Pioneering Computer Scientist Grace Hopper Shows Us How to Visualize a Nanosecond (1983)
Human imagination seems seriously limited when faced with the cosmic scope of time and space. We can imagine, through stop-motion animation and CGI, what it might be like to walk the earth with creatures the size of office buildings. But how to wrap our heads around the fact that they lived hundreds of millions of years ago, on a planet some four and a half billion years old? We trust the science, but can’t rely on intuition alone to guide us to such mind-boggling knowledge.
At the other end of the scale, events measured in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second, seem inconceivable, even to someone as smart as Grace Hopper, the Navy mathematician who invented COBOL and helped built the first computer. Or so she says in the 1983 video clip above from one of her many lectures in her role as a guest lecturer at universities, museums, military bodies, and corporations.
When she first heard of “circuits that acted in nanoseconds,” she says, “billionths of a second… Well, I didn’t know what a billion was…. And if you don’t know what a billion is, how on earth do you know what a billionth is? Finally, one morning in total desperation, I called over the engineering building, and I said, ‘Please cut off a nanosecond and send it to me.” What she asked for, she explains, and shows the class, was a piece of wire representing the distance a signal could travel in a nanosecond.
Now of course it wouldn’t really be through wire — it’d be out in space, the velocity of light. So if we start with a velocity of light and use your friendly computer, you’ll discover that a nanosecond is 11.8 inches long, the maximum limiting distance that electricity can travel in a billionth of a second.
Follow the rest of her explanation, with wire props, and see if you can better understand a measure of time beyond the reaches of conscious experience. The explanation was immediately successful when she began using it in the late 1960s “to demonstrate how designing smaller components would produce faster computers,” writes the National Museum of American History. The bundle of wires below, each about 30cm (11.8 inches) long, comes from a lecture Hopper gave museum docents in March 1985.
Photo via the National Museum of American History
Like the age of the dinosaurs, the nanosecond may only represent a small fraction of the incomprehensibly small units of time scientists are eventually able to measure—and computer scientists able to access. “Later,” notes the NMAH, “as components shrank and computer speeds increased, Hopper used grains of pepper to represent the distance electricity traveled in a picosecond, one trillionth of a second.”
At this point, the map becomes no more revealing than the unknown territory, invisible to the naked eye, inconceivable but through wild leaps of imagination. But if anyone could explain the increasingly inexplicable in terms most anyone could understand, it was the brilliant but down-to-earth Hopper.
via Kottke
Related Content:
Free Online Computer Science Courses
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Venerable Female Artists, Musicians & Authors Give Advice to the Young: Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson & More
To the Louisiana Channel and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, on behalf of mature women everywhere: Thank you. You have excellent taste.
We’ve weathered invisibility and Mom jeans jokes, as representatives from our demographic are judged more harshly in categories that never seem to apply to their male counterparts in politics and the performing arts.
You’ll find plenty of celebrated male artists contributing advice to emerging artists in the Louisiana Project’s video series, but the Guerilla Girls will be gratified to see how robustly represented these working women are.
Nothing beats authority conferred by decades of professional experience.
And while young women are sure to be inspired by these venerable interviewees, let’s not sell anyone short.
We may have assembled a playlist titled Women Artists’ Advice to the Young (watch it from front to back at the bottom of the post), but let’s agree that their advice is good for emerging artists of all genders.
Author, poet, and Godmother of Punk Patti Smith (born 1946) serves up her version of to thine own self be true.
Avant-garde composer and musician Laurie Anderson (born 1947) counsels against the sort of narrow self-definition that discourages artistic exploration. Be loose, like a goose.
Author Herbjørg Wassmo (born 1942) wants young artists to prepare for the inevitable days of low motivation and self-doubt by resolving to work regardless.
Other notables include filmmaker Shirin Neshat (born 1957), author Lydia Davis (born 1947), artist Joyce Pensato (born 1941), and performance artist Marina Abramović (born 1946).
The oldest interviewee in the collection, artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929), refuses to saddle up and come up with any teacherly advice, but could certainly be considered a walking example of what it means to be “living as an artist with a wish to create a beautiful world with human love.”
Enjoy the full playlist here:
Related Content:
Toni Morrison Dispenses Sound Writing Advice: Tips You Can Apply to Your Own Work
74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in New York City May 13 for the next installment of her book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain. Follow her@AyunHalliday.
Read More...What Is Performance Art?: We Explain It with Video Introductions and Classic Performances
If you asked me to define performance art, I’d probably stumble into a couple of clichés—you know it when you see it, you kind of have to be there, etc. Such vague criteria could mean virtually any event can be called performance art, and maybe it can. But the precedents set in the art world over the course of the 20th century narrow things a bit. PBS’s The Art Assignment primer above tells us that performance art is “a term used to describe art in which the body is the medium or live action is in some way involved.”
Still, this is mighty broad, encompassing all theater, dance, musical, and ritual performance throughout human history. And that’s kind of the point. Performance art is sometimes seen as an intrusion of a foreign body into the art world.
But the history above implies that the real anomaly is the recent tendency to think of art primarily as a static visual medium that excludes the body. The term “performance art” only took on meaning when it had an antagonist to rebel against. Some of those early rebels included the Italian Futurists, who staged noise concerts and chaotic theater pieces to shake things up.
Dada, Bauhaus, Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, the work of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, ambitious Japanese performance pieces, action painting, happenings, Fluxus…. In just its first half, The Art Assignment video covers the key movements using performance to confuse, amuse, offend, and challenge audiences. In the 60s and 70s, performance art became more explicitly political, and more directly confrontational. It also became far more dangerous for the artist.
In Yoko Ono’s 1965 Cut Piece, for example, the artist sits motionless and expressionless on stage, as audience members are invited to come up one by one, pick up a pair of scissors, and cut away any part of her clothing that they wanted. Most participants were well-behaved, but one man made menacing gestures with the scissors before cutting away his piece.
Other artists have gone much further—performing death-defying stunts and real acts of ritual or symbolic violence on themselves. (Watch Chris Burden get shot for the sake of art below.) Performance artists “wanted to make art that could not easily be bought or sold,” says the narrator of the short introduction from the Tate, further up. “The term performance came to define art that had a live element and was witnessed by an audience.”
Although we have hours of footage documenting performance art pieces throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, we really do have to be there, because as part of the audience, we are part of the piece. In some way, if you’ve never participated in performance art, you’ve also never really seen it.
This vagary might bring us back to the question that inevitably arose when performance was no longer avant-garde: “What isn’t performance?” The adjective “performative” covers broader territory, naming aspects, for example, of photography, film, sculpture, or other media that simulate or stimulate action without actually being live performance themselves.
But we should not get lost in abstractions when talking about a type of art—or a way of doing art—that relies on the utmost specificity: the irreducible concreteness of moments never to be repeated again. This is the nature of work from the most well-known performance artists, among them Marina Abramović—who ended up performing her famous “The Artist is Present” in a profound, unexpected reunion with her former partner Ulay in 2010 (further up).
German artist Joseph Beuys tested his audiences’ resolve in absurdist actions like 1965’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, in which the artist literally walks around a gallery with a dead rabbit, his head covered in honey and gold foil, whispering to the animal’s corpse while doing a sort of tortured dance. The audience watched this through the windows of the gallery for three hours. Then they were let in to watch Beuys hold the dead hare with his back to them. Not only do we get but a tiny fraction of the performance, less than a minute in the clip above, but we also see it in a way we never could have if we were there.
A less discussed, but critical, aspect of performance art is the staging. The blocking and choreography of live performance pieces not only induce effects in the audience—discomfort, anger, anxiety, disgust, or sheer bewilderment—but are also, in a sense, the very material of the piece. Performance pieces aim to shock and confound expectations—they are never coy about it. But to see them only as outlandish ploys for attention or elaborate pranks, though they can be both, is to lose sight of how they go about upsetting or otherwise moving people.
Jennifer Hartley’s Last Supper uses highly expressive, theatrical movement in a piece designed, the artist herself writes, as “a discussion on opulence and the giving of oneself as an act of auto cannibalism.” If we take a cue from this description about how we might experience the performance, we could ask, what is the vocabulary of this discussion? What are its key phrases and recurring themes, enacted through the movements of the artist’s body? Or would we even know them if we saw them? Can we recognize and appreciate art that doesn’t look the way we are taught art is supposed to look?
Related Content:
Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Adventurous 1970s Performance Art Pieces
Performance Artist Marina Abramović Describes Her “Really Good Plan” to Lose Her Virginity
Watch Chris Burden Get Shot for the Sake of Art (1971)
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Shifting Power of the World’s Largest Cities Visualized Over 4,000 Years (2050 BC-2050 AD)
“When Rome fell….” The expression seems designed to conjure the Tarot card Tower that illustrates it, a sudden attack, a reckoning. “Fell,” in the case of most ancient empires, means declined, changed, and transformed over centuries. As all great cities do, Rome suffered many violent shocks during its fall, as it transitioned from a pagan to a Christian empire. The sacking of Rome in 410 left Romans reeling, trying to make meaning from upheaval. They found it in the pagan religion of their ancestors.
To which the defender of the one true faith—by his lights—Augustine of Hippo, answered with a rather odd defense of the new order. Rather than write a theological treatise or a fire-and-brimstone sermon, though it is these things as well, he wrote a book about cities: the City of God, pitted against the Earthly City (which is, you guessed it, aligned with the Devil). The medieval idea of cities as vehicles for the grudge matches of princes must have derived from this strange text, as well as from the emergent feudal order that turned dismembered empires into uneasy patchworks of cities. Rome didn’t fall, it decentralized, diversified, and propagated.
Augustine saw the city not only as a metaphor but also as the height of human power: doomed to fall in the final analysis, yet built to pose a formidable challenge to divine rule. But what is a city? Is it merely a stronghold for corruption and commerce or something more righteous? Is it an expression of class power, the worker bees who run it or just cogs in a machine, a la Metropolis? Is it an “assemblage,” defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as “a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogenous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns”?
In our post-post-modern moment, we find all of these ideas—the hierarchical and the horizontal—operating. Popular books like Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules—For Now seem to spring from an impulse common to apologists and secularists alike—the will to linear certainty. There is a sense in which 21st century thought has turned back to theology, stripped of the trappings of belief, to make sense of the rise and decline of the West. This faith demands not blind allegiance, but data, more and more and more data—to answer the burning question of 2001’s Planet of the Apes: “How’d these apes get like this?”
Then there’s the internet—a space for sharing gifs, a functional assemblage, and maybe someday, a city. Global circumstances seem to warrant reflection. Like the Romans, we want a story about how it came to pass, and we want to make and share animated infographic gifs about it. The gif at the top of the post is such a gif. Drawing on the sweeping, several-thousand-year historical argument of Morris’s book, and data from the UN Population Division, its creator whisks us through a visual narrative of supremacy-by-city over the course of roughly four-thousand years.
Sheer size, in this visual account, determines the winners—a simplistic criteria, but the model here is simplified for effect. It dramatizes arguments made and data gathered elsewhere. To get the full effect, you’d probably do well to read Morris’s book and, while you’re reaching for your wallet, the original article, behind a paywall at The Australian, for which this gif was made. Its title? “Why Rome is the World’s Best City.” The gif’s designer admits in a Reddit post, “We are dealing with historic demographic data here which are always debated among scholars…. I acknowledge that other scholars would add or delete certain cities that pop up in my map.”
For more on the idea of the city as assemblage, see European Graduate School professor Manuel DeLanda’s lecture “A Materialist History of Cities” and his book Assemblage Theory. Augustine insisted we view the city through the eye of faith—his faith. In the 21st century, DeLanda’s intellectual gestures, like Morris’s, are as grand, but he suggests throwing out Western schematics in a return to earlier religious practices. To understand a city, he suggests, we might need “tools to manipulate these intensities… in the form of a growing variety of psychoactive chemicals that can be deployed to go beyond the actual world, and produce at least a descriptive phenomenology of the virtual.”
Related Content:
Get the History of the World in 46 Lectures, Courtesy of Columbia University
Watch the History of the World Unfold on an Animated Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today
A Crash Course in World History
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...The Rise and Fall of Western Empires Visualized Through the Artful Metaphor of Cell Division
We can hardly understand how the modern world arrived at its current shape without understanding the history of colonial empire. But how best to understand the history of colonial empire? In animation above, visualization designers Pedro M. Cruz and Penousal Machado portray it through a biological lens, rendering the four most powerful empires in the Western world of the 18th and 19th centuries as cells. The years pass, and at first these four cells grow in size, but we all know the story must end with their division into dozens and dozens of the countries we see on the world map today — a geopolitical process for which mitosis provides an effective visual analogy.
Cruz and Machado happen to hail from Portugal, a nation that commanded one of those four empires and, in Aeon’s words, “controlled vast territories across the globe through a combination of seapower, economic control and brute force.” We may now regard Portugal as a small and pleasant European country, but it once held territory all around the world, from Mozambique to Macau to the somewhat larger land known as Brazil.
And the other three empires, French, Spanish, and British, grow even larger in their respective heydays. That’s especially true of the British Empire, whose dominance in cell form becomes starkly obvious by the time the animation reaches the 1840s, even though the United States of America has at that point long since drifted beyond its walls and floated away.
Wouldn’t the U.S. now be the biggest cell of all? Not under the strict definition of empire used a few centuries ago, when one country taking over and directly ruling over a remote land was considered standard operating procedure (and even, in some quarters, a glorious and necessary mission). But attempts have also been made to more clearly understand international relations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by redefining the very term “empire” to include the kind of influence the U.S. exerts all around the world. It makes a kind of sense to do that, but as Cruz and Machado’s animation may remind us, we also still live very much in the cultural, linguistic, political, and economic world — or rather, petri dish — that those four mighty empires created.
via Aeon
Related Content:
Get the History of the World in 46 Lectures, Courtesy of Columbia University
Watch the History of the World Unfold on an Animated Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today
Animated Map Shows How the Five Major Religions Spread Across the World (3000 BC – 2000 AD)
5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History
The History of Civilization Mapped in 13 Minutes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...How to Make a Medieval Manuscript: An Introduction in 7 Videos
All of us came of age in the era of mass-market books, bundles of text on paper printed quickly, cheaply, and in large quantities. Nothing about that would have been conceivable to the many varieties of artisan involved in the creation of just one manuscript in the Middle Ages. Even here in the 21st century we marvel at the beauty of medieval manuscripts, but we should also marvel at the sheer amount of specialized labor that went into making them.
We might best appreciate that labor by seeing it performed up close before our eyes, and a new video series allows us to do just that. “The British Library has released a set of seven videos to look at the process of creating medieval manuscripts,” says Medievalists.net.
“Patricia Lovett, a professional calligrapher and illuminator, hosts these 2–3 minute videos, which follow the process from the tools used to the techniques employed in designing an illuminated page.”
Lovett covers every step in the making of a medieval book: “how to make quill pens from bird feathers”; “the complex process behind making ink for writing in manuscripts” (which involves wasps); “how animal skins were selected and prepared for use in medieval manuscripts”; “the tools for ruling and line marking in medieval books”; “the variety of pigments that were in use in the Middle Ages” to apply vivid color to the pages; “how medieval artists painted the beautiful illustrations in their books”; and “the work behind painting and embellishing manuscripts and reproducing a lavishly illuminated page.”
“The word ‘manuscript’ derives from the Latin for written (scriptus) by hand (manu),” writes Lovett and British Library illuminated manuscript curator Kathleen Doyle, and who among us will forget that, after we’ve witnessed the careful manual labor on display in these videos? For further insight into the medieval manuscript-making process, have a look at the Getty Museum’s series of videos on the subject featured last year here on Open Culture.
We’ve also featured the alchemy of the pigments used to color the pages of medieval manuscripts; the pages of a medieval monk’s sketchbook that shows what went into the designs for these manuscripts’ illumination; and a look into the making of The Book of Kells, the Irish cultural treasure that stands as one of the very finest surviving examples of the illuminated manuscript form. (And since you’ll surely get curious about it sooner or later, we’ve also put up an explanation of why so many marginal drawings in medieval manuscripts include killer rabbits.)
Just as the books we read today — whether the aforementioned mass-market products or the relatively artisanal small-press creations or even the e‑books — reveal important qualities about the world we live in, so medieval manuscripts have much to say about the beliefs, the technology, and societal structures of the times that produced them. But for those who actually developed the skills for and dedicated the time and effort to that production, these manuscripts also showed something else. As Lovett and Doyle quote the 12th-century scribe Eadwine as proclaiming about his Eadwine Psalter, “The beauty of this book displays my genius.”
via Medievalists.net
Related Content:
How the Brilliant Colors of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts Were Made with Alchemy
The Medieval Masterpiece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Digitized & Put Online
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Last Duel Took Place in France in 1967, and It’s Caught on Film
Another man insults your honor, leaving you no choice but to challenge him to a highly formalized fight to the death: in the 21st century, the very idea strikes us as almost incomprehensibly of the past. And dueling is indeed dead, at least in all the lands that historically had the most enthusiasm for it, but it hasn’t been dead for as long as we might assume. The last recorded duel performed not with pistols but swords (specifically épées, the largest type of swords used in fencing) took place in France in 1967 — the year of the Saturn V and the Boeing 737, the Detroit riots and the Six-Day War, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Summer of Love.
The duelists were Marseilles mayor Gaston Defferre and another politician names Rene Ribière. “After a clash in the National Assembly, Defferre yelled ‘Taisez-vous, abruti!’ at Ribiere and refused to apologize,” writes professional stage-and-screen fight coordinator Jared Kirby. “Ribière challenged and Defferre accepted. The duel took place with épées in a private residence in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and it was officiated by Jean de Lipkowskiin.”
Heightening the drama, Ribière was to be married the following day, though he could expect to live to see his own wedding, Defferre having vowed not to kill him but “wound him in such a way as to spoil his wedding night very considerably.”
You can see the subsequent action of this relatively modern-day duel in the newsreel footage at the top of the post. Defferre did indeed land a couple of touches on Ribière, both in the arm. Ribière, the younger man by twelve years, seems to have taken the event even more seriously than Defferre: he insisted not only on using sharper épées than the ones Defferre originally offered, but on continuing the duel after Defferre first struck him. Lipkowskiin put an end to the combat after the second time, and both Defferre and Ribière went on to live full lives, the former into the 1980s and the latter into the 1990s. Just how considerable an effect Ribière’s dueling injuries had on his wedding night, however, history has not recorded.
Related Content:
Watch a Witty, Gritty, Hardboiled Retelling of the Famous Aaron Burr-Alexander Hamilton Duel
Drunk History: An Intoxicated Look at the Famous Alexander Hamilton – Aaron Burr Duel
A Demonstration of Perfect Samurai Swordsmanship
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...53 Years of Nuclear Testing in 14 Minutes: A Time Lapse Film by Japanese Artist Isao Hashimoto
It’s strange what can make an impact. Sometimes a message needs to be loud and over-the-top to come across, like punk rock or the films of Oliver Stone. In other cases, cool and quiet works much better.
Take the new time lapse map created by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto. It is beautiful in a simple way and eerie as it documents the 2,053 nuclear explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998.
It looks like a war room map of the world, black landmasses surrounded by deep blue ocean. It starts out slow, in July of 1945, with a blue blip and an explosion sound in the American southwest—the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos. Just one month later come the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From there the months click by—condensed down to seconds—on a digital clock. Each nation that has exploded a nuclear bomb gets a blip and a flashing dot when they detonate a weapon, with a running tally kept on the screen.
Eeriest of all is that each nation gets its own electronic sound pitch: low tones for the United States, higher for the Soviet Union—beeping to the metronome of the months ticking by.
What starts out slow picks up by 1960 or so, when all the cold neutral beeps and flashes become overwhelming.
If you’re like me, you had no idea just how many detonations the United States is responsible for (1,032—more than the rest of the countries put together). The sequence ends with the Pakistani nuclear tests of May 1998.
Hashimoto worked for many years as a foreign exchange dealer but is now an art curator. He says the piece expresses “the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Related Content:
63 Haunting Videos of U.S. Nuclear Tests Now Declassified and Put Online
Haunting Unedited Footage of the Bombing of Nagasaki (1945)
How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Survive the Atomic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954
Read More...When American Financiers and Business Leaders Plotted to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Government in the U.S. (1933)
Economist and columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote about a current nominee for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors who called cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland “armpits of America” to laughs from an audience of business leaders. This same nominee has made headlines for saying “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy” and calling the 16th Amendment establishing the income tax the “most evil” law passed in the 20th century.
As crude as the comments are, many wealthy people who make decisions of consequence in the U.S. do not seem like “big believers in democracy,” as the nominee put it. It’s messy and inconvenient for those who would prefer not to answer to an elected government. The same attitudes were shared by right-wing bankers, business leaders, and conservative politicians during the worst economic crisis the country has seen.
Despite the failure of laissez-faire financial capitalism after the crash of 1929, financiers, economists, and politicians refused to admit their principles might have been very badly flawed. But in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, “the economy was staggering, unemployment was rampant and a banking crisis threatened the entire monetary system,” writes NPR, in a description of the Great Depression that reads as drily understated.
Still, Roosevelt’s election went too far for his opponents (and not far enough for progressives to his left). West Virginia Republican Senator Henry Hatfield wrote to a colleague, in a series of evergreen expressions, characterizing FDR’s historic First Hundred Days as “despotism”:
This is tyranny, this is the annihilation of liberty. The ordinary American is thus reduced to the status of a robot. The president has not merely signed the death warrant of capitalism, but has ordained the mutilation of the Constitution, unless the friends of liberty, regardless of party, band themselves together to regain their lost freedom.
Wall Street agreed, except for all that stuff about the Constitution and the welfare of the ordinary American.
In what became known as the “Business Plot” (or the “Wall Street Putsch”)—a group of bankers and business leaders allegedly created a conspiracy to overthrow the president and install a dictator friendly to their interests. The conspirators included investment banker and future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush (father of George H.W. Bush), bond salesman Gerald MacGuire, and Bill Doyle commander of the Massachusetts American Legion.
The plot was famously exposed by Major General Smedley D. Butler, who testified under oath about his knowledge of a plan to form an organization of 500,000 veterans who could take over the functions of government, as you can see Butler himself say in the 1935 newsreel footage above. The members of the Business Plot believed Butler would lead this irregular force in a coup. He had previously been “an influential figure in the so-called Bonus Army,” writes Matt Davis at Big Think, “a group of 43,000 marchers—among them many World War I veterans—who were camped at Washington to demand the early payment of the veteran’s bonus promised to them.”
Butler’s willingness to challenge the government did not make him sympathetic to a coup. He heard the conspirators out, then turned them in. But his allegations were immediately dismissed by The New York Times, who wrote that the story was a “gigantic hoax,” “perfect moonshine!,” “a fantasy,” and “a publicity stunt.” A congressional investigation corroborated Smedley’s claims, to an extent. The conspirators may have had weapons, violent intent, and millions of dollars. But no one was ever prosecuted. Many, like New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, waved the coup attempt away as “a cocktail putsch.”
The same attitudes that let the conspirators suffer no consequences, and let them go on to serve in high office, also seemed to drive their way of thinking. Roosevelt could be brought to see reason, they believed. Since his class interests aligned with theirs, he would see that fascism best served those interests. Sally Denton, investigative reporter and author of a book about the multiple plots against FDR (The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right), explains in an interview with All Things Considered:
They thought that they could convince Roosevelt, because he was of their, the patrician class, they thought that they could convince Roosevelt to relinquish power to basically a fascist, military-type government.
What MacGuire proposed was more corporatist than militarist in appearance, at least, notes Davis. The President could remain as a figurehead, but “the real power of the government would be held in the hands of a Secretary of General Affairs, who would be in effect a dictator,” but whose job description, as MacGuire put it, was “a sort of super secretary.”
As for Butler, not only did he call the plot treason, but he also came to feel considerable regret for his service as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” as he later wrote in his essay “War is a Racket,” published in the socialist magazine Common Sense. “I was a racketeer,” he confessed, “a gangster for capitalism.” In exposing the plot, he decided to side with the flawed, but functional democracy of our own country over the will of capitalists bent on holding power by any means.
via Big Think
Related Content:
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Behold the Ingenious Musical Marble Machine
Could the return of marble-based madness be a reaction to our digital age? That we must construct real fantastical machines that perform humble amusements in the face of CGI-filled blockbusters? Do we need to know that if society collapses we can look to members of the Swedish folktronic band Wintergatan to help rebuild it? After watching the above video, friends, I say yes to all those (rhetorical) questions.
The Marble Conveyer Belt does what its name implies in a loving series of cranks, gears, “fish stairs,” ratchets, pistons, curved tracks, and springs, and no real amount of florid description will do justice to the visual poetry of watching Wintergatan’s Martin Molin operate/play what they have dubbed Marble Machine X.
This is not Molin or the band’s first machine. According to Wikipedia, between December 2014 and March 2016, Molin built the first Marble Machine, that played instruments like a vibraphone, bass guitar, cymbals, and a contact-microphone’d mini drum kit following a programmed wheel that triggered marble release armatures.
When that was a success, they disassembled the machine and set about working on Machine X.
Each step of the process was documented on YouTube, which is perfect for this sort of thing. The 79 videos can be watched over at this massive playlist. (Watch it below.) This time, Molin worked with a team of designers and engineers, along with fan input, to build something bigger and better.
Molin provided some specs over at the finished video’s YouTube page:
The Marble Conveyer Belt is Completed and it delivers Perfectly.
— lifts 8 marbles per crank turn.
— thanks to it being driven by ratchets and pistons, it makes a short halt to load and unload the marbles, on exactly the same spot every time.
— The pistons are connected to the crank shaft with a 2:1 gear reduction which means that the conveyer belt go in time with the music, and in half time. I can even use the mechanical sounds from the ratchets and the marbles climbing the fish stair to create parts of the beats.
— I only had one kick drum channel up and running so the kick drum plays on 2–4 like a snare normally would. Sounds a little strange but I just made this piece of music to demonstrate the concepts are working. (no music you hear in the videos are going to be used for the album, its quick and dirty functional pieces for the videos only)
— Its been a journey but we are now on our way. Again.
— the throw of the pistons s 40mm, the pitch of the chain is 15,875x2 mm, an imperial value, and it happens to be exactly twice the marble diameter. All this makes it possible to lift exactly one row of marbles per crank turn. The ratchets move 40 mm but only grabs onto the chain to move it exactly 31,75mm per crank turn.
The carriers are flame polished cnc:ed acrylic
— The chain was custom made in Japan and I waited 5 months for it to be delivered. haha. Of all the time consuming darlings on the MMX I love the conveyer belt /fish stair combo the most.
the marbles looks like they are stuck over the demagnetiser wheel, this is by design, as soon new marbles come into the pipes from below, the marbles are slowly pushed over the demag wheel which ensures perfect demagnetisation.
Molin has some kind of madness, the good kind. Where he goes after this achievement is anybody’s guess.
Related Content:
Metropolis II: Discover the Amazing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinetic Sculpture by Chris Burden
200-Year-Old Robots That Play Music, Shoot Arrows & Even Write Poems: Watch Automatons in Action
Watch a Musician Improvise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instrument, The Carillon
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Read More...Support Us
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
About Us
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
FREE UPDATES!
GET OUR DAILY EMAIL
Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
FOLLOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
Advertise With Us
