thidwick markvol
3 years ago edited
" the Bill of Rights was enacted primarily to entice the following territories to join the Union. In other words, Of Course the eighth is incorporated!"
Not actually. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, the Bill of Rights was not considered to apply to state action. The Bill of Rights was in fact demanded by most of the states for agreeing to the Constitution as a limit on federal power, because while they recognized the need for a more vigorous and cohesive central government than under the Articles of Confederation, they also wanted to make sure the federal government would be constrained in various critical ways - those they could then enumerate (the first 8) and those they could not just yet (9 and 10). The Fourteenth Amendment imposed equal protection and due process limits on the states. After a few decades, the courts began interpreting the right to due process under the Fourtheenth Amendment as including various parts of the Bill of Rights. That is what 'incorporation' means in this context. Generally, states have not recognized that an amendment applies to them until the federal courts say so. Often they have parallel provisions in their constitutions, so it did not come up all that often. My recollection is that 'excessive fines' had been incorporated, but in the contexts of direct criminal penalties and punitive damages, not asset forfeiture.
But in looking through the Bill of Rights to make this reply, I noticed something I have not heard discussed before. Only the First Amendment says "Congress shall not..." The rest just say the rights of the people as to various things (be armed, not house soldiers, have jury trials for amounts over $20, etc.) shall not be infringed. It seems to me the difference reflects that only the First may have been intended to apply only to the federal government, allowing the states to have their established religions (as several did at the time), or make their own provisions as to press and speech. In any case, Marbury v. Madison (which said it was the courts' job to declare whether an Act was constitutional) was not issued until 1803, a generation after the Bill of Rights was ratified, and the legal establishment of the time may have simply forgotten that only the First was so limited to Congress's acts, and so when issues about state action arose, everyone just accepted that the Bill of Rights did not apply to them. This paragraph is largely speculative.
Medieval villages in northern Kyrgyzstan may have been very close to ground zero.
In 1338 and 1339, people were dying in droves in the villages around Lake Issyk-Kul in what’s now northern Kyrgyzstan. Many of the tombstones from those years blame the deaths on a generic “pestilence.” According to a recent study of ancient bacterial DNA from the victims’ teeth, the pestilence that swept through the Kyrgyz villages was Yersinia pestis—the same pathogen that would cause the devastating Black Death in Europe just a few years later. //
In just five years, bubonic plague killed at least 75 million people in the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe. Known as the Black Death, the cataclysm of 1346-1352 is still the most deadly pandemic in human history. But the Black Death was only the first devastating wave of what historians call the second plague pandemic: a centuries-long period in which waves of Y. pestis periodically burned through communities or whole regions. When English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the Great Plague of London in 1666, he was describing a later wave of the same pandemic that began in the mid-1300s with the Black Death. Centuries of life with the reality of the plague actually shaped the genetic diversity of modern European populations.
Thomas Jefferson is the most enigmatic of the American Founding Fathers. The author of the Declaration of Independence, he is sometimes called the “Author of America.” As a son of the Enlightenment and the American founding, he is claimed by many sides.
And as Thomas Kidd reminds us in his splendid new biography, we still haven’t quite got Thomas Jefferson right, especially in his religious and philosophic views. What Kidd reveals is that Jefferson was, and remains, America’s chief political theologian articulating a theology of liberty. //
Jefferson the thinker, and “sect unto himself,” was a man who combined elements of “Christianity, Epicureanism, the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and universal rights, and the republican values of virtue, limited government, and political liberty.” The problem with discerning Jefferson’s moral universe and commitments from our standpoint comes from the fact that we live in an age of dogmatic ideology.
We impose a dogmatic reading of Jefferson, whereas Jefferson lived in age of intellectual experimentation that usually left contradictory and incompatible philosophies contesting, without seeking to resolve them. Jefferson’s mishmash of views was only possible to weave together because of the intellectual excitement and relative openness the Enlightenment afforded.
Dogmatists of the secularist post-Enlightenment want an only secular and rationalist Jefferson and misleadingly (ignorantly or otherwise) present the third president in that light. Dogmatists of the new Christian right present a misleading portrait of what Kidd describes as a “brilliant but troubled person,” as they selectively cobble together some of Jefferson’s positive comments about the relationship of Christianity and public virtue with contemporary anti-statist politics. //
Jefferson’s moral universe, a universe undergirded by a God of justice, a moral order knowable through rational inquiry, and an individual soul seeking the felicity of tranquility in all relations, becomes the spirit and flesh that comes to govern — however imperfectly, and imperfect it was — Jefferson’s life.
Jefferson’s life seeking union with the moral universe that he conceived in his mind became, in soft cultural form, the moral universe of the United States and its people, even if we don’t always realize it. We too want a God of justice, a moral order to conform to by the dictates of reason, and a tranquil soul and community where liberty abounds within that harmony under God’s justice and moral rationalism. In sum, we are still Jefferson’s children. Jefferson’s political theology has become our own. //
Because Jefferson’s moral imagination and universe drew upon many worlds, Jefferson remains an enigma for narrow-minded dogmatists who want an equally narrow Jefferson contrary to who Jefferson actually was. But, as Kidd shows in this splendid biography, we benefit by entering Jefferson’s worlds on his terms, not ours. We do ourselves, and Jefferson, a gross abuse by trying to impose our ideological presuppositions on him rather than becoming better humans by learning from the life and intellect of the Sage of Monticello. And Jefferson’s moral universe was one in which God, liberty, and man were meant to be united
G-UNET is 30 years old and was originally in service with Air Canada before being converted for cargo use in 2006. Since then, the aircraft has been flown by Air China Cargo, ACT Airlines, and Air CargoGlobal.
Air One Aviation Limited is an Exclusive Global Sales Agency that represents international cargo airlines. The agency organizes global charter services for freight forwarders, logistics providers, and charter brokers using freighter Boeing 747 and B737 aircraft. The jet is yet to be put into active service. //
East Midlands-based CargoLogicAir, which is owned by the Russian Volga-Dnepr Group, handed back its two Boeing 747-400Fs to lessors Aircastle and AerCap in early March. The move was partly due to Western sanctions affecting Russian-based businesses and airlines operating within the UK, EU, and the US. The decision by CargoLogicAir resulted in there being no UK-registered jumbos for practically the first time in 52 years.
What moved the brave men who stormed the beaches of Normandy and scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was the firm resolve and spirit that liberty and virtue, freedom and duty, God and justice, were bound together and it is only in this unity that true freedom and progress be enjoyed. The relativism preached today is contrary to the American Founding and the American resolve and spirit that confronted the great darkness of Nazism and totalitarian ideologies in the twentieth century.
Looking back at the great American tradition of freedom, we find the necessity of virtue and belief in the justice of God as the common pillars upon which freedom stands. Today’s license of choice exiles virtue and God from freedom. This is intentional. The enemies of freedom and progress who seek to enact centralizing decrees over all need the elimination of virtue and God from the hearts of the people in order for their totalitarian impulses to be realized.
To borrow a quote from James Michener’s Bridges at Toko Ri, “where do we get such men?”
When June 6 passes this year, the memories of that day will be little noted, save for a diminishing number of men in their 90’s who were there, and their surviving families who lived through that day. There may be some grainy films on the History and Military channels, and there will be reruns of Saving Private Ryan, but for the most part, it will not be on the minds of the Woke generation or their proponents in the media, academia, or entertainment circles. If noted at all, it will be to condemn Eisenhower’s (who’s he?) use of the words “Great Crusade” as highly offensive and religiously divisive.
It is common now to call these true heroes “the Greatest Generation”, but I think that deserved appellation may be unfair to those who answered the call to colors in other wars -- the simple farmers and tradesmen who rallied to the Union cause to save the Union and free the enslaved, the Doughboys who went Over There, the first Cold War defenders in Korea fighting the spread of the new communist tyrannies, the draftees who went to Vietnam and returned to an ungrateful nation – these, too, were Great Generations.
But my, and your, concern should not be for the current apathy in remembering D-Day and other great accomplishments by those in uniform over our history, but of who will replace them in our future. Is there a next Great Generation? The augurs are not good.
We have a woke generation who manifestly hates America. We have organizations (BLM, Antifa) whose purpose is to destroy America. We have media that preaches only the much-exaggerated sins of America. We tolerate policies and lawlessness designed to “fundamentally change” the culture and majesty that is America. We have educators who vilify the founders and history of America. We have political leaders who want to mimic the governments and practices of the enemies of America.
Who would want to defend that America?
There are still those who reflect the qualities, goodness, and patriotism of their forebearers, that one-half of one percent who today serve to keep the rest of us free to go to the mall, or look at our Twitter tweets, or burn Portland. To them, we are grateful, though not so much to their leaders, military and civilian, who are increasingly political creatures focused on advancing their careers and echoing the politically correct words and policies that their sponsors demand of them – like diversity, pronouns, anti-religion, white supremacy, inclusion.
But that mere 0.5% will not prevail in the coming dangers from a China, Russia, or nuclear Iran and North Korea. They will not be reinforced by new divisions from the woke generation, the America haters, the on-the-dole illegal aliens, the pride flag-wavers, the 70% physically or criminally unqualified pool of draftable males, the possibly brave yet 110 lb. females, the easily-triggered college students.
No, for the first time in our history, it seems there is not the raw material available for our next Great Generation. D-Day will mean the arrival of the new iPhone, not the invasion on some enemy shore to save Liberty and guarantee Freedom.
Fifty some years ago, when it was still a respectable news and entertainment network, CBS produced some great documentaries. One of them from 1964 was CBS Reports: D-Day Plus Twenty – Eisenhower Returns to Normandy.
This Sunday, June 6, 2021, it might be worth your while to spend 82 minutes watching it, especially Eisenhower’s closing comments.
Again, where do we get such men?
More importantly, in our current state of self-hating America, where will we ever get such men, and now women, again?
A new Washington, D.C.-based museum honoring the 100 million plus victims of global communism opens later this month.
Originally slated to open in 2021, the Victims of Communism Museum will welcome visitors starting June 13th, 2022. It’s managed by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—an organization established in 1993 by a “unanimous Act of Congress signed as Public Law 103-199 by President William J. Clinton on December 17, 1993.”
This museum will educate visitors about the atrocities committed under communist regimes and discuss its global reach under totalitarian governments today. //
Our final stop on the media tour was meeting participants of Victims of Communism’s Witness Project, the organization’s award-winning video series, in the adjacent conference room.
There I met Merita McCormack, originally from communist Albania, who is grateful to VOC for keeping her and her family’s stories alive.
“There's many folds of importance here,” she told me. “First of all, you tell the story— tell a true story— which is not been even told in our own countries. Second, it's healing. It's very therapeutic for those who have gone into seeing that somebody cares and tells the stories. And the third is, I think most important, and this is kind of got me into getting involved with this, is that our children that are Americans know what happens. And it [communism] doesn't happen here.”
“In order for the future to be safe of certain dangers, we have to tell the stories of what happened. We don't want that repeated,” she added.
National Geographic @NatGeo
Since it was unveiled to the public on Memorial Day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial has become one of the world’s best-known monuments—and a key stop for millions of annual visitors to Washington, D.C.
nationalgeographic.com
See 100 years of the Lincoln Memorial in photos
9:01 AM · May 30, 2022
The visitors come for all sorts of reasons, as the Washington Post explains:
They come to learn, to give thanks, to protest, to be inspired, to propose, to eat lunch, to walk dogs, to peddle T-shirts, to snap selfies, to launch school trips, to shoot movie scenes, to share a kiss, to have a nightcap, to give speeches, to ask for votes, to pray for change, to mourn America’s greatest sin and remember its greatest ideals, to hope that the union Abraham Lincoln died to preserve will endure. //
The official opening occurred on this day 100 years ago in a ceremony attended by about 50,000 people, with 2 million more listening on radio. It had been 57 years since President Abraham Lincoln was felled by an assassin’s bullet just days after the Civil War had officially ended.
On the road south from Los Angeles, two-thirds of the way to San Diego, one will drive past Camp Pendleton. Each time I pass it, I can’t help but think of my dad and brother who both went through boot camp and training at Pendleton. In my father’s case, as a combat Marine, he later witnessed many of his mates die in combat. My brother, serving as a corpsman, held the hand of many a Marine as they took their last breath. My family members returned. Too many did not.
Before one passes Pendleton, you’ll see a road at the north end of the base called “Gunnery Sergeant John Basilone Memorial Highway.” It’s named after a WWII Marine who earned the Medal of Honor for bravery on Guadalcanal. After Guadalcanal, the Marines pulled him out of combat to raise money for the war effort. Basilone could not shake a deep feeling of guilt that his mates were still fighting a war while he was not. He begged to be returned to active duty. The Marine Corps acquiesced. On 19, February 1945, Basilone was killed on Iwo Jima. He was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross for heroism, being the only enlisted man to earn both the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross.
Last year, I repeated a story that my father wrote in his war memoir about how death affected him. Here it is:
“Over the side, down the Life Net and into the landing craft. Once full, our boat headed to the rally point. Signal given, then to Engibi. The landing craft hit the sand at the south end of the island. The ramp went down and we ran for whatever cover we could find. Rounds were zipping past us. I hit the sand, looked for where the fire was coming from and got up and moved for cover. I was running for a better spot when a Marine in my company, who was in my landing craft took a round in the chest. Thump. The bullet seemed to hit him dead center. He went down like a sack of potatoes. I stopped and yelled for a Corpsman. Eventually a corpsman took over, and I headed for a hole or something to get behind. I rolled into a shell hole.
“The grim reaper was about to say hello again. Although it seemed like an eternity, we had been on the beach for just moments. Guys were hopping shell hole to shell hole. Our company captain, Captain Blood (yes, his real name) was next to me, when we were raked by machine gun fire. Captain Blood took a direct hit, and was killed instantly.
“Later, when the battle was over and the graves detail was preparing Captain Blood’s body to be taken back to the ship or buried I asked the Marine removing his personal effects if I could look at his wallet. Captain Blood took his last breath right next to me, and I wanted to know more about him. In his wallet was a photograph. Staring back at me was his beautiful wife and two children. I was crushed. What was running through my mind was – A wife would never see her husband again. Children would never again feel their father’s touch. That photograph was burned into my memory. It remains there still.”
Each man or woman lost in combat had a family. Each Soldier, Sailor, Marine, or Airman had a loved one who never saw them return. Over a million Americans have given the last full measure and each one had a story.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people”. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
– John Adams
“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”
– John Adams
“…Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored.
– John Adams
In my hometown of Simi Valley, California, we have a beautiful Holy Week tradition that helps us remember Christ’s sacrifice throughout the week. Atop Mt. McCoy, at the far western end of the valley, sits a cross originally erected in the early 1800s as a landmark for Spanish priests traveling between the Ventura and San Fernando missions. Since 1921 sunrise services have been held at the cross on Easter Sunday, and since 1941 (with a few exceptions) it has been illuminated every night during Holy Week by members of local community groups – some of whom have their families sleep overnight on the mountain to keep watch over the generator. On Good Friday, though, there is no light, a solemn reminder of that dark night.
As a child I loved seeing the cross lit up during that week and thought it was pretty, but my appreciation for what it represents has grown significantly as I’ve gotten older and experienced the pain of losing a loved one.
The Vacuum Tube’s Forgotten Rival
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FEATURE
HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY
THE VACUUM TUBE’S FORGOTTEN RIVAL
Magnetic amplifiers, the alt-tech of the Third Reich, lasted into the Internet era
KEN SHIRRIFF
27 MAR 202212 MIN READ
A photo of an older woman in front of an early generation computer.
Magnetic amplifiers were used in the Univac Solid State, shown here being operated in 1961 by pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper. COMPUTER HISTORY MUSEUM
DURING THE SECOND World War, the German military developed what were at the time some very sophisticated technologies, including the V-2 rockets it used to rain destruction on London. Yet the V-2, along with much other German military hardware, depended on an obscure and seemingly antiquated component you’ve probably never heard of, something called the magnetic amplifier or mag amp.
In the United States, mag amps had long been considered obsolete—“too slow, cumbersome, and inefficient to be taken seriously,” according to one source. So U.S. military-electronics experts of that era were baffled by the extensive German use of this device, which they first learned about from interrogating German prisoners of war. What did the Third Reich’s engineers know that had eluded the Americans?
After the war, U.S. intelligence officers scoured Germany for useful scientific and technical information. Four hundred experts sifted through billions of pages of documents and shipped 3.5 million microfilmed pages back to the United States, along with almost 200 tonnes of German industrial equipment. Among this mass of information and equipment was the secret of Germany’s magnetic amplifiers: metal alloys that made these devices compact, efficient, and reliable.
U.S. engineers were soon able to reproduce those alloys. As a result, the 1950s and ’60s saw a renaissance for magnetic amplifiers, during which they were used extensively in the military, aerospace, and other industries. They even appeared in some early solid-state digital computers before giving way entirely to transistors. Nowadays, that history is all but forgotten. So here I’ll offer the little-known story of the mag amp.
An amplifier, by definition, is a device that allows a small signal to control a larger one. An old-fashioned triode vacuum tube does that using a voltage applied to its grid electrode. A modern field-effect transistor does it using a voltage applied to its gate. The mag amp exercises control electromagnetically.
A photo of a rocket on a launcher with trees in the background. A photo of a man sitting at an early computer next to a typewriter.A photo of two men sitting at a terminal in front of an early computer.Magnetic amplifiers were used for a variety of applications, including in the infamous V-2 rockets [top] that the Germany military employed during the Second World War and in the Magstec computer [middle], completed in 1956. The British Elliot 803 computer of 1961 [bottom] used related core-transistor logic. FROM TOP: FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES; REMINGTON RAND UNIVAC; SMITH ARCHIVE/ALAMY
To understand how it works, first consider a simple inductor, say, a wire coiled around an iron rod. Such an inductor will tend to block the flow of alternating current through the wire. That’s because when current flows, the coil creates an alternating magnetic field, concentrated in the iron rod. And that varying magnetic field induces voltages in the wire that act to oppose the alternating current that created the field in the first place.
If such an inductor carries a lot of current, the rod can reach a state called saturation, whereby the iron cannot become any more magnetized than it already is. When that happens, current passes through the coil virtually unimpeded. Saturation is usually undesirable, but the mag amp exploits this effect.
Physically, a magnetic amplifier is built around a metallic core of material that can easily be saturated, typically a ring or square loop with a wire wrapped around it. A second wire also wrapped around the core forms a control winding. The control winding includes many turns of wire, so by passing a relatively small direct current through it, the iron core can be forced into or out of saturation.
The mag amp thus behaves like a switch: When saturated, it lets the AC current in its main winding pass unimpeded; when unsaturated, it blocks that current. Amplification occurs because a relatively small DC control current can modify a much larger AC load current.
The history of magnetic amplifiers starts in the United States with some patents filed in 1901. By 1916, large magnetic amplifiers were being used for transatlantic radio telephony, carried out with an invention called an Alexanderson alternator, which produced a high-power, high-frequency alternating current for the radio transmitter. A magnetic amplifier modulated the output of the transmitter according to the strength of the voice signal to be transmitted.
One Navy training manual of 1951 explained magnetic amplifiers in detail—although with a defensive attitude about their history.
In the 1920s, improvements in vacuum tubes made this combination of Alexanderson alternator and magnetic amplifier obsolete. This left the magnetic amplifier to play only minor roles, such as for light dimmers in theaters.
Germany’s later successes with magnetic amplifiers hinged largely on the development of advanced magnetic alloys. A magnetic amplifier built from these materials switched sharply between the on and off states, providing greater control and efficiency. These materials were, however, exquisitely sensitive to impurities, variations in crystal size and orientation, and even mechanical stress. So they required an exacting manufacturing process.
The best-performing German material, developed in 1943, was called Permenorm 5000-Z. It was an extremely pure fifty/fifty nickel-iron alloy, melted under a partial vacuum. The metal was then cold-rolled as thin as paper and wound around a nonmagnetic form. The result resembled a roll of tape, with thin Permenorm metal making up the tape. After winding, the module was annealed in hydrogen at 1,100 °C for 2 hours and then rapidly cooled. This process oriented the metal crystals so that they behaved like one large crystal with uniform properties. Only after this was done were wires wrapped around the core.
By 1948, scientists at the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, in Maryland, had figured out how to manufacture this alloy, which was soon marketed by an outfit called Arnold Engineering Co. under the name Deltamax. The arrival of this magnetic material in the United States led to renewed enthusiasm for magnetic amplifiers, which tolerated extreme conditions and didn’t burn out like vacuum tubes. Mag amps thus found many applications in demanding environments, especially military, space, and industrial control.
During the 1950s, the U.S. military was using magnetic amplifiers in automatic pilots, fire-control apparatus, servo systems, radar and sonar equipment, the RIM-2 Terrier surface-to-air missile, and many other roles. One Navy training manual of 1951 explained magnetic amplifiers in detail—although with a defensive attitude about their history: “Many engineers are under the impression that the Germans invented the magnetic amplifier; actually it is an American invention. The Germans simply took our comparatively crude device, improved the efficiency and response time, reduced weight and bulk, broadened its field of application, and handed it back to us.”
The U.S. space program also made extensive use of magnetic amplifiers because of their reliability. For example, the Redstone rocket, which launched Alan Shepard into space in 1961, used magnetic amplifiers. In the Apollo missions to the moon during the 1960s and ’70s, magnetic amplifiers controlled power supplies and fan blowers. Satellites of that era used magnetic amplifiers for signal conditioning, for current sensing and limiting, and for telemetry. Even the space shuttle used magnetic amplifiers to dim its fluorescent lights.
The image shows a Redstone rocket at the launch pad, with three space-suit-wearing astronauts in the foreground.Magnetic amplifiers were also used in Redstone rockets, like the one shown here behind astronauts John Glenn, Virgil Grissom, and Alan Shepard.UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
Magnetic amplifiers also found heavy use in industrial control and automation, with many products containing them being marketed under such brand names as General Electric’s Amplistat, CGS Laboratories’ Increductor, Westinghouse’s Cypak (cybernetic package), and Librascope’s Unidec (universal decision element).
The magnetic materials developed in Germany during the Second World War had their largest postwar impact of all, though, on the computer industry. In the late 1940s, researchers immediately recognized the ability of the new magnetic materials to store data. A circular magnetic core could be magnetized counterclockwise or clockwise, storing a 0 or a 1. Having what’s known as a rectangular hysteresis loop ensured that the material would stay solidly magnetized in one of these states after power was removed.
Researchers soon constructed what was called core memory from dense grids of magnetic cores. And these technologists soon switched from using wound-metal cores to cores made from ferrite, a ceramic material containing iron oxide. By the mid-1960s, ferrite cores were stamped out by the billions as manufacturing costs dropped to a fraction of a cent per core.
But core memory is not the only place where magnetic materials had an influence on early digital computers. The first generation of those machines, starting in the 1940s, computed using vacuum tubes. These were replaced in the late 1950s with a second generation based on transistors, followed by third-generation computers built from integrated circuits.
Transistors weren’t an obvious winner for early computers, and many other alternatives were developed, including magnetic amplifiers.
But technological progress in computing wasn’t, in fact, this linear. Early transistors weren’t an obvious winner, and many other alternatives were developed. Magnetic amplifiers were one of several largely forgotten computing technologies that fell between the generations.
That’s because researchers in the early 1950s realized that magnetic cores could not only hold data but also perform logic functions. By putting multiple windings around a core, inputs could be combined. A winding in the opposite direction could inhibit other inputs, for example. Complex logic circuits could be implemented by connecting such cores together in various arrangements. //
“I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids, and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia, with only primitive tools, raised and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons!” –Edward Leedskalnin
Coral Castle is an unsolved megalith whose secrets of construction can be uncovered and proved using only information found on the Internet. This article presents the proof and links the technology used to construct it to a scientist’s theory for Egyptian pyramid construction that was rejected several decades ago.
THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS, The New Yorker, 5/29/95, pp 45-53
CITY PERILS
THE FIFTY-NINE-STORY CRISIS
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 29, 1995, pp 45-53
What's an engineer's worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a skyscraper like Citicorp Center are flawed---and hurricane season is approaching.
The Crew That Found Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ Wasn’t Just Looking for a Sunken Ship
The team behind the shipwreck’s discovery sought more than just a shipwreck
Abigail Barronian
Mar 18, 2022
In January 1915, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, became icebound in the Antarctic. What happened next would become legend: Shackleton and his crew watched their ship slowly sink, survived a year and a half stranded on the ice, and eventually secured their own rescue with an 800-mile journey in an open lifeboat. Every member of the 28-man team survived.
Now, 106 years later, the wreck has been found, in remarkable condition, at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet in the Weddell Sea. An expedition team from the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust led by polar geographer John Shears located the wreck using an underwater autonomous vehicle on March 5, after a month at sea. They announced the discovery to the world four days later.
The mission to locate Endurance had other goals—ones that focused on environmental dynamics and scientific research that Shackleton and his men likely could have never envisioned a century ago. The crew spent nearly six weeks off the coast of Antarctica aboard the South African icebreaking polar research vessel Agulhas II, during which time scientists and researchers conducted studies on a wide range of topics, including maritime navigation and how the changing climate has affected ice levels around Antarctica.
“A lot of these snow and ice properties we measure here are needed to learn about the structure of the ice and snow in the Weddell Sea,” says Lasse Rabenstein, the expedition’s chief scientist. “It’s a complicated and special one, more complicated than other parts of the Antarctic or Arctic.”
It helped popularize the interactive computing paradigm we take for granted today.
The history of computing could arguably be divided into three eras: that of mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Minicomputers provided an important bridge between the first mainframes and the ubiquitous micros of today. This is the story of the PDP-11, the most influential and successful minicomputer ever.
Veteran polar explorer Tim Jarvis is on a mission to discover exactly what happened on the most famous survival story in expedition history — Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 800-mile boat journey across the Southern Ocean and deadly mountain crossing of South Georgia.
Aired: 01/08/14
Expires: 09/23/23
Rating: TV-PG
Sir Ernest Shackleton led famed expedition that became timeless story of human survival.
In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months on the Antarctic ice after their ship, Endurance, was crushed by pack ice and sank into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Today, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic announced the discovery of this famous shipwreck, nearly 107 years later, 3,008 meters down, roughly four miles (6.4 km) south of the ship's last recorded position.
The shipwreck is in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the Endurance22 expedition's exploration director, Mensun Bound, told The New York Times that the shipwreck is the finest example he's ever seen; Endurance is "in a brilliant state of preservation." The expedition has released the first images of the wreck—the first time anyone has laid eyes on Endurance since its sinking a century ago. Bound et al. included shots of the stern (with "ENDURANCE" clearly visible), the rear deck and ship's wheel, and parts of the deck and hull. //
Shackleton's brilliant navigator, Frank Worsley, painstakingly calculated the coordinates for the position where Endurance sank using a sextant and chronometer. He recorded that position in his log book: 68°39'30" south; 52°26'30" west. But there was some question as to the accuracy of the marine chronometers he used to fix longitude, which would have affected the final coordinates. //
The wreck of the Endurance is a historical monument, marked for preservation under the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, so nothing was touched and no artifacts were removed. The images and scans that are still being collected will be used in a planned NatGeo documentary (to air this fall), as well as for educational materials and museum exhibits. You can check out NatGeo's short TikTok video announcing the discovery below.
Nixon would play a pivotal role in protecting the Jewish state, as Nixon recognized that the defeat of Israel was unthinkable for US interests. Nixon went to Congress to request authorization for emergency aid for Israel despite the Gulf States announcing a price increase of seventy percent in the wake of the Arab assault. After Nixon went to Congress for authorization, the Gulf States responded vigorously, announcing a total boycott of the United States, causing the oil shock of 1973.
The Gulf States’ retaliation simply served to further entrench the opposition of many who had fought to slow or halt the shipment of weapons to the Israelis (the former being represented by Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Kissinger, the latter being represented by Secretary of Defense Schlesinger). Nixon hit the roof when he learned that Kissinger was delaying the airlift because of a concern that it would offend the Russians. Despite the opposition of his national security and foreign policy brain trust, Nixon ordered the airlift, saying, “We are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for three hundred,” and later in exasperation at the slow start of US support, said “Use every [plane] we have—everything that will fly.”
Finally, after several days of internal politicking amongst the upper echelons of the Administration, Nixon got his airlift: “Operation Nickel Grass.” Over the course of the airlift 567 missions were flown, delivering over 22,000 tons of supplies, and an additional 90,000 tons were delivered to Israel by sea. Later in her life, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir would admit that upon hearing of the airlift during a cabinet meeting, she began to cry.
Nixon’s loyalty drove him to save a US ally from the threat of utter destruction despite the real risk of economic crisis, and political cost to himself. To borrow the phrase from the Kennedy clan, Nixon’s decision to aid Israel was a true “profile in courage.”
Which countries are the central nodes of the global trade network? While China is currently the world’s largest trading partner, this hasn’t always been the case.
This series of graphics by Anders Sundell outlines the history of the world’s biggest trade hubs, showing how the landscape has evolved since 1960. Using netgraphs, each visual connects countries to their primary trading partner, using data that includes both imports and exports.