When it comes to tourist pilgrimage sites in the United States, the Hoover Dam may not quite rank up there with the Statue of Liberty, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland. But that’s not due to a lack of importance, nor even a lack of impressiveness. Proper appreciation of its man-made majesty, however, requires an understanding of not just the vital function it serves, but the enormous task of its construction. The guides at the Hoover Dam have been trained to explain just that to its many visitors, of course, but all of us could benefit from going in prepared with a little knowledge. Watch the hour-long video on the dam’s design and construction from Animagraffs above, and you may be prepared with enough knowledge to tell the guides a thing or two.
Animagraffs is the YoTtube channel of Jacob O’Neal, which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its acclaimed explanations on a sixteenth-century explorer’s sailing ship and the Golden Gate Bridge, another iconic construction project of the Great Depression. Like those, his Hoover Dam video uses detailed 3D models based on serious research, not least into the project’s original design documents.
This allows O’Neal to show each element of the dam and its complex system of supporting infrastructure in detail and from every angle, as well as in a kind of x‑ray vision. We’ve all seen photographs of the Hoover Dam, and maybe even bought some from its gift shop, but even the most sublime aerial view doesn’t reveal as much about its ambition as a look into its inner workings.
And the ambition of the Hoover Dam is one aspect guaranteed to impress any viewers. It required thousands of workers about five years to re-shape the Nevada and Arizona landscape at a grand enough scale to make possible human control of the mighty — and, more to the point, mightily unpredictable — Colorado River. With its large turbines, the engineering and installation of which O’Neal explains in full, it managed to generate enough electricity to repay its construction cost of more than $811 million in today’s dollars by 1987, just over 50 years after it opened. And in an achievement almost impossible to believe today, it opened more than two years ahead of schedule. We hear a good deal today about the concept of “state capacity,” and how the U.S. could regain it. At the Hoover Dam, we behold state capacity quite literally made concrete.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. — Lynda Barry
In the spring of 2016, the great cartoonist and educator, Lynda Barry, did the unthinkable, prior to giving a lecture and writing class at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
She demanded that all participating staff members surrender their phones and other such personal devices.
Her victims were as jangled by this prospect as your average iPhone-addicted teen, but surrendered, agreeing to write by hand, another antiquated notion Barry subscribes to:
The delete button makes it so that anything you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so nothing new has a chance. Writing by hand is a revelation for people. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a different way of thinking that goes along with them.
Barry—who told the Onion’s AV Club that she crafted her book What It Is with an eye toward bored readers stuck in a Jiffy Lube oil-change waiting room—is also a big proponent of doodling, which she views as a creative neurological response to boredom:
Boring meeting, you have a pen, the usual clowns are yakking. Most people will draw something, even people who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And everybody has something they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my little guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eyeballs, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doodle during those meetings?” I believe that it’s because it makes having to endure that particular situation more bearable, by changing our experience of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the difference between, if you’re not doodling, the minutes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doodling, it’s more like Brillo. It’s not much better, but there is a difference. You could handle Brillo a little longer than the cheese grater.
Meetings and classrooms are among the few remaining venues in which screen-addicted moths are expected to force themselves away from the phone’s inviting flame. Other settings—like the Jiffy Lube waiting room—require more initiative on the user’s part.
Once, we were keener students of minor changes to familiar environments, the books strangers were reading in the subway, and those strangers themselves. Our subsequent observations were known to spark conversation and sometimes ideas that led to creative projects.
Now, many of us let those opportunities slide by, as we fill up on such fleeting confections as funny videos and all-you-can-eat servings of social media.
It’s also tempting to use our phones as defacto shields any time social anxiety looms. This dodge may provide short term comfort, especially to younger people, but remember, Barry and many of her cartoonist peers, including Daniel Clowes, Simon Hanselmann, and Ariel Schrag, toughed it out by making art. That’s what got them through the loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom of their middle and high school years.
The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form.
- Adrian Tomine, introduction to 32 Stories
Barry is far from alone in encouraging adults to peel themselves away from their phone dependency for their creative good.
Photographer Eric Pickersgill’sRemoved imagines a series of everyday situations in which phones and other personal devices have been rendered invisible. (It’s worth noting that he removed the offending articles from the models’ hands, rather that Photoshopping them out later.)
Computer Science Professor Calvin Newport’s book, Deep Work, posits that all that shallow phone time is creating stress, anxiety, and lost creative opportunities, while also doing a number on our personal and professional lives.
Author Manoush Zomorodi’s TED Talk on how boredom can lead to brilliant ideas, below, details a weeklong experiment in battling smartphone habits, with lots of scientific evidence to back up her findings.
But what if you wipe the slate of digital distractions only to find that your brain’s just… empty? A once occupied room, now devoid of anything but dimly recalled memes, and generalized dread over the state of the world?
The aforementioned AV Club interview with Barry offers both encouragement and some useful suggestions that will get the temporarily paralyzed moving again:
I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I never know. I oftentimes have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start drawing the pictures as if I can… I hear a sentence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the beginning of the first sentence, then I just… I write really slow. So I’ll be writing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the panel. Then, when it gets to the end, usually I’ll know what the next one is. By three sentences or four in that first panel, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the drawing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on another page! Or when I’m drawing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say something, but then I’ll hear Marlys say something back. So once that first sentence is there, I have all kinds of choices as to where I put my brush. But if nothing is happening, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start messing around.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
When many of us first learned of the RMS Titanic, it was presented first as one of history’s greatest ironies: the “unsinkable” ocean liner that went down on its maiden voyage. Of course, there’s a great deal more to the story, as anyone who becomes obsessed with the ill-fated ship (James Cameron being just one notable example) understands full well. Even apart from the many human experiences surrounding it, some of them told by the wreck’s survivors and preserved on film, the mechanical aspects of the Titanic hold out considerable fascination for anyone with an engineer’s cast of mind. Put aside, for the moment, the matter of the sinking, and consider just what went into making it one of the most glorious creations of man launched into the ocean to date — or rather, one of the three most glorious.
The Titanic was one of a trio of similar White Star Line ships completed in the early nineteen-tens. In the video above, Bill Hammack, known on YouTube as Engineerguy, tells the story of not just the Titanic, but also the Olympic and the HMHS Britannic. An engineering professor at the University of Illinois, he found in the campus library issues of the journal The Engineer published between 1909 and 1911 that contain detailed photographs of the construction of both the Titanic and Olympic, sister ships that were built side-by-side.
One element highlighted that we may not much consider today is the sheer scale of the things: each was held together by three million rivets, could contain 1.5 million gallons of ballast water, weighed 52,000 tons when fully fitted, required 23 tons of lubricant to slide from the dock into the water, and burned 650 tons of coal per day on a transatlantic crossing.
Alas, size alone wasn’t enough to prevent disaster. “Less than a year after the launch of these two giant ships, one suffered a collision that ripped a gaping hole in its side,” says Hammack. “That ship was of course, the Olympic.” Its sudden encounter with a passing warship necessitated patching with wood before it could return home for a full repair, but thereafter it remained in service for nearly a quarter-century. Its less lucky sibling ended up at the bottom of the ocean after running into trouble of its own: a mine and a torpedo spelled the end for the Britannic in 1916. As for the Titanic, we all know about its fateful encounter with the iceberg, and maybe we’ve even heard discussions of how its designers could have mitigated the impact: more or taller bulkheads, a double hull rather than just a double bottom, greater lifeboat capacity. As for whether and how those solutions would have worked, perhaps Hammack could still shoot a follow-up explaining it all to us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
We can go through most of our lives holding out hope of one day seeing in reality such works as van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Monet’s Haystacks, a clay tablet containing actual cuneiform writing with our own eyes, or the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. We can actually come face to face — or rather, face to surface — with all of them, temple included, at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains all those and more artifacts of human civilization than any of us could hope to examine closely in a lifetime. But even if we did, we might only feel tempted to look at them more closely still, even to touch them. That may be an improbable hope, but we can at least get closer than ever now thanks to the Met’s new archive of high-definition 3D scans.
“Viewers can zoom in, rotate, and examine each model, bringing unprecedented access to significant works of art,” says the Met’s official announcement. “The 3D models can also be explored in viewers’ own spaces through augmented reality (AR) on most smartphone and VR headsets, as a resource for research, exploration, and curiosity.”
Browsing this archive of more than 100 digitized historical objects, you’ll also notice pieces from Japan like seventeenth-century screens by the artists Kano Sansetsu and Suzuki Kiitsu. These must have been priorities for the Met’s institutional partner in this project, the Japanese television network NHK. It all came about “as part of the public broadcaster’s initiative to produce ultra-high definition 3D computer graphics of national treasures and other important artworks,” with “further educational programming and potential content using these cutting-edge, best-in-class models” in the offing. For now, though, the archive offers us more than enough to behold from any possible angle. To do so, just click the “View in 3D” button below the image on the page of your artifact or artwork of choice. It may not be the same as holding the object in your hands, but it’s as close as you’re going to get — unless, of course, you find yourself inspired to pursue the dream of becoming a curator at the Met.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The Silk Road’s long period of high activity spanned the second century BC and the fifteenth century AD, but its name wasn’t coined until more than 400 years after that. Scholars have argued it practically ever since, given that the referent wasn’t just one road but a vast and ever-changing network of them, and that silk was hardly the only commodity carried by its traders. Yet the name persists, and not only due to Marco Polo-type romanticism. Silk may not have been the highest-volume item on its eponymous road — more business was surely done in everyday textiles, to say nothing of spices, grains, or dyes — but it was perhaps the most visible, and surely the most glamorous. From the perspective of Chinese civilization, it can also look like the most important.
In the new Primal Space video above, you can hear the story of “the machine that made China rich”: the pattern loom, that is, a model of which was unearthed in 2017 during subway construction in the city of Chengdu. At somewhere between 2,100 and 2,200 years old, they represent the earliest known evidence of pattern loom technology, of which China made highly productive use during the time of its three-millennium monopoly on silk.
As far away as the Roman Empire, those who had the means couldn’t get enough of the stuff, especially when it came in designs never before seen in human history. Hence the high priority China placed on keeping knowledge of its harvesting and weaving proprietary — at least until a couple of Roman monks managed to smuggle silkworm larvae back to Europe in the middle of the sixth century.
Yet even having lost its status as the only land capable of producing silk, China retained a great advantage in the form of its sheer manufacturing capacity. (This story rings somewhat familiar about a millennium and a half later, when none of us can dispute which country holds the title of “the world’s factory.”) Its silk industry could achieve that scale thanks to the relative ease of use of the pattern loom, which required no special skills to operate. The most complex aspect would have been “programming” the patterns to be formed by the strands, which, though an entirely analog process, has its basic similarities with the digital computer programming we know today. China’s trade networks have greatly multiplied since the days of Marco Polo, and the technology it uses has developed to a previously unimaginable degree. Yet somehow, the “Electric Vehicle Road” doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
From TED-Ed comes an animated introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek device that dates back to the 2nd century BCE. TED writes: “In 1900, Greek divers stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old shipwreck whose contents would shake our understanding of the ancient world. Among the remains were fragments of mangled wood and corroded metal, which archaeologists soon realized were parts of the oldest geared device ever discovered — and humankind’s first computer. So, how did it work?” Above, science journalist Max G. Levy explains the inner workings of the Antikythera Mechanism and how the Greeks put the device to use.
For those who want to take a deeper dive into this ancient analog computer (there’s a lot more to learn), we invite you to explore the titles in the Relateds section below. They’ll take you deeper into this marvel of ancient engineering.
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Granted access to a time machine, few of us would presumably opt first for the experience of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of survival would be better than if we underwent the same procedure 400 years later, at least if it took place on a Civil War battlefield. In both fifteenth-century Peru and the nineteenth-century United States, surgeons were performing a lot of trepanation, or removal of a portion of the skull. Since the Neolithic period, individuals had been trepanned for a variety of reasons, some of which now sound more medically compelling than others, but the Incan civilization took it to another level of frequency, and indeed sophistication.
Anyone with an interest in the history of technology would do well to study the Incas, who were remarkable in both what they developed and what they didn’t. Though there was no Incan alphabet, there was khipu, (or quipu), previously featured here on Open Culture, a system of record-keeping that used nothing but knotted cords.
The Incas may not have had wheeled vehicles or mechanical devices as we know them today, but they did have precision masonry, an extensive road system, advanced water management for agricultural and other uses, high-quality textiles, and plant-derived antiseptic — something more than a little useful if you also happen to be cutting a lot of holes in people’s skulls.
Studying the history of trepanation, neurologist David Kushner, along with bioarchaeologists John Verano and Anne Titelbaum, examined more than 600 Peruvian skulls dating from between 400 BC and the mid-sixteenth-century, which marked the end of the Incans’ 133-year-long run. As Science’s Lizzie Wade reports, the oldest evidence shows an unenviable 40% survival rate, but the surgical technique evolved over time: by the Inca era, the number rises to between 75% and 83%, as against 46% to 56% in Civil War military hospitals. Some Incan skulls even show signs of having undergone up to seven successful trepanations — or non-fatal ones, at any rate. Though that venerable form of surgery may no longer be practiced, modern neurosurgeons today use techniques based on the same principles. Should we find ourselves in need of their services, we’ll no doubt prefer to keep our distance from the time machine.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Gladys Mae West was born in rural Virginia in 1930, grew up working on a tobacco farm, and died earlier this month a celebrated mathematician whose work made possible the GPS technology most of us use each and every day. Hers was a distinctively American life, in more ways than one. Seeking an escape from the agricultural labor she’d already gotten to know all too well, she won a scholarship to Virginia State College by becoming her high school class valedictorian; after earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics, she taught for a time and then applied for a job at the naval base up in Dahlgren. She first distinguished herself there by verifying the accuracy of bombing tables with a hand calculator, and from there moved on up to the computer programming team.
This was the early nineteen-sixties, when programming a computer meant not coding, but laboriously feeding punch cards into an enormous mainframe. West and her colleagues used IBM’s first transistorized machine, the 7030 (or “Stretch”), which was for a few years the fastest computer in the world.
It cost an equivalent of $81,860,000 in today’s dollars, but no other computer had the power to handle the project of calculating the precise shape of Earth as affected by gravity and the nature of the oceans. About a decade later, another team of government scientists made use of those very same calculations when putting together the model employed by the World Geodetic System, which GPS satellites still use today. Hence the tendency of celebratory obituaries to underscore the point that without West’s work, GPS wouldn’t be possible.
Nor do any of them neglect to point out the fact that West was black, one of just four such mathematicians working for the Navy at Dahlgren. Stories like hers have drawn much greater public interest since the success of Hidden Figures, the Hollywood adaptation of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book about the black female mathematicians at NASA during the Space Race. When that movie came out, in 2016, even West’s own children didn’t know the importance of the once-classified work she’d done. Only in 2018, when she provided that information on a biographical form she filled out for an event hosted by her college sorority, did it become public. She thus spent the last years of her long life as a celebrity, sought out by academics and journalists eager to understand the contributions of another no-longer-hidden figure. But to their questions about her own GPS use, she reportedly answered that she preferred a good old-fashioned paper map.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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