Awesome Thing of the Week No. 1: Suspect Device

The BBC has this report, today, on the Antikythera Mechanism. The Antikythera Mechanism, in addition to being an awesome band name and potential X-Files episode, is the first known mechanical computer. Various sources say that a devices of similar complexity did not start appearing for another thousand years.

from Wikipedia
The mechanism is the oldest known complex scientific instrument. It has several accurate scales, and is essentially an analog computer made with gears. It is based on theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Persian and Egyptian astronomers. Based on the shape of the Egyptian letters used in the manual of the instrument, it is estimated that it was constructed around 150 to 100 BC...Consensus among scholars is that the mechanism itself was made in Greece. All the instructions of the mechanism are written in Greek.

Per the BBC article, a sophisticated X-ray system has allowed researchers to map out the device's 29 surviving gears. High resolution imaging has aided in reading the devices inscriptions... apparently it used the Olympic (pan-Hellenic) games as a reference point.

"The Olympiad cycle was a very simple, four-year cycle and you don't need a sophisticated instrument like this to calculate it. It took us by huge surprise when we saw this.

"But the Games were of such cultural and social importance that it's not unnatural to have it in the Mechanism."

-Tony Freeth, of the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project

Culture

Back in New York, tanned and relaxed, despite a few job woes. Kay and I have begun reading the Brothers Karamazov together, which has rekindled my love for Russian literature. I don't really believe in genetic dispositions, but as the descendent of many slavs, there's an extent to which the philosophical manic-depressive acceptance so pervasive in what Russian literature I have read (and its not nearly enough to be making such a generalization) just feels like home (ha!).

We went to see The Last Mistress on Sunday, as an on-the whim decision in a rainstorm, and were pleasantly surprised. Its a very beautifully-shot film based on a 19th century French novel about the tribulations of a reformed libertine. It's paced like a novel, which is a little off-putting, but the acting is superb. Rococo France usually bores me to no end. This held me in rapt attention. It's only playing through the end of the week at the IFC theater, but I'm sure there are other ways to get a glimpse of it.

We also saw Cecil B. DeMille's 1934 Cleopatra at the MoMA. Which was fantastic on so many levels. The extent to which film of that time was still very much theater was in full swing, by which I mean huge, choreographed dances, a sense of scale built around a fourth wall, orchestral grandeur... and Claudette Colbert is simply amazing as a cheeky 1930's era Egyptian queen. Add to that amusing anachronisms, like how whoever someone is supposed to represent, they're white and speaking in the Hollywood Accent, and the film represents a time when movies weren't supposed to be virtual reality, but theatrical storytelling. Also represents a time when there was a monolithic white America, but lets not call the kettle black, here.

So, add to that the fact that I'm listening to several live bootlegs of the Archers of Loaf right now, and I feel like a paragon of culture.

Hot Mess of a Debut

Coke Machine Glow reviews our album!

But getting to the goddamn music already (... phew), let’s start with some reference points: R.E.M., the Wrens, and the Replacements all come to find. I’ll get to R.E.M. more later, but if Let It Be is a classic of teenage anxiety, and Meadowlands is the same, only replace teenage years with middle age, then B-Sides and Rarities takes place in the world of noise and nakedly honest emotion that pops up during the decade where youthful optimism morphs into a very adult reckoning of the real world. (That is: the twenties.)

Also, you can now purchase our album from our myspace at myspace.com/demonofentropy

The ocean was like glass off the coast today, and as evening set in, a school of dolphin swam in close to the shore on their way along the coast. So my brother, father and I scrambled the Kayaks and pushed off from the beach, paddling out to meet them. I was the quickest and angled myself into the school, who began surfacing all around me. Very careful not to paddle too deeply, I matched their speed and kept up behind a pair of dolphins that kept surfacing regularly. As my dad and my brother caught up, the dolphins spaced out to allow us into the school, somewhat, and we traveled about a quarter mile with them when they started playing, slapping their tails on the water and leaping fully out of the water five feet off my boat, turning in mid air to show their bellies while I tried to slap the water in return in an attempt to make contact. We continued this for about another mile or so and the whole time I kept thinking, "cool! they're doing with me what I'm doing with them!"

...The quiet calm of just listening.

The best advice I ever received on a beach...

"Just listen."

Live-blogging my First Ocean Swim this Year

4:49pm(est) - so far it seems that the water has not affected the keybo__







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Also, looks like we (Maxwell's Demon) may have another gig happening at Pianos, opening for The Darts on August 5! Take the Edge off Tuesday!

I'm twenty minutes outside of Raleigh on my way southward. I have the Raleigh (which I like far more than the city of the same name) in the back of the car. It's humid as hell. This is my first time south of Bayonne, New Jersey since January. And I'm realizing that I'm going to need to learn to love the south again.

That old plan of setting up shop in Boone is sounding better and better.

for Love of the Machine

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between the work we do on things and the attachment we feel towards them.

As I've mentioned before, my bicycle's on old criterium racer (short urban race courses) from a time when water bottles were hung from the handlebars. Accordingly, there's no place to attach water bottles to my frame. After some research, I found a nifty little device designed for the dark art of cycling, triathlon. It's a double water bottle holder that hangs down from the seat. In the as-aerodynamic-as-possible world of time-trialing/triathletics, the idea is that putting the water bottles behind your ass will keep the round, already-aerodynamic objects from interrupting your slipstream. For me, it was a nice way to avoid drilling my frame without putting three pounds of water over my front wheel (and thus affecting handling). I should mention that the apparatus cost me a pretty penny (at least what I'd made that day). So my second ride out with them, I'm about to climb over the Manhattan bridge when the harsh terrain of Fulton Street (first paved street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant of the 1800s and apparently untouched ever since)knocks a pivot bolt loose and the whole apparatus swings precariously over my rear wheel until i get to the Manhattan Bridge and flag down a fellow cyclist to ask after his toolkit.

Testament to NYC's bike culture, this guy pulls over immediately and digs through his pack for the tools I need, making small talk as I work. It quickly becomes apparent that getting to this one little bolt will require taking the damn thing apart, and I give the dude an "I'm really sorry to be taking all of your time" look, and he just smiles. "This is why they call triathlon an executive sport," he says. "Guys are so rich they never need to work on their stuff. They just buy a new one."

Likewise, I was reading a book in the local Barnes & Noble, the other day while waiting for Kay, entitled "The Need for the Bike". It was by a french book publisher who has been an avid rider and follower of racing all his life, composed of little vignettes about cycling. Phenomenally well written, I recommend it. Anyway, he does a bit about the difference between racers and mechanics. To unjustly simplify, racers hate the bike, it is the source of their pain; mechanics love it deeply as a thing of beauty.

A few nights ago I was repacking the bearings on what I call the Raleigh's race wheelset -- very light, quick clincher wheels that I built a little while ago, wheels that would definitely hold their own in a cat 4 or cat 5 road race (if paired with a quicker rider than me). If you've never repacked bearings, it's not a pleasant or particularly fun job. You have to take apart the wheel hub, remove about 18-24 ball bearings caked in old, grimy, gritty grease, clean each of them, clean all traces of the old grease from the hub, repack the hub with new, very sticky, very messy grease, plop the bearings back in and reassemble the hub, all while straining your eyes to make sure not a single speck of dust gets in there with them. Then you have to adjust the hub to spin freely without any play along the axle. And as I was doing this, I started wondering how many riders in the whole Tour de France peleton had done this since their first ten-speed. I was holding a wheel that I had built, knowing that if my front end was wobbling later, it'd be my fault. Knowing each spoke and bearing that'd carry me downhill in excess of 40mph.

That's why I dig my mechanic buddy Malcom. He's a racer. Damn fast. But he has the look of a man who now cares for the machines he used to abuse. It's a balance.

Our ability to act upon the world is what makes us human... but it's the old Hegelian thing: if we just get what we want, without having to go through the motions of bringing it about, we're the same as servants who bring about only what they're told to do.

Incorrect

“Every technological advance we’ve made in the 21st century and throughout the 20th has come from the United States of America.”

-Sen. John McCain

+ The Internal Combustion Engine / Automobile (Germany)
+ The Jet Engine (Germany / Italy / Great Britain)
+ Radio Communication (Italy)
+ Sonar (Great Britain / Germany)
+ Binary computers (Germany)
+ Radar (debatable, but largely Great Britain)
+ Radiation Therapy (Britain)
+ The Maser, predecessor to the Laser (USSR)
+ The Helicopter (France)
+ The Modern Ballpoint Pen (Hungary)
+ The Three-point Seat-belt (Sweden)
+ Anti-lock brakes (France)

Young cabbie on Bowery and Delancey compliments me on (1) my bike and (2) my aggressive turn signal as I wait to turn onto the Williamsburg Bridge.

Open Source Government

Military Lawyer De-Bugs the Court


Obama's network gets bottom-up

In other news, Damien is back in town from the UAE, if only briefly. This past weekend we had a gathering of the whole clan up at his parent's house in Westchester. Like all such gatherings, the activities vacillated between the extremely civil (delicious food, delicious wine, many toasts, white linen shirts) and the bacchanalian (3am wrestling matches by torchlight, delicious whiskey, dancing until four), punctuated by moments of pure childish fun, like swimming out to cliffs and jumping into the river. D leaves for the middle east again soon, but its very good to know that they heyday of these sort of family gatherings is far from past.

The next day, Kay trained up to join me, and she and I head out solo to an old hiking spot that D and I used to do once or twice a year, called Breakneck Ridge (technically we do Mt.Taurus). It's on the
Hudson River, on the border of Duchess County, a few miles north and on the
other side of the river from West Point. Lots of fun rock obstacles (its an absolute blast to do with a set of climbing shoes) and a phenomenal view of the Hudson river. You know, grab some sandwiches, ditch the car on the side of the road and just go. Kay and I went a little off course on our way down and found the
remains of an old set of cabins in the woods, and these strange stone buildings from the 1910's. Walking along a trail that had been partially rerouted due to an avalanche a few years back, we came upon a stone wall that D and I hadn't found before. It'd been breached by one of the boulders in the avalanche, creating this great post-apocalyptic affect (We've been watching too much battlestar galactica). So naturally we go through the breach and through a field up on to an elevated mound, like the kind you'd build to put a railroad track on, except this one is overgrown and has tire ruts. So Kay and I hop up onto it and follow its curve into the forest. After a few minutes, we were face to face with an arcane stone building, bricked up and sitting in the middle of the elevated right-of-way, in the middle of this forest. We're approaching it from the rear, and suddenly the whole forest seems eerily silent. We get to the building and work our way around the side. There's a bricked-up window with bars over it, only the bricks have been blown out, by the looks of it from the inside. That's when I started thinking "this is the point in the movie where no one hears from us again." We edge around to the front of the building, where there is a metal door. Above the metal door is a coat of arms involving some beavers and windmills (*not* swastikas, as Kay would later insist)and above the coat of arms is emblazoned "ERECTED 1913". The door itself is the most interesting part--It's clearly missing several locks, and has a bar welded across it. on the bar is a small square of metal, painted bright red, on which was welded "15". It was inexplicably creepy. Definitely unspace. We continue on our way at a quickened pace, past a closed gate at an intersection in the right-of-way, where there are fresh tire-tracks. We duck off the right of way and find our way to a trail system that I am familiar with. Somehow, we still manage to stray off course a fair amount, and find ourselves on a very well-maintained trail through some dense forest, surrounded by the remains of old stone farm buildings. We finally make it back to the road, about a mile south of the car, and hike along the side of the road, tucked close against the shoulder as cars speed by us doing 65, 75 mph. All of a sudden we hear this snarling growl-bark-snort of some creature from the reeds next to us and we jump back into the road, and start running, leaving the beast behind and contending with BMWs on the open road.

I am sore and it was awesome.

It really does feel as though L is a wholly and completely different person. I was waiting for something like this -- when she left me it was like someone had thrown a switch in her brain. She won't return any calls. The scariest part about the whole thing is that I just don't know who she is. People say things like that a lot. I really mean this one.