NationalGeographic | Great news! [Princeton University professor] Joe Taylor talked to
Angel Vazquez, who made contact with the observatory via ham radio.
Everybody there is safe and sound,” reported Arecibo deputy director Joan Schmelz.
However, it’s not yet clear how staff who weathered the storm in town
are doing, or what conditions are like for local communities. Reports
suggest that the road up to the facility is covered in debris and is
largely inaccessible.
Still, according to the National Science Foundation,
which funds the majority of the telescope’s operations, the observatory
is well stocked with food, well water, and fuel for generators. As of
Thursday night, there are enough supplies for the staff hunkered down
there to survive for at least a week, although Vazquez reports that it’s
not clear how long the generators will be working.
“As soon as the roads are physically passable, a team will try to get up to the observatory,” the NSF statement says.
Because of its deep water well and generator, the observatory has
been a place for those in nearby towns to gather, shower, and cook after
past hurricanes. It also has an on-site helicopter landing pad, so
making sure the facility is safe in general is not just of scientific
importance, but is also relevant for local relief efforts.
Built in 1963, the Arecibo Observatory has become a cultural icon,
known both for its size and for its science. For most of its 54-year
existence, Arecibo was the largest radio telescope in the world, but in
2016, a Chinese telescope called FAST—with a dish measuring 1,600 feet across—surpassed Arecibo in size, although it’s not yet fully operational.
The observatory was originally designed for national defense during
the Cold War, when the U.S. wanted to see if it could detect Soviet
satellites (and maybe missiles and bombs) based on how they alter the
portion of Earth’s atmosphere called the ionosphere. Later, the
telescope became instrumental in the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence (SETI) programs and in other aspects of radio astronomy.
SFGate | One person in Arecibo died after being swept away by rising water.
Officials believe there are probably others they haven't yet been able
to confirm.
At the intersection of Routes 2 and 1o in Arecibo, employees of the
Gulf Express gas station and their families - about 20 people in all -
were hard at work Saturday. Their boots and sneakers were caked with mud
because there is mud everywhere: On their pants and shirts, in their
cars and on the walls of their homes. The makeshift cleanup crew was
using brooms to sweep out the grayish brown slop that lay two or three
inches thick inside.
After Maria blew threw the city, taking down trees and power lines, the flash floods came.
"The water had to be at least six, maybe seven feet high," said
Nelson Rodriguez, an employee at the Gulf Express. "It took everything.
All the medicine in the pharmacy, all the food, it's gone."
Every home and business in this part of Arecibo was affected by the
flooding. Two blocks away from the gas station, Eduardo Carraquillo, 45,
helped his father, Ismael Freytes, 69, clean the mud out of their
yellow, first-floor apartment. Inside, a film, rising six feet high on
the walls, marked where water stagnated for much of a full day.
"The water just pushed through the door, as if it had been left
open," Carraquillo said. "We all evacuated the day after the storm,
because we were warned about the flash flood that might come. Everyone
left, just to be safe, except for two older men that lived a few houses
away. They just didn't want to leave. When we came back, we found out
the flood had killed them right there in that apartment."
Some Puerto Rico officials believe it could be months before the
island recovers and that it will be at least a year before some sense of
normalcy returns.
Officials estimate it will take three weeks for hospitals to regain
power, and about six months for the rest of the island to have
electricity. By Saturday, 25 percent of the population had
telecommunications connections.
Gov. Ricardo Rosselló announced efforts to centralize medical care
and shelters for the elderly. He also plans to distribute 250 satellite
phones among mayors to facilitate communication. He said he urged the
mayors to develop a "buddy system" with other local officials.
Yulín, San Juan's mayor, said she has never seen such devastation,
but she also said she has never seen such determination to make it. She
described a phrase she keeps hearing from residents: "Yo soy Boricua. I
am from Puerto Rico."
Guardian | Large amounts of federal aid began moving into Puerto Rico
on Saturday, as the island tried to recover from a battering by
hurricane Maria. Local officials praised the Trump administration’s
response but also called for the emergency loosening of rules long
blamed for condemning the US territory to second-class economic status.
In the north-west of the island, people began returning to their
homes after a spillway eased pressure on a dam that cracked after more
than 1ft of rain fell in the wake of the hurricane. Though water
continued to pour out of rain-swollen Lake Guajataca, the dam had not
burst by Saturday night.
Upstream of the towns of Quebradillas and Isabela, the state of the
dam had prompted stern official warnings from Governor Ricardo Rossello
and the US National Weather Service (NWS). Federal officials said Friday
that 70,000 people would have to be evacuated, although Javier Jimenez,
mayor of the nearby town of San Sebastian, said he believed the number
was far smaller. Secretary of Public Affairs Ramon Rosario said about
300 families were in harm’s way.
The NWS extended a flash flood watch for communities along the
rain-swollen Guajataca River until 2pm local time on Sunday. If the dam
failed, the NWS warned, the flooding would be life-threatening. “Stay
away or be swept away,” it said.
The governor said there was “significant damage” to the dam and
authorities believed it could give way at any moment. “We don’t know how
long it’s going to hold,” Rossello said. “The integrity of the
structure has been compromised in a significant way.”
Some residents nonetheless returned to their homes on Saturday as
water levels in the reservoir began to sink. “There were a lot of people
worried and crying, but that’s natural, because the reservoir was about
to break through,” said Maria Nieves, 43. “They couldn’t open the
spillway until later in the night.”
The 345-yard dam, which was built around 1928, holds back a man-made
lake covering about two square miles. More than 15in of rain from Maria
fell on the surrounding mountains.
The aid effort quickened with the opening of the island’s main port
in the capital, San Juan, allowing 11 ships to bring in 1.6 million
gallons of water, 23,000 cots, dozens of generators and food. Dozens
more shipments are expected in upcoming days.
dailymail | The so-called 'Christian numerologist' who
alleged that the world would end on September 23 has clarified that the
apocalypse has in fact been delayed.
Speaking to the Washington Post,
conspiracy theorist David Meade - who claimed that a mysterious planet
would collide with Earth - is now saying that Saturday only marks the
beginning of the end of the end of times.
Indeed,
Saturday will see the beginning of a number of cataclysmic events that
will occur over a number of weeks, that will lead to our demise.
'The world is not ending, but the world as we know it is ending.'
Meade added: 'A major part of the world will not be the same the beginning of October.'
Meade
used the 'biblically significant' number 33 and his interpretation of
the Bible's Book of Revelation to suggest that the legendary - and
widely debunked - planet Nibiru would strike Earth on September 23.
The impact would set in motion cataclysmic events, according to Meade.
Nibiru would strike 33 days after the total solar eclipse. In his analysis, Meade cited how Jesus allegedly lived for 33 years.
'I’m talking astronomy. I’m talking the Bible,' Meade told the Washington Post.
Another Christian fringe group, called Unsealed, claims that a Biblical image will appear on the sky on September 23.
gizmodo | Many Californians’ regularly scheduled broadcasts were interrupted
Thursday morning with strange emergency messages warning of
extraterrestrial invasions and the beginning of Armageddon. The bizarre
warnings aired on TVs in the Orange County area, affecting Cox and
Spectrum cable users, according to the Orange County Register.
One
video of the broadcast uploaded to YouTube includes a terrified,
breathless voice saying: “The space program made contact with... They
are not what they claim to be. They have infiltrated a lot of, uh, a lot
of aspects of military establishment, particularly Area 51. The
disasters that are coming—the military—I’m sorry the government knows
about them...”
pbs | Dr. John G.
Trump, an electrical engineer with the National Defense Research
Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was
called in to analyze the Tesla papers in OAP custody. Following a
three-day investigation, Dr. Trump concluded:
His [Tesla's] thoughts and efforts during at least
the past 15 years were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and
somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and
wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable
principles or methods for realizing such results.
Just after World War II, there was a renewed interest in beam
weapons. Copies of Tesla's papers on particle beam weaponry were sent
to Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. An operation code-named
"Project Nick" was heavily funded and placed under the command of
Brigadier General L. C. Craigie to test the feasibility of Tesla's
concept. Details of the experiments were never published, and the
project was apparently discontinued. But something peculiar happened.
The copies of Tesla's papers disappeared and nobody knows what happened
to them.
In 1952, Tesla's remaining papers and possessions were
released to Sava Kosanovic´ and returned to Belgrade, Yugoslavia where a
museum was created in the inventor's honor. For many years, under
Tito's communist regime, it was extremely difficult for Western
journalists and scholars to gain access to the Tesla archive in
Yugoslavia; even then they were allowed to see only selected papers.
This was not the case for Soviet scientists who came in delegations
during the 1950s. Concerns increased in 1960 when Soviet Premier
Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet that "a new and fantastic
weapon was in the hatching stage."
Work on beam weapons also continued in the United States. In
1958 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a
top-secret project code-named "Seesaw" at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
to develop a charged-particle beam weapon. More than ten years and
twenty-seven million dollars later, the project was abandoned "because
of the projected high costs associated with implementation as well as
the formidable technical problems associated with propagating a beam
through very long ranges in the atmosphere." Scientists associated with
the project had no knowledge of Tesla's papers.
In the late 1970s, there was fear that the Soviets may have
achieved a technological breakthrough. Some U.S. defense analysts
concluded that a large beam weapon facility was under construction near
the Sino-Soviet border in Southern Russia.
The American response to this "technological surprise" was
the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by President Ronald Reagan in
1983. Teams of government scientists were urged to "turn their great
talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the
means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete."
Today, after a half-century of research and billions of
dollars of investment, the SDI program is generally considered a
failure, and there is still no realistic means of defense against a
nuclear missile attack.
airminded | The 'aeros' themselves look not much like any real airships that flew
later; they are more spherical than elongated and so not streamlined.
(It's tempting to read the image at the top of this post as showing an
airship from the front and below, but comparing it with his other
paintings in fact it's a side, or 'Flanck' in Dellschau's idiosyncratic
English, view.) Then there's the 'Lifting Fluid', suppa, with its
wonderful properties. There are only a few possible lifting gases, and the only ones not discovered by the 1850s are neon (which is only just viable) and (much better) helium,
both of which are very rare on Earth and difficult to extract. It's
conceivable that they could have been discovered earlier than we
currently believe, but it would require a substantial of resources to
produce enough for use in airships (as is well known, Germany was forced
to use hydrogen for its airships in the 1930s due to a US embargo on
helium exports). And again, we would then have to accept that this
discovery was then forgotten for decades, like the secret of the aeros
themselves. The improbabilities are piling up alarmingly.
[Dellschau] illustrates a remarkable number of designs --
maybe as many as 100 -- for airships with names such as Aero Mio, Aero
Trump, Aero Schnabel and Aero Mary. (There's even an Aero Jourdan.) All
were powered by a secret formula that Dellschau called both "supe" and
"suppe"; it could both negate gravity and drive the ships' wheels, side
paddles and compressor motors.
One drawing tells the story of Adolf Goetz's Aero Goeit, recklessly
commandeered by an unskilled pilot; the airship got tangled in a Sequoia
tree, and the interloper died of a broken neck. Another cautionary tale
involves Jacob Mischer, a pilot who went down in flames in the Aero
Gander; Dellschau hints that he was sabotaged by other club members, who
suspected him of using the aircraft to make money by hauling cargo.
But most of the airships' flights were safe -- and great fun.
Dellschau depicts his aviators enjoying hot breakfasts, and delights in
enumerating the ships' clever gadgets. He often bedecked his watercolor
paintings with little press clippings -- from Scientific American, the
Houston Chronicle and an unidentified German-language newspaper -- that
recount air disasters; Dellschau called them "press blooms." Against
paintings of the Sonora club's successes, the clippings seem intended as
an ironic counterpoint.
Dellschau never seems to explain why the club worked so hard to
protect its secrecy, but he shows the members going to great lengths to
do so. By day, the Aero Goeit was disguised as a gypsy wagon, so it
could travel open roads undetected. Dellschau writes that a club member
was banned from developing a machine because he'd talked to outsiders.
And of course, even years after the club disbanded, many of Dellschau's
own comments are rendered in code. Apparently, whatever it was that he
had to say was too private even for his own notebooks.
The first and most obvious thing to note is that the capabilities of
these aircraft are far in advance of the technology of the day. The first airship flight was made by Henri Giffard
in France in 1852; with only three horsepower and a speed of about six
miles an hour it was unable to fly into the wind. His subsequent
attempts to build bigger and more powerful airships failed. A decade
later, in what is perhaps the closest known parallel to Dellschau's
Aeros, Solomon Andrews flew the Aereon,
a weird balloon/airship hybrid with three gas envelopes, over Perth
Amboy, New Jersey. At about the same time, according to Dellschau, the
Sonora Aero Club had perfected controlled, powered, lighter-than-air
flight and many
of its machines were secretly flying in California's skies -- after
which they disappeared, leaving no trace in the documentary record. This
is incredible and in fact not credible.
HoustonPress | In 1969, Mary Jane Victor was an art history student at the
University of St. Thomas -- and a regular patron of the O.K. Trading
Center. She remembers being amazed to come across the scrapbooks.
At the university art department, Victor was working for art patron
Dominique de Menil, a Schlumberger heiress famous for her eye for
surrealists and the primitive art that inspired them. Victor promptly
told de Menil about her find and put her in touch with the junk dealer.
Soon after, the heiress paid Washington $1,500 for four of the earliest
notebooks.
"Dellschau for her was an eccentric," recalls Steen. "She had a
wonderful affinity for eccentrics." Half joking, she told Steen she was
especially drawn to the coded phrase "DM=X" scrawled across the top of
many drawings. She thought DM stood for "Dominique de Menil." And the
rest somehow equaled her own death.
Soon after de Menil acquired the notebooks, she exhibited some of
their leaves in "Flight," a University of St. Thomas show on the
subject. And it was there that Pete Navarro, one of the most dogged
investigators of Dellschau's mysteries, first encountered the aeros.
Navarro, a Houston commercial artist, was intrigued by UFOs,
especially by a mysterious rash of airship sightings near the turn of
the century, not long before Dellschau began his drawings. Navarro read
about the St. Thomas exhibition one morning at the breakfast table. And
when he saw Dellschau's drawings, he felt there had to be a connection
to the sightings.
Ufologists believe that between November 1896 and April 1897,
thousands of Americans in 18 states between California and Indiana saw a
curious dirigible-like flying machine floating eastward. No physical
evidence of a ship or a designer has ever surfaced, but newspapers such
as the New York Times, Dallas Morning News, San Antonio Daily Express
and Chicago Tribune devoted space to the sightings. In this century,
authors Daniel Cohen and William Chariton have published books on the
subject.
The mysterious craft was first spotted on November 17, 1896, by R.L.
Lowery, near a brewery in Sacramento, California. According to various
newspaper reports, the craft seemed to travel eastward. In spring, it
was spotted in Texas.
At 1:16 a.m. on April 17, 1897, the Reverend J.W. Smith saw what he
thought was a shooting star in the night sky of Childress, Texas, then
decided it was really a flying machine. Eventually he recognized it as
the much-discussed cigar-shaped airship.
Four days after Smith's UFO sighting, the Houston Daily Post gave a
lengthy account of his and other spottings of the same airship, a
30-foot-long skiff-shaped contraption outfitted with revolving wheels
and sails.
Jim Nelson, a farmer from Atlanta, Texas, recalled glimmers of red,
green and blue lights and "a glaring gleam of white light" that shone
directly in front of the airship. In Belton, a crowd witnessed the same
vehicle the next night. They claimed its pilots spoke loudly as they
flew overhead, but the ship's velocity was so great, their words were
lost in the wind.
According to other newspaper accounts, witnesses managed to talk
with the pilots. Sometimes townspeople even came upon the crew members,
who were apparently making repairs to their marvelous machine and were
willing to chat.
In 1972, three years after de Menil bought her four notebooks, Pete
Navarro learned that more Dellschau notebooks were collecting dust at
Washington's junk shop. Nobody wanted them, so Navarro gave the dealer
$65 for one book. Hooked by what he saw, he returned and offered $500
more for the remaining seven.
Navarro tried to sell four of the notebooks to de Menil; she chose
not to buy them -- perhaps because she liked the work in her own
notebooks better. De Menil owned some of Dellschau's earliest notebooks
and believed that they included his best work. As the artist aged, his
works grew looser, more expressionistic; de Menil seems to have
preferred his earlier precision.
But for Navarro, the notebooks weren't about artistic quality; they
were pieces of a historical puzzle. He visited Helen and Tommy Britton,
cousins of Leo Jr. Helen promised she'd try to find more books and
pictures of Dellschau that were hidden around the family's old house,
but she died before she could locate anything. Navarro also talked to
Tommy Britton, who was a preteen when Dellschau died. Now in his 80s, he
may be the last living relative who remembers Dellschau. (Britton
couldn't be reached for this story.)
After culling a vast number of such press clippings, Navarro created
an elaborate map of every Texas sighting and wrote several papers. Some
are on file at the Houston Public Library's Texas archive; others are
available on the Internet at www.keelynet.com.
In "The Mysterious Mr. Wilson and the Books of Dellschau," co-written
with UFO enthusiast Jimmy Ward, Navarro posits a connection between
Dellschau's clandestine society and a mysterious pilot named Hiram
Wilson mentioned in an article by the San Antonio Daily Express on April
26, 1897, about a local airship sighting. The article identifies the
airship's occupants as Wilson, from Goshen, New York; his father,
Willard H. Wilson, assistant master mechanic of the New York Central
Railroad; and their co-pilot C.J. Walsh, an electrical engineer from San
Francisco.
In that story, Hiram Wilson divulged to witnesses that his airship
design came from an uncle. Navarro believes that the uncle could have
been another Wilson -- the Sonora club member Tosh Wilson mentioned in
one of Dellschau's watercolors. According to Navarro, Dellschau's coded
messages say that Tosh searched seven years to rediscover suppe, the
lost fuel, and finally succeeded.
Navarro has found no trace of a Hiram Wilson residing in Goshen. But
he does offer evidence of his presence at 1897 airship sightings in
Greenville, Texas (on April 16); near Lake Charles, Louisiana (on April
19); near Beaumont, Texas (April 19); Uvalde, Texas (April 20); Lacoste,
Texas (April 24); and Eagle Pass, Texas (April 24).
On April 28, the Galveston Daily News ran the headline "Airship
Inventor Wilson." The article reported the inventor's encounter with one
Captain Akers, a customs agent from Eagle Pass. Akers told the
newspaper that Wilson "was a finely educated man about 24 years of age
and seemed to have money with which to prosecute his investigations."
Based on such reports, Navarro proposes several scenarios. Perhaps
the ship spotted near San Antonio had been flown by both Hiram and
Willard Wilson. Or perhaps each pilot was steering his own airship
across Texas. (This would explain why witnesses living a distance from
one another offered simultaneous sightings of a man who identified
himself as Wilson.) Navarro also speculates that one of these Wilsons
was the same Tosh Wilson who had once belonged to the Sonora Aero Club.
In that scenario, Tosh would have been reliving the glory days Dellschau
could only illustrate in his notebooks.
To confirm the aero club's activities, Navarro has traveled to
Sonora, talked to historians, searched the newspapers and even visited
all the cemeteries. He found nothing. At times, he says, he couldn't
help thinking that Dellschau made everything up.
Eventually, whether the Sonora club was a dream or real stopped
mattering to Navarro. One day, he remembers being absorbed by a passage
inscribed in one of the drawings: "Wonder Weaver, you will unriddle my
writings." Navarro grew convinced that he and his brother, Rudy, "were
weaving wonders." He says of Dellschau, "Maybe we had similar minds."
To crack Dellschau's 40-symbol code, Navarro enlisted the help of
his brother, Rudy, and a couple who spoke German. He says the effort
took only one month, but he won't release the key or a literal
translation.
Navarro will talk only about the same phrase that enchanted de
Menil: "DM=X." To Navarro, it stands for "NYMZA," an acronym for a
secret society that controlled the Sonora club's doings. Based on
Navarro's papers, some ufologists have speculated that NYMZA was
controlled by -- what else? -- aliens; Navarro doesn't buy that theory.
Navarro explains that he's saving his best stuff for his
collaborator, Dennis Crenshaw, who's writing a book called The Secrets
of Dellschau. But Steen, at the Menil, isn't convinced that Navarro
really deciphered the symbols. Steen once asked Navarro to translate the
code; Navarro would tell him the meaning of only a couple of sentences.
Navarro is clearly torn between showing off and keeping secrets.
He's compiled a voluminous scrapbook titled "Dellschau's Aeros." He
proudly showed it to me. It's full of wild code translations and weird
exegeses on the aeros and oddments that Dellschau just stuffed, unbound,
in the notebooks: cartoons, a photocopy of Dellschau's marriage
certificate, letters, maps, clippings and more clippings about all
manner of harebrained inventions. There's even a picture of Otto,
Bavaria's Mad Monarch.
theatlantic | It was the time of Gold Rush, and
people of every nationality were pouring into California in search of
that earth that would make them rich.
The settlement of Sonora,
about 130 miles east of San Francisco, was booming. It was there, in the
saloon of one of the local boarding houses, that a group of men would
get together every Friday night and talk of dreams. Well, just one
dream, really: human flight.
They called themselves the Sonora
Aero Club and, over time, they counted some 60 members, possibly many
more. Their ranks included great characters, such as Peter Mennis,
inventor of the Club's secret "Lifting Fluid," later described as "a
rough Man, whit as kind a heart as to be found in verry few living
beengs," despite being "adicted to strong drink" and "Flat brocke." The
Aero Club's rules: Roughly once a quarter, each member had to stand
before the gathered group and "thoroughly exercise their jaws" in
telling how he would build an airship.
On
one night in 1858, a man by the name of Gustav Freyer stood to present
his invention: the Aero Guarda, an airship surrounded by a sort of
hamster-wheel cage that would protect its passengers upon landfall.
Freyer was a highly educated mechanic, and he waltzed up to the
blackboard, took the chalk in hand, and began.
"Brothers," he
said. "You all know I am not quite a professor." He looked at his fellow
airship enthusiasts and continued: "I give you a nut to crack. My idea
is to put a guard fence all around the machine to fall -- land -- easy
and always safe, to keep some of you smarties from falling out." His
contraption, he argued, would somersault upon hitting water, in such a
way that the passengers would always "stay perpendicular, I mean head up
on the floor of the hold."
He drew a sketch on the board and declared his work done.
"Well," he concluded, "now some of
you have to pay the treat for me. Tell ya the truth, I am busted and dry
as a fish!" And they bought him a beer, lifted up their glasses, and
toasted his good health.
Or perhaps they didn't. Perhaps Gustav
Freyer never stood up among his comrades and proposed this ridiculous
design. Perhaps there was no Gustav Freyer, no Friday nights at the
saloon talking about flight, no clink of the glasses to celebrate a
new-fangled airship design.
Perhaps the Sonora Aero Club never existed at all.
designobserver | Sometime in the mid-1960s, a junk dealer in Houston, Texas acquired 12
large notebooks that had been thrown out to the curb after a house fire.
Filled with mysterious, double-sided, collaged watercolor drawings, the
journals were eventually discovered at the junk shop in 1969 by art
history student Mary Jane Victor. Victor attended the University of St.
Thomas in Houston, where she worked with art patron Dominique de Menil.
After telling Menil about the books, Menil purchased four of the
notebooks for the (then) hefty sum of $1,500, and included them
immediately in an exhibition at Rice University in Houston. Pete
Navarro, a local graphic artist and mystery enthusiast, upon seeing the
exhibition — eventually acquired the remaining books, studying them
obsessively for more than 15 years. Navarro eventually sold the
remaining books to museums and galleries.
It turns out that the
drawings/watercolors were the work of one Charles August Albert
Dellschau (1830 - 1923). Dellschau was a butcher for most of his life
and only after his retirement in 1899 did he begin his incredible career
as a self-taught artist. He began with three books entitled Recollections
which purported to describe a secret organization called the Sonora
Aero Club. Dellschau described his duties in the club as that of the
draftsman. Within his collaged watercolors were newspaper clippings (he
called them “press blooms”) of early attempts at flight overlapped with
his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret
formula he cryptically referred to as “NB Gas” or “Suppa” — the “aeros”
(as Dellscahu called them) were steampunk like contraptions with
multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments.
Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic,
these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz.
The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to
1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost
magical. Newspapers of that period were full of stories about air travel
feats and the acrobatic aerial dogfights of WWI were legend.
Researchers have found no account of a Sonora Aero Club, not in Texas or
California. So was this simply a fantasy-fueled creative exercise by a
retired man smitten with the wonders of flight? There were numerous
accounts of pre-20th century UFOs in the Houston area — so perhaps Mr.
Dellschau had witnessed something that ignited his simmering creative
soul? The best we can do is speculate on the mystery and be thankful for
the Houston junk dealer who saved a piece of art history.
All
works are watercolor, pencil and collage on paper, approx. 17 x 18
inches, Images are from various public and private collections, supplied
by Stephen Romano, Brooklyn, NY. A book on the images is forthcoming at the end of March from Marquand Books/D.A.P.
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strategic-culture | On
September 18, the US Senate voted to ban the use of products from the
Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab by the federal
government, citing national security risk. The vote was included as an
amendment to an annual defense policy spending bill approved by the
Senate on the same day. The measure pushed forward by New Hampshire
Democrat Jeanne Shaheen has strong support in the House of
Representatives, which also must vote on a defense spending bill. The
legislation bars the use of Kaspersky Lab software in government
civilian and military agencies.
On September 13, a binding directive issued
by Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke, ordered federal
agencies to remove Kaspersky Lab products from government computers over
concerns the Russia-based cybersecurity software company might be
vulnerable to Russian government influence. All federal departments and
agencies were given 30 days to identify any Kaspersky products in use on
their networks. The departments have another 60 days to begin removal
of the software. The statement says, «The department is concerned about
the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence
and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that
allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from
Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks».
The Russian law does not mention American networks, nevertheless it is
used as a pretext to explain the concern.
Similar bans against US government use of Kaspersky products have been suggested before. In 2015, Bloomberg Newsreported that the company has «close ties to Russian spies».
According toUS News,
scrutiny of the company mounted in 2017, fueled by U.S. intelligence
assessments and high-profile federal investigations of Russian
interference in the 2016 election. This summer, the General Service
Administration, which oversees purchasing by the federal government,
removed Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. In June, a proposal prohibiting
the US military from using the company's products was reportedly
included in the Senate's draft of the Department of Defense's budget
rules. US intelligence leaders said earlier this year that Kaspersky Lab
was already generally not allowed on military networks.
moonofalabama | It is indisputable that the generals are now ruling in Washington DC. They came to power over decades by shaping culture
through their sponsorship of Hollywood, by manipulating the media
through "embedded" reporting and by forming and maintaining the
countries infrastructure through the Army Corps of Engineers. The
military, through the NSA as well as through its purchasing power,
controls the information flow on the internet. Until recently the
military establishment only ruled from behind the scene. The other parts
of the power triangle,
the corporation executives and the political establishment, were more
visible and significant. But during the 2016 election the military bet
on Trump and is now, after he unexpectedly won, collecting its price.
Trump's success as the "Not-Hillary" candidate
was based on an anti-establishment insurgency. Representatives of that
insurgency, Flynn, Bannon and the MAGA voters, drove him through his
first months in office. An intense media campaign was launched to
counter them and the military took control of the White House. The
anti-establishment insurgents were fired. Trump is now reduced to public
figure head of a stratocracy - a military junta which nominally follows
the rule of law.
Ultimate power to shape American foreign and security policy has fallen into the hands of three military men [...] ... Being ruled by generals seems preferable to the alternative. It isn’t. ... [It]
leads toward a distorted set of national priorities, with military
“needs” always rated more important than domestic ones. ... It
is no great surprise that Trump has been drawn into the foreign policy
mainstream; the same happened to President Obama early in his
presidency. More ominous is that Trump has turned much of his power over to generals. Worst of all, many Americans find this reassuring.
They are so disgusted by the corruption and shortsightedness of our
political class that they turn to soldiers as an alternative. It is a
dangerous temptation.
The country has fallen to that temptation even on social-economic issues:
In the wake of the deadly racial violence in Charlottesville
this month, five of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were hailed as moral
authorities for condemning hate in less equivocal terms than the
commander in chief did. ... On social policy, military leaders have been voices for moderation.
washingtonexaminer | Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said someone leaked information about his call
this week with White House chief of staff John Kelly, possibly to
undermine his ability to speak directly with President Trump about
WikiLeaks.
The Republican congressman from California spoke with Kelly on
Wednesday regarding his recent meeting with WikiLeaks publisher Julian
Assange in London, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday evening, and broached a possible trade.
Rohrabacher
reportedly used the word "deal" in his conversation with Kelly and said
Assange would get a pardon or "something like that" in exchange for
information files on a data-storage device showing that Russia did not
hack Democratic emails that WikiLeaks published last year during the
2016 campaign.
"He would get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was not proof," Rohrabacher told Kelly, according to the Journal.
Rohrabacher said after his August meeting with Assange that WikiLeaks
could disprove the conclusion of U.S. spy agencies that Russia was
responsible for hacking Democratic emails, and that he would seek a
meeting with Trump to discuss the information.
Rohrabacher told the Washington Examiner on Friday evening
that he would not confirm quotes attributed to him, and said nobody in
his office was responsible for disclosing the call.
"I have honored the confidentially of a very important
business-related call," he said, speculating that someone inside the
White House or within U.S. intelligence agencies leaked the call.
"I don't know who it is, all I know is I'm up against an array of
very powerful forces, including the intelligence services and major
newspapers that are basically allied with the liberal Left who have
every reason to undermine communication on this issue," he told the Washington Examiner.
"Look, there are very powerful forces at work," he added. "We've got
the NSA, the FBI and the CIA, all of whom confirmed a major lie that was
being used for political purposes and a lie that was repeated and
repeated in order to undercut our new president."
Rohrabacher said White House leaks to the press are particularly bad
during Republican presidencies, as staffers attempt to ingratiate
themselves with reporters, and he's not ruling that out as an
explanation.
tomdispatch |By Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security
studies at Hampshire College and the author of 14 books including, most
recently, The Race for What’s Left. He is currently completing work on a new book, All Hell Breaking Loose, on climate change and American national security. Originally published at TomDispatch
Deployed to the Houston area to assist in Hurricane Harvey relief
efforts, U.S. military forces hadn’t even completed their assignments
when they were hurriedly dispatched to Florida, Puerto Rico, and the
U.S. Virgin Islands to face Irma, the fiercest hurricane ever recorded
in the Atlantic Ocean. Florida Governor Rick Scott, who had sent members
of the state National Guard to devastated Houston, anxiously recalled
them while putting in place emergency measures for his own state. A
small flotilla of naval vessels, originally sent to waters off Texas,
was similarly redirected
to the Caribbean, while specialized combat units drawn from as far
afield as Colorado, Illinois, and Rhode Island were rushed to Puerto
Rico and the Virgin Islands. Meanwhile, members of the California
National Guard were being mobilized to fight wildfires raging across that state (as across much of the West) during its hottest summer on record.
Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the
damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas
caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive
thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name — not
yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that. “The
firepower of the federal government” was being trained on Harvey, as
William Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), put it
in a blunt expression of this warlike approach. But don’t expect any of
the military officials involved in such efforts to identify climate
change as the source of their new strategic orientation, not while
Commander in Chief Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office refusing to acknowledge the reality of global warming or its role in heightening the intensity of major storms; not while he continues to stock his administration, top to bottom, with climate-change deniers.
Until Trump moved into the White House, however, senior military officers in the Pentagon were speaking openly
of the threats posed to American security by climate change and how
that phenomenon might alter the very nature of their work. Though mum’s
the word today, since the early years of this century military
officials have regularly focused on and discussed such matters, issuing
striking warnings
about an impending increase in extreme weather events — hurricanes,
incessant rainfalls, protracted heat waves, and droughts — and ways in
which that would mean an ever-expanding domestic role for the military
in both disaster response and planning for an extreme future.
That future, of course, is now. Like other well-informed people,
senior military officials are perfectly aware that it’s difficult to
attribute any given storm, Harvey and Irma included, to human-caused
climate change with 100% confidence. But they also know that hurricanes
draw their fierce energy from the heat of tropical waters, and that
global warming is raising
the temperatures of those waters. It’s making storms like Harvey and
Irma, when they do occur, ever more powerful and destructive. “As
greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global
temperatures increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating,”
the Department of Defense (DoD) bluntly explained
in the Quadrennial Defense Review, a 2014 synopsis of defense policy.
This, it added, “may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of
future missions, including defense support to civil authorities” — just
the sort of crisis we’ve been witnessing over these last weeks.
As this statement suggests, any increase in climate-related extreme
events striking U.S. territory will inevitably lead to a commensurate
rise in American military support for civilian agencies, diverting key
assets — troops and equipment — from elsewhere. While the Pentagon can
certainly devote substantial capabilities to a small number of
short-term emergencies, the multiplication and prolongation of such
events, now clearly beginning to occur, will require a substantial
commitment of forces, which, in time, will mean a major reorientation of
U.S. security policy for the climate change era. This may not be
something the White House is prepared to do today, but it may soon find
itself with little choice, especiallysinceit seems so intent on crippling all civilian governmental efforts related to climate change.
thesaker | We are hard-coded to be credulous and uncritically accept all the
demonization of Nazis and Soviets because we are Jews and White
Russians. Careful here, I am NOT saying that the Nazis and Soviets were
not evil – they definitely were – but what I am saying is that we, Jews
and Russians, are far more willing to accept and endorse any version of
history which makes the Nazis and Soviets some kind of exceptionally
evil people and that, in contrast, we almost instinctively reject any
notion that “our” side (in this case I mean *your* side, the American
one since you, unlike me, consider yourselves American) was just as bad
(if only because your side never murdered Jews and Russians). So let’s
look at this “our/your side” for a few minutes.
By the time the USA entered WWII it had already committed the worse
crime in human history, the poly-genocide of an entire continent,
followed by the completely illegal and brutal annexation of the lands
stolen from the Native Americans. Truly, Hitler would have been proud.
But that is hardly all, the Anglo invaders then proceeded to wage
another illegal and brutal war of annexation against Mexico from which
they stole a huge chunk of land which includes modern Texas, California,
Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico! Yes, all this land was illegally
occupied and stolen by your side not once, but TWICE! And do I even need
to mention the horrors of slavery to add to the “moral tally” of your
side by the time the US entered the war? Right there I think that there
is more than enough evidence that your side was morally worse than
either the Nazis or the Soviets. The entire history of the USA is one of
endless violence, plunder, hypocrisy, exploitation, imperialism,
oppression and wars. Endless wars of aggression. None of them defensive
by any stretch of the imagination. That is quite unique in human
history. Can you think of a nastier, more bloodthirsty regime? I can’t.
Should I even mention the British “atrocities tally”, ranging from
opium wars, to the invention of concentration camps, to the creation of
Apartheid, the horrors of the occupation of Ireland, etc. etc. etc.?
I can just hear you say that yes, this was horrible, but that does
not change the fact that in WWII the USA “saved Europe”. But is that
really so?
To substantiate my position, I have put together a separate PDF file
which lists 5 sources, 3 in English, 2 in Russian. You can download it
here:
I have translated the key excerpts of the Russian sources and I am
presenting them along with the key excerpts of the English sources.
Please take a look at this PDF and, if you can, please read the full
original articles I quote. I have stressed in bold red
the key conclusions of these sources. You will notice that there are
some variations in the figures, but the conclusions are, I think,
undeniable. The historical record show that:
The Soviet Union can be credited with the destruction of roughly 80%
of the Nazi military machine. The US-UK correspondingly can be credited
with no more than 20% of the Allied war effort.
The scale and scope of the battles on the Eastern Front completely
dwarf the biggest battles on the Western Front. Battles in the West
involved Divisions and Brigades, in the East they involved Armies and
Groups of Armies. That is at least one order of magnitude of difference.
The USA only entered the war a year after Stalingrad and the Kursk
battle when it was absolutely clear that the Nazis would lose the war.
The truth is that the Americans only entered the war when it was
clear that the Nazis would be defeated and that their real motive was
not the “liberation of oppressed Europe” but to prevent the Soviets from
occupying all of Europe. The Americans never gave a damn about the mass
murder of Jews or Russians, all they cared about was a massive
land-grab (yet again).
[Sidebar: By the way, and lest you think that I claim
that only Americans act this way, here is another set of interesting
dates:
Nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: August 6 and 9, 1945
Soviet Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation: August 9–20, 1945
We can clearly see the same pattern here: the Soviets waited until it
was absolutely certain that the USA had defeated the Japanese empire
before striking it themselves. It is also worth noting that it took the
Soviets only 10 days to defeat the entire Kwantung Army, the most
prestigious Army of the Japanese Empire with over one million
well-trained and well-equipped soldiers! That should tell you a little
something about the kind of military machine the Soviet Union had
developed in the course of the war against Nazi Germany (see here for a superb US study of this military operation)]
Did the Americans bring peace and prosperity to western Europe?
To western Europe, to some degree yes, and that is because was easy
for them: they ended the war almost “fresh”, their (stolen) homeland did
not suffer the horrors of war and so, yes, they could bring in peanut
butter, cigarettes and other material goods. They also made sure that
Western Europe would become an immense market for US goods and services
and that European resources would be made available to the US Empire,
especially against the Soviet Union. And how did they finance this
“generosity”? By robbing the so-called Third World blind, that’s all. Is
that something to be proud of? Did Lenin not warn as early as 1917 that
“imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism”? The wealth of Western
Europe was built by the abject poverty of the millions of Africans,
Asians and Latin Americas.
But what about the future of Europe and the European people?
There a number of things upon which the Anglos and Stalin did agree
to at the end of WWII: The four Ds: denazification, disarmament,
demilitarisation, and democratisation of a united Germany and
reparations to rebuild the USSR. Yes, Stalin wanted a united, neutral
Germany. As soon as the war ended, however, the Anglos reneged on all of
these promises: they created a heavily militarized West Germany, they
immediately recruited thousands of top Nazi officials for their
intelligence services, their rocket program and to subvert the Soviet
Union. Worse, they immediately developed plans to attack the Soviet
Union. Right at the end of the WWII, Anglo powers had at least THREE
plans to wage war on the USSR: Operation Dropshot, Plan Totality and Operation Unthinkable.
weforum | The best place from which to draw inspiration for how immersive
technologies may be regulated is the regulatory frameworks being put
into effect for traditional digital technology today. In the European
Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force in 2018.
Not only does the law necessitate unambiguous consent for data
collection, it also compels companies to erase individual data on
request, with the threat of a fine of up to 4% of their global annual
turnover for breaches. Furthermore, enshrined in the bill is the notion
of ‘data portability’, which allows consumers to take their data across
platforms – an incentive for an innovative start-up to compete with the
biggest players. We may see similar regulatory norms for immersive
technologies develop as well.
Providing users with sovereignty of personal data
Analysis shows
that the major VR companies already use cookies to store data, while
also collecting information on location, browser and device type and IP
address. Furthermore, communication with other users in VR environments
is being stored and aggregated data is shared with third parties and
used to customize products for marketing purposes.
Concern over these methods of personal data collection has led to
the introduction of temporary solutions that provide a buffer between
individuals and companies. For example, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation’s ‘Privacy Badger’
is a browser extension that automatically blocks hidden third-party
trackers and allows users to customize and control the amount of data
they share with online content providers. A similar solution that
returns control of personal data should be developed for immersive
technologies. At present, only blunt instruments are available to
individuals uncomfortable with data collection but keen to explore
AR/VR: using ‘offline modes’ or using separate profiles for new devices.
Managing consumption
Short-term measures also exist to address overuse in the form of
stopping mechanisms. Pop-up usage warnings once healthy limits are
approached or exceeded are reportedly supported by 71% of young people in the UK. Services like unGlue
allow parents to place filters on content types that their children are
exposed to, as well as time limits on usage across apps.
All of these could be transferred to immersive technologies, and
are complementary fixes to actual regulation, such as South Korea’s Shutdown Law.
This prevents children under the age of 16 from playing computer games
between midnight and 6am. The policy is enforceable because it ties
personal details – including date of birth – to a citizen’s resident
registration number, which is required to create accounts for online
services. These solutions are not infallible: one could easily imagine
an enterprising child might ‘borrow’ an adult’s device after-hours to
find a workaround to the restrictions. Further study is certainly
needed, but we believe that long-term solutions may lie in better
design.
As businesses develop applications using immersive technologies,
they should transition from using metrics that measure just the amount
of user engagement to metrics that also take into account user
satisfaction, fulfilment and enhancement of well-being. Alternative
metrics could include a net promoter score for software, which would
indicate how strongly users – or perhaps even regulators – recommend the
service to their friends based on their level of fulfilment or
satisfaction with a service.
The real challenge, however, is to find measures that align with
business policy and user objectives. As Tristan Harris, Founder of Time
Well Spent argues: “We have to come face-to-face with the current
misalignment so we can start to generate solutions.” There are instances
where improvements to user experience go hand-in-hand with business
opportunities. Subscription-based services are one such example: YouTube
Red will eliminate advertisements for paying users, as does Spotify
Premium. These are examples where users can pay to enjoy
advertising-free experiences and which do not come at the cost to the
content developers since they will receive revenue in the form of paid
subscriptions.
More work remains if immersive technologies are to enable happier,
more fulfilling interactions with content and media. This will largely
depend on designing technology that puts the user at the centre of its
value proposition.
This is part of a series of articles
related to the disruptive effects of several technologies
(virtual/augmented reality, artificial intelligence and blockchain) on
the creative economy.
medium | Two decades
ago, our research group made international headlines when we published
research showing that virtual reality systems could damage people’s
health.
Our
demonstration of side-effects was not unique — many research groups
were showing that it could cause health problems. The reason that our
work was newsworthy was because we showed that there were fundamental
problems that needed to be tackled when designing virtual reality
systems — and these problems needed engineering solutions that were
tailored for the human user.
In
other words, it was not enough to keep producing ever faster computers
and higher definition displays — a fundamental change in the way systems
were designed was required.
So why
do virtual reality systems need a new approach? The answer to this
question lies in the very definition of how virtual reality differs from
how we traditionally use a computer.
Natural
human behaviour is based on responses elicited by information detected
by a person’s sensory systems. For example, rays of light bouncing off a
shiny red apple can indicate that there’s a good source of food hanging
on a tree.
A
person can then use the information to guide their hand movements and
pick the apple from the tree. This use of ‘perception’ to guide ‘motor’
actions defines a feedback loop that underpins all of human behaviour.
The goal of virtual reality systems is to mimic the information that
humans normally use to guide their actions, so that humans can interact
with computer generated objects in a natural way.
The
problems come when the normal relationship between the perceptual
information and the corresponding action is disrupted. One way of
thinking about such disruption is that a mismatch between perception and
action causes ‘surprise’. It turns out that surprise is really
important for human learning and the human brain appears to be
engineered to minimise surprise.
This
means that the challenge for the designers of virtual reality is that
they must create systems that minimise the surprise experienced by the
user when using computer generated information to control their actions.
Of
course, one of the advantages of virtual reality is that the computer
can create new and wonderful worlds. For example, a completely novel
fruit — perhaps an elppa — could be shown hanging from a virtual tree.
The elppa might have a completely different texture and appearance to
any other previously encountered fruit — but it’s important that the
information used to specify the location and size of the elppa allows
the virtual reality user to guide their hand to the virtual object in a
normal way.
If
there is a mismatch between the visual information and the hand
movements then ‘surprise’ will result, and the human brain will need to
adapt if future interactions between vision and action are to maintain
their accuracy. The issue is that the process of adaptation may cause
difficulties — and these difficulties might be particularly problematic
for children as their brains are not fully developed.
This issue affects all forms of information presented within a virtual world (so hearing and
touch as well as vision), and all of the different motor systems (so
postural control as well as arm movement systems). One good example of
the problems that can arise can be seen through the way our eyes react
to movement.
In
1993, we showed that virtual reality systems had a fundamental design
flaw when they attempted to show three dimensional visual information.
This is because the systems produce a mismatch between where the eyes
need to focus and where the eyes need to point. In everyday life, if we
change our focus from something close to something far away our eyes
will need to change focus and alter where they are pointing.
The
change in focus is necessary to prevent blur and the change in eye
direction is necessary to stop double images. In reality, the changes in
focus and direction are physically linked (a change in fixation
distance causes change in the images and where the images fall at the
back of the eyes).
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