Wendy Carlos on HAL 9000
When I first experienced 2001 (in the huge Cinerama theater on Broadway), I guessed that the effect of HAL dying simply had to have been done on an Eltro machine, or a close copy of one. By absurd coincidence, I was an engineer in NYC who may have had the most experience with an original Mark II, at Herb Moss’s Gotham Recording Studios, now long gone.
Spotted this today and just had to share. Ain’t nothing but the geek in me.
(Via Coudal.)
the codus sinaiticus
The oldest known version of the New Testament is being put online.
Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago — it isn’t exactly clear where — the surviving 400 or so pages carry a version of the New Testament that has a few interesting differences from the Bible used by Christians today.
The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus’ disciples discover his empty tomb, for example. Mark’s last line has them leaving in fear.
“It cuts out the post-resurrection stories,” said Juan Garces, curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project. “That’s a very odd way of ending a Gospel.”
James Davila, a professor of early Jewish studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said the Codex also includes religious works foreign to the Roman Catholic and Protestant canons — such as the “Epistle of Barnabas” and the “Shepherd of Hermas,” a book packed with visions and parables.
Davila stressed that did not mean the works were necessarily considered Scripture by early Christians: They could have been bound with the Bible to save money.
rebuilt boat to the afterlife
600 fragments of a boat meant to ferry a pharaoh to the afterlife will be excavated from a pit in Egypt and reconstructed.
“In Egypt, almost everything real had its counterpart meaning or significance in the spiritual world. But there’s a lot of debate as to whether these vessels ever were used or not,” Darnell said.
Those who argue the vessels may have touched water point to rope marks on the wood that could have been caused by the rope becoming wet and then shrinking as it dried.
But Hawass believes these were symbolic vessels, not funerary boats used to bring the pharaoh Khufu’s embalmed remains up the Nile from the ancient capital of Memphis for burial in the Great Pyramid, the oldest and largest of Giza’s pyramids.
The opposite of building a ship in a bottle.
the origin of patriotic songs
A little late for the July 4th holiday, a list of the origins of patriotic songs.
“The Star Spangled Banner,” sung to the melody of a drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” is based on a poem written by Francis Scott Key called “Defense of Ft. McHenry.”
City folk come in droves (to be where the action is)
“City folk come in droves to once-isolated White Rock Lake [in Dallas, Texas]. Some come to picnic, sail or fish, some just to be where the action is.” (April 1972)
Item from [NARA] Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1944 - 2000.
Burnt Hendrix Auction
A guitar Jimi Hendrix set afire on stage and thought lost is being auctioned on ebay.
“When Hendrix set this guitar alight it marked a watershed in live performance,” said Ted Owen, director of acquisitions at the auction house.
Hendrix, who died in 1970, burnt two guitars on stage — he repeated the stunt at a festival later in 1967 — but the one to be auctioned is the only example that survives intact.
Also on auction, Jim Morrison’s last notebook of poems. Too bad it wasn’t burnt on stage.
Too Weird for The Wire
In Baltimore, inner city drug dealers are using white supremacist legal theories in an attempt to undermine cases against them.
“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Judge Davis, a Baltimore-born African American in his late fifties, tried to interrupt. “I object,” Mitchell repeated robotically. Shelly Martin and Shelton Harris followed Mitchell to the microphone, giving the same speech verbatim. Their attorneys tried to intervene, but when Harris’s lawyer leaned over to speak to him, Harris shoved him away.
The precedents the West Baltimore drug dealers were invoking were based in the laws southern Democrats after the Civil War used to limit the protection of black southerners from violence and discrimination and that marked the beginning of Jim Crow.
Judge Davis and his law clerk pored over the case files, which led them to a series of strange Web sites. The flesh-and-blood defense, they discovered, came from a place far from Baltimore, from people as different from Willie Mitchell as people could possibly be. Its antecedents stretched back decades, involving religious zealots, gun nuts, tax protesters, and violent separatists driven by theories that had fueled delusions of Aryan supremacy and race war in gun-loaded compounds in the wilds of Montana and Idaho. Although Mitchell and his peers didn’t know it, they were inheriting the intellectual legacy of white supremacists who believe that America was irrevocably broken when the 14th Amendment provided equal rights to former slaves. It was the ideology that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing, the biggest act of domestic terrorism in the nation’s history, and now, a decade later, it had somehow sprouted in the crime-ridden ghettos of Baltimore.
The evolution of this defense culminated in a series of self-help seminars for white farmers in the 1980s.
Hucksters and charlatans prowled the Midwest as the farm crisis deepened, selling desperate farmers expensive seminars and prepackaged legal defenses “guaranteed” to cancel debts and forestall foreclosure. Since the gold standard had been abandoned in 1933, they argued, money had no inherent value, and so neither did their debts. All they had to do, farmers were told, was opt out of the system by sending a letter to the appropriate authorities renouncing their driver’s license, birth certificate, and social security number. That number was allegedly tied to a secret government account held in a secure subterranean facility in lower Manhattan, where citizens are used as collateral against international debts issued by the Fed and everyone’s name is on a master list, spelled in capital letters—the very same capital letters used in the official court documents detailing foreclosure and other actions against them. The capital letter name was nothing but an artificial construct, they were told, a legal “straw man.” It wasn’t them—natural, live, flesh and blood men.
A PCP dealer locked up for twenty seven years brought these arguments to inner city drug defendants.
In Baltimore, Burpee found a group of inmates at the margins of society, people like Willie Mitchell and company who were staring at the full force of the federal government. As one defense attorney representing a flesh-and-blood defendant put it, they “saw a freight train coming and felt three feet tall.” Soon the unorthodox legal filings and courtroom outbursts began to multiply. It was, one public defender later explained, “like an infection that was invading our client population of pre-trial detainees.” Burpee appears to have been patient zero in the epidemic. For over a year, he harangued his lawyers and judge about the conspiracy and spread the word in the Baltimore lockup. Then, in a stroke of bad luck for the public defender’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided to drop the charges against Burpee—perhaps reasoning that he wasn’t worth the hassle considering that he had already been sentenced to twenty-seven years. For Burpee’s peers, the decision imbued the flesh-and-blood defense with legitimacy and the hope of freedom.
So, the use of the defense ended 180 degrees from where it began.
Like the Midwestern farmers before them, the Baltimore inmates were susceptible to the notion that the federal government was engaged in a massive, historic plot to deprive them of life, liberty, and property. Such suspicions are prevalent in certain pockets of the black community—that year, a study from the Rand Corporation found that over 25 percent of African Americans surveyed believed the AIDS virus was developed by the government, and 12 percent thought it was released into the population by the CIA. And black separatist groups like the Nation of Islam—also fond of conspiracy theories—have long cultivated members through the prison system; some of these groups have explicitly adopted the language of constitutional fundamentalists. Given these developments, Levitas told me, “I’m surprised this didn’t happen sooner.”
Mummies with Ulcers
Two Mexican mummies circa 1350 A.D. have been found to contain Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria that causes ulcers, in their intestinal tracts. In other Mexico news, mysterious pyramids north of Mexico city are being excavated in the hope they will provide insight into a pre-Aztecan culture that inhabited the area then abandoned it in 700 A.D.
Leonardo’s lost fresco, The Battle of Anghiari
Maurizio Seracini has been looking for Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, a fresco presumed to be lost behind layers of other frescoes, and by some estimates, the most beautiful work of the Renaissance.
Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci’s mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo’s own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.
In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci’s work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: “cerca trova.”
Seek; you will find.
Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bruce Conner’s “Sound of Two Hand Angel,” 1974.
Bruce Conner died Monday (July 7, 2008). This from a [Smithsonian] Archives of American Art interview, April 16, 1973:
BRUCE CONNER: Well, when I was in high school I was very interested in paleontology and archeology. I had a geology class which I had no real interest in because they were always scratching rocks for the first two-thirds of the semester before it got into paleontology. My instructor in high school, Dr. Barnard, made a claim that there were no trilobites in the Permian strata in Kansas. Nobody had ever found any. Michael and Dave knew of a limestone quarry where there were lots of fossils.
The Fall of Detroit
Detroit is in the worst state it’s seen in years, and the bureaucracy that runs it is essentially a horde of criminals. I live 20 miles outside of the city border and used to work in the city itself. I’ve been watching this my entire life. The citizen migration rate out of the city is staggering, and the population has dropped below the 1M mark; it is the first American city in history to drop below a million citizens. By way of contrast, in 1950 it boasted 1.8M residents.
Half the housing stock is needed. Many parts of the city are literally a wasteland.
The powers-that-be have a track record of turning down large, entrepreneur-originating initiatives of $200M for new, progressive charter schools. Invariably, the Detroit Board of Education sees the gesture as a white man’s attempt to infiltrate and overthrow the black power structure, not as one to provide a viable option to an otherwise horrible and floundering educational system.
People are starting to talk about Detroit in an urgent fashion, and not just because of Kwame Kilpatrick’s ridiculous troubles. Here’s a spot-on video of Newt Gingrich saying what nobody in Detroit wants to hear — and what I bet nobody will listen to in my lifetime.
Why so pessimistic? Because I’m an analytical person, and I see no data whatsoever that suggests this trend is anywhere near being reversed.
An Alternate Future
There will be no War Between the Vampires and the Zombies, as predicted in the apocalyptic clusterflock post Historic Downtown Greenville (Ohio).
The coming War of Distinctive Destinations will instead pit Historic Downtown Greenville (Ohio) against Galena (Illinois).
The Gabriel Tablets
The release of inscriptions from a three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing quiet a stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it appears to speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If this turns out to be an accurate rendering, and the date holds, this turns out to show that the idea of resurrection did not come from Christianity per se, but was part of a larger, Jewish world of anticipation and thought. The Jewishness of early Christianity is more positively confirmed by this extraordinary finding.
The First Album Cover
In 1939 a 23 year-old Alex Steinwess, a designer for Columbia, wrangled them into creating the first true album cover (rather than generic sleeves):
(hat tip to Triumph of Bullshit)
Communist inspired interrogation techniques
Turns out the “interrogation techniques” we’ve been using at Guantánamo were lifted verbatim from a 1957 study of techniques used during the Korean war to obtain — mostly false — confessions from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
For Cooper: Steampunk RV
Roll Away the Stone
A gloss on sha-la-la-la push-push.
And then there was the time
I caught a glimpse of a partially hidden graffito in the men’s room in the building at UT Arlington where the History Dept was housed and, instead of realizing the obvious GO MAVS, the first thing that came to my mind was GO SLAVS.
North Korea Better Off with Nuclear Reactors
An Editorial — Bitterness, disagreement, and animosity characterize U.S.-North Korea relations, but the long decades of name calling and saber rattling could be nearing an end.
President George W. Bush formally removed North Korea from America’s list of regimes that sponsor terrorism, and declared the former rogue state to be “kind of annoying, but no longer eligible for the Axis of Evil.”
Recent diplomatic breakthroughs aimed at reducing nuclear proliferation appear, on the surface at least, to benefit the world’s peace and security. Are these changes truly positive?
From the Chicago Tribune Archives
Set Trial Date for Lenny Bruce, 2 Others
Judge Daniel J. Ryan set trial in Jury court yesterday for Lenny Bruce, comedian, and two other men arrested Dec. 5 in a police raid on the Gate of Horn night club, 1036 N. State st., for Jan. 14. Bruce is charged with obscenity and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and the others with charges of keeping or being inmates in a disorderly house. Charges of disorderly conduct against Roger Pittman, 21, of 2147 78th av., Elmwood Park, and George Carlin, 25, of 20 E. Delaware pl., who were spectators in the club, were dismissed by Judge Ryan. The others charged are Alan Ribback, 34, of 59 E. Bellevue pl., the club owner, and Herbert O’Brien, 33, of 1. E. Oak st., a bartender.
December 1962 item reproduced on page 21 of Chicago Tribune, June 26, 2008.
Ventastega curonica
Scientists found the skull of a primitive tetrapod that is thought to be the first example of a four legged animal making the transition from water to land.
The 365 million-year-old fossil skull, shoulders and part of the pelvis of the water-dweller, Ventastega curonica, were found in Latvia, researchers report in a study published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. Even though Ventastega is likely an evolutionary dead-end, the finding sheds new details on the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapods.
The animal looked like a small alligator with a small fin on its back and lived 100 million years before dinosaurs, or Adam, roamed the earth.
Kermit Love dies at 91
Kermit Love, the designer that helped Jim Henson bring almost everyone I love to life, passed away this week.
Henson designed the original sketches of Big Bird, and Love then built the 8-foot, 2-inch yellow-feathered costume.
It was Love’s idea to add a few feathers designed to fall off, to create a more realistic feel.
for Sheila
I’ll see your Everlys and raise you a litter of Osmonds
The Stories We Can Tell (Everly Brothers)
Did ever two voices meld so beautifully as those of Don and Phil Everly?
If it’s all too much, zip ahead to the four-minute mark or so, and tell me if it isn’t so.