• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
Cracking the Code of Letterlocking
A tale of Black Chambers, lost correspondence, and high technology.
The “virtual unfolding” of sealed letter DB-1538 is an example of how researchers are able to discern the folds and read the contents of sealed 17th-century letterpackets. Embiggenable. Protip: Virtual Fold.
IF YOU SENT A LETTER IN 7th-century Europe, there was a good chance it would pass through one of the continent’s so-called “Black Chambers”—secret rooms attached to post offices and staffed by intelligence units, where mail was opened, copied, resealed, and sent on its way, with the writer and recipient none the wiser.
Nadine Akkerman, a senior lecturer at Leiden University, is an expert in 16th- and 17th-century espionage. But during her research into the Black Chambers, she ran across something perplexing—a document by Samuel Morland, a British spymaster, in which he bragged about his talent for opening and resealing letters. “Wait,” she thought to herself. “Can’t we all do that?”
It wasn’t until she met Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith—researchers studying letters and document security during this period—that Morland’s braggadocio began to make sense. As it turns out, letters in the 1600s didn’t look exactly like letters today. Mass-produced envelopes weren’t invented until the 1830s, meaning that most 17th-century letter writers folded their correspondence in such a way that it became its own envelope—a process Dambrogio had dubbed “letterlocking.” Letterlocks could be simple, just a series of quick folds without any sort of adhesive. But they could also be incredibly complex, even booby-trapped to reveal evidence of tampering.
The locking mechanism on DB-1976 was used beginning in the 1500s. Virtual unfolding showed that it was a low-security locking technique. Embiggenable.
So when Morland referred to resealing letters, he meant replicating the complicated sequence of folds, tucks, and more that made up each particular letterlock. “Just imagine that you throw 1,000 origami birds on a pile and have to refold them quickly to make sure that the recipient doesn’t know that you’ve actually read that letter,” Akkerman says. “Of course, that is an art.” …
PODCAST: Disgusting Food Museum
Join us for a daily celebration of the world’s most wondrous, unexpected, even strange places.
IN THIS EPISODE OF THE ATLAS OBSCURA PODCAST, we visit a food museum in Sweden that challenges what exactly makes something delicious … or disgusting. …
RELATED: Rawlins, Wyoming: Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum
This prison-turned-museum is a remnant of the Old West’s grizzly, violent past.
Cell blocks at the Wyoming Frontier Prison Museum. Embiggenable. Explore this tourist attraction at home.
POST-CIVIL WAR WYOMING WAS ONE of the wildest of the wild west states. Its endless canyons were an asylum for outlaws, its untouched plains a playground for the law averse.
Anxiously awaiting statehood, Wyoming chose Rawlins as the prime location for its new prison. The Cowboy State, as it was to become known, no longer intended to act as a haven for criminals. The Wyoming Frontier Prison was going to enforce the territories intention to be a law-abiding member of the union.
Opening in 1901, the prison consisted of 104 cell blocks, and in the beginning was absent of running water or electricity. Women were housed in the prison until 1909, when the last woman was transferred to Colorado. In the 80 years that the prison operated, general advancements were made on the facilities, and due to the apparent popularity of the institution, many expansions were made.
The prison used various methods of discipline for the people incarcerated there, many of which are considered inhumane today. Methods including a dungeon, solitary confinement, and a “punishment pole” to which men were handcuffed and whipped. It was the setting of prison riots and daring escapes. Train robbers, horse thieves, and murderers made up the bulk of the population over the years—when it closed its doors in 1981, the prison had held at least 13,500 people within its walls, and executed 14.
The Wyoming Frontier Prison reopened as a museum in 1988. It now offers three-hour tours, guiding you through the cafeteria, the grounds, three of the former cell blocks, and of course the Death House, where 14 men were executed for their transgressions: nine by hanging and five in the still-present gas chamber. …
The Next Big Gasoline Shortage Is Coming
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot ignore the warning signs for future catastrophes.
In North Carolina, where I live, only about one-third of gas stations are currently reporting that they have any gas, and that’s after some improvement in availability. A ransomware attack shut down a key pipeline supplying these stations, an event that could, but likely won’t, serve as a wake-up call, before we experience a true catastrophe.
Prior to the pandemic, I wrote a lot about digital security, or the lack thereof. I once compared our security status quo to “building skyscraper favelas in code—in earthquake zones.” Not much has changed since then, but we are starting to hear more rumbles.
The dynamics of digital insecurity, ransomware, and related threats are eerily similar to the global public health dynamics before the pandemic. Battlestar Galactica helps explain one key similarity: Networked systems are vulnerable. The premise of the series is that the battleship Galactica, and only Galactica, survived an attack by the Cylons (humanoid robots) on the human fleet simply because it was old and had just been decommissioned in the process of being turned into a museum. Being older, it had never been networked into the system. The “shutdown” command sent by the attackers never reached it, and it was thus spared.
In pandemic terms, Galactica was an island that no one could travel to.
Our software infrastructure is not built with security in mind. That’s partly because a lot of it depends on older layers, and also because there has been little incentive to prioritize security. More operating systems could have been built from the start with features such as “sandboxing,” in which a program can play only in a defined, walled-off area called a “sandbox” that is unreachable by anything else. If that program is malicious, it can do damage only in its sandbox. (This is analogous to the idea of “air gapping,” in which crucial parts of a network are unplugged from a network’s infrastructure.) …
BOOK REVIEW: The singing neutrino Nobel laureate who nearly bombed Nevada
From desert to gold mine — Frederick Reines was a larger-than-life physicist who did larger-than-life experiments.
Frederick Reines, left, and Clyde Cowan, at the controls of the Savannah River experiment, where they were the first researchers to detect neutrinos, in 1956.
Chasing the Ghost: Nobelist Fred Reines and the Neutrino Leonard A. Cole World Scientific (2021)
In the early 1950s, the physicist Frederick Reines and his colleague Clyde Cowan designed an experiment to detect neutrinos, the tiniest and most elusive of subatomic particles. Theorists were convinced that neutrinos must exist — and that they would be untraceable. And Reines liked nothing better than a challenge.
The experiment was to take place in the Nevada desert. A flux of neutrinos would be created by detonating a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb, comparable to that dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, a few years earlier. A deep hole would be dug 40 metres away from the detonation site, into which a detector would be dropped at the moment of explosion to catch the flux at its maximum.
Eminent physicists enthused about the plan. It was approved by Reines’s employer, the government-funded Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. Work began on the detector, nicknamed El Monstro, and on the construction of the shaft. At the last minute, Reines and Cowan transferred the experiment to a nuclear reactor, but not because of environmental or safety concerns. They had worked out that although the reactor would deliver a flux of neutrinos three orders of magnitude lower than that from the bomb, it offered a better option for distinguishing signal from noise.
So they did the work instead at the Savannah River nuclear reactor in South Carolina, and Reines and Cowan became the first scientists to detect neutrinos. In 1995, Reines won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics. (Cowan had died by then.)
The idea of including a nuclear bomb in a basic-research protocol might sound outlandish, but in Chasing the Ghost, his biography of Reines, Leonard Cole reminds us that attitudes were different then. …
Rich Guy Asks Around To Find Out Who The New Jeffrey Epstein Is https://t.co/PCyUzHk5Yt pic.twitter.com/YShJZdqEMt
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 17, 2021
Board Games Are The Closest We’ve Come To ‘Star Trek’s Holodeck
Anyone who’s seen Star Trek: The Next Generation is familiar with the Holodeck, that sophisticated electronic playground that let the Enterprise crew live out their irksomely wholesome, public domain fantasies. Seriously, why was anyone playing 4D chess or attending coworkers’ awkward trombone concerts when they could literally replicate any scenario imaginable at the touch of a button? Sadly, we’re nowhere near replicating this amazing technology, but we would like to humbly suggest that there is a fantastic substitute that A) already exists in real life and B) made of literal cardboard.
Yup, we’re talking about board games — they’re not just for families to get into heated arguments over rent hikes at gentrified waterfront properties anymore; there are elaborately constructed open-world games available. It’s no wonder that during the pandemic, board game sales rose by a whopping 21%. And unlike video games, board games aren’t bound by graphic constraints; they utilize what every school librarian claimed was the greatest power of all: the power of imagination.
And so many of the specific Holodeck programs we saw on Star Trek have real-world board game analogs. Like Captain Picard’s Dixon Hill program, a hard-boiled detective game that enables him to solve mysteries and ogle digital women.
Here in the 21st century, we have Detective: City of Angels, which similarly lets players roam around old-timey Los Angeles questioning suspects and finding clues …
Data and Geordi repeatedly play Holmes and Watson, inadvertently creating an entirely new lifeform in the process …
There’s an entire series of Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective games that allow you to play the detective without having to dress up in itchy clothes and do bad British accents …
…
Tourist Left Dangling After Winds Break Glass Bridge #WhatDoYouThink? https://t.co/MBKUknbabl pic.twitter.com/DCRkom3duQ
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 17, 2021
RELATED: 15 Extreme Pieces Of Performance Art
If you’ve never thought of prancing around in public wearing a suit made entirely out of chicken skins, then you’re probably not a performance artist. Or maybe you just have, like, normal nightmares. We’re not going to pretend to know what goes on in the minds of the following people, is what we’re saying. Also, fair warning: Know that some of these entries may be disturbing to some. We tried to add some palate cleansers. We tried.
15
14
6 Perverted Sexual Fantasies People Passed Off As ‘Art’
13
12
11
…
New Obesity Drug Delicious https://t.co/MJW05G6sGD pic.twitter.com/ZAd4opyy1F
— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 16, 2021
Why do we hate the sound of our own voices?
As a surgeon who specializes in treating patients with voice problems, I routinely record my patients speaking. For me, these recordings are incredibly valuable. They allow me to track slight changes in their voices from visit to visit, and it helps confirm whether surgery or voice therapy led to improvements.
Yet I’m surprised by how difficult these sessions can be for my patients. Many become visibly uncomfortable upon hearing their voice played back to them.
“Do I really sound like that?” they wonder, wincing.
(Yes, you do.)
Some become so unsettled they refuse outright to listen to the recording – much less go over the subtle changes I want to highlight.
The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology.
For one, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak. …
Giant Marilyn Monroe Statue Returns To Palm Springs, But Its Backside Faces Backlash
The ‘Forever Marilyn’ statue by artist Seward Johnson was first in Palm Springs from 2012 to 2014. Now, she’s headed back to the resort town permanently. But her return is sparking a backlash. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
After seven years, Palm Springs, Calif., is about to scratch its Marilyn Monroe itch. A towering sculpture of the screen icon called “Forever Marilyn” that spent almost two years in the city is coming back permanently.
When she was there from 2012 to 2014, she was one of downtown’s hottest attractions. But while some like it hot, others have a frostier take on the star’s comeback.
The sculpture itself is a 26-foot-tall, stainless steel and aluminum likeness that captures Marilyn in that famously billowing white dress as she stands over a subway grate in the movie The Seven Year Itch.
Billy Wilder’s 1955 film “The Seven Year Itch” gave the world one of the most indelible images of Marilyn Monroe.
That scene has lived on in pop culture for generations and is partly why Aftab Dada has spent years working to return the statue to the desert.
“She makes [the] majority of the people very happy,” Dada says.
He’s a managing director at the Palm Springs Hilton and the head of PS Resorts, the hospitality organization that’s decided “Forever Marilyn’s” forever home will be the Coachella Valley. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here is me critical analysis of racoons. The ones that steal food, the ones that go into houses, yeah nah mostly the ones that are the dodgiest overall in the animal kingdom.
土管ワープ！Maru teleports with pipe!
FINALLY . . .
Artist Reimagines Famous Paintings With the Quirky Cast of ‘The Simpsons’
EVER WONDER WHAT A fine art-themed episode of The Simpsons would be like? One Ontario, Canada-based artist has, and they’ve shared their vision through funny mash-ups between famous paintings and Simpsons characters. Known simply as @fine_art_simpsons on Instagram, the artist replaces historic figures in fine art paintings with beloved characters like Homer Simpson, Ned Flanders, Edna Krabappel, and Milhouse Van Houten. Suddenly, Bart is Jackson Pollock spilling paint everywhere, Grandpa and Mona are their own version of the iconic American Gothic, and Kent Brockman is the Norman Rockwell-esque “undecided voter” stuck choosing between Kang and Kodos.
The artist began creating the aptly titled Fine Art Simpsons series in 2020. “I thought it would be funny to combine Klimt’s The Kiss and Hokusai’s Great Wave with familiar scenes from The Simpsons,” the artist tells My Modern Met. “A friend saw them and convinced me to create an account to show them off. Since then, I’ve learned more about fine art than I ever did in my years at ‘art school’ and continue to have a really good time finding visual and thematic similarities between classic art and my favorite cartoon.”
Each scene is a brilliant mix of art history and an astute knowledge of The Simpsons, making it very clear that the artist is a super fan. The Instagram account is the perfect spot for those that sit in the middle of a Simpsons and art history Venn diagram as it gives a nod to both in clever ways. For instance, the artist takes David Hockey’s swimming pool scene in A Bigger Splash and adds a tiny Bart peering through the window in the back. For keen Simpsons fans, this is a clear reference to the Bart of Darkness episode, in which Bart breaks his leg and starts spying on neighbors from his room. On the art history side, Vincent van Gogh’s Night Café, Salvador Dalí’s surreal dreamscapes, and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks make appearances amongst a long list of other masterpieces. …
Ed. Click the link for the visual goodnesses.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
This proposal couldn't have gone worse pic.twitter.com/ydBlj9MqdV
— The Sun (@TheSun) May 17, 2021
