Category Archives: The seasons

Revolutions are unpredictable and their most significant changes take time. The signage reads: POOR VISIBILITY AHEAD

. The seasons
-- photograph: MIL22

— photograph: MIL22

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR

 

[ Racing to wish our readers for the arrival of 2016 last week we posted these excerpts, intending to use them as epigraphs for a much longer entry. But the plan changed when a train of ideas refused to stop growing. We realised that it would be easier to put what we had to say in a new post. ]

 

[I]n 1440 … Gutenberg is said to have perfected and unveiled the secret of printing based on his research … By 1450, the press was in operation …

— Wikipedia entry on Johannes Gutenberg

…

At the end of the 15th century, even the advent of printing did little to reduce a book’s price. It was more of a saving to buy parchment or paper, inks, etc., and copy a book than to purchase even a second-hand printed copy. … Ordinary people . . . did not have Bibles and would never be able to afford one, whether copied by scribes or printed …

— Marc Drogin, writer, calligrapher and independent scholar, cited in a footnote to our next excerpt:

…

Because a newly printed Gutenberg Bible “cost roughly the equivalent of more than a dozen well-fed cattle or the title to a house in town,” few in the late fifteenth century could ever hope to own a copy, not to mention the abundant supply of cheap monastic labor that made unnecessary the additional expenses for reproducing ecclesiastical works through the printing press.

— ‘Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen,’ Peter Yu, 2006, as an associate professor of Law at Michigan State University College of Law.

 

Late July break: ‘electric messages’ flying between two variations on summer

. Culture after Gutenberg, The seasons

Senigallia rooftop satellite dish

cloudwatching, tall Highway 139 poatgutenberg@gmail.com

Pictures of satellite dish and medieval rooftops are by MIL22; of clouds above electric wires, by postgutenberg@gmail.com

 

Across the wires the electric message came

He is no better. He is much the same.

— Alfred Austin, generally reckoned to be Britain’s worst Poet Laureate of all time, on the illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871

…

Nothing as gossip-worthy as that is travelling between the satellite dish on a tiled roof that could easily have been built in Gutenberg’s day — and an elongated expanse of semi-wilderness an ocean and oversized continent away. We might, if we only had the time to spare, tell a shaggy bat story — a four-day saga not quite over, starring the only known species of flying mammal. Never before have we kept company with a face copied often in medieval church gargoyles — yet oddly apt for its boffin-ish style of getting about.

Read these extracts from the Wikipedia entry on echolocation, and we defy you to come away less than one hundred per cent certain that bats are the ultimate geek totem animal:

FM signal advantages

The major advantage conferred by an FM signal is extremely precise range discrimination, or localization, of the target. J.A. Simmons demonstrated this effect with a series of elegant experiments that showed how bats using FM signals could distinguish between two separate targets even when the targets were less than half a millimeter apart. This amazing ability is due to the broadband sweep of the signal, which allows for better resolution of the time delay between the call and the returning echo, thereby improving the cross correlation of the two. Additionally, if harmonic frequencies are added to the FM signal, then this localization becomes even more precise.

[…]

CF signal advantages

The structure of a CF signal is adaptive in that it allows the CF-bat to detect both the velocity of a target, and the fluttering of a target’s wings as Doppler shifted frequencies. A Doppler shift is an alteration in sound wave frequency, and is produced in two relevant situations: when the bat and its target are moving relative to each other, and when the target’s wings are oscillating back and forth. CF-bats must compensate for Doppler shifts, lowering the frequency of their call in response to echoes of elevated frequency – this ensures that the returning echo remains at the frequency to which the ears of the bat are most finely tuned. The oscillation of a target’s wings also produces amplitude shifts, which gives a CF-bat additional help in distinguishing a flying target from a stationary one.

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Senigalli rooftops JULY 2015 unnamed