Author Archives: dr.hypercube

More alt history

Posted on by

Via The Reality-Based Community, a link to this overview of the work of Onken and Jones. It ties in to a question I’ve always had about the way events work – are there really pivot points, or are there broad trends that force thing in certain directions and we retrofit the specific causes (or – as things seem usually to be – a bit of both)?

The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”

In other news, my friend Ray seems to have been involved with early efforts towards a transatlantic cable, discussing same with a favorite steam-vicky – Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

From above

Posted on by

A few pictures from the local métropole, taken from a vantage point I rarely experience. There was a vendor presentation today at a nice private club atop a local five-story skyscraper – nice lunch and very useful info (if you care about 802.11n and mesh networks). Win.

*

*

*

BTW – I think Flickr’s been infiltrated by Mainers (compare where Flickr says the pictures were taken with where I placed them on the map)!

Alt history

Posted on by

Alternative histories can be a lot of fun – or they can be teeth-grindingly dumb. Part of the trick, it seems to me, is to find a good pivot point – a specific thing that could have gone differently – and then carefully work through the implications. Done poorly, it devolves into a “Well, my Goths invented the Gatling gun” – “So what? My Romans allied with Godzilla!” kind of exercise (complete with the smell of burning plastic and the pop of Black Cats – not that I’d know anything about it); done well, it makes you wonder about why things turned out the way they did.

All this is a long-winded way of pointing you at a Strange Maps post on a map of the Republic of New Netherland – maps and alternative history – nice match. While I’m on the subject, C.M. Kornbluth’s Two Dooms is alt history that is definitely worth a read.

What kind of mutant?

Posted on by

You are a: DIPROSOPIC PARAPAGUS

You have one head, one body, but two faces, partially merged, with a third eye in the center, two noses, and two mouths.

*

From a distance, you look like anyone else. It is only those you allow close enough to look into your eyes who will see your true nature, which is emergent. You are neither one thing nor a different thing, but rather the difference just emerging from within the one. Walking down the street, you seem to hear other footsteps keeping pace with yours. Speaking, you hear your every word echoed, but so quickly you cannot be sure it is not your imagination. Reading, you see double; every word seems out of register. Never at ease, you are haunted by a feeling that something is about to happen. It never does; or rather, when things do happen, it is evident that they do not exhaust the sense of imminence that bothers you. When you close your third eye, and try to look at things as others do, you see all the more clearly the fissure in the heart of things. Maybe because your ordinary eyes are farther apart than theirs, you can tell, as singletons cannot, that the fat and friendly world they see as one is really the forced marriage of two parts that are already sliding apart—product of the binocular point of view. And when you close both ordinary eyes, and look at the world through the third eye that partakes equally in both parts of you, you begin to glimpse the world as it truly is: a scatter of sequins, a broken mirror. Your literary form is the off-rhyme.

You are related to…
The Two-Headed Lamb in Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities, who was born at Beeding Court Farm in West Sussex, around 1871.

*

Quiz here, via Whimsy, Cabinet and ineradicablestain.