Maitri's VatulBlog

This is going to be quick.  I just got back from New Mexico and Columbus and am running out of time before D and I leave for Germany next weekend.  My main woman Julie (from Wisconsin) and I (from Wisconsin) got a chance to see Michael Feldman (from Wisconsin) conduct a live recording of his famous NPR variety show Whad’ya Know? at the College of Wooster’s McGaw Chapel. Wisconsin came to me.  Whad’ya know?

When on the road, Feldman highlights the specialties and quirks of his host town.  One of the interviewees this time was Paul Locher of The Daily Record, Wooster know-it-all and author of When Wooster Was A Whippersnapper.  For instance, we learned that the town sits at the intersection of three large Native American trails, which are now major state highways.  The natives held off the Presbyterian influx for quite a while until one of the settlers shot and killed a chief named Beaver Hat and took over the center of town (at which a couple of women in the audience shrieked with laughter – killing natives, very funny).  We also learned that Gerstenslager, now an auto body maker, used to make carriages for the likes of German emperor Kaiser Wilhelm and Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobiles (again with that whole Wisconsin connection).  And the average commute time in Wooster is 11.7 minutes.  That long, huh?

Here is a slideshow of pictures Julie and I took at the event.

The WYK? band killed as usual – John Thulin on piano, Jeff Hamann on bass and James Brown’s own funky drummer and Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee Clyde Stubblefield.  We got to talk with Michael Feldman, John Thulin and Clyde Stubblefield at length after the show, when Thulin encouraged me to go after my dream of re-learning piano, but only on a Yamaha if I ultimately choose an upright.

And, darn it, I forgot to get Feldman on board with the HinJewism movement.  Next time.

The events and artifacts of World War II fascinate me.  Not World War I, not Korea, not Vietnam, not even the war of the greatest import to my family, but World War II.  I still smile knowing we lived only a few blocks down the street from the D-Day World War II museum in New Orleans (incidentally, Jonah Langenbeck is the museum’s new Interactive Media Manager).  As my father-in-law, an American veteran of a foreign war, likes to say, “There is no such thing as a good war” and 1945 saw many sad, large, global messes in the name of victory, but I have nothing but awe for that era in world history.

The technology generated and used in World War II, that are still in use to this day, boggles the mind.  Radar, sonar, jet engines, rocket propulsion, nuclear fission and, most important to me, encryption and code-breaking.  So, imagine my surprise when D tapped me on the shoulder, pointed down the way to a collection of what looked like old, skinny typewriters and said, “Hey, you might want to take a look at those.”  In a large glass display case, on the starboard side of the U-505, sat naval Enigma machines recovered from the sub!  This one is probably a rare M3 with a ticker printer on top (the display’s captions aren’t too helpful).

Hope you like these pictures because it took me 20 minutes to get them (and the others in the set), I lost D And The Gang in the process and a search party was sent out to find me – sorry!  Crypotography is damned cool and how often does one get the opportunity to stare lovingly at a well-preserved Enigma machine?   Of course, my love for and comprehension of this topic  is … well, let’s just say I’m a dwarf standing on the shoulder of über-dorks.  I close this post by turning it over to Neal Stephenson, in his letter to mathematician Mike Anshel:

… As you know better than I, the Riemann Zeta function has been, and continues to be, of intense interest to mathematicians. During the 1930s, Alan Turing went so far as to build a mechanical device for calculating its values. This dovetails naturally with one of the chief themes of my novel [Cryptonomicon], which is the early history of the computer. So, in the book, I have invented two fictitious characters, Rudolf von Hacklheber and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, both mathematicians who (so the story goes) befriend Turing at Princeton shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

A few years later, at the height of the war, von Hacklheber (who by this point has gone back to his homeland of Germany and has ended up working as a cryptographer for the Nazi regime) needs to invent a wholly original cryptosystem that has nothing in common with the Enigma, which he suspects has been been compromised. The system he comes up with, which is dubbed Arethusa, makes use of zeta functions. It is computationally intensive by the standards of the 1940’s, but this problem is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that, as a result of having helped Turing work on his zeta function computer at Princeton, von Hacklheber knows how to build a device that will automate many of the calculations.

Capture of U-505 on 4 June 1944

On 4 June 1944, a hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captured the German submarine U-505. This event marked the first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the nineteenth century. The action took place in the Atlantic Ocean, in Latitude 21-30N, Longitude 19-20W, about 150 miles off the coast of Rio De Oro, Africa.

… Alerted by American cryptanalysts, who–along with the British–had been decrypting the German naval code, the Guadalcanal task group knew U-boats were operating off the African coast near Cape Verde. They did not know the precise location, however, because the exact coordinates (latitude and longitude) in the message were encoded separately before being enciphered for transmission. By adding this regional information together with high-frequency direction finding fixes (HF/DF)–which tracked U-boats by radio transmissions–and air and surface reconnaissance, the Allies could narrow down a U-boat’s location to a small area.

Fifty eight crew members were taken out of the submarine and sent to a POW camp in Ruston, Louisiana.  In late 1954, Chicago acquired the submarine from the US government and installed it in the Museum of Science & Industry. The gutted interior of the submarine was refurbished with parts donated by German manufacturers. Their rationale: “We are sorry that you have our U-boat, but since she’s going to be there for many years, we want her to be a credit to German technology.”

A couple of Saturdays ago, D and I spent a good portion of the day at the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry with friends.  The museum has come a long way since 1992, when I visited last, and it should go on your list of 100 Places To See Before You Die.  The exhibits are cleaner, better-lit, well-organized, more relevant and Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince is playing on the Omnimax, as opposed to The Fires Of Kuwait* which I was forced to endure 17 years ago.

We didn’t see the whole museum, but spent large chunks of time in the following exhibits: Toymaker 3000, Petroleum Planet, Circus, the captured U-505 submarine (schwing!), Internet World, the Transportation Gallery (with the Wright Flyer!) and Harry Potter: The Exhibition.  Friend Annie and I got great pictures everywhere except at the Potter exhibit because Warner Bros. are a bunch of wankers who want to own all rights to everything they touch and you to spend hard cashola in the store at the end.  It’s what the market chooses to bear, as D likes to point out, and he’s not entirely wrong as witnessed in the sheer number of (little and big) kids who threw obscene amounts of money at cheap replicas of Harry’s wand and Nimbus 2000s built to seat toddlers.  Me?  Contemptuous?  No!

Back to the point of this post.  D, the two young ‘uns in our group and I decided we were going to watch the ToyMaker 3000 automated assembly line in action by having it make each of us a little plastic gravitron.  D, ever the chivalrous one, let me go ahead of him in line.  Smiling, I stuck my little barcode in the reader and BOINK** – the machine jammed, renewing my interest in the theory that I am indeed an earthly agent of Chaos.  Sirens wailed, children screamed, the SWAT team dropped in, allegations bounced against the walls.  All was discord and sweating parents, until we saw the coolest thing: a real-live museum engineer apparating to fix the robotic assembly line (oh, the irony) with wires, screws and tools.  That was pretty neat, educational and worth the hour wait.

Of course, my gravitron is chartreuse in color and has not yet been removed from its packaging. What sort of a nerd do you think I am?

More pictures and stories to come from Chicago.

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*Yeah, it did wonders for the PTSD, thanks for asking.
** The noise made by scientific progress, as everyone knows.