Finding Home

"...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province." From "On Exactitude in Science" by Borges


Early maps of the world contribute much to deep sea dragon hunting and not a lot else, as far as modern wayfinding goes. Like if you want to get to California by some early cartographers' maps, you'd have to go by boat--California was depicted as an island in the Pacific--sailing very close to the Garden of Eden. Watch for dragons, and mind the grumpy marginalia between Earth and chaos, it disturbs unless sacrificed to. Apropos it may be for the state founded by opportunism and known for raunchy artifice to appear on maps so near the site of original sin (filmed on location at low transportation cost!), but it's little more than a coincidence among myths.

On the Typus Orbis map, the standard world map from 1540 to 1570, wind-blowing heads surround the world's land as in Homer's Odyssey, on which the depiction was based. (At some point in their journey back to Ithaca, Homer's crew untie the bag of wind given to them by King Aeolus, letting out a wind that blows them ashore of an unknown island.)

The Typus Orbis world map, popular from 1540-1570

Plenty of maps from the Mediterranean regions show winds symbolized by heads or windbags, and given how important wind was to sea travel, it isn't too surprising that cartographers would reference myth and legend in their schemas: the map had to be accurate to documented reality and supplicatory before chance, making it both tool and talisman.



The idea that a map should be usable by anyone, should overcome limitations of language and relative orientation, is one that's unique to our time and place. Marshall Island mapmakers constructed maps out of sticks, strings and shells to memorize ocean swell patterns and islands' locations before leaving by boat for a journey.

A stick map used by Marshall Island navigators

Often these maps could be interpreted only by the mapmaker, who, having memorized his map, would be the primary navigator for the trip. Rather than consult a map during the trip, he would rely on memory and a sense of how the water moved honed by lying on the bottom of the boat to feel its pitches and rolls.* This sort of tactile training, seen and experienced after much practice, can look and feel like "intuition," a conflation that's both easy to mock and venerable as a synthetic, much like polyester (which I learned is often used to make boat hulls).

Echolocation is another technique that's a rare deviation from our reliance on one sense--sight--to navigate. Bats, whales and dolphins use it regularly; the blind can be trained to use it to find a course among objects. This is done by emitting a clicking sound with the tongue (or using a device that makes a clicking sound) and interpreting the sound waves that return. I talked with a man who'd been blind since birth and relied on echolocation to get around in the city; he said that different cities obviously sound very different (some, like Boston, have lots of buildings made of heavy stones, some are often snow-covered, some have lots of glass-covered buildings) and that he'd developed "sound maps" of areas he frequently traveled, which made it easy to know when familiar objects on his route had changed. He remembered these maps the way you'd remember a song, and each place's song was a mnemonic that encapsulated not only information about objects' locations, but also his own dispositions in each place, with favorite places' sounds being of course more pleasing.

Plenty of research disagrees about how we go about wayfinding. Do we perform complex computations, summing vectors and optimizing manifold possible routes? Do we memorize sequences of images? Do we store whole maps, or do we store route information more abstractly, and in more than one physical place in our brains? None of these questions have been answered without being challenged almost immediately by contradictory evidence; a few simple observations about wayfinding techniques will have to suffice, as far as answers go: wayfinding techniques include dead reckoning (estimating your position based on the distance you've traveled in your current direction from your previous position), using a map and compass, echolocation, astronomical positioning, and the latest fad, global positioning.

Those aren't the four winds in the corners, they're satellites.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed by the US Department of Defense, and it consists of a number of satellites orbiting Earth. Very simply, how it works is this: a satellite sends a signal to your GPS device (which is basically a receiver for said signals) and it measures the time delay between when the satellite sent the signal and when you received it. It multiplies this time by the speed of light, and it compares this to the satellite's location, which the satellite occasionally sends the receiver. Using position and range, the receiver can determine its own position. And satellite images are also useful for wayfinding: Google maps and google earth are two fine examples of how nice it is to augment meager human wayfinding abilities with our more formidable abilities to develop sense and memory extending technologies.

And these super-accurate maps render superfluous the "Here there be dragons"
commonly written on ancient maps' uncharted regions. We've gone from murk and darkness and monsters to very precise representations of what's really out there, making the old maps and myths obvious allegories for our fears of the unknown--which isn't to say that these have been rendered superfluous. They'll just be a little more private, the echoes, songs and mnemonics that make the murk and darkness of even the most well-documented places more familiar.


*Maps' importance (or lack of) as political documents is apparent: that the Marshall Islanders didn't carry maps to show expectant royalty or patrons newly conquered territory at least suggests that their sea travels were motivated by different goals than were those of early Europeans.

Retraction simile*

ghost politicos' cadenced march to tollers
may bring up oil and some seasonal despair
written by self-appraisers in styptic metaphor
to encourage enactments of propriety in minature relief
from seabed ablation, the answer
being nowhere in the distance of that metaphor.


*The title of spam I recently received. Content is not spam.

More Machine Love

The tour proper of the steam plant was led by a man in a machinist's jumpsuit who knew the turbines minutely, who for about an hour did not stop giving us very specific information about parts and frequencies and other etcetera, and often stood very close and spoke like he was trying with some effort to meter out information at an intelligible rate and not in one explosive gust. (Even so, I didn't understand most of what he talked about, so I looked up the following description.)

Briefly, here is how a steam turbine works. A steam engine's function is based on a principle of thermodynamics that says that entropy (unusable energy--heat--that sometimes is described as a measure of randomness or disorder of a system) increases in any system producing work (in thermodynamics, work is a little more general than mechanical work--weight lifted to a height--and basically refers to energy that changes a system macroscopically). Since steam turbines rely on the irreversible process of cooling (heat moves only from hot to cold), some amount of energy will be irretrevably lost during the process of generating work. The idea is: steam inside the turbine is expanded in chambers, and nozzles direct this pressurized steam to rotor blades, which the steam turns. These blades spin an electric generator (the dynamo was the first electric generator), which operates on the principle that when electric conductors are perpendicular to a magnetic field, potential difference is created that can generate a current. From mechanical movement comes electricity, but never with ideal efficiency--there's always friction diverting some energy to useless heat. In an ideal world, theoretical machines turn energy into work with no losses, but as touching the nearest lightbulb will show you, this is not an ideal world.

Turbine rotor blade

The Georgetown turbines are capable of generating 3,000, 8,000 and 10,000 kw, respectively. For a comparison: Puget Sound Energy, which now supplies Seattle's power, is capable with all of its plants of generating a combined 1,800 megawatts, which is 1,800,000 kw. This is why the Georgetown Steam plant is very much a museum and not an operating plant. It is simply dwarfed by demand for electricity.

[Actually a watt is sort of complicated to define, and this complication gets at how abstract units of measurement actually are, the ones that reference the human body (the foot, the mile--which is from the Latin phrase for 1,000 steps, the inch--possibly originally the distance between the tip of the thumb and the first joint of the thumb, and the hand) being less so than the ones associated with really big or really small units, or with things that cannot be visualized laid end to end or stuffed in mouldy plastic containers at the back of the fridge. Which is perhaps yet another example of how an abstraction can become what's considered technical over time and through a routine course of associative training, which is what the above comparison between kilowatts and megawatts assumes. For me, it's only a comparison between numbers of zeros, which are themselves nifty abstractions.

For the definition, a watt is one joule of energy per second, a joule being the energy required to produce the power of one watt for one second, a definition which may not make the defined any more clear. Sorry.]

During the tour, it was difficult not to pay attention to this: what the machines do to someone intending to write about them is make superfluous the whole project of generating metaphors and trying by (often facile) literary tactics to make the machines mean anything beyond their utility. Sort of in the same way that trying to frame a stampeding elephant calls attention to the frame rather than the intended subject, making the device the subject--and the guy wielding the frame a damn fool. Which is to say, I felt silly, and this feeling is also part of the appeal, another aspect of machine love.

And I suppose this is where all kinds of obvious things can be said about why we tend to romanticize* what we know of through myths and abstractions and icons rather than through technical expertise. Not knowing anything about the turbines, I felt like a tourist in the steam plant: a little detached, consciously ignoring a sense of being where I didn't quite fit in.

What's preserved in the steam plant, in the weird silence surrounding big machines still capable of being very noisy, is the Myth of the American Inventor. This is unexpected, given the machines' obsolescence, and only reaffirms that the myth doesn't really have anything to do with the thing invented, but rather with the way the inventor has supposedly bypassed repetitive drudge work (the mechanical definition of work) to produce something seemingly from nothing. And then the inventor's name is put on the product and maybe the unit of measure the product requires we adjust to, and the process of invention is eclipsed by the Proper Noun.

Why the Myth of the American Inventor seems obsolete, too, like it definitely belongs in a museum, can perhaps be attributed to corporate R&D and marketing. Now the company puts its name on the product, and through marketing maintains focus on the product...but this is getting really tangential, except to say that there might be instances where overlooking the process of "inventing" a product is unethical, and this could lead into a discussion of bio-engineering and gene synthesizing that I'd be happy not to pursue right now. Suffice it to say that maybe the myth of the American inventor has survived as the myth of the American invented, where the process is often patented and sold to the public via euphemisms and abstractions. And from here the leap to talking about a much anticipated invention--the robot--is not that far.

There is the argument that our brains are chemically-controlled machines, that humans are big meaty chemical factories that house various mechanisms, including one called "soul" or "mind" or whatever. One aspect of this argument has cohered in the practice of prescribing and taking pills to alter the brain's inputs and thus its outputs. Another in the practice of designing machines that can reproduce thought (and whether it must be human thought in order for us to validate it as thought is also obviously debatable). A compelling argument can be made for defining love as a totally chemical phenomenon. Consider the effects of oxytocin, a hormone, on the brain: arousal (spontaneous erection in rats injected with the stuff), pair bonding, maternal behavoir, increased trust, fewer symptoms of stress.

Of course the gist of the opposing argument is that there is more to the human brain than the behaviour it causes; hence, we'll never really know how it works. Really, the arguments for and against brains as machines are complex, and they revolve around the equally complex arguments for and against the brain as mind/soul/third eye/etc. Either way, the debates themselves are fine evidence of just how complicated and self-conscious the brain certainly is, machine or not. And just this sort of self-consciousness is a crux of both sides.



We may resist seeing ourselves as machines, but we do readily anthropomorphize them. We enhance them with humanlike qualitative motivations and sensibilities, a practice that makes fairly routine advances in robot building (one I read about recently is a tacticle-sensing mechanism intended to allow surgeons doing minimally-invasive surgeries to "touch" tissue that might be abnormal to decide whether it is) seem familiar, even destined, and talk about robot ethics (like this article about human-robot interaction) seem warranted. We often don't want to see ourselves as machines, and yet we do, judging by the robots to which we pay the most attention. It's a case of real life catching up with a version of fictionalized--and idealized--life. (And aggrandizing the future is not unlike doing the same to the past.) Only in life, as in machines, idealizations turn out to be a lot less intricate (and certainly colder) than the real thing.


*Romanticize is the word to use here. What the group of philosophers, writers, painters, musicians, etc. cordoned into the category "Romantics" were (very generally) doing was sort of reacting in an unorganized way (from the p.o.v. of their present) to aspects of the Englightenment they found devoid of moral direction, a.k.a. nihilistic. While the scope of what they accomplished is broad and not necessarily subordinated to the thematic thrust of most histories, generally speaking they sought the individual, subjective experience and tried to get at the unification of phenomena through disciplines perhaps not as hell-bent on rigorous classification as the emergent sciences. In retrospect what this generated was, from one perspective, an almost exclusively aesthetic focus that survives in modernist lit. and art and that lots and lots of people see as a slipshod platform on which to build any sort of ideology/ethics, or as an escape altogether from dealing with trying to do this. Anyway. There's a bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that gets close to how I've come to understand the Romantic outlook: "Arete implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency--or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself."

Machine Love

Here is one human predicament, one of many: we desire that which does not desire--and certainly does not desire us. We seem to want to jump the circuit of human logic, human wish-fulfillment, human design totally, bodies intact or not intact, minds recording or not recording, doesn't matter, because (it seems) what's outside of knowledge must sustain itself via a mechanics that doesn't much depend on bipedal legs and opposable thumbs and neocortical tissue, wonderful as these advances have been to our own manufacture of artifacts.

My own escapism often focuses on machines: I love the big ones, the obsolete ones that once embodied the height and breadth and depth of enigneering. These machines-- the dynamo, the steam engine, the turbine--sustained the infrastructure of human movement while being visibly absent from that system save to the few who had to know the machines thoroughly to keep them working. And the inventors: here were the fellows who straddled the systems' divide, guys easily made heroic and inaccessible by their specific knowledge of what appears to be complexity contained, chaos gauged by meters, controlled by levers and made to output itself, quantized: electricity.



This is decidedly a skewed view, one made possible by a vague understanding of how these machines work communicated mainly through three-page essays with titles like: Michael Faraday: Taming Electricity, and Maxwell's Darling Demon. These essays tend to hero worship, furthering the "Myth of the American Inventor," a phrase from an apropos scene in The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon).

Briefly, the scene: protagonist Oedipa Maas is touring the R&D side of a large aerospace engineering corporation, Yoyodyne. She talks to a young inventor-hack, a guy made cynical and distracted by the routine of his job. She mentions that she didn't think people invented anymore: "I mean, who's there been, really, since Thomas Edison? Isn't it all teamwork now?" And the engineer explains that what's taken the risk and reward away from invention is the patent system and corporate-owned intellectual property. The myth, "one man per invention," is not borne out by experience. Disillusionment with the present ensues, and so does the aggrandizement of the past that is often coincident with disillusionment. So the myths persist.

Thinking I might investigate the focus of some rather mythical ideas I have about machines, I toured the Georgetown Steam Plant, home of three turbines that once powered Seattle's cable car system and provided electricity for the Georgetown neighborhood, an industrial zone wholly inhospitable to sentiment, what with the emphasis on distribution rather than consumption: lots of barbed wire, loose gravel, nondescript warehouses, and desolate backdoor break areas composed of mismatched, often broken chairs that suggest a contingent comfort, a waiting space for something that already happened.

It was a fine setting for a visit to past circumstances, their focus being industry enabled by new ways to move stuff, lots of it, around. It's fitting that Boeing field edges the steam plant to the south because riding up to the plant, one sees it's planes doing the moving of stuff, not the cable cars the steam plant once powered. With 1906 moulded in poured concrete on the building's neoclassic-revival style facade, the planes are a superfluous counterpoint to the building's outmoded utility.

But then you go inside, and you see the machines themselves, and you start to think that if utility had a distributor, the steam plant could surely still be it. The turbines are big, and the intracacy of their sprawl beautiful. That they're still "fully functional" is all the more tantalizing, given their current quiescence. Around the base of one machine steam or smoke whorled suggestively.




Next: The love affair continues, culminating with: robots.