Artist Murray Groat has created four wonderfully atmospheric Hergé meets Lovecraft covers for Adventures of Tintin albums that sadly will never be. There of course is a vast tradition of homage-à-Tintin covers, often linked to current affairs, like Zartosht Soltani’s Tintin in Tehran from 2002, and many more, but I haven’t yet seen Tintin associated with Lovecraft’s universe.
There is a brilliant article by Ed Barnes at FoxNews: ‘Mystery surrounds cyber missile that crippled Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.’ When I first read it, at the least when a third into the text, I would have thought it to be fiction, hadn’t I heard about ‘Stuxnet‘ before … and Wikipedia’s entry on it cites all in all 82 sources. It seems to me, that Barnes is a fan of William Gibson’s writing, that’s the one thing. The other thing is, that nobody can deny anymore that we are living in a cyberpunked world. Have two quotes, the first one from Barnes’ article, the second one from Gibson’s 1982 short story ‘Burning Chrome.’
But as the extent of the worm’s capabilities is being understood, its genius and complexity has created another perplexing question: Who did it?
Speculation on the worm’s origin initially focused on hackers or even companies trying to disrupt competitors. But as engineers tore apart the virus they learned not only the depth of the code, its complex targeting mechanism, (despite infecting more than 100,000 computers it has only done damage at Natanz,) the enormous amount of work that went into it—Microsoft estimated that it consumed 10,000 man days of labor—and about what the worm knew, the clues narrowed the number of players that have the capabilities to create it to a handful.
“This is what nation-states build, if their only other option would be to go to war,” Joseph Wouk, an Israeli security expert wrote.
[Eric] Byres is more certain. “It is a military weapon,” he said. (Barnes 2010)Then Cyrillic alphanumerics started reeling down the monitor, twisting themselves into English halfway down. There were a lot of gaps, where the lexicon ran up against specialized military acronyms in the readout I’d bought from my man in Colorado, but it did give me some idea of what I’d bought from the Finn.
I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switch-blade and come home with a small neutron bomb.
Screwed again, I thought. What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight? The thing under the dust cover was right out of my league. I didn’t even know where to unload it, where to look for a buyer. Someone had, but he was dead, someone with a Porsche watch and a fake Belgian passport, but I’d never tried to move in those circles. The Finn’s muggers from the ‘burbs had knocked over someone who had some highly arcane connections.
The program in the jeweler’s vise was a Russian military icebreaker, a killer-virus program. (Gibson 1987 [1982]: 179)
The objectivity and integrity of contemporary science faces many threats. A cause of particular concern is the growing competition for research funding and academic positions, which, combined with an increasing use of bibliometric parameters to evaluate careers (e.g. number of publications and the impact factor of the journals they appeared in), pressures scientists into continuously producing “publishable” results. (Fanelli 2010: Introduction)
Such begins Daniele Fanelli his 2010 article on the negative consequences of the ‘publish or perish’ policy—since quite some decades running wild within academia. But since when exactly? My educated guess is: since the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the universities and the ‘academic world system’ as a whole were restructured and shaped according to the principles of cybernetics. This now may well sound like my own bias for suspecting cybernetics to lurk behind every corner. Luckily in recent years historians of science and knowledge have taken up the issue of the history of cybernetics and its impact. For a comprehensive historical study, focussing on the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, see Philipp Aumann’s book ‘Mode und Methode’ [‘Fashion and method’] published 2009, and for a concrete study of cybernetics’ influence on the universities, their structures and management, see David Gugerli’s article ‘Die Kybernetisierung der Hochschule’ (2008) [‘The cybernetification of higher education’]. Aumann has brought the meaning of cybernetics wonderfully to the point—in my mind indispensable for historical and anthropological understanding:
Kybernetik war in der idealtypischen Annahme ihrer Ganzheit genauso wie in ihren historischen Manifestationen in der Wissenschaft und in der Öffentlichkeit zunächst eine Form des Denkens—und zwar des mathematisierenden Denkens und des Denkens in Systemen. (Aumann 2009: 449)
[Cybernetics in the ideal conception of its overarching entireness, as well as in its historical manifestations in the sciences, academia, and the public, first of all was a mode of thought—of mathematizing thought and of thinking in systems. (my translation—put the blame on me)]
Quite obviously the belief in bibliometrics, impact factor, and quantified evaluation in general is a manifestation of that very mode of thought. And matchingly the ‘Science Citation Index’ and with it the concept of the ‘impact factor’ was created in 1963 by Eugene Garfield, and the word ‘bibliometrics’ itself was introduced by Alan Pritchard in 1969—everything during the heyday of cybernetics, the ‘long 1960s.’ Of course there were forerunners to bibliometrics, at least dating back to 1913, but the long 1960s can be seen as a Foucaultian rupture in regard to the impact of cybernetics. During this decade cybernetics became a discursive formation, no more restricted to the confines of academia and scientific discourse, but permeating many dimensions of society, and for sure all aspects of the nation states’ ‘apparati’ on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe. read more
… and here is a discussion of NASA’s politics concerning announcements of that ilk.
Finally I brought myself to get a proper domain and to resurrect my blog ‘xirdalium.’ Not that it was dead and gone, but definitely in an undead state. The reasons for that were manifold. The first category of reasons are technical problems with the server the original instance of ‘xirdalium’ called its home. Since several weeks more often than not you got an ‘internal server error’ message when navigating there. Reason enough to quit the server. Another technical problem was, that somehow I lost the battle against comment spam too often, finally gave up, and permanently disabled the comments by pulling the plugin. There are solutions for fighting comment spam for Blosxom, the software ‘xirdalium’ ran on, but then again I am not too much of a coder (not a coder at all, that is), the hassle was just too great. Don’t get me wrong, Blosxom is wonderful software, and I learned unbelievably much by using it, but I need something more comfortable, hence the switch to WordPress. Now I’ll customize the thing here till I get the look and feels of the first instance, and then I’ll see if I can import all ye ole content.
Superheroes are the new gods, and they come with a vast mythology. The two main universes, Marvel and DC, are huge accumulations of concepts, ideas, and narrative content, close to unmanageable. When you have played, or want to play ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’, like I have done, you might long for background on Arkham. The above movie by gametrailers furnishes it in a comprehensive manner.
Since DC/Marvel’s crossover comic ‘Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man‘ from 1976 I am a regular fanboy of heavy crossovers, I have to confess. ‘Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe‘ is a somewhat perfect specimen. Besides Ed Boon, the co-creator of the ‘Mortal Kombat‘ series, narrating, what I especially dig in this movie, is Superman firing his heat-vision right into Scorpion‘s face at point-blank range (that sound!), and then slamming him through a dozen or so walls. To do this kind of over-the-top cartoon violence Tex-Avery style full justice, I’d welcome another crossover: ‘Mortal Kombat vs. Tom & Jerry,’ or, maybe even better, vs. ‘Itchy & Scratchy.’
‘Maxpy,’ a 22-year-old programmer from Shenzhen, PR China, has developed and built a device which makes an iPod Touch into an iPhone. The ‘Apple Peel 520‘ is a case fitting around an iPod Touch, containing a battery, dock connector and SIM card.
What’s more is the Apple Peel also illustrates the evolution of China’s massive “shanzhai,” or black market, phone industry. Based mostly in Shenzhen, it is an industry characterized by the massive production of copycat mobile phones and other devices, which are sold at lower prices and often with more localized functionality than global brands [bold emphasis mine].
With the video Jeffrey “cwtrain” Eldredge uploaded to YouTube yesterday, the story of the inverse tie-knots finally seems to have come to an end. In the video Jeffrey demonstrates exactly ↵the sequence I had come up with on 19 October 2008. This knotting-sequence I had christened ‘Eldredge Variant,’ because all I did was adding two through-the-loop moves to Jeffrey’s original sequence, thereby making it into a knot. Since then I regularly wear the knot in public and even made inverse tie-knots the core topic of my Habilitationsvortrag ‘↑There is no Merovingian! Tie-knots, Neo-Dandyism and Cyberculture,’ presented on 03 February 2010. Because I only added two twists to Jeffrey’s sequence, I shied away from giving the knot a new name, although I like to call it ‘xirdalium’ in private. In order to give due credit to those involved, and to clear some matters up, here are the landmarks in the history of the inverse tie-knots:
On 21 June 2003 Luke “edeity” Housego invents the inverse tie-knots. The day before he had seen ‘Matrix Reloaded’ at the cinema and wanted to have a tie-knot as cool as the one the character ‘Merovingian’ sports in the movie.
On 28 September 2003 Luke publishes a .pdf-tutorial for his knot on the Internet. He calls his invention ‘edeity’s knot.’
On 03 February 2006 Victor Allen “Lord Whimsy” Crawford III publishes a .pdf-tutorial for a tie-knot he calls ‘The Merovingian.’ In fact it is edeity’s sequence, but rendered much more clearly than in edeity’s original .pdf. Whimsy had the idea from said .pdf, but was not sure, if he had matched the sequence.
On 16 February 2007 Henry “SimplyJustHen” Hu publishes a video on YouTube wherein he shows how to tie a knot he calls the ‘Hen Tie.’ In the video Henry makes clear that he has the idea from edeity’s .pdf-tutorial, but that he was not sure if he had matched the sequence. In fact Henry’s sequence slightly differs from edeity’s.
On 18 February 2007 the knot called ‘Merovingian’ appears in the German version of the Wikipedia, linking to Lord Whimsy’s tutorial.
On 04 May 2008 Jeffrey “cwtrain” Eldredge publishes a video on YouTube, demonstrating how to tie an even larger inverse tie-knot he calls the ‘Eldredge.’ Luke “edeity” Housego gave the world the inverse tie-knots, and Jeffrey Eldredge invented a subterfuge in tie-knotting not to be found in the literature so far: He simply tucks away the rest of the tie’s narrow end under the collar, thereby making possible the largest tie-knot known. This move rightfully can be called ‘the Eldredge tuckaway.’ But there is a problem with Jeffrey’s knot: It’s not a knot, but more a ‘wrapping.’
On 19 October 2008 Alexander “zephyrin_xirdal” Knorr publishes the description and sequence of the ‘Eldredge Variant’ in his weblog, making the ‘Eldredge’ into a true knot.
On 19 June 2010 Jeffrey Eldredge publishes the video ‘The Eldredge Knot: Revisited’ on YouTube, demonstrating how to tie the sequence of the ‘Eldredge Variant.
In detail and with background information, pictures, sequences, diagrams, and movies the, more or less, full story can be read in my old blog-entries (in chronological order): ↵merovingian ties, ↵more merovingian ties, ↵the eldredge, and ↵eldredge variant.