mind iron so much). It does take on a slight bluish tinge in large quanitites, and this is a minor reason why the sky is blue.

Without even touching hydrology or the biologic processes that rely on water, I believe we have defintively established that water is awesome. Way better than isopropanol and tetrafluoroethylene anyway.

Deutschkurs I

2008-11-18T13:17:00.005-06:00

So, you've heard about German compound words but you just assumed they'd be simple like "bathroom" or "airmail" (das Badezimmer and die Luftpost, respectively). Well, Germans like to go longer. While it's relatively easy to surpass the English "antidisestablishmentarianism" in letter count by cheating (in the same way that antidisestablishmentarianism is mainly made out of prefixes and suffixes), German has plenty of long words without resorting to such cunning linguistics.

It's important to note that - like many languages that aren't English - German has noun genders. They're not all that important if you're saying one single German word, but they're included for the crazy people that want to build sentences. The genders are feminine (die), masculine (der), and neuter/neutrum (das). You'll want to get it out of your head right now that linguistic gender in German corresponds to actual gender - it doesn't (the girl - das Mädchen - isn't linguistically female, although some younger Germans may use die Mädchen instead). That'd be too easy.

A few long German words you might actually hear:

Schadenfreude (f) -

[shah-din-froi-duh] enjoyment from the misfortune of others

This is a compound noun from der Schaden (damage/injury/adversity) and die Freude (joy/delight). It popped up in the early 1900s in German literature, and people have been loving and hating it ever since. I hear the New York Times crosswords like to feature it frequently.

Fliegerabwehrkanone (f) -

[flee-gur-ahb-vehr-kah-no-nuh] antiaircraft gun

This one was so long for the Germans that it has an abbreviation, one you're probably more familiar with: FLAK. Coined when military hardware was constructed with the expressed purpose of shooting down enemy airplanes in the 1930s, it's a combination of der Flieger (flying object/airplane), die Abwehr (Defense), and der Kanone (Cannon/Gun). It has a closely related cousin in the Panzerabwehrkanone.

Schwangerschaftsabbruch (m)-

[shvahn-gehr-shahfts-ahb-bruch] (medical) abortion.

Literally meaning "pregnancy severance," the word consists of die Schwangerschaft (pregnancy) from the early 1700s and the much older der Bruch (break-off/severance) from around the mid 1300s - because Germans have been stopping things for longer than they've been getting pregnant. In the Victorian era (from the 1830s) to the Weimar Republic, the preferred idiomatic expression was "to bring a child to heaven". After that they didn't care anymore and it was just too long so they went with Abtreibung.

Fahrvergnügen (n) -

[Far-fver-gnew-gin (not like the drink)] driving pleasure

This word was popular in Volkswagen's 1989 advertising camapign, and confused much of the American populace because no one knew what it meant. You'll be hardpressed to find a German who actually uses it either - it does, strangely, also have a synonym: Fahrspaß [far-shpahs]. From fahren (to drive) and das Vergnügen (pleasure/enjoyment).

Kreislaufzusammenbruch (m)

[Krice-lauf-tsu-zam-min-brooch (long o sound, not the fancy pin)] circulatory failure

Due to the way the German language is structured you'll often get a noun pulling double duty by indicating action. In this case, the noun is often a means to convey 'to pass out'. Er hatte einen Kreislaufzusammenbruch. He passed out. From der Kreislauf (circulation) - which is a compound noun itself from der Kreis (circle), der Lauf (course/way) - and der Zusammenbruch (failure/collapse). It should be noted that Germans are very concerned about their circulation. In the world of modern medicine, purported circulation problems are one of the leading reasons for Germans' hospital visits. This word, too, has a synonym: der Kreislaufkollaps.

...That's right, I said cunning linguistics.

"Quotes in Quotes in Quotes..."

2008-11-17T14:30:00.006-06:00

"...add another quote and make it a gallon."

--Groucho Marx (in Animal Crackers)

20th century American comedian

There is a quote for almost everything under the sun. In fact, there's probably a quote about making quotes under the sun. So, I figured I'd break out a collection of exciting quotes I have accidentally remembered throughout my random accretion of information (...but looked up for proper wording).

The theme is randomness, in case you were wondering.

"Hunger is the best pickle."
--Benjamin Franklin,
18th century American statesman

This is a strange and rare quote from Benjamin Franklin. Pickles were one of the most common appetizers in America during later 1700s. This quote essentially says "If you don't eat anything you'll be hungrier." An outspoken proponent of moderation and a well-honed lifestyle (not so much a practitioner), Franklin doesn't want you to fill up on pickles before your next big meal. I would be remiss if I didn't link you to what some other crazy people say the meaning of the quote is (the meaning of pickle as 'a difficult situation' has been around longer than pickle as a food (although pickle as a sauce is oldest of all)). You'd be surprised how often this shows up on cooking websites talking about pickles...little do they know they are promoting abstinence from pickles.

"The first casualty of war is truth."
--Aeschylus,
Greek playwright

Americans tend to see this in every war - the curbing of civil liberties during wartime. The latest pair of conflicts are two of the latest casualties, but many past wars have seen a restriction on the freedom of press and speech (and occasionally assembly). Unfortunately Iraq and Afghanistan may end up being a bit more of a special case, considering the perpetual nature of discontent (and subsequently, terrorism). Aeschylus just tells us it's not a unique American phenomenon, and that leaders just don't like to tell the populace everything is going to hell.

"...going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind."
--Jed Babbin,
onetime US Deputy Undersecretary of Defense

He may be a Republican who believes in a liberal-driven media, but at least he's got some good French comedy. Although, France really writes its own jokes, sometimes. That's right, I photoshopped a picture of an accordion wearing a beret - I would have thrown a loaf of French bread in there but that would have been too many French clichés, even for me.

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
--Samuel Clemens 'Mark Twain',

19th century American humorist and author

Here we see that mockery of the American legislative system and the crazy kooks in the Capitol is not limited to our own century. Twain has lots of good comedy and interesting anecdotes, unfortunately they're usually not at a quotable length. His essay The Awful German Language seemed to be a favorite of one of my German professors (who excerpted it at two seperate awards ceremonies).

"Perfection is attained not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
20th century French aviator and author

Some might remember this quote from when you discover Engineering in Civilization IV (and Leonard Nimoy reads it awesomely). It is from Saint-Exupery's memoir Terre des Hommes (literally Land of Men; published as Wind, Sand and Stars in English) of when he flew mail routes in South America and the Sahara, published in 1939. I don't know French, so I can't give you a fancy context, unfortunately. We do know he's an awesome Frenchman though, since the crux of his book deals with a plane crash in the Sahara in 1934 and him wandering to civilization with his navigator.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
--Samuel Johnson,
18th century English author

This is often misinterpreted to mean that anyone who believes in patriotism is a scoundrel. Taken in the context of Johnson's contemporary biographer (and friend) James Boswell's words, Johnson was referring to false patriotism - those who would hide their misdeeds behind a veil of ingenuine patriotism. Considering he was an Englishman and that whole 'American revolution' thing was going on, it has been suggested that he was referring to Edmund Burke.

Now, why the post of quotes? So you can avoid being berated by people who insist that using quotes isn't the perogative of intelligent people...by using quotes themselves.

"Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them."
--Samuel Palmer,
19th century painter and writer

Strangely enough, this is the only unsourced quote in my list. No one is sure if this quote exists, because Palmer's son, Alfred, burned a bunch of his father's papers so that they wouldn't fall under the public's watchful eye (despite the fact that almost no one knew who his father was when he did it). History will show Alfred was a douche.

"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought."
--Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey in "Gaudy Night").
20th century British author

But this one is also cheating, because it's said by the author through a character in a work of fiction.

Now I'm all quoted out.

In 10,000 Years Skulls Could Be Rainbows

2008-11-13T14:54:00.016-06:00

I know what you're thinking: "The Cold War had the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, but what do I get?" The US Department of Energy has just the thing for you.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is a transuranic nuclear waste disposal facility. It sits in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert (because if Chihuahuas are hit with a freight load of radiation maybe they'll grow bigger and be less annoying) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. They've been piling nuclear waste into it since 1999, and they'll be doing it for quite a few more years. They put it there because (it's easier than repudiating the START treaties so we can reprocess the waste) the location is remote, the geology is sound, and New Mexico is trying to catch up with New Jersey for 'Waste Capital of the World'.

The main storage facility lies half a mile below the surface of the Earth, nestled in the Salado and Castile salt domes of the Delaware basin (nevermind that the Delaware basin is not located in Delaware). Here, the unique geologic strata will ensure the facility will remain sealed well into the foreseeable future. The salt (contrary to our usual interactions with salt and other minerals) is relatively fluid and will be able to effectively seal any cracks which may develop in the shell of the subterranean structure. The salt formations indicate aridity on a geologic timescale - which is important, because nuclear waste in your groundwater will probably make it taste like Bellevue tap water. The rock salt also provides radiation shielding at nearly the same rate as concrete. Due to the heat from constant radiation the waste containers will be prone to condensation, and so the air will be ciriculated to maintain the integrity of the radioactive casks. The access and ventilation shafts sit in a 4 mile by 4 mile plot of land recessed from casual human intrusion.

The interesting part is that the EPA has assigned the WIPP a regulatory period of 10,000 years - the half-life of most of the waste inside (that doesn't mean it'll be safe in 10,000 years, just half as dangerous, really). This means that the EPA feels it has a moral responsibility to assure safety for future generations and warn them against intrusion into the structure (lest they become Fallout-esque mutants). So how do you warn people 10,000 years in the future that "digging here may be a bad idea, yo"?

10,000 years is a long time. 10,000 years ago humans had barely discovered agriculture. We've had alphabets for less than 3,000 years. We've known about radiation only since the 1800s. If you were trying to convey a message to people unimaginably far into the future, how would you do it?

Languages evolve quickly - words are invented and discarded constantly. Colors and symbols are culture specific, and their meanings can change on a whim (swastikas, rainbows, skull and crossbones - symbology has evolved for each). Even the relatively famous and common nuclear trefoil has met with some symbolism migration recently. So the WIPP hired a consortium of linguists, scientists, anthropologists, futurists, and science fiction authors to determine the best way to say, "don't dig here if you don't want a face full of radiation."

What did they decide? Two rings of equally spaced, 25-foot high monoliths etched in 7 languages (the six languages of the United Nations and the local language - Navajo) with Edvard Munch's "The Scream" face and some symbols (like ...Dr. Evil's head, for some reason); a collection of bunkers which repeat and expand on the information; and a berm (soil wall) showcasing the facility's underground footprint (including underground radar reflectors and magnets). In addition a set of documents will be sent to archives and libraries internationally. The plan is to use sturdy materials resistant to corrosion with redundant backups, constructed so they cannot be salvaged or easily removed. The finalized plan (with material types, quanity and placement) is expected to be complete in 2028.

How will we know if it works? Look for the three-headed man in the year 12029.

The Dinosaurs are Dead

2008-11-13T04:16:00.005-06:00

I'm no literary afficianado. My time spent with reading is usually limited to my course-related historical non-fiction or (admittedly less exciting) textbooks, but I'll tell you that Michael Crichton - from Andromeda Strain to Jurassic Park, from Timeline to Prey - was my favorite author. I say "was", because unfortunately Crichton passed away due to cancer on November 4th (maybe you missed it due to that whole "electing a new President"-thing).

A Chicago native, he majored in anthropology at Harvard and eventually wrote novels while studying at Harvard Medical. Originally he had planned on majoring in English literature, but an exchange with one of his professors changed his mind. Suspecting the professor of intentionally handing him poor grades, he plagiarized a paper by George Orwell (informing another professor beforehand). He got a B-. His first major successful novel, Andromeda Strain, was published under a psuedonym while he was still at Med School, but soon his attention would be turned towards using his new found medical terminology and academic education to create 'techno-thrillers' and 'near future science fiction' (as well as non-fiction like Travels and Five Patients and the TV show ER).

Now, my enjoyment of Crichton began in 4th grade SSR periods (That's Silent Sustained Reading, not that it usually followed any of those three criteria). Maybe it was my love of dinosaurs, maybe it was the inclusion of complex scientific theories (or maybe it was the copious amounts of swear words), but I loved that book. I can tell you right now that if Ray Bradbury's bibliocaustic society ever manifests itself, I'll be the first one running off into the woods and staking a claim on Jurassic Park (I'm already half way there: "The sign said ELECTRIFIED FENCE 10,000 VOLTS DO NOT TOUCH, but Nedry opened it with his bare hand...").

Despite the years of R.L. Stine and the Boxcar Children, Sideways Storys from Wayside School and Choose Your Own Adventure novels, I always came back to Jurassic Park. Even when it was tattered and torn, kicked down the halls of middle school, and missing the ending I still kept it. It's been retired now - sitting in my desk at home, its position filled by a double that cost $0.25 at the Salvation Army. Accompanied by a version of the book in German.

Appendicitis is no treat, but it's much better with Timeline and Sphere to entertain you. And weekends without video games were just that bit easier when you could borrow Andromeda Strain and Congo from the Door County Public Library. He may not be known for his sweeping literary themes and timeless masterpieces, but I can guarantee you no one's building a dinosaur themepark in the future without some careful considerations.

requiescat in pace