indistinguishable from magic

Æon Magazine has an excellent reflection on how automata slowly infiltrated Western Europe thought, through accounts of ambassadors to far-off lands to the East and South and curious, remarkable gifts given to comparably dull European sovereigns by potentates of unbelievable wealth and learning, but rather than immediately try to reverse-engineer what wonders they’d seen or heard of, that thought veered towards the preternatural, an aberration with esoteric causes.  Albeit the spectacle of the courts of the Near East with animatronic menageries and mechanised stages sound a little like an episode of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, it was sure to impress visitors and it seems that Europe, even the educated caste, reaffirmed the maxim of author and inventor Arthur C. Clarke that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic many times over. Though I suppose innovative craftsmanship and technical knowledge was never completely ruled out, rather than cogs and gears, witnesses were at a loss to account for these displays and resorted to the usual quiver of superstitious explanations, demonic possession, planetary alignment, necromancy.
Once the forgotten industrial prowess of Antiquity was rediscovered in the late Middle Ages, clockwork and associated applications began to promulgate slowly—however, European courts also were big for the theatrical, special effects. It strikes us as rather naïve and unreasonable to think anyone could be so primitive to mistake robotics for magic, like the cargo-cults that pray to air-traffic overhead to bring more humanitarian aid, but I suppose it is quite a bit similar to the modern phenomena of readily attributing past human achievement and future direction to extra-terrestrials or conspiracy. What do you think? Is technology demystified the closer in comes to appearing like actual magic? Maybe so long as we’re privy to the research-and-development phase, we won’t cower in fear and awe.

arsenal and armoury

Though medieval times are known—particularly in Europe, for violence and brutality and tactical sophistication does not exactly leap out, there were a few rather interesting innovations that were given exposure during the Crusades and contributed to the arsenal of exchange of destructive play-things among the East and West—arsenal itself coming from the Arabic word, dār as-sināça, a workshop.
The mainstay of the European Crusaders was the siege engine or the catapult (battering rams and siege towers included), which although refined and improved, was a technology already known and utilised during antiquity—and that was really the West’s best game. They were skilled at building secure fortifications that would repel attacks but were also good an undermining defenses. The Seljuk Turks were highly skilled archers and were more mobile than European warhorses at staging ambushes however they were also in possession of a secret weapon, inspired by the so called Greek fire of the Byzantines.  Still a mystery as to the exact formula, this was an incendiary substance, and like napalm, once aflame it was impossible to extinguish and would burn even across the surface of water or could be used like a flame-thrower.

The Muslims also expertly utilised messenger pigeons to quickly relay reports and commands across vast distances, a sorcery that the Europeans had never seen before and could not hope to compete with. It was, however, the armies of the khan from the far distant Mongolian steppe encroaching on Persia and on Transylvania to the north that brought to the battlefield the most volatile new weapon. The Mongols were able to ransack Baghdad and suppress nearly an entire continent through gun-powder, but once witnessing the power of explosives, the Muslims and then the Europeans alchemists were quick to harness it for themselves.

five-by-five

tron, troff: vector map that renders cities as if out of the film Tron 

milk’s for babies: a look how cheese and tolerance to dairy changed the world

sky hostess: gorgeous vintage collection of stewardesses in uniform, via Neat-o-Rama

phoenix: from out of the rubble, a show-and-tell of San Francisco rebuilding and reinvention after the great quake

digital syndicate: a roundup of podcasts to peruse

lexeme oder news you can use

Before the Norman Conquest and the explosion of French borrowings that displaced many but certainly not all Germanic roots—at least the straightforward ones, of the language, the word for news was tidings—frozen in biblical verse and carols—news coming from the Latin by way of the French term nouvelles, the latest. I had always thought that the German Nachrichten or Neuigkeit was the German equivalent, though these words refer more to the broadcast, presentation and the quality of being hitherto unknown and novel, whereas Zeitung, associated with newspapers, only refers to the medium by convention and rather means the news in the immediate sense. In the adjacent Dutch, it is rendered tijding and from there, just a hop over the sea to tidings. Comfort and joy.