More in the Way of Hands, Mechanical

Since I've been on the subject of waldos, and making things by hand, I might as well show a few of the myriad interesting images I've come across. The hand can be interpreted in so many ways.


First, an amazing clockwork hand manipulator, which I would love to have, even if it's really simply art for art's sake. However, imagine if this could read Jacquard cards (or complex cams) and thus make your hand move in specific ways. Gives a new meaning to the term "player piano" - or perhaps, "piano player." Which would it be?

And a YouTube video of how it works:




Shane Willis' cool Escher-inspired hands repairing each other.


Part of a school project where students had to build working hands out of popsicle sticks and strings as a study of engineering and physiognomy.


A Becker Lock Grip hand, modded by the writer of a blog on "Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues." In fact, modded twice. Really a very nice hand to have if you need a prosthetic arm, because it is so moddable (and cool looking). An interesting discussion, too, of people's reactions to different prosthetics he's tried... And a neat video of him using it to chop tomatoes.



(Editor's note: Wolf Schweitzer, author of the Technical Below Elbow Amputee Issues blog, above, has written to tell me that I must include the beautiful Monestier-Lescoeur hand, made by a sculptor and automata maker who does very interesting work. He's right - check it out: you can see the video here)


Another school project, with instructions


Kroenen's Mechanical hand, a reproduction of the one in the movie Hellboy.


A cheap mechanical hand ($17) which I came across on BoingBoing

I wasn't able to get a copy of this amazing tattoo of a hand emerging from this person's flesh, but I encourage you to go look at it.


In the Waldo tradition, this person made an oversized wooden hand to fit on their arm


Lastly, Ambroise Pare's excellent rendering of a mechanical hand, made from the original but with metal parts inside. From a nice Timeline of Robotics website.

The picture at the top was in Google Images, but led to a site which proposed to scan my computer for viruses, and nothing more. So I snagged the image and got out of there...

Adele Blanc-Sec Comes to the Screen!

Okay, you-all probably already heard about this, given that the movie has already been released all over Europe, but I only found out about it this morning. After all, I've been busy building a house. Nevertheless... peel me off the ceiling!

I am absolutely over the moon. Thank you, Luc Besson!!! I have been a fan of Adele Blanc-Sec for nearly 30 years, if you can believe it: I found one of the comics in a store the very first time I went to France. It was a comic book - but it had naked breasts! And a strong woman protagonist who smoked and pulled guns on people! And it took place in the early 1900's, with all the wonderful fin de siecle architecture and early-century atmosphere! I'd never seen anything like it - the whole thing just blew my young mind. And I learned a lot of French trying to figure out what was going on.


This series of books, originally written by Jacques Tardi in 1972, is a hu-u-uge reason why I love Steampunk today. It made the most incredible impression on my young mind, and I spent many years hunting down first French, then English versions of the books. They have been hard to find, and I loved them a lot - and by extension, I learned to love Tardi. And now, thanks to the movie, Fantagraphics says they will be bringing out new English translations this fall. This sounds exciting, but it's only Volume 1 - the others will follow later (I hope).

This is a very long time coming, but I am redeemed! Bwahahaha!

Check it out:



Unfortunately, according to IMDb, the film seems to have no release dates in any English-speaking countries. It's not clear why this is, but I encourage all to write to the distribution company and demand to know when they will bring this awesome-looking film to the English-speaking world. In the UK, that would be Optimum Releasing, but I haven't found anything for North America yet. It seems like the delay in announcing it is pretty long. I just hope they're not bickering about the bath scene or something (argh).

Thanks to the Steampunk Home for finding this!

Slashfilm has some photos here...

And here are also Two reviews one of which doesn't like it so much and the other which does. I don't care - I see scenes, even in the trailer, that I remember from the book, and it makes me childishly happy, regardless!

Where's the Waldo?

Last night I had a dream where hands had become obsolete. For everything one wanted to do, one selected a tool that attached to one's arm, and then used the tool to do the activity. Golf clubs, oars, hammers, even cutlery -- they all had little slots in various walls; and when you wanted to do that activity, you simply stuck your (obsolete, apparently) hand into the ends that stuck out, and they would click onto you, becoming part of your body.

This is, of course, ridiculous, because hands and arms are one of the most amazing examples of evolutionary engineering that one can find in nature. Ultimately, a huge number nonrotational mechanical devices -- pliers, pistons, and even backhoes, to name a few -- are directly related to the structures of our hands. Why (as in my dream) would anyone make tools that bypass that extraordinary usefulness?

But it was just a dream.

In 1942, Robert A. Heinlein published a story called Waldo, about a man who is weakened by disease who invents a device (nicknamed a "Waldo") which allows him to magnify his own manual strength: the movement of his own hand would direct the device, which was also hand-like.

The Giant Hand, which is waldo-driven and was also at Maker Faire - and anyone could sit in the driver's seat

Since then, of course, remote manipulators (actually called waldos) have become common, especially for magnifying size and strength or reducing movements to microscopic size. For the most part, they have been used to reproduce hand movements; but this has progressed to things like powered exoskeletons, a la Ironman or Aliens (curiously, some of the real life ones were actually inspired by Heinlein, again - this time the book Starship Troopers). True, the contemporary exoskeletons can only walk a mile in half an hour, and their power packs don't last long; but someday, of course, we'll all be fighting wars with faceless super-soldiers.

Cyrano de Bergerac must have had a good sense of smell

Much of the funding for exoskeletons has come from places like MIT and the Pentagon, homes of ubergeeks and soldiers -- thus the dream of making oneself superstrong and impervious. True, the appeal of Ripley in the cargo loader in Aliens saying "Get away from her, you bitch" is enormous. But why can't we create waldos for other uses, perhaps to enhance more peaceful parts of us? I'd like to see sensory enhancement, not just moving and lifting. Waldo noses, for example, that allow you to smell better or in weird and interesting ways -- imagine smelling the difference between oxygen and helium, or being able to have a nose like a hound dog! I'd love to be able to become a SuperTaster , like in the They Might Be Giants song. Or perhaps someone could make Steampunk-like eye enhancers, like in City of Lost Children, that let you see infrared, ultraviolet - or even (gasp) real X-Ray specs?


There are actually waldo noses, although sadly they do not connect to anyone's sense of smell. And of course, visual enhancers have been around for a long, long time (say, three thousand years or so?). At Maker Faire two years ago, too, I saw Elly Jessop's wonderful Opera Glove, which she developed in MIT's Media Lab. This shoulder-length Glove was a sort of Voice Waldo, allowing her to catch her voice and manipulated it with an interactive glove. Very cool! In fact, a nice note (sic) to end on:



Links:

How to see if you're a Supertaster

On Utopias and the Hand

This year, in an effort to get the count in so our school could get more accurate funding, I became a census enumerator for the Non Response Follow Up (NRFU) part of the census operation.

It was interesting because, being someone who moved back to the area in which I grew up, I finally got to go down all the roads I'd wondered about as a kid -- and explored the outer reaches of Last Chance Road, which winds and bumps for eight miles or more into the back country, unpaved all the way. Some of it requires four wheel drive just to be able to get over the lumpy terrain or up the super steep hills. People there live in all kinds of interesting situations.

When I told other census workers I was going up Last Chance, they looked at me in awe. "Aren't you afraid to go up there?" one person asked me. "I had to go there to find houses. Brrr," and she shuddered. Other people had similar reactions. "Be careful," one person told me, as if I might not come back.

However, I knew a great many of the people who live back there. Some of them are teachers at the local school, and a great many have kids who go to school with my children. The larger majority of them are people who wanted to own their own land and their own homes, who wanted to grow gardens and live in nature, but could not afford to do it in fancier "rural" neighborhoods like Bonny Doon -- which has city garbage service, post boxes, and a bus line. Instead, they opt to drive in and out the five or six miles of rutted dirt road to their houses in the knowledge they can live their lives undisturbed, without a mortgage or a crazy lifestyle to support it.

Some of them have been there from the beginning. One of the teachers, for example, has a half-adobe house with hand-hewn beams and lives in a valley rich in creek-bottom soil. The garden, and the plants and flowers all around their house are like a fairy tale -- the result of more than 35 years of hard work. They built their house themselves, with no hired help, and it's a lovely work of art, like a house out of the Brothers Grimm.


A Low Impact Woodland Home – but not from here. This one's in Wales...

Another family homesteaded a piece of property where the soil wasn't quite so rich, but 36 years on the garden is extraordinary: fruit trees and bowers of roses, vegetables and one of the most beautiful hand-built log houses I've ever seen. It took three and a half years to build, hauling the trees in from the forest, peeling them and setting them; cutting the floorboards and making kitchen cabinets from hand-cut boards without the benefit of power tools.

Other houses perch on hillsides with extraordinary views, tucked among the manzanita; and there was one amazing treehouse I came across that towered over a hundred feet up in a huge tree, a three-tiered platform with arguably the most breathtaking vistas anywhere.

Some of the houses there are newer, and built with less creative endeavors in mind, of modern trucked-in materials; there are even all-mod-con trailers parked here and there in the woods. But they have the same idea in mind: a beautiful place, undisturbed by your neighbors. Even people who live only a few yards away from each other don't bother each other, except to say "hi" when you are getting in and out of your car. The unwritten rule is that they are all out here for one basic reason: to be left alone to live their lives. How that makes these people scary, I can't imagine. I suppose the outside reaction to their life-choices says more about the people who are scared than it does about the people they are scared of.

I wasn't part of the 1960's and early 1970's ideology which some of the old-timers up Last Chance have managed to successfully embody. However, my parents were. They were a bit old to be hippies, but they had a creative (some would say bohemian) outlook which fit well with the can-do attitude of the times. In 1967 they built one of the first summer craft schools in the United States and called it Big Creek Pottery. It was more than a place to go to learn to throw pots; it was a place where people discovered themselves, dropped some of the pre-existing ideas of who they were. That sounds cheesy, but think about it: they learned how to build a kiln; they learned the chemistry of glaze formulas; they had lectures and slide shows and demonstrations by some of the leading craftspeople of the time. And they stepped out of their lives for a moment, into a place in the country, where there was hand-cooked food, two acres of vegetable garden, goats, chickens (fresh eggs!), and all the stars in the world to look at when they stayed up at night. It was idyllic, and it was hard not to go home changed.

Most of my early adulthood was spent coming to terms with the fact that adult live would never be like that. The eighties and nineties were enough to teach me that those days might never return. However, now I've come back to the place I grew up I'm finding new generations of believers in the idyll: this area is rife with organic farms, and new crops of idealists keep Last Chance alive and kicking. The can-do attitude has not died.

Wavy Gravy

This summer my children went to Camp Winnarainbow, a circus camp which was started by 1960's icon Wavy Gravy. I sent them there because it sounded fun, learning stiltwalking, trapeze, tightrope, juggling, you name it. When they came back changed, I couldn't help thinking of Big Creek Pottery and wondering what experiences they'd had in their time away. My younger daughter, given to fits of evil genius which tended to ruin her sister's life, suddenly was making an effort to be sympathetic and good-hearted. The older daughter seemed calmer, and talked about wanting to do acting. She'd never wanted to be onstage in front of lots of people before.

Winnarainbow's slogan is "Toward the Fun," a humorous take on the Sufi expression "Toward the One." And as it happens, there is another agenda here: one of giving children a safe place to go and explore parts of themselves they don't get to be with every day -- without fear of being made fun of or the sense that they are weird. There is a whole tent devoted to costumes (one drawer is labeled "gorilla parts"): spangly things, wigs, silly hats, ball gowns, makeup. Children can access this treasure house at will, and often wander around with costume parts on as part of the everyday routine. The Tornado of Talent goes on almost nightly, and everyone gets to show what they can do. My younger daughter, who had been bullied at school this last year, discovered an insane talent for improv -- when I got there, strangers would come up to me and tell me she had the best sense of humor in the camp -- and is now putting that talent to use practicing comebacks for the bullying remarks she might encounter next year.

The camp is associated with Patch Adams, and some of the counselors have been Clown Ambassadors to other countries. Their stated philosophy is to teach responsibility for one's own behavior, and develop confidence, inner security, and appropriate self expression; to value the uniqueness of each individual within a diversity of backgrounds; and "to provide a training ground to nurture leaders for a peaceful, harmonious and sustainable culture."

I'm not an advocate of backwards-looking thinking. I don't believe we should always be remembering the "Good Old Days" and wishing we could go back. But I do believe in learning from our past. There are a lot of failure stories from the 1960s: hungry people abandoning their attempts at self-sufficiency; communes where people had impossible falling-outs; the sexual revolution backfiring as women who didn't want to sleep with every living being were told they were "uptight."

At the same time it can be awfully tempting to look back and see a time with fewer electronic devices, when we weren't all expecting Internet access and people had so very much time to actually build things and make things - and talk to each other face to face. The loss of hand-work as a regular part of life is a definite problem with the way we do things now, which is why I'm always so pleased to see people making things with their hands. Here in California, I see music programs, art programs and all the shop and woodworking programs being cut out of existence -- not only that but the equipment is being sold off and the buildings closed or even pulled down. The outlay involved to rebuild these programs, buying the equipment and so on, will be impossible for many, many years; and in the meantime, generations of children are being raised who aren't being taught to do anything with their hands other than type and write (and use a Wii). And sports, of course, but not all of us are cut out for that.

So it's easy to look at a time when most people did have those skills - the skills to build their own houses and to fix their own cars and make gardens out of poor soil, and did have time, and worked together to build a shared vision of the future - and see a time that's slipping away. And yet, here I am, talking to a much vaster audience, all about making things and being idealistic. And there's Make, and Instructables, and learning things via YouTube, all the products of visionaries. My daughter learned how to do Jacob's ladder from an unknown 11-year-old boy on YouTube; how cool is that? You can convert your diesel car to cooking oil, and power your generator on walnut shells, if you learn how at places like Maker Faire which is the coolest thing ever, and a place where like-minded visionary people can come together. It really isn't a lost culture, after all, we're just doing it a little differently. So I'll finish with one last exhortation: Make stuff. Do it a lot. Use your hands. And don't be afraid to change your environment. Or the world.


LInks:

A Wonderful book by Juhani Pallasmaa called The Thinking Hand:
"In The Thinking Hand, Juhani Pallasmaa reveals the miraculous potential of the human hand. He shows how the pencil in the hand of the artist or architect becomes the bridge between the imagining mind and the emerging image. The book surveys the multiple essences of the hand, its biological evolution and its role in the shaping of culture, highlighting how the hand–tool union and eye–hand–mind fusion are essential for dexterity and how ultimately the body and the senses play a crucial role in memory and creative work."

Rural Old New York

Janice McIntire just sent me a link to a New York Times article about a man who has spent 30 years turning his 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment into a rustic cabin á la Abe Lincoln. Check out the amazing interactive tour, which allows you to see a panorama of both his living room and his kitchen. I took a couple of screen shots just to give you a taste (check out the computer in the kitchen, and don't forget you can look at the ceiling and floor).

The things one can do if one has enough time! Who says Steampunk is a recent development? It's been in the works a long time.


Thanks, Janice! (via Bettershelter)

Social Sewing and Networked Objects

My friend Gwyan sent me a link (via O'Reilly Radar) to a project developed for Microsoft Research's Design Expo, wherein a group of students came up with a wonderful networked object which is designed to be a comfortable improvement for a grandparent. The project is called Social Sewing, and was designed for Despina, grandmother to one of the people in the design group.

Despina was a dressmaker before she retired, working in a shop with several other people, all sewing and gossiping together as they worked. She did this for many years, until it became too hard to get to the shop. Apparently she is still working, but now does it from home – and finds it incredibly lonely work. So the group designed three little sewing-machine-like-objects, with different colored fabrics on each one, which are networked with her friends' sewing machines. When her friends are sewing, the needles on the faux machines go up and down and the wheels go around - with apparently the right sound - and a light goes on to illuminate the fabric, just like in a real machine. When Despina sits in her sewing chair, communication is activated by her weight, and she can talk to whichever friends are sewing at that time, thus making her sewing the interesting gossip-and-sew experience it used to be in the shop. Apparently the friends are all such good seamstresses that they can tell, just by listening to the sound of the others' sewing, what the others are making. By making the devices familiar in shape and sound, the group have enhanced Despina's life dramatically without making her learn anything outside her comfort zone.

For years people have been talking about humanity getting wired into the world, wearing earrings that talk to the bus (and pay the fare) and so on. But I think that is largely chatter. The real impact is going to be in ways like this, where individual people find ways to make their lives better in ways that corporate entities could never imagine. How well would a device like this sell - or perhaps I should ask how many people out there are retired seamstresses? Not many. And yet people like this group, and many of the people who come to events like Maker Faire, are finding incredibly individual and creative ways to use technology - including, as in this case, networking everyday objects so as to make them familiar and fun, without all the learning involved in a designed corporate interface. As far as I'm concerned, this is where combining humanity and technology will have real impact, when we have the tools to design our own technological objects, when the tools are in our own hands to make what we please, in much the same way we knit sweaters or design our own websites. We are all different from any other person; and so, too, should our technology be different. And part of our everyday world, not as "technology", like cell phones or the Internet, but incorporated into our clothes, our knitting needles, the things we like to do. It's where all the personalized interfaces are trying to go, but in a much better, much more interesting way.

(PS. I'll be posting about Maker Faire in the next few days, I hope).

Old Man Bites Tenderly

I came across this entirely by accident, but it's hilarious (if a bit brutal), especially toward the end.



When I lived in Japan, the TV was full of shows like these: people having to put their faces into cages full of live snakes or having to dance on giant slimy inflatable balls, or being dropped in cars from 100-foot-high cranes. Most of the time they didn't seem funny to me, being largely about humiliation and doing things that looked insanely dangerous. This one, however, is made funnier by the inanity of the punishments and by the stricture of having to be quiet in a library. And what the heck is that American guy doing there? No idea, but it's very typical of the genre.

There was also a series of Arnold Schwarzenneger commercials when I was there for what we called a "genki drink" (energy drink), where Arnold behaved like a lunatic, which struck all of us gaijin (foreigners) as extremely funny, in that "Oh, my God" kind of way. Here's one, below: "Bui" is how the letter "V" is pronounced in Japanese, and "Daijobu" means "no problem"; so the "Daijobui" is a kind of play on words for the name of the product.



Hard to imagine, in those days, that he would become the governor of California.

My closest brush with this kind of silly show was when a TV crew came to the gaijin house (a kind of residence hotel) where I lived for awhile and filmed us all making dishes of our own concoction out of Japanese ingredients. The crew were very polite, but the TV show, when it came on the air, ended up just as sensationalized and inane as all the others. Still, it was extremely interesting to see oneself through the lens of another culture's media.

News: Museums as Social Network

I just got an email this morning about a new social networking place called Creative Spaces, which looks like it's going be a really splendid and inspiring. Nine British museums have banded together to create a sort of Facebook/Flickr type of place where you create an account and then build collections of your own from the collections of some of the most famous museums in Britain. You can add comments, network with other people and start groups - and upload your own pictures and videos to your notebooks.

So, in a sense, you can become a virtual curator.

The project is part of the UK's National Museums Online Learning Project:

"The project aims to get partner museum websites better used, engage new audiences and transform the way they think about and use existing digital collections. We are developing a range of innovative and exciting online learning resources across the nine websites for pupils, teachers, and lifelong learners. These resources will provide greater access and usage of the museum partners' online collections, and utilise new technologies to encourage and support user participation."

The NY MOMA has something similar, but it's small and not very well worked out, and you can't add your own stuff. Plus it's just one museum. This one is much more well-thought-out and proves the British are, once and for all, no longer the hidebound Empiricist nation that they once were.

The project is still in serious beta, and it's apparent that a great deal of things are not quite there yet. The Search feature, for example, is not all it should be, and a great deal of the online collections are not quite as accessible as I would like. And I don't see a system for simply browsing as of yet. I do dearly wish the Science Museum were part of the list.

Still, it pleases me. It pleases me that I could have an online place to collect my favorite images, where I can see other people's choices; and I can download from the Mutter Museum, say, and then mingle them with the many things I find here, to share them with other like-minded people. Keep an eye on it, and wait: at some point, it will be less fledgling, and we can all get together and share.

Lunokhod and the Art of Space

I recently wrote a short story in which the archeologist protagonist is on the Moon, years after the human race is dead, looking at the human leftovers there and wondering about our culture. While researching the items that were left there by our astronauts, I came across this image of Lunokhod 1, sent in November 1970 by the USSR to travel the Moon, probing and testing with its various tools and to send back images and analysis of the lunar surface.

"The vehicle was powered by batteries which were recharged during the lunar day by a solar cell array mounted on the underside of the lid. To be able to work in vacuum a special fluoride based lubricant was used for the mechanical parts and the electric motors (one in each wheel hub) were enclosed in pressurised containers.[1] [2] During the lunar nights, the lid was closed and a Polonium-210 radioisotope heater unit kept the internal components at operating temperature. Lunokhod was intended to operate through three lunar days (approximately 3 Earth months) but actually operated for eleven lunar days."

In other words, the thing was so well-made that it lasted almost four times longer than it was designed to. And no wonder! Look at that thing! Was ever something so beautifully and functionally designed, so compact and complete? It looks like a Steampunk idea of itself, which is oddly appropriate, given that it was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.

It's hard to put a finger on why the Lunokhod 1 is so attractive to my eyes, but I think it has to do with the fact that it's not all angles. The simple tub-like shape, like a soup tureen on eight wheels; the two wonderful stalk-like eyes with their hanging lids; the wonderful appendages with their enigmatic functions; and best of all, the lid which opens in the day to charge up and then closes (with a clang? Perhaps if there was atmosphere) at night - all these combine to give it a nearly-friendly anthropomorphic quality, like a wind-up toy or the walking bathtub from Nightmare Before Christmas. And am I the only one who wishes they could look inside sometime when the lid was open? What's inside it, other than the solar panels on the lid?


To add to the general mystique, I then came across this remarkable little piece of history while stumbling around Wikipedia:

"According to a French documentary TV film "Tank on the Moon" by Jean Afanassieff, the Lunokhod design returned to limelight 15 years later due to the Chernobyl nuclear powerplant disaster. The East German made remote controlled bulldozers available to Soviet Civil Defence troops weighed dozens of tons, too heavy to operate on the remaining parts of the partially collapsed reactor building roof. Human labourers could not be employed effectively to shovel debris, since workshifts were limited to tiny 90-second intervals due to intensive ionising radiation.

"Lunokhod designers were called back from retirement and in two weeks time they produced a field-usable, six wheeled, remote control vehicle prototype that was light enough to work on the weakened roof. Since the original Lunokhod moon rovers used nuclear decay heatsources for internal rack climate control, their electronic systems were already hardened to resist radiation. This benefit allowed the 1986 designers to quickly come up with a derived vehicle type for nuclear disaster recovery work. Eventually two such six-wheeled rovers were delivered to the Chernobyl accident zone and proved very useful for remotely operated debris clearing work, saving lives and earning decorations for the designers."

Somehow this little description of a moment in history feels like the perfect reward for the group of designers who created such a perfectly aesthetic object.

In my story, at least, it was the finding of this one artifact that convinced the Enlightenment-style aliens that we were not a complete loss, after all: we clearly had some inkling of aesthetic sensibility. I'd like to see more aesthetic influence on the stuff we send out into space, wouldn't you? Perhaps a few more rococo curls on our probes, or at the very least, decorative rivets. Perhaps they could escape the black-and-white sobriety of the paint jobs we've stuck to until now? Then at least our space-junk wouldn't be completely divorced from the important cultural life of our world. NASA could hire artists-in-residence to help design the "look and feel" of the space probes, so that they embody some message about the way we look at the universe, not just about the facts and functionality of science.

Instead of ugly plaques with our body outlines and a few lines in various languages, I would like to see us leave "postcards" with some of the world's great artworks shown on them. If you look at the images from the two Voyager's Golden Records (sent out in 1977), which appear by my researches to be the only extensive image selection to be sent out into space, they show all kinds of things about humans and Earth: various mathematical and physical concepts; how we are conceived, born, and grow; what the landscapes look like here; all of our engineering feats (cars, airplanes, bridges, etc). There are 116 of them. Two of them show, respectively, someone painting a picture (kind of in the background, no less) and a string quartet. This is the sum total of mention of art (there are at least three pictures of cars and five pictures of dwellings).


Okay, so it was 1977, and the big thing was science, and making sure the aliens who encountered this could see what our science looked like so they could grasp our world-view, so to speak. But what about how we view ourselves? It seems to me a great deal can be said about us by how we express ourselves, and the great variety of cultural artifacts we produce. What about Japanese woodcuts? The Mona Lisa? African Kente cloth? What about the wave organs, the Expressionists, or (God Forbid) Mount Rushmore? What would alien cultures learn about us from this dazzling array? It would be easy enough to show someone painting, and then show a series of paintings; to show someone weaving and then a selection of woven things. And so on.

It's true that various forms of music have been sent out into the spheres, probably because music is a fairly compactable (and mathematical, and therefore acceptable) art form. There has been some discussion of the efficacy (or not) of images as a way of communicating to extraterrestrial cultures; but it seems to me that even if they don't have eyes per se, they are likely to have some way of sensing the wavelengths of light, so they will "see" it somehow. And it most certainly seems that any culture that is advanced enough to be out in space, finding our stuff, is surely going to have some concept of aesthetics, and therefore find our artmaking the subject of much interest and discussion. Think about meeting someone for the first time. Are you more interested in how they built their house, or in how they see the world - what music they like, whether they read and go to museums or simply watch violent movies every night on TV? I suspect that meeting some other race would be like the dance we do when making a new friend, at least a little bit.

At least, one certainly hopes so. Otherwise, really, what's the point of it all?

Reading, Young and Old

I was just reading Ursula Le Guin's marvelousThe Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination this morning in an effort at delaying the approaching end-writing of one of my two unfinished novels (there are two finished ones, as well - anyone know a nice agent?). It's quite amazing what tactics one will employ not to do the thing one loves most; however, reading this book is much nicer than my other forms of procrastination (laundry, cleaning the chicken coop, etc). Ms. Le Guin is such a sage, intelligent, clear writer, she makes me happy.

The essay "Reading Young, Reading Old" is all about how we read at different ages, and how our perceptions change of old favorites over the years. It was odd that I opened the book here, because I've been thinking about doing a post on books that have made an indelible impression on my psyche; so now, as another form of procrastination, perhaps I can make a brief list and hope that others can enjoy these, too.


I think the single book I come back to again and again, in terms of consistently extraordinary ideas, was The Wind's Twelve Quarters (and a few stories from The Compass Rose, which I tend to conflate with the former). It is difficult to explain why the ideas in these books come back to me again and again, throughout my life, but I think it has to do with the way they go places - both in terms of interpersonal examination and intellectual exploration - that I wouldn't have ever gone otherwise. But perhaps it has more to do with the impressionable age at which I read them.

Interestingly, one of the things I most admire about Ursula Le Guin is the really rigorous social critique she brings to her books and stories. Not in a preachy way, mind, but in a way that makes you see what's possible; she has in fact said that one of the virtues of science fiction is its ability to make metaphors literal. This is a woman whose father was Alfred L. Kroeber, a man who had a huge impact on the development of social anthropology - and H. J. Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was her cousin. Her mother was a noted biographer. In other words, she comes from smart people.


The thing about Leguin is that as she has grown older, she looks backward with increasing wisdom at the various stages of life and development. As a result, though her later works don't seem to get the same recognition as the earlier ones, I actually find many of them more wonderful, more gemlike; smaller but truer. There is a period, of which Four Ways to Forgiveness is a standard-bearer and probably my favorite, where her writing managed to achieve an awareness together with a beauty and simplicity which I feel is unparalleled. She has a real knack for showing us the visceral realities of hardship and oppression which is impossibly empathetic. As a writer, I find it nearly miraculous that she can get inside the heads of people who have, for example, been through wars similar to that in Kosovo, and write about it, without getting maudlin or harsh. ,,,And all in a science fiction environment, no less.

The Birthday of the World is an extraordinary short-story collection from this period, and Tales from Earthsea, Unlocking the Air (whose title story manages to be small but stunning) and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, are all worthwhile. Believe me, they will leave you thinking.


An older favorite of mine is Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, which manages to be historically accurate while creating a completely alternate history of Manhattan. The layers of image and storytelling in this book have stayed with me year after year, and I find myself going back to it just to remember things. My favorite notion is that of the Cloud Wall, which hovers over the water and swallows things. One of the characters, in order to go home to see her parents, must skate up the river through the cloud-wall to get there; but that is the mystery and magic of where she was raised - one can't reach it by normal means. Really, an excellent, stick-in-your-brain read, and a celebration of all the really magical bits of old Manhattan, to boot.


John Crowley's Little, Big has shaped a lot of how I think about universes within universes, and the way Faery should interact with our world. It manages to do some of what the things that Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son does, in terms of making magic a deeply folkloric and American thing, but it does it in a broader, more adult, more understated way. It's the story of a family's growth and change, their lives and loves; but - and it's difficult to describe how this works - they are no ordinary family. Their close ties to Faery are never explicitly explained, yet permeate all their interactions with the world, and make their lives, in some real way, much more difficult and complex. The scene where the changeling baby begins to fall apart is one which will haunt me for the rest of my days.


Diana Wynne Jones' The Dalemark Quartet are, I think, the widest of her books. I'm a great fan of Ms. Jones, but most of her books are very domestic, taking place in and around one building or sometimes one neighborhood; it's a hallmark of hers, to bring the magic into the domestic world. These books are much more sweeping - and yet they manage to be beautiful and odd at the same time. I really love her ability to make us feel what it's like to be wrapped up in a situation, the way we get to really feel what it's like to be in the thick of magic, either from one's self or from somewhere else. She has a way of making it terribly intimate. These four books take that intimacy into a broader context, and are wonderful for that. Of course, it could be that they were the first of her books I ever read...

Then there are some books I think people should read just because there is nothing else like them. Really. And, of course, because they're great. Here's a list:


Edward Gorey's Amphigorey is... well, if you haven't read any Gorey, and you like this blog, you really need to get this book. It's what being weird is all about - in a good way. And if you have any pretensions of wanting to be a writer, you must read "The Unstrung Harp," a story in Amphigorey which describes the writing process of novelist Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel."

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is a relatively recent book, and absolutely beautiful in its conception and execution. I've known grown men to cry at the end of this book. Perhaps that's not a recommendation, but imagine how harrowing your life would be if you had a disorder that meant you were unexpectedly yanked from the present time into some other time during your lifespan, regardless of your present situation? The dangers, and an elegant time-crossed love story, are nicely thought out here.


The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is described thus: "...a thoughtful and powerful examination of cultures and the people who shape them. How might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow." Warning: this book contains extensive reincarnation - the characters get to live through the whole seven centuries, over and over. Really, a fascinating, well-researched and well-thought out read - and a great story, to boot.


Russell Hoban is a wildly varied and intriguing author. Not only did he do the plain-and-simple Frances books, which many children know and love, but he did the incredibly creative Captain Najork picture books, of which there are sadly only two. In A Near Thing for Captain Najork, for example (the second of the two books), one character invents a "two seater, jam powered frog" which he uses as a conveyance. The frog hops over walls and rivers and people, and is pursued by a vengeful-but-upright Captain Najork:

"'Follow that frog!' he shouted to his hired sportsmen as he leapt into his pedal-powered snake, and away they undulated. Captain Najork had not forgotten the time when Tom had beaten him and his hired sportsmen at womble, muck, and sneedball. 'I'd like to try some new games on him,' said the Captain. 'I'd like to see how good he is at thud, crunch, and Tom-on-the-bottom.'"

Captain Najork remembers how, in How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, Tom's fooling-around ways helped him win at some rather odd games. In the end, as the champion, Tom trades in his iron-hatted Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong for a new aunt, one who likes to sit in trees with a glass of wine: Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet.


Riddley Walker, also written by Hoban, is a post-apocalyptic (?) novel about life among the villages in England when it's no longer England, but a rural place with its own rituals and religion. Here is what one reviewer says:

"Here's the first sentence of this extraordinary novel: 'On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn't ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.' This is Riddley-speak and it's a sort of post-apocalyptic patois spoken by Riddley and the various peoples who live in a desolate Kent thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust. The tribes are living at an Iron Age level of technology and what they are allowed to think and do is shaped in part by the legend of St Eustace and controlled by leaders who use itinerant puppeteers to communicate their policies."

The language is difficult at first, but incredibly poetic in the end, ragged and beautiful. And the story is astonishing in its virtuosity.

On a different and more normal note, Harnessing Peacocks is where I first discovered Mary Wesley, who has her finger on the pulse of wartime (and post-wartime) characters in Britain. She also wrote The Chamomile Lawn, which is probably more well-known, but I like the protagonist of Harnessing Peacocks, which takes place in the eighties, perhaps. The premise of the story is very odd, that of a woman who works part-time as a special sort of cook and part-time as a prostitute - but a prostitute unlike any other - to support her son.

In a similar real-world vein, The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, is quite boggling, as well. Really a weirdie of a book. I liked it more as a young person than I do now, but I feel I really should mention it if I am writing of books that are unlike any other. It's a fast and interesting read.

Well. That was not a brief list. Now, I suppose, I shall have to actually get to work... wait, I'm hungry.

Hindu Dieties for Christmas

I had a few hours to myself in San Francisco the other day (a wonder in itself), and I happened across The Little Book of Hindu Dieties, a remarkable book in that it seems to conflate Shiva, Vishnu and the rest with the Power Puff Girls. I was extremely taken with the image of Kali, so cute! And yet with the severed-arm skirt and the head in her hand...

The Little Book is the product of Pixar's Sanjay Patel, working via his gheehappy site, where you can get books, prints and clothes with the images on them. I really wished I could get a t-shirt of the Kali in the book, but alas, kids' sizes only (these links here don't work but a fix is promised). The links page is of some interest, too.

Then I found that, of course, bOINGbOING had already showcased GheeHappy, including a plush Kali doll made by a friend of Patel's:


It was tempting to buy the book, given that my kids are big on Hindu mythology comic books, which tell the gazillion tales about the panoply of Hindu gods. My elder daughter used to even talk with strangers about "severe penances," which she learned about while reading the story of Parvati. That was always interesting to try to explain; lots of sidelong looks. The comics can be a great teaching tool, and very entertaining (though you may have to suffer the odd looks if your kids take them to heart). You can get hindu comics here, if you're interested.

In any case, this made me think about going to check out what's been happening with Nina Paley, who created Sita Sings the Blues, an indescribably fabulous set of animations which, last I saw, were just that: a series of wonderful shorts from the Ramayana which she was hoping to parlay into a feature film. Now I find she has done just that, to my intense joy - but guess what? They moved the copyright year back again. She is having trouble with rights for the songs.
[editor's note: This is what happens when you try to get a blog post out in very little time after not sleeping enough. I need to check my sources! I am still trying to "rediscover" the source where I found out about this... More soon. In the meantime, it looks like there will be a big fight in 2018 when they try to extend again.]


I have to say, copyright is a tricky business - and I do mean business. Every time it looks like Disney's oldest character, namely one Mickey Mouse, is about to go out of copyright, our obliging (but certainly not corrupt; never that) government takes it into their heads to extend the date when things go out of copyright. Why is this? No one knows. Surely it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Disney is so fabulously rich, that they can afford the most expensive lawyers to slap down independent artists and perhaps to lobby continuously about the copyright thing. No, there must be another reason.

I'm waxing sarcastic. Unlike me to be annoyed at something like this, but I have friends who have been on the wrong end of a Disney lawsuit. And I do keep hoping they'll lose the copyright one of these days. Everyone else has, throughout the history of copyright. It's supposed to be fair, right?

In Nina Paley's case, she built the shorts around songs which were due to go out of copyright, and then the dates moved were out of copyright, but then found she had to pay for synch rights - and of course, the person or corporation who held those rights is now asking far more than any individual could possibly pay. So theoretically she could be up as a felony criminal for using them without permission. Sigh. So it might never be released.


I despair at the fact that this fab-o movie came to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago but I missed it. The trailers look marvelous. Go check it out, and keep an ear to the ground about the copyright thing; Ms. Paley has a blog, a very smart and somewhat disillusioned chronicle of neat stuff. It's a crying shame it can't be released. The movie has won more awards than I've seen attached to a single animated work before. Stunning.

Here's the trailer, in case you wanted to see it:



Update: go see what Roger Ebert has to say about the movie!

A Rule of Thumb

"Fingerprints have been found on ancient Babylonian clay tablets, seals, and pottery. They have also been found on the walls of Egyptian tombs and on Minoan, Greek, and Chinese pottery — as well as on bricks and tiles in Babylon and Rome. ...on some pottery, fingerprints were impressed so deeply that they were likely intended to serve as the equivalent of a brand label." [wiki]

There is something eternally fascinating about the ridges and whorls on our hands and feet, those unrepeatable patterns which cover most of what is termed our "volar skin", that is, skin of the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet. When I was a kid I spent hours staring at the swirls and lines, looking at where they ended - and wondering why they were there. "Designs" I called them, when I was young.

I even went through a period, when I learned about fingerprinting and the idea that everyone has completely different fingerprints, where I made everyone around me (mostly adults) squash their fingers onto my ink-pad and leave their mark on the paper which I carried around for the purpose. Of course, it wasn't washable ink, so there seemed to be an inordinate number of long-suffering, black-fingered folks around my household.

The other night I got to talking with friends about fingerprints. How do they work? Why do we have them? The conversation didn't go very far, but it did make me decide to go look it up. Forty websites later, I am still no expert, but I continue to be fascinated.


(Koala fingerprint, above, versus human, below)

For example, did you know that koalas are one of the few mammals besides primates who have fingerprints, and in fact even with an electron microscope, it is difficult to tell koala prints apart from human prints? There's a mystery story in there somewhere, like The Murders in the Rue Morgue only (hopefully) more believable (anyone met a murderous orangutan lately?). Fishers are also said to have fingerprints, which seems to me very strange: if fishers do, why not stoats? Weasels? And so on?


Spider monkeys, whose prehensile tail-tips are so sensitive and flexible that they can pick a dime up off a floor, also have prints on the bare spot at the end of their tails. Since the tails are used not only as a sort of third arm when swinging in the trees (as a safeguard from falling), but often supports the entire weight of their bodies while they feed, this would make sense: fingerprints, and other places with "friction ridges" - the volar regions - generally tend to occur where one needs to grip something. This can mean gripping an object to keep from dropping it, or (as in the case of trees) to keep it from dropping you, or simply to keep your feet steady on the rocks so you don't fall off a cliff.

But how does it work? One source I was perusing posited that there could be a Van der Waals force element, like gecko's feet. The person cited the fact that our fingertips can feel the grittiness of a powder down to about 150 microns, and then it just didn't feel gritty anymore; since Van der Waals' forces tend to show up more when something is 150 microns or smaller, he conjectured a connection.


Other sources, however, didn't support this idea, even if it appealed to me. The general belief among my local pundits was that friction ridges weren't deep enough, enclosing enough or wet enough for either suction or for cohesion; and their structure wasn't complex enough for Van der Waals. The consensus was almost entirely on friction. Given that the flesh in these dermal ridges (to use another term) are notoriously squashy (thus making crime scene fingerprints - known as "latent prints" seriously difficult to decipher), the friction thing holds up as an answer. Just as tires made of squishy gel are more likely to stick to the road than ones made of hard plastic, so do the flexible, moist areas on our hands and feet provide an excellent surface to grip with. Thus does the fingerprint contribute to our development as tool-users.


Dermal ridges develop in the womb, and are pretty much developed by seventeen weeks. The patterns on our fingers are influenced by our time in the womb: subtle stresses and tensions affect how they grow, creating uniqueness through a combination of genetics and in utero experience (as can be seen by genetically identical twins, who don't have identical fingerprints). Once the fingerprints are set, they cannot be altered easily:

"Should the top layer of skin suffer any injury, the ridges grow back after healing in the exact pattern they had before. Therefore, superficial cuts or abrasions alter fingerprint characteristics only temporarily. If the injury reaches deep into the dermis and destroys the dermal papillae, then growth of new epidermal cells is impaired and a permanent scar is created."
[New South Wales Police Department]


The way the ridges develop, oddly, depends on the arrangement of the sweat glands, rising to pores which, in the volar regions, protrude in papillae (nipple-like structures) above the baseline of the skin surface. As these grow, they also grow connections to each other in rows - and this is how the lines and whorls of the fingerprint are created.

It also explains why fingerprints - the kind the police use for identification - are often made up of what appear to be rows of dots, rather than nice smooth lines:

"Such pore holes are critical to the production of latent prints since sweat reaches the surface of the hand and efficiently coats the tops of the fingerprint ridges with sweat. Sweat glands serve as small chemical reservoirs and contain a variety of water-soluble chemical compounds, produced or stored by the body."


In other words, we leave a chemical trace when we touch things, as rows of little oily mineral sweat-dots.

For those of you who have ever worried about the old hair-on-the-palm story, you can relax: both sebaceous glands and hair follicles appear in the dermal layer of other skin surfaces but don't in friction skin. Probably for good reason. How useful would it be to have painful pimples on the palms of your hands if your best escape from predators was to swing up into a tree?

Johann Christoph Andreas Mayer recognized in 1788 that although friction ridge patterns could appear similar, they never seemed to repeat themselves. Using fingerprints' unique patterns as an identification system, however came in much later, starting with the movement to the cities in the Industrial Revolution, when people began leaving their ancestral homes, where every face was familiar, and moving into more populous environments, where they were more difficult to identify and it was harder to find out their history.

"...felons quickly learned to lie about their names, and the soaring rate of urban crime forced police to search for a more exacting way to determine and keep track of identities. The first such system was devised in 1883 by a Parisian police clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. His method, called anthropometry, relied on an elaborate set of anatomical measurements -- such as head size, length of the left middle finger, face height -- and features like scars and hair and eye color to distinguish one person from another. Anthropometry proved useful, but fingerprinting, which was then coming into use in Britain, held more promise...


Francis Galton

"In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds published the first comments, in the scientific journal Nature, on the use of fingerprints to solve crimes. Soon afterward, Charles Darwin's misanthropic cousin, Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist and the founder of eugenics, designed a system of numbering the ridges on the tips of fingers -- now known as Galton points -- which is still in use throughout the world. (Ultimately, though, he saw fingerprints as a way to classify people by race.)"
-- [Michael Specter, from a fascinating article on the fallibility of fingerprints in the New Yorker]


Bertillon's method was actually quite popular in France long after fingerprints had become popular everywhere else (a member of the Bonnot Gang actually sent his fingerprints to the French police because he knew they only had his physical measurements on record). This popularity after his long struggle for the legitimization of his system meant that Bertillon was able to go on to implement such innovations as mug shots, systematized crime scene photography, ways to preserve footprints and ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering.

Now, after a nearly hundred and fifty years of fingerprint analysis being considered unquestionably right, despite any evidence against it in trials across the world, a few cases have brought the practice into the limelight. Much of fingerprint analysis hasn't changed since it was first created, and its status as a "science" is coming into question, since scientific method, not to mention actual studies of the practice to see how accurate it is, seem to be missing from the process.


Some people are, actually, born without fingerprints. A genetic disorder due to defects in the protein Keratin 14 lead to two different diseases causing embryos not to form friction ridges. It makes it difficult to do certain things, like turn pages or deal cards. Most of all, it makes it difficult to get certain kinds of jobs - such as school teacher, nurse, and so on. Not to mention working for the government in either law enforcement or classified work.


In the old days, safecrackers used to sand the ends of their fingers to make them more sensitive and to make their fingerprints less identifiable; but that seems to be going out of fashion in contemporary times. Nowadays, you are more likely to affect your whorls by picking up a tiny virus-based skin tumor called a plantar wart (veruca), which deforms the skin striae as it grows, making the ridges go around it. When the wart finally goes away, your striae never look quite the same...

So, the next time you are lying on the couch with a loved one's feet in your lap, have a look, and marvel at the fanciful shapes and swirling minutae of their toes. Think about how long they have been on our feet, probably millions of years, and how even though we wear shoes, our bodies still create these wonderful artworks. They really are amazing.




Links:

A simple timeline on the history of fingerprints

Michele Triplett's Fingerprint Dictionary: Every term you could possibly want to know about fingerprint analysis and police procedure.

A little YouTube of the beginning of my favorite story about safecrackers, Butch Minds The Baby

Website about Sir Francis Galton, above

Photoshop brushes which give you fingerprint effects over at DeviantArt