My uncle in Italy during WWII

Sixty-five years ago this week my Uncle Bill had a terrific headache. While touring through the Italian countryside near Santa Maria Infante, a piece of metal that would have killed him hit his helmet instead. I am glad for that.

I came across some Life magazine pictures being hosted by Google, and I asked him if they looked like what he saw. He fought west of Monte Cassino, where most of these pictures were taken, but he did say that this view typified what he saw much of the time.

gothic-line

He graciously agreed to write down some memories of that time and let me publish them here. Thanks Uncle Bill, and happy birthday!

It might be appropriate to outline my involvement in the infamous Italian campaign. On turning 18, I was drafted, after a year in college. In the fall of 1943 I was sent for basic infantry training to Fort McClellan in Alabama. After 13 weeks of training the companies were divided into two groups, one going to Fort Ord in California for the Pacific and the other to Fort George G. Meade in Maryland for the Atlantic. After a week at home I was sent to Fort Meade and then to Camp Patrick Henry in the Hampton Roads area, embarking on a troop transport for Oran, North Africa. Naples had fallen and a British ship took me to Naples. From there I subsequently found myself in the front lines north of the Garigliano River, the Gothic Line. There I was inserted, as a replacement, into a combat division, the 88th Infantry Division, 350th Regiment, first Battalion, Company B.

In an active combat division the attrition rate is high, some 60 percent in six months. Replacements are necessary. Unfortunately, replacements are at a disadvantage. Not having trained with your comrades, replacements were strangers in the midst of veterans. You were sent up to the line, stuck in a foxhole, not even knowing your comrades in the next foxhole over.

For a couple on months the Gothic line was static. I did watch the massive bombing of Cassino in March and could see the eruption of Vesuvius to the south. It was a spectacular display but I would have appreciated a better and more comfortable seat than a foxhole. On May 11, after an unusually fierce artillery bombardment, we pushed off, headed for Anzio. I remember walking behind tanks through devastated villages. Once, near Santa Maria Infante, my helmet was hit by shrapnel. My helmet was holed and I was knocked silly but the wound was superficial and after a few hours I was sent back into the line. We eventually met the troops from the Anzio beachhead and on June 4th we entered Rome, the first infantry troops in the city.

North of Rome, progress was rapid with only sporadic German resistance. On July 14, 1944, while trying to circle around a German machine gun emplacement, I was hit in my left ankle and foot. After some hours I was evacuated to a cave, where along with other wounded soldiers and civilians, I remained for a couple of days before being carried across the valley to battalion aid station, thence to Rome for surgery, to Naples and a hospital ship home. I had been ZIed, a wound sufficient to be sent to the Zone of the Interior, home!!!

My memories of Italy have been softened and blurred by time. Sixty years puts a bit of a strain on recall. I do remember the rain, the mud, and being supplied entirely by mule trains, carrying supplies in and the dead and wounded out. I remember the isolation and fear lying in a foxhole. I remember the never ending mountains and the uncanny ability of the Germans to use this advantage in defense. I remember the dead and the wounded and the cruelty on both sides. Sherman had it right.

I also remember the freedom from fear when pulled back from the front for R & R, the walk through Rome treated as conquerors, returning to Rome and seeing the Pope at the Vatican, those were the good days. I remember the trip home on the hospital ship, the attentive nurses, fried chicken and, most improbable, all the ice cream one could eat. And I remember my parents, scraping to borrow tires to make the trip to McGuire General Hospital in Richmond to visit me.

If you’re interested in the Italian campaign, I recommend Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, which I wrote about previously here. Also, while trying to locate some information on Santa Maria Infante, I found some old newspapers that have turned up on public archives. Here’s a link to a short article on the Americans marching through Santa Maria Infante and Castellanorata, but if you zoom out, you get a fascinating glimpse into a day of news in the all-consuming story of that war.

Peak Everything

Our best predictions of the future, which is to say, when those predictions work, tend to be straight-line extrapolations based on trends that don’t change too much. Our worst predictions occur when previously stable trends start to do loopy nonlinear things. Trendquakes.

We’re in for a lot of those in the next few decades.

There’s a lot of talk about peaks of one kind or another, trends that have done nothing but grow in living memory now starting to reverse course. Peak oil has been a popular term since the publication of Ken Deffeyes’ book Hubbert’s Peak. The premise is that the rate at which we squeeze oil out of the ground has topped out and is now in a terminal decline. Tim O’Reilly has pointed out that we may also be in the era of peak consumption, or perhaps more aptly, peak waste.

In the American Scientist this month there’s an article that dwells not so much on the environmental concerns of burning all that oil as the limits to growth once that “free” energy starts to dry up: Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil. In it, the authors mention Richard Heinberg’s concept of peak everything.

One of the more interesting peaks is peak population. Everyone who was born in 1965 or before (hey, that’s me!) has seen the world’s population double to its current value of 6.8 billion. The world’s population will never double again. Peak population isn’t expected until 2050 or so, but there is an inescapable and sustained depopulation in our future, something that hasn’t happened in a thousand years.

Sustained depopulation will be new when it’s happening across the entire globe, but it’s happening already in more places than you might suspect. In Russia, it’s gotten so bad they call it “hypermortality”. Read about it in the World Affairs Journal: Drunken Nation: Russia’s Depopulation Bomb. Here’s another demographic snapshot of a changing world from the Wilson Quarterly: The World’s New Numbers. Birthrates are falling all over the world with the exception sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, Africa will become the global centroid of both Christianity and Islam.

Bionic air penguins

This little YouTube movie looks to me like it belongs in the exposition part of a science fiction movie. For some reason, it made me think of the Mr. DNA video in Jurassic Park.

The images are so surreal and the voiceover is so oleaginous that it seems like fiction. But no, it’s not fiction. It’s just German. Festo is a real company, and they’re doing some amazing stuff. Those bionic air penguins (just after a minute into the movie) are the real deal. Who, after seeing this video, can honestly say they don’t want to own a bionic air penguin? Team them up with a few Big Dogs and you’re starting to get a good approximation of video games in real life.

Journey to the bottom of the Mandelbrot set

If you want to explore the Mandelbrot set, or fractals in general, you have endless options, but you should definitely look at the Xaos Fractal Browser. It’s been super-streamlined for zooming around quickly. Lots of people use it and upload their pictures to Flickr, and Flickr, in turn, makes it easy for me to embed this dandy slideshow.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649

Zooming around in Mandelbrot space got me thinking about the problem of mathematical exploration in general. I did a little googling and found this news item. (Note: actually I made it up)

WASHINGTON, DC (May 1, 2009)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Government officials were scrambling this morning to put the finishing touches on what’s being touted as the “most significant exploration initiative since Apollo.” The program, called Fractal One, has been established to plant an American flag on the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Lead mathematician for the program Curt Canneford explained: “The Mandelbrot set is a mathematical object, a fractal set of fantastic richness. The deeper you delve into it, the more mysteries you find. It’s unconscionable that, since its discovery more than twenty years ago, we still don’t know where it stops.”

Bipartisan support has been building for the initiative. As Representative Malcolm Blakey (R, Missouri) explained at a press conference yesterday, “When we heard that the French were funding an expedition to set foot on the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, we realized this was a matter of national pride and competitiveness. Why, in an age when Everest has been climbed, the Marianas trench plumbed, and the moon itself claimed for this great republic, is the Mandelbrot set still hiding secrets? This math resource should be probed and exploited. We might find oil, mineral wealth, or lots of cool pictures for American students to put up in their dorm rooms.”

Late last night, underscoring the urgency of the effort, came word of an imminent Chinese expedition, and there was an unsubstantiated claim that a Russian team was “already there.”

What will it look like at the bottom? It’s hard to say. Lead Mandelnaut Irving Bell was sanguine about the dangers. “We’re talking about extremely small numbers… the linear dimensions alone will measure less than 10 to the minus 128. The computational pressures will be enormous. The iteration counts near the bottom could pin us down for weeks, and a divergent blowout could happen at any time.”

It was a stirring scene as he and his team, against the backdrop of a large American flag, were sealed into the stainless steel Fractal One compute pod and lowered into the complex set.

Assembling the space station

Just this morning my Dad sent me this nifty Flash animation from USA Today: Building the Space Station. There’s a lot of depth to it. Keep on clicking and you can find out where the Soyuz periscope is stowed. The graphic is nifty and moderately interactive, but it also makes the station look a little toy-like and antiseptic, like something out of a Tintin comic.

If you want to see what it really looks like to put together a space station, take a look at the Big Picture version of the story. I love the human stories, like this picture of someone exercising. The place is a mess, there are Russian magazines and pictures of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky on the wall, and you just know it smells in there. And although this picture shows that up and down are arbitrary concepts in space, I once learned from an astronaut that on the space shuttle up and down are very important social constructs. It’s disconcerting to address yourself to someone else’s boots. Like facing the wrong way in an elevator, you can do it, but it’s weird and it makes everyone else uncomfortable.

That’s human nature for you. We like to think the world is defined by physics, but really it’s psychology.

Test Your Geography Knowledge

I have sung the praises of Sporcle.com (here and here), the game site that can teach you more than you learned in grad school. First they had the U.S. presidents. Then they added things like African countries, and the periodic table of the elements. Now they’re adding games at a breakneck pace, and along with the expected pop culture quizzes on cartoon villains, you can crack your brain on obscure and mind-bending tests like naming the 54 Danish monarchs between 934 and the present day. FYI: “Hamlet’s Dad” is not an acceptable answer, but “Eric the Memorable” and “Gorm the Sleepy” will both work. I always forget Eric.

And by the way, I’m chagrined to report that I could only get 44 out of 50 correct on the Monty Python and the Holy Grail quiz. Can you top that?

Anyway, I didn’t want to get sucked into talking about Sporcle again. What I wanted to do was point you to an entirely new and seductive way to waste hours of your precious time. On MakeUseOf.com I got introduced to the amazing head-to-head geography challenge called Geosense. You get paired with another player, they flash up a city like “Vientiane, Laos” and you have to click on it on an unmarked world map faster and more accurately than your opponent. Hard and fun. Try it.

Complexity made visible: mechanical watches

Your “Check Engine” light comes on for no good reason. The fax machine keeps swallowing your pages, but the message never gets sent. The screen on your cell phone starts turning black. The world is full of so much baffling and deeply hidden technology it can make you crazy. Contrariwise, it is reassuring to see simple cause-and-effect in action. That’s what’s so appealing about Rube Goldberg devices. The complexity of the world is reflected in the improbable machinery, but it’s nice to see each little step spelled out, one obvious consequence after another. The roller skate rolled into the tea-kettle only because it was kicked by the shoe on the croquet mallet. It makes perfect sense!

A similar appeal is behind the surging interest in extremely accurate mechanical watches. Why would anyone pay more than $100,000 for a watch, especially when you can get a much more accurate electronic watch for a tiny fraction of that amount? Because it’s mechanical gears are reassuring, even charming. It feels more real, like something you can understand. Although honestly, I bet only three and a half people on the planet actually understand the Jaeger-LeCoultre Gyrotourbillon. Just look at it.

Call it micro-steampunk. Luddism writ small. I wonder if you can sabotage it with a tiny wooden shoe?

Pushing this mechanical fetish even farther is this remarkable mechanical-digital watch. It looks digital, but it’s powered by gears. And although it is powered by electrical motors, here’s a favorite of mine: the wooden TV.

Oh sure, those Electrons are your friends now. But one of these days they’ll forsake you for the industrial bourgeoisie. Then where will you be? Come the Revolution, you’re going to need Gears!

“Ode to Joy” played on wine glasses

One of my friends from elementary school found me via Facebook the other day, and what do you know, he’s the timpanist for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. It’s good to know people who are principal timpanists.

I never excelled at playing orchestral instruments, but I remember being fascinated with their names when I was in elementary school. There are so many good ones, many of them strangely similar in shape and sinew to the instruments they announce: trombone, bassoon, oboe, gong. There’s something very timpanic about the word timpani. What’s the word for that? Orchestronomatopoeia?

Anyway, his Facebook page had this great video of some rim-riffing Beethoven. Be sure and stick around for the harmony in the second half. You reckon that feller could play “Freebird” on them glasses?

The arrangement of all those glasses looks awfully inconvenient. Couldn’t someone build a musical instrument that makes that sound? Yes they could, and that person was Ben Franklin. At one time his glass armonica (also spelled “glass harmonica”) was so popular that Mozart composed for it. Franz “Mesmerism Is Almost My Last Name” Mesmer used the armonica as part of his hypnosis experiments. Then someone started spreading nasty rumors that it caused listeners to go insane*, and the armonica went the way of the theremin. Happily, you can still buy an armonica today, and I was especially pleased to see that the Finkenbeiner Glass Harmonica showroom in nearby Waltham, Mass. is practically in my back yard.

Now here is your musical riddle for the day: why is this woman in 18th century apparel playing a jazz standard on the armonica?

* I don’t think it will actually make you go insane, but I did hear that if you watch this video five times in a row your eyeballs will turn black.

Stalking the wild chartreuse

Let’s say you’re a designer, a coutourier, and you’re trying to figure out what to do for your upcoming spring collection. You’ve been going through the Pantone color swatches, you’ve browsed through the Fashion Color Report (PDF), but nothing seems vivid and alive enough. What to do?

amazon-colors

Well, if you’re Issey Miyake, you send a team of color experts on a trip to the Amazon to go hunting for wild colors. There’s something so marvelously obsessive and wacky about this that I can’t help but be impressed. ColourLovers does a nice job breaking it down for us:

Dai and his team traveled with a huge collection of cloth colour samples. They tested these against trees, leaves, bark and mud to find the palette of the forest.

I just love the image of intrepid explorers deep in the jungle, wearing pith helmets and mosquito netting, hard up against the buttressed roots of a ceiba tree, and armed only with … a stack of color swatches.

The Issey Miyake site and full video can be found here.

Galileo’s telescope

It’s been a big year for anniversaries. First we have Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin blowing out 200 candles apiece (were they jealous of each other?), and now comes a Galileo event at twice that span: 400 years. When you put it that way, it’s interesting to consider that Darwin gets you halfway to Galileo. Quick question: if two Darwins buys a Galileo, what can you buy with two Galileos (800 years)? Answer: Cambridge University, which was founded in 1209. So it goes.

But back to Galileo. In fairness, we are talking not about his birth year (1564), but the first year in which he turned his famous telescope upon the heavens. A curious historical footnote is that Galileo did not invent the telescope, but he does seem to have been the first to think to point it straight up. In honor of the events of 1609, this year is to be an International Year of Astronomy. Last weekend witnessed the 100 Hours of Astronomy celebration. Visit their web site to see some fun short videos from observatories around the world in Around the World in 80 Telescopes.

But what about Galileo’s original telescope? You can still find it (or one of its early siblings anyway) at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence. I’ve been there, and let me tell you it is worth the visit.

As you enter the museum, you see part of an enormous marble dial for a barometer and thermometer that used to sit in the Loggia dei Lanzi in the famous Piazza della Signoria. But, this being Florence, public displays of science gave way to public displays of art, and so the instrument was banished to the museum. On the second floor you can find not only Galileo’s old telescopes, but also, bizarrely, his old finger. It is, in fact, his middle finger, and although Galileo was pardoned by Pope John Paul II in 1992, I would have to guess that it still points at Rome.