Insect Technics: War Vision Machines

Author(s):  
Fabienne Collignon

This chapter investigates insectile weapons systems, 'weird' war machines that, in one way or another, pertain to a 'becoming-insect'. Jussi Parikka argues that ‘insect media’ might yield a weird futurity that emerges due to modes of perception that are radically other. Yet this ontology of perceptive enmeshment also functions as immersion into sovereign super power and its swarm technologies. What Peter Sloterdijk calls an ‘aesthetics of immersion’ is considered in relation to ‘weird’ (China Miéville) war machines, focusing on the 1960s anti-missile missile project Safeguard in North Dakota. This pyramidal architecture of ‘defense’ also repeats a gigantic insect eye on each side of its building, whose fly-like ‘gaze’ transposes a wish to perceive the latent dimensions of the earth as total vision-field. Safeguard is linked to newer conceptualizations of war machinery whose ‘scopic’ regime operates through drone warfare. As a networked entity, the drone, also fly-like, acts in a functional circle of immersion and death distribution: the ‘face’ of the drone as expression of a weird futurity in which the notion of the insectile expresses, updates, super power as affective, rhythmic, a ‘becoming-insect’ that maintains a ‘thanatopolitics’.

Author(s):  
Peter Molnar

‘The basic idea’ presents the principles of plate tectonics and describes how this revolutionary theory took hold. It begins with Alfred Wegener in 1912, who proposed the concept of continental drift and a former huge continent, Gondwanaland. In the face of strong opposition, this theory was supported by the development of palaeomagnetism in the 1950s and, in the 1960s, became subsumed within the broader framework of plate tectonics. Three major events precipitated this change: a switch in emphasis from continents to ocean basins and their exploration; rapid growth in seismology; and a shift in perspective from the chemical stratification of the Earth, in terms of crust and mantle, to another that emphasized strength—a strong lithosphere, some 100–200 km thick, overlying a weak asthenosphere.


This book is devoted to the life and academic legacy of Mustafa Badawi who transformed the study of modern Arabic literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1960s the study of Arabic literature, both classical and modern, had barely been emancipated from the academic approaches of orientalism. The appointment of Badawi as Oxford University's first lecturer in modern Arabic literature changed the face of this subject as Badawi showed, through his teaching and research, that Arabic literature was making vibrant contributions to global culture and thought. Part biography, part collection of critical essays, this book celebrates Badawi's immense contribution to the field and explores his role as a public intellectual in the Arab world and the west.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-103
Author(s):  
Lina Aniqoh

This paper seeks to elaborate on the textual interpretation of Q.S Muhammad verse 4 and Q.S at Taubah verse 5. These two verses are often employed by the extremist Muslim groups to legitimize their destructive acts carried out on groups considered as being infidels and as such lawfully killed. The interpretation was conducted using the double movement hermeneutics methodology offered by Fazlur Rahman. After reinterpretation, the two verses contain moral values, namely the war ordered by God must be reactive, fulfill the ethics of "violence" and be the last solution. Broadly speaking, the warfare commanded in the Qur'an aims to establish a benefit for humanity on the face of the earth by eliminating every crime that exists. These two verses in the contemporary socio-historical context in Indonesia can be implemented as a basis for combating the issue of hoaxes and destructive acts of extremist Muslim groups. Because both are crimes and have negative implications for the people good and even able to threaten the unity of mankind.


Author(s):  
Roy Livermore

Despite the dumbing-down of education in recent years, it would be unusual to find a ten-year-old who could not name the major continents on a map of the world. Yet how many adults have the faintest idea of the structures that exist within the Earth? Understandably, knowledge is limited by the fact that the Earth’s interior is less accessible than the surface of Pluto, mapped in 2016 by the NASA New Horizons spacecraft. Indeed, Pluto, 7.5 billion kilometres from Earth, was discovered six years earlier than the similar-sized inner core of our planet. Fortunately, modern seismic techniques enable us to image the mantle right down to the core, while laboratory experiments simulating the pressures and temperatures at great depth, combined with computer modelling of mantle convection, help identify its mineral and chemical composition. The results are providing the most rapid advances in our understanding of how this planet works since the great revolution of the 1960s.


Horizons ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-194
Author(s):  
Christopher Pramuk

In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.” “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.” Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-117
Author(s):  
Christian Henrich-Franke

Abstract The second half of the 20th century is commonly considered to be a time in which German companies lost their innovative strength, while promising new technologies presented an enormous potential for innovation in the US. The fact that German companies were quite successful in the production of medium data technology and had considerable influence on the development of electronic data processing was neglected by business and media historians alike until now. The article analyses the Siemag Feinmechanische Werke (Eiserfeld) as one of the most important producers of the predecessors to said medium data technologies in the 1950s and 1960s. Two transformation processes regarding the media – from mechanic to semiconductor and from semiconductor to all-electronic technology – are highlighted in particular. It poses the question of how and why a middling family enterprise such as Siemag was able to rise to being the leading provider for medium data processing office computers despite lacking expertise in the field of electrical engineering while also facing difficult location conditions. The article shows that Siemag successfully turned from its roots in heavy industry towards the production of innovative high technology devices. This development stems from the company’s strategic decisions. As long as their products were not mass-produced, a medium-sized family business like Siemag could hold its own on the market through clever decision-making which relied on flexible specialization, targeted license and patent cooperation as well as innovative products, even in the face of adverse conditions. Only in the second half of the 1960s, as profit margins dropped due to increasing sales figures and office machines had finally transformed into office computers, Siemag was forced to enter cooperation with Philips in order to broaden its spectrum and merge the production site in Eiserfeld into a larger business complex.


2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer ◽  
Sylvie Rivot ◽  
Jean-Loup Madre

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.


1780 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 354-377 ◽  

Sir, As you had recommended to me the examination of the air at sea by the nitrous test, I followed your advice in my return to the Continent in the beginning of November last: and I embraced that opportunity with the more eagerness, as I knew that you had given credit to the account of several consumptive people having recovered their health by going on sea voyages, after the common means for curing that distemper had failed. I was in hopes likewise to find in this inquiry, a confirmation of what you conjectured in you Anniversary Discourse in the year 1773, viz . that great bodies of water, such as seas and lakes, are conducive to the health of animals, by purifying and cleansing the air contaminated by their breathing in it: so that the salutary gales, by which this infected air is conveyed to the waters, and by them returned again to the land, though they do rise now and then to storms and hurricanes, must nevertheless induce us to trace and to reverse in them the ways of a beneficent Being, who, not fortuitously, but with design, not in wrath, but in mercy, thus shakes the waters and the air together, to bury in the deep those pestilential effluvia which the vegetables upon the face of the earth are insufficient to consume.


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