Seen in the Northern Territory of so-called Australia where protesters from around the continent are converging to demand the closure of Pine Gap, a US spy base which has operated since 1966.
“We are not,” Jacques Rancière remarks, “in front of the images; we are in the middle of them, just as they are in the middle of us. The question is to know how to circulate among them, and how to get them to circulate as well.”
Jacob Lund. 2022. The Changing Constitution of the Present: Essays on the Work of Art in Times of Contemporaneity. London: Sternberg Press.
Curves are if you took a straight line and bent it
Straight line is this: |
Bending is that act of taking the two ends of something and rotating them in opposing directions resulting in the middle section being forced to move while the ends stay in the same spot
Curves are if you took a straight line and bent it
Straight line is this: |
Bending is that act of taking the two ends of something and rotating them in opposing directions resulting in the middle section being forced to move while the ends stay in the same spot
A diagram of the wing shape of flying vertebrates, including birds (black), pterosaurs (blue), and a bat (red). Based on JMV Rayner (1988), "Form and Function in Avian Flight", fig. 14D & 16D (link) and MP Witton (2008), "A new approach to determining pterosaur body mass and its implications for pterosaur flight", table 4 (link).
The two axes represent wing loading (body weight divided by wing surface) and aspect (length-to-width ratio), independent from overall size. While the distribution of species is mostly continuous, there are "regions" corresponding to particular wing shapes and flight styles.
Starting in the lower-right region of high loading and low aspect (small, short wings and heavy bodies) we find saltuary flyers like gamefowl (e.g. pheasants, turkeys) and, presumably, the pterosaur Dimorphodon. These species only fly in short bursts to escape ground-based predators. This is not a primitive trait: both gamefowls and Dimorphodon have ancestors that were better flyers.
If we keep wing loading high and increase wing aspect, we move upward into the divers: birds like ducks, grebes, puffins, and auks that dive into water to feed and so have relatively heavy bodies. Narrow wings help them acquire speed as they plunge into water.
The highest wing aspect is found among marine soarers, of hich the purest example is the albatross (and the pterosaur Nyctosaurus, who has the highest wing aspect ever recorded). At the edges of this cluster, gulls transition between marine soarers and aerial predators, and gannets between marine soarers and divers.
Aerial predators, who hunt in mid-flight, have low loading and mid-to-high aspect to be as fast as possible. Insectivores like swifts and swallows have narrow, swept-back wings, whereas bird-eaters like harriers and falcons have broader wings. Here we also find the tiny insectivorous pterosaur Anurognathus.
Beneath, with the lowest wing aspect, we find thermal soarers, who fly long distances over land exploiting rising thermal currents. They tend to have broad wings with slotted ends, like storks and vultures. Here we also find the largest bats and giant azhdarchid pterosaurs such as Quetzalcoatlus.
Finally, near the center we find versatile, unspecialized terrestrial flyers like parrots and pigeons. Hummingbirds, with a unique hovering flight, appear near the divers, though for rather different reasons.
It's Spiders Georg! I've translated it into Angkorian Khmer, the language of Cambodia from 802-1351 AD. Because I like doing stuff like that ;)
You read the black consonants first, then the blue consonants, than the purple vowels. If there's no written vowel, use an 'a'. Magenta is punctuation - a dingbat marking the start, periods, and then a stronger period that tells you the paragraph/section is finished.
Here's what it says!
The original:
reallyreallytrying
Jan 8, 2013
“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Transliterated into Latin characters:
1935¹ śaka, ekādaśi roc mārggaśira, 'aṅgāravāra, nu rilirilitroyiṅ kathā: Neḥh ’ālakṣaṇa kathā: ’nak cya pīṅ pi pratisaṃvatsara, toy vyat vakra saṃkhyā.
’Nak cya pīṅ śūnya pratisaṃvatsara.
Nau ru Jaṃrau Pīṅ, ’nau guhā cya daśasahasra pratidina, ga te krau daṃnuk ta caṅvāt ti mān ban dāṃ ta kāñ.
More detail under the cut!
How it’s spelled:
1-9-20-10-5 ś-k e-kā-d-śi ro-c|mā-ʳgg-śi-r
ʔ-ṅgā-r-vā-r nu ri-li-ri-li-tro-yi-ṅ|k-tʰā neḥ-
h|ʔā-l-kṣ-ṇ k-tʰā ʔn-kˣ cy pi-ṅ|pi pr-ti-sṃ-
v-ts-r to-yˣ vy-t|v-kr sṃ-kʰyā . ʔn-kˣ cy
pi-ṅ|śū-ny pr-ti-sṃ-v-ts-r . nau ru jṃ-rau pi-
ṅˣ ʔnau gu-hā cy d-ś-s-h-sr pr-ti-di-
n g te krau dṃ-nu-k|t c-ṅvā-t|ti mā-n|b-n|dāṃ
t kā-ñ .
1935th Śaka year, 11 day of the waning moon of the month Mārggaśira, Tuesday. On this day, Reallyreallytrying said:
This, the instruction which says “People eat 3 spiders yearly” is really because of a calculation mistake.
People eat zero spiders every year.
Of Spiders Georg - who lives in a cave and eats 10,000 daily - he is outside the boundaries of the set and should not have been counted.
¹ The Angkorian Khmer used a different calendar than we do, called the Śaka Saṃvat, or Shaka Era. It starts in year 78 of the Christian Era, so 2013 AD lines up with 1935 Śaka.
² The Khmer has a large number of Sanskrit/Pali words, similar to how English has a lot of Latin/French. These loans are marked with a degree symbol ( ° ). I decided to use very formal language here, so there's a lot of loans.
³ ‘pīṅ’ is a Modern Khmer word (or at least a component of several modern names) for spiders. My Angkorian dictionaries didn’t have a term, and this one has cognates in several related languages, so I decided it was my best bet.
⁴ I'm not certain that zero could be used in this way at the time. They were definitely using 0 in large numbers, but actually treating it LIKE a number is usually a later development.
⁵ Translations in brackets mean that the word has no direct translation. The best I can do is say the function they serve in the sentence.
⁶ I think I'm funny.
⁷ Angkorian Khmer doesn't have a word for 'and' - you can just put things side by side. I've chosen to move the 'e' in 'ge ta' so that it reads 'ga te' to replicated the original misspelling.
And here are some (undescribed) old guides to reading Angkorian Khmer. They're written in a slightly different style - especially visible in the 'ñ' - but might still help if you're interested!
kastrakomnenes
this may be one of the most interesting posts I've ever seen. What got you into Angkorian Khmer specifically?
Thank you!
I'm interested in cultural history and I love the First Millenium AD/Early Medieval period. I got really into Heian Japanese fashion, and then was looking at other cultures that existed around the world during the same period. Sometimes it was the fashion that grabbed me. Sometimes the architecture. And sometimes it was the script or language. Angkor has all three!
I find the script (characters used to write) to be gorgeous, and the grammar is similar enough to English that I can wrap my head around it. (Very little inflection!) I am endlessly fascinated by how people take scripts that do NOT work for their language, and smash them with hammers until they do - the way the Irish use Latin to communicate consonantal sounds, how English uses it to communicate vowel sounds, how Angkorian Khmer uses Braḥmi to communicate consonant clusters, etc.
There's a large enough surviving corpus (enough things with writing on them), and enough of it's online (even if the scan quality can be unbelievably bad) that I can really sink my teeth into it. There are enough grammars from India during the same period that we've got a good understanding of how Sanskrit/Pali works, and studying the differences between Indian and Khmer Sanskrit/Pali is really, really neat! Plus, Angkorian Khmer works COMPLETELY differently, so seeing how they incorporated all the Sanskrit loanwords into non-Sanskrit texts is even MORE interesting!
But mostly, I love the curves. I love how the characters stack. I love how the 'e' diacritic comes before the main letter and I always forget to leave space for it and then want to have a tantrum. I love that the last black character on that text I wrote becomes a spiral later on in history. Becomes half as wide, loses all those weird bits that look like diacritics but aren't, and just becomes a spiral.
Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.
— Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator (1923)
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