History

It looks like underground Paris is even more interesting than underground London: The Paris underground, often referred to as the catacombs, has been luring curious visitors for centuries. The City of Lights is built atop a vast realm of darkness: enormous gypsum and limestone quarries that were mined beginning in the 12th century for the construction of Notre Dame, the Louvre, and other edifices. Burrowed haphazardly beneath the surface city, these quarries became increasingly unstable over time. When a street collapsed in 1774, Parisian authorities investigated the galleries and reinforced weak areas. As they did, the investigators marked the tunnel walls with the names of the corresponding ground-level streets. These two-century-old signs are still used for navigation. The freshly mapped underworld would soon have many uses. From 1785 until the 1880s, the quarries received bones from Paris’s overflowing cemeteries—the public Les Catacombes museum, housed deep inside a blocked-off section of the quarries, alone contains the bones of some six million citizens. During World War II, the passages were occupied not only by the French resistance but also by Germans, who left their traces in a military installation called the Bunker Allemand. Since then, artists, performers, graffitists, and others have added to the catacombs’ multilayered history. “Regardless of where your research takes you, there are always new things to discover about subterranean Paris,” says Ingmar Arnold, a Berlin-based underground historian. “Wherever you walk, you can never be sure you’re not passing across something mysterious—behind every corner there could be a great secret." One of these secrets was unexpectedly revealed in September 2004 when the Paris police discovered an illegal cinema beneath the Palais de Chaillot. Patrolling officers had stumbled across the hidden amphitheater, fully equipped for movie screenings. For an illegal setup, it was remarkably sophisticated: Next to a screen and projector sat a bar and restaurant outfitted with several telephones and Internet access. The complex was protected by a closed-circuit-TV security system that set off a recording of barking dogs whenever an intruder passed by. … We crawled through a narrow corridor that dripped with mold and entered the heart of this ossuary. There, a central room, filled with stacks of bones, opened onto small tunnels on every side. The entire area was saturated by an ocean of broken skeletons. It was impossible to move without crawling over piles of bones several feet deep—they crackled beneath our weight. In one eerie chamber, a sculpture made of femurs rose from the scattered heaps. Only John and I climbed into that central room; turning off our lights, we crouched on bones in utter darkness, each paying respect in our own way. The article refers to Carolyn Archer’s book Paris Underground, which contains photographs of some of the underground locations. The underground movie theater is described in a 2004 article in The Guardian.

Long or Short Capital gives some historical detail on Cinco de Mayo that’s generally lacking from most descriptions (with a little bit of exaggeration and humor). It’s not a celebration of Mexican independence, but of a successful victory by Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragozea Seguin against French occupation forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. The Mexican government owed money to the English, the Spanish, and the French, and was late on debt payments. All three creditors sent armed representatives to Mexico. The English and Spanish were successfully negotiated with, but the French decided to obtain repayment by taking possession of Mexico, and sent a large military force. General Zaragoza led a force of Mexicans and Indians and were victorious. ...

This morning on the Howard Stern Show, there was some discussion of Timothy English’s book, Sounds Like Teen Spirit: Stolen Melodies, Ripped-Off Riffs, and the Secret History of Rock and Roll, along with playing some pairs of songs that had very strong resemblances. I didn’t realize that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” was a derivative work, with the main guitar line closely resembling that in Spirit’s “Taurus”–and Spirit used to open for Led Zeppelin. (Apparently a lot of Led Zeppelin’s songs are derivative works.) An example of this kind of borrowing that I recognized myself was when Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” first started getting airplay–I immediately thought that the main guitar riff sounded almost exactly like that in Killing Joke’s “Eighties." It’s not clear which of these borrowings are intentional and which are accidental, but as English’s book makes clear, this is an extremely common occurrence. Some of these have led to successful copyright infringement lawsuits, but most haven’t–at least in the past. The Dr. Demento Show, which I used to listen to every week back in high school, used to have a regular feature called “Damaskas’ Copycat Game” which would play short bits of songs in sequence, demonstrating their similarity. Spider Robinson wrote a short story in 1983 called “Melancholy Elephants” which is a story about a woman who tries to persuade a Senator to oppose an extension of the term of copyright into perpetuity on the grounds that there are finite permutations of notes that are perceived as distinct musical melodies, and thus that the bill would result in an end to creation of new works. In the story, she succeeds in persuading him to kill the bill, while in reality, the equivalent bill–the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998–passed, and Larry Lessig and Eric Eldred failed to overturn it at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 (Eldred v. Ashcroft). While this didn’t extend copyright to “in perpetuity,” it has an economic effect virtually indistinguishable from copyright of infinite duration (as Justice Breyer’s dissent recognized). In 2005, arguments over the practice of sampling music came to a head, when the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that no sampling could take place without a license–not even for a 1.5-second, three-note guitar riff that N.W.A.’s 1990 song “100 Miles and Runnin’” sampled from Funkadelic’s “Get Off Your Ass and Jam.” This decision led to a protest in the form of a collection of songs composed solely of that sample. [The Downhill Battle organization’s website has been down since November 2007, but can be found on the Internet Archive. -jjl, 6 Jan 2009.] (Related: An excellent short video documentary about the use of a six-second drum sample from The Winstons’ “Amen Brother.") UPDATE (December 27, 2011): The Economist, Dec. 17-30, 2011 year-end issue features an excellent article, “Seven seconds of fire," about the Amen break. UPDATE (May 18, 2014): The estate of Randy California, of Spirit, is suing Led Zeppelin over “Stairway to Heaven” being a derivative work of “Taurus." The site whosampled.com has a list of songs which have sampled “Amen, Brother." I should have noticed that the Killing Joke/Nirvana riff is also very close to an earlier (1982) riff in The Damned’s “Life Goes On” (I certainly listened to the album “Strawberries” enough times…). ...

Which Historical Lunatic Are You? From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey. Like John Wilkins and Afarensis, I got matched with Joshua Norton. I was glad to make this match, since I’ve actually been interested enough in him as a historical figure to read his biography (and you can find some references to him on my discord.org web page).

British comic Robert Newman presents a very entertaining and interesting 45-minute performance about oil in the Middle East (at Google Video), including an interpretation of World War I as an invasion of Iraq and a discussion of peak oil. Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): Thought-provoking.

I posted this review of Larry Lessig’s book Free Culture to Amazon.com: Lessig has written a very clear and entertaining book about copyright, piracy, and culture, filled with lots of real-world examples to make his points. The book covers major events in the history of copyright in the United States (from its beginnings in English common law and the UK Statute of Anne) in order to show how its meaning has changed, and how those who are making accusations of piracy today were the pirates of yesterday. (Jessica Littman’s book, Digital Copyright, is a nice complement to this book, covering the history of copyright in greater depth.) Lessig makes a strong case that the direction of copyright, giving greater control over content to a very small number of owners than has ever existed, is eroding the freedom that we’ve historically had to preserve and transform the elements of our culture. Lessig begins by describing how the notion of a real property right for land extending into the sky to “an indefinite extent, upwards” became a real rather than theoretical issue with the invention of the airplane. In 1945, the Causbys, a family of North Carolina farmers, filed a suit against the government for trespassing with its low-flying planes, and the Supreme Court declared the airways to be public space. This example shows how the scope of property rights can change with changes of technology, in this particular case resulting in an uncompensated taking from private property owners, yet leading to enormous innovation and the development of a new industry and form of transportation. He follows this with the example of the development of FM radio, which was intentionally back-burnered by RCA and then hobbled by government regulation at RCA’s behest in order to protect its existing investment in AM radio. This example shows how powerful interests can stifle technological change through its ownership of intellectual property (in this case, the patents regarding FM radio). He then discusses how intellectual property laws have developed in the U.S., pointing out that Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse made his talking picture debut in the movie “Steamboat Willie” (he had earlier appeared in a silent cartoon, “Plane Crazy”), which was a parody of Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.” Many of Disney’s characters and stories were taken directly from the previous work of others, such as the Brothers Grimm–works in the public domain, freely available for such copying. As new forms of media have been created, they have borrowed from previous forms. Today, however, the creators of content who have borrowed from their predecessors have successfully changed the rules so that their successors cannot borrow from them, both by extending the term and scope of copyright protection and by developing technologies that have greatly reduced the ability of successors to borrow or re-use content. The specific rules are completely inconsistent, based on the political power of the relevant parties at the time the laws were changed. When Edison developed the ability to record sounds, including recording music written by others, copyright law was changed to provide for compulsory licensing for a fee paid to the composer. With radio broadcasting, the fee still goes to the composer, but not to the recording artist. But put that same radio broadcast on the Internet, and now fees must be paid to both the composer and the recording artist. Where there used to be a sea of unregulated uses of copyrighted material containing a small island of restricted uses (with shores of fair use), there is now a vast continent of restricted uses, a stark cliff of fair use, and a tiny channel of unregulated uses. Lessig shows a table on pp. 170-171 showing commercial and noncommercial uses and the rights to publish and transform for each. In 1790, copyright only governed publication rights for commercial uses, the other three cells of the table being free. At the end of the 19th century, publication and transformation for commercial use was governed by copyright, while noncommercial use was free. The law was changed to govern copies, including much noncommercial use. Today, all four cells of the table are governed by copyright. Lessig discusses Eric Eldred’s attempt to defend the right to transform public domain works into electronic versions by fighting Congress’s continuing extensions of the term of copyright in the face of the Constitution’s restriction to “limited Times,” and how the case was lost at the U.S. Supreme Court to inconsistent reasoning from the conservative justices who failed to even address the commerce clause argument and the precedent they set in Lopez v. Morrison case. This is a wonderfully written, persuasive, entertaining, and dismaying book. It deserves to be widely read and understood, so that ultimately intellectual property law in the U.S. will be reformed. This book is available online at no charge. http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/ ...

I was going to put up something about the mythical story of the Liberty Bell being rung on July 4, 1776 (a story invented in the mid-19th century by George Lippard of Philadelphia–the name “Liberty Bell” is actually a Civil War-era name regarding the abolition of slavery, not American independence), but I was unable to find my copy of Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History. Instead, here are links to a few other sites that have put up some nice Independence Day postings: Radley Balko at The Agitator asks: if forced to put the people who crow loudest about patriotism today on one side or the other in 1776, wouldn’t you think most of them would have been defending empire, tradition, and the glory of the crown? I can almost read the National Review editorial now, inveighing against the radical, Godless-deist separatists! Here’s another: Would the founders – whom our government celebrates today – have tolerated the government we have now? As Cowen notes, we rose up and revolted against a government that was far less intrusive, invasive, and – at risk of hyperbole – tyrannical than the one we have now. My guess is that alcohol prohibition alone would’ve been enough have Payne [sic] or Jefferson calling for arms. Never mind the New Deal, the Great Society, or today’s encroaching police state. ...

Here’s a nice Flash-animated timeline of the earth’s history, with sliders you can move back and forth to see continental drift and animals appear and disappear. (Via Pharyngula.)

I’ve been reading back issues of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, and just read the April 1985 issue. They are fascinating historical documents. The last two pages of that issue contain the ARPANet hosts file as of September 27, 1984, listing the hosts by geographic location. This was shortly after the ARPANet/MILNET split and about the time of the introduction of the domain name system. The ARPANet hosts used the 10 network (which is now private IP space–it’s not publicly routed and can be used by any individual or organization for internal numbering) and MILNET used the 26 network (26.0.0.0/8 is still assigned to DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency). Arizona at that time had two hosts: YUMA-SW (26.3.0.75) and YUMA-TAC (26.2.0.75), both on MILNET. The TACs (Terminal Access Controllers) were systems that allowed telephone dialup access to the network; they essentially played the role of a terminal server. The MILNET TACs developed a system for user authentication called the TAC Access Control System, or TACACS, which allowed a user to authenticate to a given TAC without the actual credentials being stored on the TAC. This protocol was enhanced by Cisco into XTACACS and then TACACS+, which is still used today, mainly on Cisco routers and switches. (The original deployment of TACACS meant that ARPANet users could not login using MILNET TACs–this is something that led to author and computer enthusiast Jerry Pournelle being kicked off the ARPANet in 1985 when his account on MIT-MC was shut down.) There were a number of Multics systems on the net, including MIT-MULTICS in Cambridge, Massachusetts (10.0.0.6, through which I got access to ARPANet mailing lists back then), HI-MULTICS (10.1.0.94, the only host in Minnesota, belonging to Honeywell), USGS2-MULTICS in Colorado (26.0.0.69, belonging to the U.S. Geological Survey), and RADC-MULTICS (26.0.0.18, at the Rome Air Development Center in Rome, NY). The only hosts outside of the United States were MINET-RDM-TAC (24.1.0.6, in the Netherlands), MINET-HLH-TAC (24.1.0.13, in Scotland), FRANKFURT-MIL-TAC (26.0.0.116, in Germany–along with about 10 other hosts in Germany), three hosts in Italy, two in England, and three in Korea–all on military bases. ...

The March 1952 document “A Brief History of Communications Intelligence in the United States” by Captain Laurance F. Stafford, USN (Retired) has been declassified by the National Security Agency and released to the public. It was originally classified TOP SECRET SUEDE. The document is a 24-page PDF. The document tells the history of COMINT prior to Pearl Harbor, beginning with the entry of the U.S. into WWI, when Herbert O. Yardley set up MI-8, the “American Black Chamber” to do cryptology work. On a quick scan I didn’t see anything that wouldn’t already be familiar in broad strokes to readers of James Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace or Body of Secrets, though there may be some details not previously public, such as the number of staff working on cryptography.