Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gothic surprise in Turkey

Real life imitates Gothic, continued: read this gorgeous post about eerie spaces from Bldgblog.  It focuses on the recent discovery of Derinkuyu, an entirely underground city found in Turkey through this surreal, Gothic fashion, by:

a man who simply "broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another..."

Many great reflections and thoughts in that post, especially for the Gothically-inclined:

Do humans no longer build interesting subterranean structures like this – with the exception of militaries, where, to paraphrase Jonathan Glancey, we still see the architectural imagination at full flight...

[M]ight not some archaeologist, scanning the hills with ground-penetrating radar, stumble upon an anomalous void, linked to other voids, and the voids lead to more voids, and he's discovered yet another long-lost city?

The post references several well-chosen texts, including Stephen King's great underground rat story, Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and The World Without Us (the only one of these I haven't read).  It's fun to think of a syllabus along these lines, starting with Lovecraft ("Rats in the Walls") and Poe ("Amontillado"), not forgetting classic Walpole and Radcliffe.

(via MetaFilter)

Help meeeeeeeee: giant spiderwebs bigger in Texas

The story of the giant Texas spiderweb is big news today.  The best Gothic aspect, though, besides the delicious, arachnophobic horror of it all, is this quiet line from CNN's account:

"At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles east of Dallas. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs." (emphasis added)

Ah, never underestimate the power of sound.

(be sure to click for this full power of this awesome photo)

Caption this: Russian Gothic landscape

Alexei Myakishev's photography is splendid.  He studies Russian life, and offers the occasional eerie shot:

(via the excellent La Main Gauche)

Lost tales from a better dimension: Edward Gorey does Star Trek

This is mad and brilliant: Edward Gorey's The Trouble With Tribbles.

The tone, the style - perfect.  And Gorey trumps Trek by the end.

(via Making Light)

Parasite rex

Life imitates horror movie: American scientists spot one parasite copying its DNA into its hosts' genome.  Wolbachia is so good at the imperial game that:

"This parasite has implanted itself inside the cells of 70 percent of the world's invertebrates, coevolving with them..."
Wolbachia may be the most prolific parasite in the world—a "pandemic," as Werren calls it.
"A hundred million years from now, everyone may have a wolbachia organelle."

(via Bruce Sterling)

Nearly a century of time ends

Telephone companies first started offering a time service in the 1920s.  Now, nearly a century later, AT+T is about to turn off the last American holdouts.  It's fascinating to think about this cultural influence, from that association of authority with Ma Bell to language:

in the 1950s, a woman named Mary Moore emerged as the nation's leading time-teller.

Her reading of hours, minutes and seconds was delivered in a distinctive if somewhat prissy tone. Moore's odd pronunciation of the numbers 5 ("fiyev") and 9 ("niyun") influenced a generation of operators,

(via Slashdot)

Web 2.0 seminar syllabus

"Web 2.0: What Went Wrong?" is a rich, full slideshow serving two purposes: class syllabus and media criticism argument. It's not an easy argument to summarize, but it focuses on economics: ownership of Web 2.0 projects, business models built on unpaid user activity, the difficulty of linking social activism to social media.  The reading list, spread over a dozen slides, is excellent.

Trebor Scholz (SUNY Buffalo) teaches a whole series of courses on digital media.

Slideshare, which hosts this presentation, must be quietly growing.  After using it since the start, I'm seeing more instances of others taking advantage of it.

(via elearnspace)

"Mad Hatter" arrested; world blames New Jersey

Life imitates pulp fiction: New Jersey police arrest a criminal dubbed "the Mad Hatter."  Because he switched hats between many bank jobs.

The article is a wonder of economy, mixing breezy humor with casual violence:

The robberies began about a month after Madison was released from a halfway house after serving nearly 20 years in prison for the bludgeoning death of a girlfriend. He said that upon release he found a $42,000-a-year job as a machinist.

"I thought, that's not bad, right? That was good money when I went in. But that was 20 years ago," he said. Then came a lesson in inflation.

No word on The Riddler in Newark.  I await The Scarecrow, anywhere.

Fearsome Web and Chinese censorship

Coming up in China: animations on your browser, warning you not to hit inappropriate content.
What sort of content?

nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film

(thanks to Jim Lai)

Spy thriller of doom: secret atomic death sliding from the Himalyas

Life as pulp thriller: a lost atomic pile is sliding down from Himalayan peaks, and nobody's stopping it.

Schaller and a team of elite American and Indian climbers were to scale Nanda Devi and secure an instrument, powered by a plutonium generator. The device would intercept and transmit radio signals from the Chinese missile tests. The plutonium mixture would generate enough heat to make the electricity needed to power the transceiver, making the equipment self-sustaining in a hostile environment, a strategy since deployed in space as well.

In this 1960s spy thriller come to life, the CIA recruited an elite, secret team of spy-mountaineers, then trained them under cover of being astronauts.  They ascended some of the world's tallest, deadliest mountains time and again, successfully installing one atomic-powered device on a nearby peak.

They left one device behind during an especially rough climb, but the thing was gone when they returned, along with its supporting cliff.  It's been sliding down the glacier ever since, the same glaciers which feed the Ganges River and a bunch of India.  Maybe traces have already been detected in the Ganges area; maybe it won't come to anything.  Certainly it's an advance on the previous century's Great Game - take that, Kipling!

There's a Gothic aspect (and I first learned about Nanda Devi at a Gothic conference in Sweden), in that we're dealing with the eruption of the past into the present.  Specifically a wartime past, the materials of the Cold War.  It's akin to seeing an abandoned fortification loom in the dusk. 

Additionally, the Seattle P-I article notes that one of the agents' records of the events are hidden away.  Classic Gothic hidden object.

A mountaineer-cum-journalist has published one book on the subject.  Great images in the PI slideshow.

(via MetaFilter)