blue ant

A field guide to the world of William Gibson."The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed." www.tatewilliams.org @tatejw

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Inchmale’s Cabinet

Victorian English literature is filled with angst about what chaos lies behind proper and unassuming exteriors. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow says Brussels always reminds him of a “whited sepulchre,” a biblical reference to hypocrisy by which things “appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”

William Gibson’s London puts a psychedelic twist on this notion, with all manner of sinister weirdness lying in wait behind plain facades. This is most true in Cabinet, the hotel and private club that serves as home base for our heroes in Zero History.

Cabinet is “(h)alf the vertical mass of an eighteenth-century townhouse, one whose facade reminded her of the face of someone starting to fall asleep on the subway,” with the interior decor “ragingly, batshit insane.”

In Hollis Henry’s room:

The two largest pieces of furniture in the room were the bed, its massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastic-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head, and a birdcage, so large she might have crouched in it herself, suspended from the ceiling.

Descriptions of Cabinet are classic examples of Gibson’s rewarding prose, descriptions you can tear apart and hold in your bare hands to look at the pieces one at a time. The club is a smaller version his world, full of puzzling things that get more puzzling the closer you look at them.

Since Zero History first published, people have wondered whether Cabinet is real, as places in Gibson’s fiction sometimes are, and this one even described with close to an address, in Portman Square.

Readers suspected an odd club close to thereabouts in London, and Gibson confirmed in a Twitter exchange that it’s “obliquely” based on Home House Private Members Club (all photos except the last two are from Home House).

Home House is described in the membership materials as “London’s most exclusive private members’ club, fusing 18th century splendor with 21st century style.” Before you get too worked up, it’s not quite as bonkers as Cabinet, but it is extremely ornate and each room is uniquely designed, including multiple bars, restaurants, lounges, and private rooms.

The club is more expansive than Cabinet, too, encompassing three units, Nos. 19, 20, and 21 Portman Square. The building originates in 1773, when Elizabeth, countess of Home, commissioned famed neoclassical architect James Wyatt, who was later fired and replaced by rival Robert Adam. It’s considered one of the greatest surviving townhouses of Adam’s with its grand reception rooms and stunning central staircase spanning the height of the building.  

Over the years it was owned by various royals, and was home to an institute of art for about 60 years. After being vacant for most of the 90s, a group of investors bought and restored it to its current state.

The restaurants and drawing rooms have their own old world charm, but the bars are stunning and kind of alien. You’ve got “The Vaults,” the late-night party rooms with animal prints and warm lighting. The House Bar has a bizarre, freestanding bar that looks like molten metal.

One phenomenon you see in Gibson’s fiction is he’ll get a grasp on something weird, and before long it sort of mutates and fragments. It’s that eventual, even distribution of the future. I feel like this has happened to the fever dream figment of Cabinet, with the rise of short-term, personal rentals. Consider these airbnbs, for example. 

In the past five to ten years, the oddity of Cabinet has splintered into thousands of small, private clubs, in which the right online fund transfer can land you access to the inside of a castle, a clock tower, a water tower, a tree house in the redwoods, a funhouse of mirrors in Pittsburgh. There’s a cabinet of curiosities on every block. 

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The Monomolecular Filament Thumb, Part Two: Weird Materials

So there’s a bunch of wiry weapons and tools out there, but is there anything in reality along the lines of the monomolecular filament? How about carbon nanotubes?

Read Part One here.

Carbon nanotube is a relatively new and advancing material that, while a bit hyped right now, show a lot of exciting potential for strength, light weight, and conductivity. Nanotubes are made of graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon with a honeycomb, chicken-wire-like structure, rolled into a cylinder. The result is a tube that has a diameter of about a nanometer, or one billionth of a meter, or one ten-thousandth the thickness of a human hair.

Engineers can make nanotubes 100 times stronger than steel and six times lighter. Possible applications include various health care uses, biomedical implants, body armor, bulletproof clothes, electrical circuits, and structural materials. Rhett Allain did one of his cool physics of fictional items analyses using carbon nanotube ropes as Spider-Man’s webs.

And yet, for all the excitement around carbon nanotubes, most of this is pretty early stuff. For example, they are NANO-materials, meaning they exist on a microscopic scale. They don’t get very long, and the longer they get, the more brittle they are. So at the very small level they are incredibly strong, but for now, they are impractical at greater lengths. In real life, they are less like tiny superpowered ropes, and more like vials of fine powder.

But the material is always advancing, with different research teams threading the fibers like yarn to make a conductive artificial muscle fiber. Then there was one idea for creating cables made of carbon nanotube as the basis for space elevators up to orbiting stations (that’s another Blue Ant post…).

Another cool story about the nano-material actually does involve the tiny tubes being used in weaponry, but around 900 AD. In 2006, a German materials researcher found what he suggested to be carbon nanotube structures in Damascus steel sabers used in the Crusades. His team found that the special steel used to make the super-sharp swords had a pattern of nanometer-sized tubes, which could have formed from carbon at high temperatures, centuries before scientists even discovered the structures.

So could carbon nanotubes someday be the basis of a new weapon? A super-fine garrote spooled in a thumb? Even if it could, what a terrible idea.

And the reason is the execution. One of the holy grails of scifi coming to life is the light saber. There’s always some apocryphal report of “scientists are closer to creating a real light saber” alongside headlines for the real-life hoverboard and real-life invisibility cloak. There’s a pretty fun recent Quora thread on this, in which one answerer suggests carbon nanotubes as a solution. But a real life light saber would be a terrible idea, leaving a trail of amputees in its wake. (And this officially just became the geekiest Blue Ant post to date.)

Same thing for the thumb. That shit is just crazy.

Which reveals the true star of these early stories—fancy brains. Part of the fun of Gibson’s stories is that a lot of the action actually takes place between the ears. Sometimes just from a bunch of awesome drugs.

Just as a fictional Jedi is the only person who could reasonably use a laser sword, the only person who could use razor fingernails or a thumb with an invisible wire saw tucked inside, without almost immediate dismemberment is someone whose nervous system was jacked up in Chiba City. 

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The Monomolecular Filament Thumb, Part One: Weird Weapons We Love

I went and saw Gibson in Cambridge last month, his last stop on the U.S. tour for The Peripheral, and hearing him talk about the progression of his writing got me thinking about the earlier stuff.

So I thought it would be fun to go way back to an early story, still one of William Gibson’s most iconic and well-known, and only the second story he ever published — Johnny Mnemonic (pdf). Of course the reason it’s so well known probably has a lot to do with the much-savaged Keanu Reeves film linked above (more on that later). But even more memorable than the main concept of using a brain for storage, in my humble opinion, is the monomolecular filament weapon. One of the weirdest and most memorable weapons in the history of science fiction.

I dug up my copy of Burning Chrome, published in 1986 (although Johnny was published in 1981 in Omni), and flipped to the first story in the collection. I have to admit, while I adored Burning Chrome when I was in high school, I couldn’t remember much about the actual story. Other than that thumb thing…

It’s one of the first moments I can clearly remember in reading Gibson’s fiction where I had to repeatedly reread a section to figure out what the hell just happened. As you read more Gibson, this becomes a frequent joy, as if the elements in the books are too weird to focus your eyes on, so you have to squint really hard at the imagery. 

Here’s the weapon’s introduction: 

The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic tip, and cored the stump, fitting it with a spool and socket molded from one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they’d carefully wound the spool with three meters of monomolecular filament.

…

And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connecting it to the killer’s hand passes laterally through Ralfi’s skull, just above his eyebrows, whips up, and descends, slicing the pear-shaped torso diagonally from shoulder to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.

Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched section rolling forward onto the tiled pavement. In total silence.

Pow! One thing rereading this story that surprised me was how hardboiled it is. It’s like a gritty detective pulp, mixed with manga, but in that jam-packed, crackling prose. The other surprising thing is that it’s only 22 pages long. So the thumb weapon really plays a big part. In fact, even though the memory thing is the central premise, the weapons are really the stars of this show, between Johnny’s old-timey shotgun, Molly’s razor nails, and the thumb. 

In the story, it’s deftly described as being basically invisible, with only rainbow refraction under direct light. But in the movie, it’s pretty much a laser. In fact, in subsequent pop culture mentions, it would generally be referred to as “the laser whip” or some variation. 

So. About that movie. 

I’m going to take a controversial position and say that this movie is not actually all that bad. I mean, it’s definitely bad. But it’s like early John Carpenter bad. And if nothing else, it is quite possible a perfect representation of the time it was made. Keanu at his worst. Lawnmower-Man-style computer graphics. Proto-Matrix wardrobe and combat. Ice-T. This movie is straight up 90s as fuck. Behold a key scene with the thumb thing. The payoff is at about 34:30, but go ahead and watch the whole scene starting at around 31 mins, in its schlocky glory. (you can skip to 31:00 in the embedded video below or hit this link to go right to it)

I don’t know why, but action and horror moviemakers just cannot get enough of lasers or otherwise superfine cord slicing people up. I’m thinking of that scene in Resident Evil. Predator. Star Wars. Congo. This kind of thing is all over manga and anime. There’s something satisfying about something weightless cutting right through stuff and that silly moment when the cells have separated but the nervous system doesn’t know it yet. 

But in the story, Gibson’s thumb weapon isn’t so much a laser as it is a super-extreme garrote. A garrote, or wire saw, or razor wire, or something like it is also a common trope in TV and movies. It’s such a surgical weapon, more elegant than a gun or a knife or even sword. It’s a weapon of an assassin. That scene in The Godfather comes to mind. Or the most horrifying scene, perhaps in the history of movies in my opinion, is the last scene in Audition, when the killer shows her skill at slicing through unfortunate items with her wire saw. (Clip here: DO NOT WATCH)

Garrotes have a long history as real-life weapons too, but typically for strangulation (here’s a fun how-to for a homemade one, which you should definitely NOT follow). Wire saws are also legitimate tools, favored by survivalist types who like the idea of such a small, portable tool that can pack some cutting power. Frankly, that cutting power isn’t all that impressive. Maybe the most powerful real-life analog would be diamond wire saws. They use the same basic principle of using a cord to slice through something, although in this case it’s more of a cable, embedded with diamond dust for abrasion, kept cool with water or lubricant. Mining companies use them to cut through huge blocks of stone, even granite. 

None of this is really the same as the thumb thing though. Something so fine that merely touching it glides right through the molecular bonds of flesh and bone.

To be continued...

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Surveillance Armor, or The Ugliest T-Shirt in the World

Surveillance is a part of how we live now, and how we respond to that runs throughout the Blue Ant trilogy. The books are laced with true developments like widespread CCTV, drone surveillance, and computer spying. Like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, Zero History traffics in crafty ways to dodge prying eyes. One of these techniques, at the time of the book's publication, was entirely fictional, but perhaps less so today. And of course, since it's on the surface a book about fashion and marketing, the secret weapon in question is a T-shirt.

"What's that?" she asked.

"The ugliest T-shirt in the world," he said... "So ugly that digital cameras forget they've seen it."

The shirt in the book is not quite camouflaged, but it has a way of making itself disappear when digital cameras attempt to recall footage of it. It's also described as being extremely dangerous to own or know about, such is its power of invisibility. 

In an interview surrounding the release of Zero History, Gibson responded to whether there was such a thing. He said it was real “only insofar as that the description of it emerged instantly and effortlessly from my colleague Bruce Sterling.”

And yet, as these things often do, surveillance-proof fashion has sprung up in recent years, albeit mainly as artistic demonstration. There's nothing quite as powerful as Gibson's ugly T-shirt on the books, but there have, in fact, been several garments designed to obscure a wearer’s identity from digital detection. 

Most recently we saw an Austrian architecture studio’s Jammer Coat, which is a piece of clothing that combines two previous blog topics—Dazzle camouflage and the Faraday pouch. Literally combines them, as the giant, hideous cloak is lined with metallic fiber to block radio waves and tracking devices, and its pattern is disruptive camo, a series of stitched curves and black and white spots that make it difficult to distinguish the human form within. Its goal is to allow the wearer to become invisible to digital recognition, although along the way it also makes him or her remarkably conspicuous in just about every other way.

New York designer Adam Harvey, who brought us facial dazzle camo we discussed in an earlier post, has a similar garment, cloaking users in metallic material to hide a heat signature from aerial drone recognition. He says:

"Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa: to act as 'the veil which separates man or the world from God,' replacing God with drone.” 

There’s another more direct route, a “privacy visor,” developed by two Japanese professors in 2012. The apparatus emits near-infrared light from a series of LEDs, detectable by camera but not human eye, that will scramble the image and prevent facial recognition. It is also not something anyone would actually want to wear. 

Finally, we get to a true ugly t-shirt. This one was directly inspired by the shirt in Zero History, developed by graphic design grad student Simone C. Niquille in Amsterdam. The REALFACE Glamoflage T-shirt is a jumble of digitally reproduced celebrity and non-celebrity faces, not designed to obscure the wearer’s face, but to confuse facial recognition, specifically a Facebook algorithm, trying to identify users. 

As with many of these creations, the Glamoflage is half-farce, half-political statement. But also like many of these creations, you can really buy one. And they remind us that the issues they address are more real than we’d often like to acknowledge. 

More than just spying, Zero History is about struggling to be seen or not seen, and what jockeying powers above do with the many images we present. Navigating the strange world we've come to inhabit is an entirely real struggle, and has become part daily life, if not daily wardrobe.

Faraday Pouch

Dazzle Camouflage 

io9

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A Human Flying Squirrel

“He liked Banksy. Identified with him. They’re both from Bristol.”

“But he wasn’t a graffiti artist.”

“I think he thought he was. Just not with paint.” 

“With what?”

“History,” said Hollis.

Garreth Wilson, love interest of Hollis Henry and third-act super-sidekick of Zero History, is a “base-jumping madman from Bristol,” who regularly teams up with a mysterious handler to organize disruptive stunts. Garreth is “scrawling graffiti on the secret machineries of history,” more of a fringe performance artist than the thrill-seeking athlete you might suspect based on one of his chosen art forms—wingsuit BASE jumping. 

Throughout most of the novel, he’s off embarking on one of his stunts—we never learn what the others are—involving jumping from the top of the world’s largest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, wearing a nylon suit with airfoil membranes. Things go south, and Garreth has to land on the freeway, where he’s taken out by a Lotus.

This kind of wingsuit flying is very real and very dangerous, and there are many dubstep-heavy online videos to prove it. It’s sort of a cross between skydiving and hang gliding, in which the daredevil jumps from either a plane or very high ledge (the latter being BASE jumping), and uses the suit to both slow the descent and channel momentum into tremendous horizontal speed. The mechanics roughly involve transforming the body into a wing, creating lift that can slow descent from 120 mph down to 50 mph, and extend flights to as long as 9 minutes in one record-breaking jump. 

The lift created by the suit is not enough to allow safe landing, however, so jumpers still use parachutes (although one guy in 2012 landed without one using a runway of thousands of cardboard boxes). While the sensation is often described by pilots as flight, skydivers wearing wingsuits are still hurtling toward the ground at tremendous speeds. The combination of these speeds, more complex math beyond jump-ripcord-land, and the complication of managing a suit and a parachute, means wingsuits are only used by the most advanced jumpers. Users must master control of the suit so it doesn’t fling them back into the structure they came from. And even small changes in form make big differences in speed and angle of descent. 

As scary as they are, developing suits that work as safely as they do today took decades. The first wingsuit pilot was documented in the 1930s, and in these early “birdman” suits, skydivers often struggled to exit planes or open their parachutes, causing dozens of deaths through the 1960s. Eventually, in the 1980s, the concept of webbed wings became more successful, and in the 1990s was further refined to the three-wing model used now (although the French skydiver who developed it died while testing).

Today, the basic design involves flexible fabric that connects the arms to thighs, and one between the legs. The skydiver extends the wings and air sucks through inlets, inflating the suit and keeping it stiff without requiring rigid materials. 

While popular in advanced skydiving, the suits are also used by the more adventurous BASE jumpers like Garreth, hurling themselves often illegally from skyscrapers, or from cliff edges, trying to maximize the distance and time before pulling a chute. There’s a variant of base jumping called proximity flying, which involves jumping from a high ledge and then tearing along the face of mountain formations, which further simulates horizontal flight as the pilot buzzes surfaces on the way down.

The accident in Zero History had plenty of real life inspiration to draw from. Even since the 1990s, there have been several deaths associated with wingsuits, especially during BASE jumping. In 2011, 10 pilots died using the suits. 

And while there’s nobody quite like Garreth out there, on the record anyway, the character may have been partially inspired by Jeb Corliss. Corliss has jumped from the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle, the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, through a waterfall, and a narrow geographic feature in China. He has had two near-fatal BASE jumps. And in 2006, he attempted to jump from the Empire State Building, wearing a fat suit to conceal his gear on the way to the top. He was stopped and arrested and is now banned from the building for life. 

Corliss hasn’t jumped from the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (by the way, the entire city of Dubai is extremely Gibsonian, right?) others have. The year Zero History was published, the record jump from the hotel was set at 2,204 feet. Just this past April, jumpers set up a temporary platform at the pinnacle of the building, topping the record with a 2,717 foot plunge. I leave you with this:

'It's More Like a Suicide Than a Sport'

Wingsuit History Timeline

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He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.

Welcome new followers! I'm happy you found your way here. Thanks to piraterob for getting us on the radar of @greatdismal himself.

In case you hadn't figured it out, this is a blog about the real concepts behind the novels of William Gibson. I mostly write about the Bigend Trilogy, but plan to branch out all in good time. I hope you find all this stuff as fascinating as I do. 

I have a lengthy list of topics to explore, but I would love to hear from others with requests for future entries. Any references in Gibson's novels that had you wondering, what the f is that all about? Hit me up in that Ask Me Anything thingy. 

Tate

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Gabriel Hounds Part One: ‘Gabble Ratchets’

Gabriel Hounds is a brand of jeans in the same sense that Zero History is a book about fashion. Both statements are technically accurate, but only as a gateway to something…slippery. In Gibson’s 2010 novel, the Gabriel Hounds are a “secret brand.” The Kaizer Soze of pants. The smoke monster of denim. The brand is the MacGuffin in a hunt for truth beyond brand names, knockoffs, seasons, and flickering atemporality in a world that is evolving faster than we can focus our eyes. 

Setting aside for a moment the product itself, and the very concept of a secret brand or a microbrand, a line of products marketed through non-marketing and secrecy (we can get to that later), the concept of a Gabriel Hound is a fitting one for the brand at the center of Zero HIstory. 

A spectral figure, half-man, half-beast, that rips the flesh from sinners and drags them to the land of the dead, only to disappear into the fog leaving no trace may be a dramatic avatar for pants, but when the pants are contending with Hubertus Bigend, perhaps not… 

She got out her iPhone and Googled “Gabriel Hounds.” 

By the time her coffee arrived, she’d determined that The Gabriel Hounds was the title of a novel by Mary Stewart, had been the title of at least one CD, and had been or was the name of at least one band.

...

But the original Gabriel Hounds, it appeared, were folklore, legend. Dogs heard coursing, however faintly, high up in the windy night. Cousins it seemed to the Wild Hunt. This was Inchmale territory, definitely, and there were even weirder variants. Some involving hounds with human heads, or hounds with the heads of human infants. This had to do with the belief that the Gabriel Hounds were hunting the souls of children who’d died unbaptized. Christian tacked over pagan, she guessed. And the hounds seemed to have originally been “ratchets,” an old word for dogs that hunt by scent. Gabriel Ratchets. Sometimes “gabble ratchets.” 

This description is fairly close to what you’ll see when Googling the term today. There is in fact, the 2006 book by Mary Stewart about two young people on an adventure in Lebanon. There is a metal band out of Cincinnati named Gabriel’s Hound, and another chamber rock band from Brooklyn called Gabriel and the Hounds (they're not bad).

But going further back, Gabriel Hounds pop up in one form or another all across European folklore. In fact, there’s a long history of tales about spectral dogs, in particular haunting the woods of Wales and Northern England. There’s the famous Hound of Baskervilles from Holmes, but also references to Black Dogs, Yell Hounds, Hellhounds (Christian adaptation), Gabriel Ratchets, Gobble-ratches, Whisht Hounds, the Moddy Dhoo, the Yeth Hound, etc, etc. The mythology often surrounds a yelping noise heard in the distance, considered an omen of death. 

Specifically, the Gabriel Hounds are an English version of Welsh, pre-Christian mythological creatures called Cŵn Annwn (pronounced like “coon anun” and the inspiration for more metal bands and songs), which are described as either black, or glowing white, with fiery red ears and eyes, sometimes with the head of a human.

The beasts were said to originate in the Welsh underworld, flying through the air to punish or seek vengeance on wrongdoers. In other descriptions, they are more benign or escort souls to the beyond. Their yowling is sometimes said to portend death or calamity, a sound that has been explained as the honking or wing beats of geese. Christian mythology later translated the beasts into hellhounds serving the devil or at the command of the angel Gabriel (although the name may come from an archaic word for corpse).

The beasts are also associated with The Wild Hunt, another ancient European myth that in all forms describes a monstrous, spectral hunt with hounds and horses, led across the sky by varying deities or supernatural figures such as Odin, the Welsh god Arawn, or Arthur. 

With references like these, Gibson in his own way is something of a weird fiction writer, describing secret truths bubbling under the surface. While you wouldn’t mistake him for a Lovecraft or Ligotti, he's said how in writing the Blue Ant trilogy, he was recalibrating himself to the ways in which our current times (or the times when he wrote each book) were weird.

Gibson is among the hardest of sci-fi writers, dealing lately in technology that exists or damn near exists. But he also shows us the ways in which technology and trend make our lives a bit supernatural, and how they reveal the strangeness just under the surface that governs us, for better or worse. The Mongolian Death Worms crawling below us. The vengeful, ghostly hounds of boutique clothing.

Bizarre Beasts

English Fairy and Other Folk Tales: Ghosts: Spectre-Dogs

Gabriel's Hounds - Mythology Dictionary

Cwn Annwfn mythical creature: Myth Beasts

Gabriel Hounds mythical creature: Myth Beasts

Gabriel Hounds

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Rattan bone grafts, or cyborg sheep with wooden legs

For all of technology’s efforts to improve upon nature, sometimes the most challenging feat is simply matching it, or even coming close. Take, for example, the endlessly versatile muscle, or the light and load-bearing bone.

Imitating the latter poses a unique problem for surgeons repairing damaged, aging or diseased bones in humans, leaving us with metal or ceramic replacement parts that are imperfect or intolerable to a patient’s system, often needing to be replaced with painful and debilitating surgery. A solution to that mismatch may be on the horizon, as researchers in Italy have turned right back to nature, albeit a different kingdom, to find what may sound like an archaic bone replacement—wood. Rattan, to be specific, a flexible palm wood used in furniture and baskets.

In William Gibson’s Zero History, a novel laced with technology just barely within reach, one unlucky daredevil is the beneficiary of such a rattan bone replacement after a base-jumping stunt gone awry. 

“Rattan. The stuff they weave baskets and furniture out of. They’ve found a way to turn it into a perfect analog of human bone.”

“You’re making that up.”

“They’re just starting to test it on humans. On me, in fact. Works a charm on sheep.”

“They can’t. Turn that into bone.”

“They put it into ovens. With calcium, other things. Under pressure. For a long time. Turns to bone, near enough.”

“No way.”

“If I’d thought of it, I’d have had them make you a basket. Brilliant thing about it, you can build exactly the bone you need, out of rattan. Work it as rattan. Then ossify it. Perfect replacement. Actually a lot stronger than the original. Microscopic structure allows the blood vessels to grow through it.”

While published research describes the technology as just on the brink of human trials in 2013, and likely still a few years away from human benefit, Garreth’s description is pretty accurate. On a fast read, it brings to mind a springy bamboo graft, but after the 10-day transformative process, the rattan turns into something that looks a bit like a piece of sidewalk chalk.

That’s because the repeated heat and pressure actually strip the small chunks of wood of many of their biological elements like cellulose and lignin. Remaining is the carbon skeleton, which are then pumped with more appealing substances like calcium, oxygen and phosphate to match the density and strength of bone. 

The important part of the product, even when baked and treated to turn it into something quite different from its original self, is the microscopic structure. Even more than other types of wood, rattan is remarkably similar in density and is porous. As a result, blood and nerves can actually travel through the material much like they do in bone. Surgeons reality checking the technology have found that, in the first patients (some Italian sheep), the attached bone begins to actually fuse to the rattan implant, leaving it difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends.

Combined with strength and, despite the lengthy procedure, affordability, and doctors involved in early studies have called the rattan implants a “holy grail” for orthopedic patients.

The rattan implant isn’t the only innovation in artificial bone working its way toward reality. British scientists have experimented with injectable bone, a toothpaste-like substance that can squirt to the site of an injury, then harden while simultaneously delivering stem cells to site of repair. Berkeley scientists have also attempted to mimic the layered structure found in mollusk shells like oysters and abalone for bone replacement. 

BBC News

Daily Mail

Cosmos

[mrchair]

Blue Line to Wonderland

I have a music podcast. No talking, in fact no words for the most part. It’s 40-60 minute mixes of mostly instrumental, electronic, ambient music and other sounds. I cobble them together for use over headphones during public transit, but really available for the setting of your choice. Often peaceful, but at least interesting, sleepy sorts of music. The kind of thing you can crawl into for a while and let go. 

You can get to it in a couple of ways:

Listen or subscribe on iTunes

Listen in a browser on my website

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I thought Blue Ant readers might be interested in my other blue project, the Blue Line music podcast. Enjoy!

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Rhenium is the last stable element to be discovered, found in 1925, before all of the nuke-y ones. It’s extremely rare, and one of the densest of elements. It’s used in alloy form, primarily in high-tech purposes like combustion chambers, turbine blades, and exhaust nozzles of jet engines.

And darts. 

Two pale silvery darts were tucked like bullets in a bandolier, into the thick cording of the jacket’s frogged front, their blood-red, paper-thin plastic flights pointing toward Number Four’s ceiling.

She rolled a third between thumb and forefinger, as if she might decide to smoke it. “Tungsten,” she said, “and rhenium. Alloyed, they’re superheavy.” She sighted along the dart’s black tip, almost invisible in this light.

It may seem like a frivolous use of such a heavy-duty material, but darts are serious business for a lot of people. Competitive dart players, for one, but also Hollis Henry’s sidekick in Zero History, Heidi, who fetishizes her super-dense darts, and eventually uses one to subdue a henchman with one to the face. 

For the average user, darts range in materials, starting with wood at the simplest, to brass at the most basic, to a nickel/silver alloy at the most common competitive level. But for the professional, the tungsten alloy dart is the way to go. Tungsten, also known by its archaic name Wolfram, is a truly unique compound, known for having the highest melting point of all the elements (3422 °C, 6192 °F), and being super-dense, at 19.3 times the density of water.

So for a dart, it’s a perfect material, with a high weight per volume that makes for a ferocious, tiny missile. While a brass, or a nickel/silver dart can be plenty dense and cheap, it’s also softer than a tungsten alloy dart, so it’ll wear down faster. A tungsten alloy dart—typically mixed with anywhere from 5-20% nickel—will also have a sharper point, which for competitive purposes makes for a better set of bull’s-eyes.

So where does the rhenium come in? 

Rhenium is one of a small number of elements that is denser than Tungsten, just shy of platinum. So the highest-end, arguably absurd compound for a dart, would be a tungsten-rhenium alloy.

They are sleek, heavy, sharp and pricey. Hard to find, and the best dart money can buy. Perfect to jab into the skull of a camo-wearing ne’er-do-well.

Rhenium and Tungsten Darts on ebay

A180 Darts

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A HERF gun, or an otherwise-nicknamed personal electromagnetic device, is the fantasy weapon of anti-government drone-haters and corporate saboteurs. As in William Gibson’s Zero History: 

Bigend was telling a story…about someone using something called a “herf” gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else’s stored data, in a drive in an adjacent building…

The herf gun, he was explaining now, the electromagnetic radiation device, was the size of a backpack, putting out a sixteen megawatt pulse, and she suddenly found herself afraid, boys being boys, of some punch-line involving accidentally baked internal organs.

In the mind of the aspiring perpetrator, a HERF gun would be something like a ghostbuster’s proton pack that emits pulses of electromagnetic waves that can fry electronic devices. Discussion of personal EMP devices are disturbingly common on white supremacist and anti-government militia message boards, members clutching the idea of an off-the-shelf ray gun that could disrupt the workings of federal surveillance or attack drones without detection.

Larger, more extreme Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons are also a common boogeyman among doomsday planners, many of whom are certain a massive version of such a device will zap a nation back into the Stone Age, thereby justifying their unhealthy obsessions with melee weapons and dehydrated food.

Is this kind of thing really out there? Or at the very least, is it something you can wear in a backpack for homespun destruction?

Yes and no.

Electromagnetic radiation can and does fuck up electronic devices. An easy way to test this fact that you absolutely should never do is to simply toss your iPhone into the microwave for a few minutes. An EMP device sounds pretty sci-fi, but really they have been warming up leftovers on countertops since 1967. Electromagnetic radiation exists in all kinds of applications along a wide spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and can have varying effects on all sorts of matter, from machinery and biology.

Employing electromagnetic waves, including high-energy radio frequency, as a weapon large or small is more complicated. Probably the most commonly feared and portrayed-in-movies version of such a weapon is the high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) device. This is when a nuclear weapon is detonated at high altitude, and the resulting electromagnetic pulse sends power surges and scrambles electronics below. This is the doomsday scenario. A crude nuclear blast high above the United States sends us back to the Dark Age and we have to defend our families using panic rooms and homemade catapults.

As for personal devices, the so-called HERF gun, this too is based in reality, but the severity of the pulse that smaller versions can generate (at least on a sampling of several YouTube videos) is pretty limited. The idea is similar to an EMP, but the radiation is directed in one location to create a surge of voltage in electronics. In most cases it’s enough at a few yards away to mess up the time on a digital clock. But it is pretty basic, and most makers just turn the parts of an old microwave into a device that directs the microwaves (so not technically HERF) in a certain direction. So while it’s definitely possible a handheld HERF gun could destroy electronics, the power source needs to be very large, and there doesn’t seem to be any documented cases.

When the development leaves the garage, however, things can get pretty serious. For example, in 2010, the United States Air Force put a call out for a device that could, nonviolently, stop a car in its tracks. Canadian company Flight International reportedly created a suitcase-sized, 50-lb device that, from up to 656 meters away, could stop a car by disabling the electronics in the engine. It takes advantage of microprocessors that modern cars need to function, so wouldn’t work on an older car.

Clearly, the home uses are less frightening, but in the hands of those in power, like most things, the threat gets more realistic. For example, weapons manufacturers have experimented with technology that uses high-energy waves on human biology.

For example, Raytheon created a jeep-mounted weapon that fires a beam of energy from long distance, giving the sensation of heat on skin, first just warmth and eventually the feeling of being on fire. It’s not in use, but police departments and military have explored using it for crowd dispersal.

Certain frequencies can also manufacture feelings of confusion, dread, anxiety or intense drowsiness. And, as suggested in Zero History, the burny-nervous-sleepy rays can go right through walls.

How to make a microwave gun

Video of a homemade herf

Car-stopping EMP cannon

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Ekranoplan

“Ekranoplan,” said Gareth. “A ground effect vehicle. He’s mad.” …

The ekranoplans reminded Milgrim of the Spruce Goose, which he’d toured in Long Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the water, incapable of greater altitude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok, had, like all the others, been built in the Volga Shipyard, at Nizhni Novgorod.

-Zero History, William Gibson

Indeed, behind the curtain of the USSR, the Soviet Navy planned a fleet of boat-plane hybrids, among the biggest and fastest transport vehicles in history, designed for carrying massive cargo of missiles, troops and vehicles for invasion by sea. As Hubertus Bigend makes his final ascent to “Bond villain” status in Zero History, he and his entourage take to the seas on one of the all but defunct ekranoplans. The vehicle seems far too strange, and massive, to have actually existed without breaking through to the rest of the world. But it did, and it was just as massive as Milgrim notes, with one model rivaling the largest aircraft in history. 

But to be clear, it’s not an aircraft, not exactly. An ekranoplan is a ground effect vehicle, sort of a cross between a plane and a boat, but not quite a hovercraft either. It uses forward thrust and short, low wings to elevate the vehicle just a small distance above the surface of the water. There were a few different classes, which could achieve varying altitudes and speeds, but they were generally powered by one huge engine mounted atop of the vehicle and a set of jet engines toward the nose. All engines would fire, and the wings, being lower to the surface, were able to create enough lift to achieve “ground effect,” a dynamic in the air between the wing and the surface, reducing drag and achieving tremendous speeds along the water.

During the Cold War, starting in the late 1960s, Soviet engineers developed the ekranoplans to transport tons of cargo, troops and weapons across the sea, primarily for beach invasions. When American reconnaissance satellites spotted one of the first odd behemoths, it was dubbed the Caspian Sea Monster. 

The benefits are clear, by riding on a cushion of air across the water, it can travel twice as fast as a boat, transport twice as much as a plane, and use half as much fuel. At ground effect, the nose engines are able to completely shut down. Since it’s out of the water, it’s safe from torpedoes and mines. So basically, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the perfect option for bringing Big War to neighboring European countries. So why don’t ekranoplans patrol the coasts of Soviet France today? Well, various geopolitical reasons that I don’t really understand enough to explain here, but short version, the Cold War ended. But also, the thing couldn’t turn very well. If it banked too sharply, one of the wings would cut into the water, causing it to spin out and crash. It also couldn’t maneuver to avoid obstacles and was vulnerable to attacks from the air. Good for a fast, big surprise but not a whole lot else. And commercially, it was a regulatory nightmare with narrow demand and huge overhead.

Still the Soviets developed and deployed Ekranoplans in limited numbers, mostly designed by famed (and somewhat disgraced) engineer Rostislav Alexeyev. An early model was the KM, the largest ekranoplan ever built, which first flew in 1966 and was Alexeyev’s first successful GEV. But in 1980, the KM crashed; the engineer was removed from his post and soon after died. After the KM came the vehicle class that Bigend and Blue Ant commissioned—the Orlyonok, or Eaglet. The Orlyonok was a medium-sized vehicle, actually capable of achieving low flight, as well as having wheels that made it amphibious. The Eaglet was much smaller than the KM, but still nearly 200 feet long, with a crew of six and capacity for 150 passengers. With one giant propeller and two turbofan engines, it could reach 285 mph. This was the most successful ekranoplan, with five units built and active until 1993. 

Then there was the Lun Class. Completed in 1987, it was larger than the A-90, with capacity for six cruise missiles and a top speed of 340 mph. Only one was completed before military funding ran out, and then came the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Lun is a strange beast, with all the mad hubris and broken utilitarianism you’d associate with the USSR. A fevered vision of space-age technology in service of the motherland—a big idea bigger payload, it just never quite got off the ground.

Lun Class via English Russia

Ekranoplan in action

Photos and Footage

Lun Class on Jalopnik

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Dazzle Camouflage

How do you camouflage an inflatable mylar drone in the shape of a penguin? You really can’t, but for the climax of Zero History, one character opts for a disruptive paint job known as “dazzle” as a way to break up its gestalt.

“The result wouldn’t conceal the penguin against any background at all, particularly the sky, but broke it up visually, made it difficult to read as an object.”

Dazzle, or “razzle dazzle” is a form of camouflage invented in World War I by British artist and naval officer Norman Wilkinson. The Royal Navy, unable to conceal its ships, went for something altogether different by painting them with loud, irregular black-and-white patterns. The result was a floating Picasso, certainly visible, but hard to make out its size, shape and speed. German submarines needed to know all three to successfully calculate a hit with a torpedo, so turning British ships into a series of discordant shapes did a far better job of protecting them than trying to make them blend into their surroundings.

Most camouflage aims to do the latter, using blending techniques to make an object look so similar to its surroundings so the eye can’t pick it out. The clustered blobs of 1980s Rambo clothes, or the 16-bit rave wear of the modern Army. But sometimes more powerful is a different approach, making the image disruptive instead of blended. In the case of the ships, erratic black-and-white patterns confuse the visual system’s ability to perceive it as a unit, making it appear more like a series of unrelated objects instead of one uniform shape.

A similar, modern use is what NYU student Adam Harvey calls his “CV Dazzle” project, in which he created hair and makeup styling that would make a person unrecognizable to computer facial recognition. By shaping the hair into blades of disruptive color, or painting black-and-white shapes surrounding facial features, Harvey was able to disrupt his models' faces, protecting them from computer recognition.

The most effective camouflage uses both disruptive and blending techniques, so some elements are visually confusing and others appear to be part of the surroundings, making the subject indistinguishable. But alas, in the case of the WWI battleship or a floating mylar penguin, sometimes you just can’t blend in. So you turn on the Dazzle and settle for confusion.

Dazzle Camouflage History

Camoupedia

CV Dazzle

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Brabus Maybach

“Most people don’t self-drive these,” Bigend said, pulling out onto Sunset, headed east.

“Most people don’t drive them at all,” Hollis corrected, from the passenger seat beside him. She craned her neck for a glimpse back into what she supposed could be called the passenger cabin. There seemed to be a sort of frosted skylight, as opposed to a mere moonroof. And a lot of very glossy wood, the rest in carbon-colored lambskin.

A Brabus Maybach,” he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. 

To figure out the Brabus Maybach, a flesh-and-blood real car, you have to extricate the two parts that, when merged together make a vehicle about as common and conspicuous as a giant flying squid. 

First, you start with a Maybach. Maybach is an elite German auto manufacturer that specialized in ultra-luxury vehicles, but unlike competitors like Rolls Royce or Bentley, flared up and burnt out not once but twice. Wilhelm Maybach was one of the legendary German engineers of the early part of the 20th century. Having designed the very first Mercedes, he and his son went on to found their own engineering company in 1909, which would build engines for German zeppelins and railcars through World War I. Following the war, Maybach started making cars along the lines of the elite Mercedes Benz’s of the time, sprawling majestic vehicles. The company also made engines for military vehicles, including Panzer tanks in World War II.

After the second war, the company went into hibernation in the 1940s, eventually purchased by Daimler. In 1997, the brand was rebooted to compete with the coaches of the super-rich. 

Enter Brabus. Known for breaking street legal land-speed records, Brabus is an after-market tinkerer that retools primarily Mercedes Benz sedans, taking already absurdly performing vehicles and making them drive much, much faster, and making their passengers much, much more comfortable. Brabus vehicles have broken multiple speed records, topping off at over 200 mph, but store-bought versions have governors that cap them at 175. 

Thus, the Brabus Maybach, based on the 2007 57S or 62S models, the aftermarket work includes the signature, 640-hp V12, getting the three-ton sedan to a top speed of 206 mph, and 0 to 60 in 4.3 seconds. Then there’s the interior. Finest leather and lambskin, with polished wood. The Brabus multimedia package includes 15-inch flatscreens embedded behind the front seats, which serve 6-DVD changers or an embedded computer with in-car Internet, and a wireless keyboard and mouse. And, just in case, there’s a hidden laptop stowed in the trunk. All this for just over a half a million dollars.

Who buys such a monstrosity? Apparently mostly fictional, wealthy eccentrics. After selling just over 200 each year and costing the company over a billion dollars, Daimler announced in late 2011 that they were discontinuing Maybach. After a decade-long revival as maker of the world's most extravagant automobiles, the brand would join the ranks of many other Gibson artifacts, too audacious to survive reality for very long.

The Maybach on Brabus' website

At Last, the Maybach is Priceless

Maybach

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The Curta

In a subplot of Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard uses a rare prototype of an early computing device as a bargaining chip for a crucial email address. She makes a straight offer to a menacing, drunken ex-spy — even trade, email address for the Curta.

It’s described as a black, cylindrical hand-grenade, “a precious instrument…performing calculations mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic components. The sensation of its operation is best likened to that of winding a fine thirty-five millimeter camera. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever constructed.”

The Curta is an extremely compact series of cogs and pins packed tightly into an aluminum case that looks like a cross between a fishing reel and a pepper grinder, just a few inches tall to fit perfectly into the palm of the hand. It is a marvel of early computing, and a pricey fetish object for collectors. In fact, it was the first handheld calculator, and remained the only one for nearly a quarter-century, conducting four functions with no wires, no electricity, just a series of whirring parts that purr in the hand.

The casing of the Curta holds a series of sliding pins for entering numbers, and with a few turns of the crank, the answer is revealed in a window at the top of the grinder. Collectors will dissect them into hundreds of tiny oiled parts, and put them back together for fun.

Part of the mystique of the Curta is the story of its conceit. Austrian inventor Curt Herzstark was on the brink of creating a handheld calculator in the 1930s, which would trump the parade of massive devices that had been used during the previous decades. With patents filed on his designs in 1938, the Third Reich invaded Austria and came knocking at his door.

His manufacturing plant was enlisted to create gauges for Panzer tanks, and Herzstark, son of a Jew and a Catholic, was spared. That was until 1943, when he was arrested by the Nazis and eventually placed in Buchenwald concentration camp. He was put to work, but eventually recognized by a former German competitor, who knew of his plans for the calculator. The Nazis made him a deal — design this calculator, offer it as a gift to Hitler, and we let you live.

He had all but perfected his plans for the Curta in 1945, when Allied jeeps pulled up to the concentration camp. The inventor walked out of Buchenwald, and made his invention a reality. And for more than 20 years, the Curta was the only portable computing device.

It remains a sought after idol of computing history, the pinnacle of number crunching before electrical devices would rule, forgotten but for a select group of obsessive collectors. You can buy one on eBay for a couple thousand dollars, or if you’re after an extremely rare (fictional) prototype, it will cost you a Russian email address that may or may not lead to the uncertain future of media.

The Curious History of the First Pocket Calculator

Stunningly Intricate: Curta Mechanical Calculator

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Bibendum

Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition has a unique ability to judge how the market will respond to logos and brands. At the root of this rare talent, for which Bigend employs her, is a "phobic reaction" to trademarks she's had since age 6 when she threw up after seeing The Michelin Man in a French catalog. Otherwise known as "Bibendum," the 114-year-old, anthropomorphic stack of tires remains her biggest weakness.

Dorotea takes her time unfastening the envelope. She reaches inside. Pulls out a square of art board the size of the last one. On it is the Michelin Man, in one of his earliest, most stomach−churningly creepy manifestations, not the inflated−maggot de−shelled Ninja Turtle of the present day, but that weird, jaded, cigar−smoking elder creature suggesting a mummy with elephantiasis. "Bibendum," says Dorotea, softly.

Cayce's adverse response to trademarks is a central theme in the book as she wrestles with her own over-astuteness (hence the title), particularly in relation to her father's mysterious death.

Bibendum himself is particularly effective as the chief offender of her phobia, both because he is creepy and weird, and because he is one of the world's oldest continuing trademarks, and a breakthrough in marketing history. So what the hell is Bibendum, or the Michelin Man, that blobby white creature currently rendered in CGI with big Bambi eyes? 

In 1898, French artist O'Galop first conceived a stack of tires as a chubby man, commissioned by French tire entrepreneurs the Michelin brothers. His original form was different that we'd recognize, his bands thinner and beige or grey to reflect the rubber tires at the time, always wearing a pince-nez and smoking a cigar. In his original advertising poster, the creature is having dinner with other creepy tire creatures, holding up a cocktail glass full of sharp debris, and raising a toast: "Nunc est bibendum!! C'est à dire: À votre santé. Le pneu Michelin boit l'obstacle ("Now we must drink... That is to say, to your health. The Michelin tire drinks up obstacles"). The implication is, this boisterous, elite tire creature cares not about road hazards, instead he drinks them as though they were a cocktail while his saggy competitors look on with fear.

So he became known as "Bibendum," and later "The Michelin Man."

He appeared in hundreds of turn of the century French advertising posters, the kind commonly seen on dorm room walls, always with his cigar and glasses, a signet ring and a cocky swagger that comes with invulnerability. Over time, he lost the cigar and jewelry and tires got fatter. But his basic look, and that pasty white color, would continue to be an undeniable symbol of a brand of tires, even after its origins and rationale faded from public memory. 

This kind of inescapable mental association makes Bibendum a monument and juggernaut of marketing, an icon once cooked up for a poster, that now lives in our minds whether we want him there or not, intertwined with a built object still up for sale after more than a hundred years. A blast of recognizability that would make a hypersensitive trademark savant recoil upon sight.

A tribute site to Bibendum

Michelin corporate site 

Gallery of old Bibendum posters

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Faraday Pouch

Zero History operative Milgrim is kept on a tight leash by his handler Ollie Sleight. He supplies Milgrim with nothing but an unusual phone and what he calls a "Faraday pouch" for carrying his passport.

Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport...You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.

The pouch plays a role in Milgrim's evolution as his involvement in corporate espionage deepens. 

A Faraday pouch does exactly what the excerpt says, and they are pretty easy to buy or make. The one pictured above is homemade, but pricier versions are cloth pouches or wallets with conductive metal threads woven in. The result is a carrying case that negates electric fields, including radio signals. (The namesake is Michael Faraday, the English scientist who paved the way for much of our understanding of electric fields.)

Why would you want a Faraday cage? Lots of reasons, as noble as protecting powerline workers from electrocution. But the purpose in question is to block theft of personal information, by criminals, corporations or the government.

Tiny RFID chips are being used in all kinds of things to allow transfer of information without physical contact. The applications are endless, including injecting the tiny chips under the skin of pets to unlock a dog door, or tracking the activity of a bee colony. But common uses include passports, ID cards, and credit cards. Privacy advocates are seriously freaked out by the fact that identity thieves or whoever can swipe personal or financial data, or more sinister scenarios like using a person's nationality indicated by a passport RFID to trigger an explosive.

It's this kind of widespread vulnerability and potential that has the tech-savvy wrapping their possessions in tin foil. It's easy to shrug off the threat, but corporations and governments have shown little respect for privacy. Another unsettling reality we tend to ignore is the constant trackability of our smartphones. A Faraday pouch will block the signal so you can't be can't be tracked by GPS, or send and receive calls.

In the world of Gibson's later novels, our digital lives have ceased to be something you delve into, but instead have spilled out to our actual space, overlaying everything we know with an invisible stratum of connection. The Faraday pouch, like its carrier Milgrim, is a little black spot, a dark pocket, for better for worse, that nobody can see.

Electronic Frontier Foundation's RFID page

DIY Faraday Pouch (image source)

For Sale Here

Scary Video