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The ABQ
Correspondent Last Two Issues April 2024 SMALL POTATOES We who are not
zealous fans of animé, manga,
Marvel movies, and other media
featuring people dressed in
interesting garments We tend to shrug off reports we hear of the Comic-Con
convention in San Diego. (Well…that’s close to Hollywood, and you can get
a crowd together for anything odd there.) It turns out that we curmudgeons
are not in the mainstream; those costume enthusiasts are. Granddaughter
Ondine, her professional costume designer mom Chantal, and associate Hide are
frantically working to finish elaborate costumes (they are moths of one kind
or another) in time to attend a costume event in Denver at the end of March
2024. I asked how many people attend these things and was told this is
just a small show…a few hundred to two thousand people, probably on the
higher end of that estimate as the event recovers from pandemic
restrictions. A couple of thousand?
How big is a big event? Denver hosts a show in the fall that draws
85,000 people…and the really big one in D.C. brings in 100,000, though
Ondine wasn’t sure whether they’re counting individual ticket sales or turns
of the turnstile by people with multi-day tickets returning to the event. In
some communities, several blocks of city streets are blocked off for
parades and competition, city convention centers and multiple hotel
facilities are filled to overflowing, and in D.C., at least, a
four-story office building hosts hundreds of commercial exhibitors. The
shows offer technical programs, and some bring in celebrities to pose for
selfies with fans, and sign pix for a fee. Not
surprisingly, this field has its own culture. which chiefly affects the hotels. The
sponsoring organizations reportedly try to negotiate three-year deals
with the hotels, booking large blocks of rooms at good rates for attendees. If
the rooms aren’t filled, the organization must pay for those empty rooms.
A hotel that hasn’t dealt with the costume people before tends to be
conservative in estimating the number (and nature) of the attendees. When
the organizations insist, and the hotel finally agrees, saying that it’s
given fair warning…the rooms are typically completely reserved weeks
before the event, and the hotel is besieged with desperate calls from
costumers explaining that they must have one of those rooms, because there’s
no way they can fit in a cab…or run for blocks…in their voluminous outfits.
Further, they don’t show up with backpacks and carryons, they have extra
bags and boxes for all their stuff. Most attendees have very little
money, so six or eight of them may share the cost of a room, with two
or three of them sleeping on the floor. They also can’t afford the
comparatively expensive hotel restaurants, and when they run out of peanut
butter sandwiches they brought from home, they look for fast food within
walking distance of the hotel. Most of them haven’t quite finished their
outfits, so one or two sewing machines are busy in most every room, day
and night. Elevators full
of costumed people often present challenges to regular guests, and sometimes
steps are taken to segregate costumers from real people. Depending on the
focus of the conference, costumers present special cleaning problems to the
hotel staff; notably, costumers are big on the use of glitter, which gets
into carpets and furniture. Importantly, hotels
are unaccustomed to having eight people in a two-person room. After calls
to the front desk for additional toilet paper, somebody usually shows up an
hour later, bringing what is obviously not from the hotel’s usual supplier;
the person has spent that hour emptying the stocks of grocery stores,
Costco and Sam’s club. …and let’s not
get into checkout time when people in partial costume and makeup besiege the
clerks, asking for late checkout times, and where they can put their
mountain of baggage? It’s a wild, BIG
business. Who’da thunk it? Incidentally
Ondine has won awards, even internationally,
for her work…including in one
instance a parrot that sat on a pirate’s shoulder.
It could turn its head and move its
mouth while saying “pieces of eight.” It
could also move its wings enough to look
alive. Interesting in the elevator. BUILDING WITH WOOD The Correspo has commented a
number of times about using wood in new ways…from directly growing finished objects like chairs…or even
houses… to generating useful amounts of electricity by walking on
floors of special wood…to using sheets of transparent (or, at least,
translucent) wood in place of glass…but not until now has an article
about using waste wood to create an “ink” for 3D printing popped up
in our view.. After you build your house or shed, using lumber and plywood,
you typically have a pile of not-very-useful wooden leftovers. The notion is
that it will be possible to convert those into filament that can be used
to print, for example, furniture for use inside the house or shed,
conserving much of what would traditionally be lost. Turns out, this isn’t
easy. While some of us still think of 3D printing as a novelty, it has been around for a
good many years. and it’s even possible to buy wood-based printing
filament from commercial
suppliers. Its use is just a bit complicated. In looking at the 3D
printing literature online, you’ll frequently find images of a small boat,
maybe a tugboat, that people print in various sizes, from teeny-weeny to the
size of a coffee cup, with various materials, and which is referred to
mysteriously as a “benchy.” This de facto standard is
used for benchmarking the performance of printers and materials. It has a
handful of straightforward features like overhangs, openings, and different
surfaces whose quality can easily be compared. (Apparently, the
algorithms/instructions for producing the benchy at various scales are widely
available.) Item: [Online April 2024] The Correspo has more than once commented on
the increasing difficulty of obtaining helium…the second-most comment element
in the universe, as far as we can tell. There’s lots of it, but not in
convenient form, and the U.S. has indifferently away its resources while the
demand for helium in really important applications has been increasing.
Reassuringly, a
large, higher quality than expected source has been discovered in Minnesota.
We’re glad. Item: At last…a floor-cleaning
robot that can move up and down stairs…at least as gracefully as I. Item: Not surprisingly, laboratory-grown meat is now
coming under concerted attack by forces who warn
that the artificially-grown products may not be safe. One recalls that
many years ago, the Dairy State of Wisconsin made it illegal to sell yellow
margarine, lest it be mistaken for butter. In the many decades since, yellow
margarine has not been shown to cause either significant heath or economic
hazards, but the reflexive resistance to it was interesting. Presumably the
beef/poultry/pork/fish industries will reflexively urge politicians to stamp
out not only real, but artificially-grown meat, but also the vegetable-based
simulated meats currently on the market. Conceivably, they have a point; one always wonders
if the foods that people shape deliberately are missing something that Nature
provides without mentioning it…some trace element or some process that
matters. We shall see. Meanwhile the show goes on. _______________________________________________
ITEM FROM THE PAST This
item from 1985 was brought to mind by the discovery that
some young technical acquaintances have never seen a “computer
card” …or even a 5¼” floppy disc PORTERABLES Standard IBM and Compaq portable computers work well, but
are clumsy backbreakers to lug. Portables with liquid crystal screens
are light and convenient, but the displays have been impractically
dim. As we stagger through airports with computers, it helps to recall
earlier portables. A chap
installed a monster 1960's system in a semi trailer, so his clients could
have computer service right there at their factories and offices on a monthly
schedule. The Thomas Bede Foundation turned that approach inside
out. Programmers in those days punched their work into IBM cards, and
handed them to computer gnomes, who would run programs in a batch, returning
the cards with the results. The programmers would groan, punch new cards
with changes, and send the twenty pounds of cards back for another
run. With fleet courier services, it was possible to run a couple of
batches a day. For one crash project, TBF put a 200 lb. IBM keypunch machine in the back of a 1964
Studebaker Lark station wagon for Ed Whitaker to drive over to Sandia
Livermore. He didn't have the clearances needed to enter the atomic
bomb works, and use their keypunches, but he parked next to the guard house
at the gate, plugged into their power, and fired up his own. The Lark
wagon had a roof panel that slid forward from the rear, making the car into a
sort of pickup. Ed sat up there
in the sunshine like a circus calliope player, banging out new cards, while
the head of computer operations at Sandia ran back and forth from the gate to
the big computer, giving Ed a dozen batch runs that day. What we're dragging through airports
now is better. The computers
we were dragging through airports in the mid-1980s
weighed about forty pounds. They did just barely fit under the
seats, and it’s hard to believe that the airlines let us hoist
them into the overhead compartments if we had the strength,
which was not always a certainty after a hard day on the
road. The Studebaker
Lark Ed took to Livermore was mine. It was so
poorly crafted that after a couple of years it was necessary
to carry pliers in the glove compartment to open and close
doors whose handles had simply fallen off, and couldn’t be
put back. Every time we’d hit a bump, the windows
would drop down inside the doors, and have to be fished
back up with a specially bent coat hanger carried for the
purpose. I loved that car, and it’s a source of pride that
we made computer history with it. A
couple of weeks ago, I discovered that the younger guys working
in Darzlab, whose entire lives have been lived in the
thumb-drive era not only hadn’t even seen “IBM cards” but
didn’t know how they worked…so I gave them a handful punched
cards that have been lying around here for fifty years
or more. They were astonished. Dar explained to them
how these antiques worked. I explained that new cards without
holes in them were particularly useful to me. I used to
give a lot of talks, and the
standard IBM card was just the
right size to fit in my shirt pocket, holding the notes I needed
for a talk. The
story goes that the size and shape of the original data cards,
patented by a chap named Hollerith in the late 1880s, were
the same as the dollar bill of the time, because it was convenient
and familiar. The size of the dollar bill was reduced
in the 1930s, but the old “blanket bill” was represented
by the IBM card up to at least 2012. March 2024 YES,
YES, I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME It a recent conversation about
printing a few color trifold brochures to take to a conference (really, there
are only two folds in a single sheet of 8½” x 11” that give you three pages on each side of
the sheet, a handy format), I repeatedly urged other members of the
meeting not to use glossy paper, but a good high-quality non-glossy stock
instead. Someone finally said, “You must have been frightened as a
child by somebody threatening you with a glossy trifold brochure. Why are you
so insanely vehement about this?” Oh. I figured out how to account for the excessive vehemence. Right up to the 1970s, color printing was an expensive BIG DEAL, nothing to be used on short-run work unless you had money to burn and really needed to impress somebody. It was necessary to convert the original photography to the desired size. Then it was necessary to create “color separations” from that material, from which printing plates could be made that would put just one color of ink each onto the paper in multiple steps. Each of these steps cost something in the resolution of the image, so was very fussy. Then, of course, the images had to be placed on the paper in exact registration…thousands of times. The whole process was picky, picky, picky. Skills and people were developed to make the process routine and reliable, but those skills and equipment were expensive. You’d be in for hundreds of dollars (in an era when a hundred bucks was a hundred bucks!) before you had a few brochures to take to a show. Well, then along came microcomputing. No industry was more affected, more rapidly, than printing. In just a few years, anybody could lay out a full-color trifold brochure on an office computer and print a few…or take the layout to a print-while-you-wait shop and get as many as desired for about twenty cents apiece (maybe a nickel each in 1950 money). We knew a guy who had inherited his dad’s prosperous graphics arts business, making color separations and the rest, using a great big camera we could walk into. The place was worth maybe a quarter million dollars when he inherited it in the mid-70s. By 1980, the business had disappeared. It was a side effect to this that was what made such a strong impression on me that I made a nuisance of myself in that meeting; when it became possible to print glossy trifold brochures fast and cheap, everybody did it. Very little of that was high quality, with good design. The world was flooded with cheesy promotional material printed on glossy paper that did not represent its proprietors well. To stand out you had to do something different and do it well…like using good pix, good design, well-crafted copy…and careful printing on well-finished, non-glossy paper. I hope I’ve got that out of my system now. What other sudden technical changes are likely to unhinge us? CANDLING I learned about “candling” as a kid in rural New England…didn’t learn much, except that people who raise chicken, ducks, etc…for eggs or meat, ordinarily held each egg up next to a candle in a dark room to see if it was fertile, containing a chick embryo or not. (The shells pass a surprising amount of light). I always assumed that the main point of candling was for those selling eggs to avoid having their customers dump live or dead embryos into their frying pans; yes, but those raising chicks also want to be sure that the embryos are doing well in their shells. Candling the eggs repeatedly, right up to the time of hatching provides all sorts of useful information. These decades later, commercial candling machines with cameras and computers can look inside the eggs at rates of 50,000 an hour, accurately reporting what they find. There are even some stories going around, sworn by believers not to be just urban legends, that candling is now taking on a more active role. An experimenter passed light through a fertile duck egg and into fertile chicken egg. The chick from that egg reportedly hatched with some duck characteristics because genetic information had been passed from one developing embryo to the other. Someone repeating the experiment, passed light through salamander eggs, into frog eggs (neither of which has a shell; the embryos grow inside transparent globs of gel). Sure enough, the hatching frog tadpoles had salamander characteristics. The key variable here seems to be the nature of the light used…the selected frequency or frequencies, variations in timing, etc. That was not reported, presumably because the experimenters don’t want everybody turning their chickens into ducks and salamanders into frogs for free. DON’T YELL AT ME; I’M JUST TELLING CANDLING STORIES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NELS
MUSES Item: Here’s another brief report on the development of
ground-effect flying machines. Not quite new, it’s a year
old, documenting the first flight of the Regent Seaglider. As near as I can
tell, they still can’t turn these things very fast, raising worry about
floating logs and fishermen who doze off and drift in the way. Still, interesting
to see. Item: Just a recollection raised in conversation with
good old granddaughter Ondine. When she was in high school, maybe twenty
years ago, she and her mom were much involved in Celtic dancing (crossed
swords on the ground, and all that). Their group had a lot of local support,
including a surprising number of bagpipers here in the high desert, and they
staged many events. Ondine tells of an important occasion when they made made
very clear, specific arrangements with a major hotel at which a big event was
to be held… explaining carefully that bagpipes have just one volume. If you
want a bagpiper to be louder, you get additional bagpipers; if you want a
bagpiper to be quieter, you move farther away from him. The hotel was to give
them space in a ballroom as far from any concurrent event as possible to
avoid auditory conflict. The hotel agreed, then booked them into a room
adjacent to a wedding reception with a mariachi band featuring loud trumpets.
The ballroom walls slightly muffled the competing sounds, but the hotel had
set up a bar in the hallway just outside the two rooms to serve both parties,
and every time a door opened (lots of traffic to the bar), deafening sound
spilled out. The bagpipers were in full regalia, with kilts, sporrans, etc…
many with dirks tucked into sheaths at their ankles. Many of the wedding
reception guests, dressed up for the important social event, were members of
various gangs in their finest oversize T-shirts with identifying symbols on
them, and baggy trousers concealing knives and pistols. As they mingled at
the bar, neither group much admiring the other’s choice of music and dress,
the opportunity for fatal conflict was present in spades. By some miracle,
despite a lot of mad-dogging and glaring, the flash point was never reached,
and all came away unscathed. The image lingers. Item: …and here’s progress
in robots weeding fields. Wow! these things are becoming
fast, very good at identifying weeds so they can be eliminated selectively,
and very good at hitting them with lasers, not just anywhere, but in
especially vulnerable spots. It’s remarkable to see a small fleet of these weeding
critters moving through a real field of crops. They can only get better. ITEM
FROM THE PAST This
seems relevant currently mostly because it’s
been forty years now since the 1984 IPRC. AROUND
THE BEND...OR TURNING THE CORNER...TAKE YOUR PICK When
Iben Browning, who had long worked on machine intelligence problems, attended
the International Personal Robot
Conference and Exposition in 1984, he said gloomily “We should have been
showing all this thirty years ago.” He had a point. All of the ideas
embodied in those machines had been kicking around for at least thirty years.
He went on to make a case that all genuinely new ideas need about fifty years to become generally
useful. People think about new ideas for that long before
they can start thinking with those
ideas. Well, more than two decades have passed since that IPRC, and some of us have been complaining the
whole time that roboticists haven’t been taking advantage of what we already
know to make smart, flexible critters. I proposed in a 1984 book, indeed,
that we should set up a “robot
habitat” where robot makers would send their offspring to interact with other
robots in an interesting environment, where Jane Goodall and her emulators might observe them patiently to
see how robot society works. (Bob Content tried to get support for this
at a science museum he managed, but...) In the last few months, all of a sudden, the key robot ideas seem
to have reached critical mass or achieved ripeness or something, because
they’re popping up all over. For example: A chap appeared in television news
recently, tending a flock of twenty or
so little autonomous vehicles that were milling around actively,
attracted by one another, but avoiding collision. Their fascinating patterns of behavior could be altered by tinkering
with their sensors and reflexes. Their shepherd had great ideas for
expanding the work. Not only are semi-autonomous
robot aircraft in many sizes and forms being used for reconnaissance and
attack on actual battlefields (and one supposes our expensive big nuclear
aircraft carriers must be accompanied and protected by unmanned undersea
critters looking for trouble), but New Scientist reports that “...A
Clodbuster robot...teamed up with three friends and a robot plane to find
targets hidden in between buildings...No computer or a human need take a
leadership role in the hunt, meaning
the bot team can still track down targets effectively if it should lose any
one robot. Each robot is
loaded with a map... and is on a
personal mission... information is also passed to other robots in the team so
no data is held centrally.” Music to the ears! New Scientist quotes one of the development team members as
saying “There is no need for
complicated coordination of the different elements of the team – each just
uses any information it gets to help with its own goals.” Even a
behind-the-scenes documentary for the Stargate scifi TV series did a
remarkable job of documenting the fact that a number of the far-out robotic
notions on the show are now being matched in reality. Folks with real funding and applications are now actively thinking
with some of the old notions, applying them, improving on them, and
innovating vigorously. What a relief. Well,
not entirely a relief… one primary reason (along
with LLM’s) for the current rapid advance in
robotry has been the War in the Ukraine, on for two
years now, which has given both sides license
to experiment more or less freely with all the
terrible things remotely controlled or almost fully
autonomous smart machines might do to people
or property. One supposes that many of the
more interesting ideas, not all necessarily lethal,
are still not being revealed. Smart machine
technology is doing some things we’re glad
of, too…in medicine, in outwitting criminals, and
most notably, enabling almost realtime communication
among people using dozens of different
languages. Yeah. Take your pick. February 2024 A note:
With this issue of the Correspo, it has been published for a full 39
years. If we get out an issue in March of this year (and we expect to), that
will begin the 40th year. Nobody is more surprised than I. PROGRESS
It was in
June of 1997 that the Correspo first noted the development of
miniature surveillance aircraft “with six-inch (really,
six-inch, fifteen centimeter) wingspans and a range of some kilometers.” Approaching thirty years later, that seems
unremarkable; the skies are full of interesting big and tiny things. Word is
getting around about a new development (apparently already in use) that gives
one pause. A classic problem with drones is that their range is limited
by the amount of fuel they can carry. This new development addresses that. A
very small vehicle is now able to perch on electrical power lines and draw
power from them, allowing the aircraft to navigate from spot to spot along
its route, stopping off to recharge whenever necessary. Given this, the
aircraft can carry a lot of navigation and communication equipment as well as
a useful payload. Somebody’s idea of a useful payload is a small,
unobtrusive package that can be secured to one of those power lines, and left
behind, not attracting attention. This package may contain an explosive…not
in itself really damaging, something along the lines of a Roman Candle that
can when triggered toss an expanding cloud of fine conductive wires into
the air. That cloud can settle over its electrical surroundings…
shorting them out. Some of us recall lunching in a New Mexico restaurant
many years ago when the lights went out for an extended time. The effect
was produced by hot weather in the state of Washington a thousand miles away
that caused some power transmission lines to expand until they shorted out on
something normally below them. Thoughtful (and quite inexpensive) application
of clouds of fine conductive wire could bring down power in a whole
country, creating inconvenience.
SPREADING THE NEWS A while back (can’t find the piece at the moment)
the Correspo spoke of work that revealed active communication among
plants…largely warnings of danger, but other matters of importance as
well. The information seems to be transported by networks of fungi
that can pass along chemical messages over great distances. It’s by no means
clear to some of us how those messages can be intelligible to their
recipients, and one wonders how complicated the messages can be, but
Nature is clever and resourceful. Those researchers were concerned with
underground systems, but work proceeds and people are discovering things about communication
using aerosols. Apparently a plant may notice
something of which it disapproves…maybe a caterpillar eating its leaves,
and it responds by releasing into the air some chemicals that carry
the message, “Hey, watch out, guys, I’m being attacked.” Other plants in
the area may respond to that warning by emitting chemicals that are repugnant
to caterpillars, giving them some protection. Detecting this message
sending/receiving was not casual for the researchers, who modified some
plants genetically, enabling them to emit light as well as noxious chemicals,
letting their reaction be seen. You can see it. Not to be too anthropic about this; the variety
of communication seems to be, must be, quite limited and entirely a
mechanistic process, but it’s easier to talk about it as if the
communication were by choice. Then again… Late friend Steven Sester (aw) whose
comments we often published, had this to say about
the piece on fungal communication: “I just realized
I tossed lots of Science Report features
including one called Tree Talk. The Acoustical Society of America worked for a more broad spectrum of
folks beyond piano builders and tuners, concert
halls, and audiology concerns. Tree talk
was about how acoustical sensors could tell how
stressed a tree was including as I remember, drought,
disease and boring beetles (they wouldn't be that
way if people had read to them). One wonders if, as your story suggests,
they were passing that information along to other
trees too. The species of trees I worked with most
had common root systems as one form of
reproduction. Redwoods needed this provision since
their seeds required high heat to shed a protective
shell and germinate otherwise. Lodgepole Pines
were almost like stands of bamboo and heat would
travel through the common roots systems and combust miles away. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NELS MUSES Item: There’s a whole lot of work on “soft” robots,
mostly because of their ability to squoosh down and slither through narrow
places (under doors, for example), expanding again on the other side. Here’s a case in
which the researchers are more interested in the “end effectors” for handing
things…using octopus tentacles and related structures for models. (We seem to have developed a soft spot for
octopuses lately.) Item: It’s hard to know what to make of this, but it’s an interesting phenomenon, different from sublimation. Item: This report on a long-term experiment to
determine how long seeds can remain vital
(they’re looking at about 150 years of controlled experiments so far, and the
things keep germinating) recalls that thirty years ago or so a friend gave us
a handful of very distinctive-looking beans that were the second generation
grown from a cache of seeds discovered in an ancient site in New Mexico,
estimated to be a couple of thousand years old. We planted them…and, sure
enough got a crop. We didn’t have the self-discipline to carry on the line,
though we talked about selling small lots of ancient beans…harder in those
pre-WWW days. We also didn’t eat any, mostly because we didn’t have enough,
but others had, and they reported that they were very good. Further, somebody
had done some scientific analysis of them, and determined that they were
exceptionally nutritious. ITEM FROM THE PAST This piece from
2000 is brought to mind by both the fact that this
is an Olympics year (in Paris) and by the emergence
of a television network dealing with the status and
activities “indigenous” peoples worldwide. THE GOOD OLD
DAYS Much commentary during Olympics coverage from Sydney
dwelt on the awkward relationship
between the aboriginal Australian people and the folks who have overwhelmed
them. Amid the handwringing, one
of the most-recently-living-away-from-civilization aboriginal gents commented
wistfully that he missed the old tribal life...but he was rather glad to be free of the power of the shamans who could
have him put to death for failure to conform with their views of what was
proper. Bingo! There’s a key consideration: if you want to preserve
the ancient cultures, can you succeed by preserving only the non-lethal
parts? If people speak the old languages, eat the same foods, and sing
the same songs...are you preserving the culture? The situation is not without
embarrassing parallels here in New Mexico. Indeed, Southwest Airlines just decorated one of its 737s with an attractive
big Zia symbol only after striking a monetary arrangement with the Zia Pueblo
authorities, who insist that it’s exclusively theirs by tradition. Well, no, the symbol isn’t copyrighted, and
yes, it’s on the state flag and has been used in commercial logos, on
letterheads, in jewelry, on clothes, cakes, license plates, coffee cups, so
often and so long that it’s virtually
a generic symbol of the region. (One hears gossip that the Zia Pueblo
helped the Spanish conquerors re-take the territory after the Pueblo Revolt
in the late 1600's, and their symbol floating over all the state buildings is
figuratively rubbing salt into the wounds of their numerous fellows here.) The airline’s gesture does not come
without complications. Dr. Sophie
Aberle (a distinguished figure with Conant, Bronk, and others on the
National Science Board that created the National Science Foundation) once remarked to me that “preservation of the
Indian cultures” became moot as soon as the tribal caciques lost their power
to have people executed, which wasn’t really that long ago. That fundamental change destroyed the
traditional structure of those societies. What’s left? We have no answers; merely point out the dilemma. Maybe cell phones and satellite TV will
solve everything by blotting out all that has traditionally seemed important.
In a
mere 24 years, cellphones and streaming have not
changed quite everything, but the work is still in
process. Now there’s a phenomenon in the form of
“FNX” First Nations Experience, a television network
that reverts to old-fashioned “free” television.
Threatened
by streaming and online media, the traditional
(well, since the 1940s) networks and PBS
have launched a campaign to persuade viewers to
obtain digital rabbit-ears antennas that allow them
to bring in very large numbers of channels (they
talk about as many as 100 in major markets …which
impresses some of us who recall having a max
of five or six in those same areas back in the day)
without any physical connection, and without charge.
One of those channels is FNX, which concentrates
on matters affecting “indigenous” groups
all over the world, from Zuni to Mauri to Uighers.
Not surprisingly, the content features a lot
of restrained, but deeply-felt reference to the savage,
maltreatment of local peoples by encroaching European
occupiers who stole their land, their culture
and their children with breathtaking arrogance. But
really, there’s a wide range of material, much of
it entertaining and informative (see Moosemeat and
Marmalade, for
example, a show in which a large
American Indian and a small, classically trained
British chef show each other what to eat and
how to prepare it in their different cultures. Lots
of great, non-resentful stuff to watch.) Every now
and again, something creeps in along the lines of
what the Australian chap expressed these years since…relief
at being free of the possibility of execution
at the whim of the shaman…and occasional recognition
that “aboriginal” really means not “we have
always been here,” but “we were here a long time
before you came.” There are a few cracks in attitudes
toward the “official” views of history enforced
by institutions that have a stake in the status
quo. Not many cracks, but a few, enough to keep
FNX sounding legitimate, not just propaganda. --------------------------------------------------------------------
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