Author Archives: dr.hypercube

Sphinxes

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Updated below.
Another good intersection in my web surfing and book reading travels… I mentioned in an earlier post that I was reading a history of the silk road. In it was a picture of three sculptures Aurel Stein excavated near Turfan:

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I also noticed in prepping this post that there are digital versions of Stein’s (and other’s) books here! More serendipity! But, to matters at hand – the monsters rang a bell, but I couldn’t figure out why. Cut to yesterday, when I was doing some Pazyryk surfing. I ran across a detail from a felt wall hanging that I’d seen before – in Sergei Rudenko’s Frozen Tombs of Siberia – now I can’t find the color version, but here’s a line drawing of a sphinx-thing battling a griffin-thing:

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Maybe it’s just me, but the critter in the middle of Stein’s trio could be the Pazaryk beastie’s second cousin. In any event – good visuals from parts of the world I’d like to see.

Update – I found a color version of the Pazyryk wall hanging here:

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along with a map (reproduced, I think, from Rudenko’s book). With the map as a reference, I did a little messing around with Google Earth and produced placemarks for Turfan (now Turpan) and my guess at where Rudenko excavated the kurgans. If you have Google Earth installed, you should be able to click the links, open with Google Earth and fly to the placemarks. The Turpan placemark already exists within Google Earth – it just took me some hunting to find it, so I thought I’d tee it up. Pan back and take a look at the Turpan Depression – impressive.

Saturday AM cleanup

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Taking a break from doin’ the domestic thing this morning – time to clean up a couple loose ends I’ve been meaning to post about…

First – Saturday morning, regardless of what you’re doing, is always improved by Kathy and Red Eye R&B on our local college radio station: WUNH. You can listen across the net and this is one of those cases where, because you can, you should.

Next – a couple new interweb vocabulary words: crowdsourcing and sockpuppet. Crowdsourcing is the strategy Neuros is using with their OSD box – release the hardware, open-source the software and let the hacker community take it from there (with the crowdsourcing company continuing to develop high priority applications and attempting to influence the direction the crowd is taking). A sockpuppet is an identity assumed by a blog author in order to comment favorably on himself, esp. on his own blog. Watch the comments on this post for an example.

Finally – search terms. I run a log file analyser on my little web server; one of the things it shows me is what search phrases bring people to the blog. Number one with a bullet is ‘litel man’ – I have no idea what folks are trying to find, but at least some of them (not many) end up here. Another ‘what are they trying to do?’ phrase is ‘netware hezbollah’. I know there’s a lot of information out there about fourth generation/open source guerilla warfare (see John Robb’s Global Guerillas in the blogroll), but this is crazy. Seriously. The last term I want to throw out there brought a smile to my face – ‘knicker critter’ – yes, at times my sense of humor is not particularly sophisticated.

Back to work…

Making Light & Mike Ford

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I’ve followed links in to Making Light twice in as many days. Today I thought I’d read around a bit and found that I’d arrived a bit too late. They are marking the passing of their friend John M. Ford who died Monday. I thought I’d quote two of the things he wrote (in comments!) on the site – just because I like them so much.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

—John M. Ford

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By John M. Ford, from the Infernokrusher thread:

[From Verona Total Breakdown (Liebestod), a forgotten early Infernokrusher work by Bill “Hoist This Petard” Shakespeare …

Ro-Mo. Your windows are still mirrored; taunt me not,
But show your colors, dare to challenge me,
These lips are two shaped charges, primed and hot,
That wait the go-code for delivery.
J-Cap. The flag is to the deadly, not the loud,
Yet aim as well as posing shows in this;
The worthy throwdown’s always to the proud,
And hammer down is how the hard girls kiss.
Ro-Mo. My draft is stopped; I struggle toward the clutch.
J-Cap. And would a charge of nitrous make thee run?
Ro-Mo. Too much; but what else is there but too much?
Let me take arms, and elevate the gun.
J-Cap. Small arms but hint what demolitions say.
Ro-Mo. Then, gunner, gimme one round.
J-Cap. On the way.

Card tricks to spread spectrum radio…

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I read an article in today’s New York Times and started thinking – dangerous stuff. I managed to get from card tricks to spread spectrum radio by connecting five people. Here they are – I’ll use birth names so it’s not too obvious:

Richard Potash -> Joseph Pujol -> Melvin Kaminsky -> Harvey Kormen -> Hedwig Kiesler

The article in the NYT concerned a dispute between magicians Eric Walton and Ricky Jay (born Richard Jay Potash). I’m a big fan of Mr. Jay’s – he fits my mental model of a perfect sleight-of-hand artist – well read, raffish, incredibly good at what he does. On the dispute itself, I’ll yield the floor to Teller (he’s the small, silent crazy one as contrasted with Penn’s large, loud crazy one).

Outright ownership isn’t at stake, he added, but Mr. Jay’s act constituted a painstaking and innovative revival of some little-practiced classics, and a certain code of courtesy should apply.

“If an act hasn’t been prominently performed for a long time, and someone takes the trouble to bring it back from absolute death and put it into his act with fine touches, and which at least hasn’t been seen by a current generation,” he said, “the gentlemanly thing to do is say, ‘That’s his for now.'”

That said, he added, “magicians are not unique in their absence of creativity.

I have a couple of Ricky Jay’s books (I covet Cards as Weapons, but a used softcover copy of that tome starts around $200) and in one of them, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, Mr. Jay introduces us to:

Le Petomane (Joseph Pujol). Le Petomane was a performer at the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s and he was, it’s safe to say, sui generis. I believe the best way to describe Le Petomane is as a fartiste. It’s pretty obvious that:

Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky) knew all about Mr. Pujol before he made Blazing Saddles. Aside from the bean scene, there’s also the name of the Governor Brooks plays in one of his roles – William J. Le Petomane. The Gov’s conniving henchman, played by:

Harvey Korman (born Harvey Kormen – go figure) is named Hedley Lamarr. This won’t be news to anyone, but an ongoing gag is confusion of Hedley’s name with that of:

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Kiesler). If all you know about Hedy Lamarr is that she was a movie star, I encourage you to click through to her Wikipedia entry. An eventful life, to say the least – in 1942 she received a patent for a very early version of frequency hopping – in this context, to make radio guided torpedoes more difficult to defend against.

There you have it – proof positive that I ought to be committed immediately. While you’re getting the paperwork ready, I’ll just drift off a bit and put myself back in the late 30’s – Hedwig and I are getting on a Short S23 flying boat for the trip to East Africa…