The Time Machines of Eighteenth-Century Mewar

The focus of this essay is a spectacular scroll in the British Museum's collections that has been neither exhibited nor published since its acquisition. Perhaps that is because several fundamental questions about it remain unanswered: Where and when was it made? Who made it, and for whom? What purpose and meaning did it have for the first people who saw it and those who subsequently came into contact with it? In this essay, I begin to address these elementary questions. I establish that this eleven-foot-long scroll was created in Mewar in western India in 1769, and that since then it has cleaved many realms. Those realms include art and devotion, text and textile, astral science and genealogy, classical epics and vernacular histories, and cyclical time and linear time. I then postulate that understanding this short scroll's ability to nimbly separate and join those realms can help us critically appreciate the forms, layouts, and functions of two other contemporaneous cloth scrolls from the same region that are considerably longer and also have received sparse scholarly attention. Ultimately, I show how micro studies of scrolls and scrolling practices can allow us to understand forms of knowledge in Mewar on the eve of British colonialism, and to participate in challenging certain perceptions of the region's past that remain inflected by James Tod's writings nearly two hundred years after their publication.

Experiments in sandscaping: Liminal entanglements on the Norfolk and South Holland Coast

This hybrid creative-critical article explores how new ways of living beyond the current environmental crisis are forged on two sandscaping schemes that have been constructed as new experimental measures against coastal erosion. The Zandmotor, created in 2011, is an artificial peninsula built out of sand on the coast of South Holland. The success of this project inspired a similar sandscaping scheme at Bacton on the coast of Norfolk, constructed in 2019. The strange liminal landscapes that are the result of these projects are not just symbols of adaptive, nature-based water management in times of rising sea levels, they also become time machines, making fossils of different times emerge out of the sand taken from the seabed of the North Sea. In addition, the sandscapes are symbols of the artificialization of the coastal landscape, given the fact that sand suppletions disrupt not only life on the beach, but also destroy much bottom-dwelling life on the seabed from which the sand is harvested. However, these unique liminal landscapes between land and sea also create new ecological opportunities. At the Zandmotor, for example, rare bristle worms and Baltic clams have made their unexpected appearance. Moreover, the sandscape invites people not just to look for fossilized mammoth teeth, but also inspires them to create sense-altering art projects specifically adapted to the unique conditions in the area. In this article, I trace these various significances of both sandscaping schemes and argue that they cannot be reduced to any of these different meanings. Instead, I describe the Zandmotor as an example of Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016: 4) and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of ‘contaminated diversity’ (2015: 30). For although enormous amounts of animal and plant life have been destroyed for the creation of the Zandmotor, this does not discredit the fact that this new liminal environment has opened up new ecological opportunities for multispecies flourishing, creating unexpected combinations of landscapes and creatures. These new combinations inspire a shift in thinking about coastal environments and present new ways of living that may emerge beyond the current environmental crisis.

Characterisations of variant transfinite computational models: Infinite time Turing, ordinal time Turing, and Blum–Shub–Smale machines

We consider how changes in transfinite machine architecture can sometimes alter substantially their capabilities. We approach the subject by answering three open problems touching on: firstly differing halting time considerations for machines with multiple as opposed to single heads, secondly space requirements, and lastly limit rules. We: 1) use admissibility theory, Σ 2 -codes and Π 3 -reflection properties in the constructible hierarchy to classify the halting times of ITTMs with multiple independent heads; the same for Ordinal Turing Machines which have On length tapes; 2) determine which admissible lengths of tapes for transfinite time machines with long tapes allow the machine to address each of their cells – a question raised by B. Rin; 3) characterise exactly the strength and behaviour of transfinitely acting Blum–Shub–Smale machines using a Liminf rule on their registers – thereby establishing there is a universal such machine. This is in contradistinction to the machine using a ‘continuity’ rule which fails to be universal.

Extreme reefs: Analyses of modern bryostromatolite ("bryolith") reefs from marginal environments in the Netherlands with comparisons to ancient analogues

<p>Marginal environments sometimes serve as natural time machines, replicating conditions of ancient environments and thus inducing similar adaptations and symbioses. Few environments are more marginal than the brackish, arsenic and titanium rich, and periodically euxinic ponds found in the Zeeland (Netherlands). These ponds contain layered, stationary bioherms of alternating bryozoans and microbialites (bryostromatolites); similar structures are known from the Late Miocene of the Paratethys and the isotopic excursions in the Silurian as well as recent hypersaline lagoons in Australia. Critical study of the modern bryostromatolites will help paleontologists understand the conditions under which bryostromatolites formed in the past.</p><p>This study applied modern methods to analyze the microstructures and minerology of bryostromatolites from the Netherlands. These bryostromatolites contained alternations of <em>Einhornia crustulenta</em> bryozoans and gypsum-cemented microbes. Bryostromatolites formed in distinct stages, alternating between a phase of bryozoan layers and a phase where microbes and cements grew in tandem over the dead bryozoans; this microbial phase likely coincides with temporary anoxia/euxinia. The microbes, tentatively identified as cyanobacteria, showed a thrombolitic texture cemented with gypsum. This gypsum was deposited while the microbes were alive, suggesting they were alive during the euxinic phases and participating in sulfide-based photosynthesis. The bryoliths were otherwise poor in fauna, containing only a few species of mollusks, arthropods, polychaetes, and diatoms. All of these factors highlight the extreme environment under which modern and possibly ancient bryoliths formed.</p>