Yes, Reticulated Pythons like Tang Tang’s pet snake, Confucius, can kill a grown man with ease. More astonishing is that they can also swallow the corpse, whole. This happens from time to time in places like rural Indonesia.
Journal
ASH WEDNESDAY
Is Kang Youwei a genuine historical figure?
Kang Youwei (1858-1927) was indeed a famous calligrapher and revolutionary, sentenced to death by the Dowager Empress, as Claiborne Lorenz states. More famous still is Tu Fu (pronounced and now more commonly transliterated as Du Fu), the T’ang dynasty poet quoted in the Kang forgery.
Lorenz chose a profitable sideline: in 2022 the small example of Kang’s calligraphy pictured sold at auction in Hong Kong for $15,000. Interestingly, it translates as “One Requires Tranquility to Reach One’s Far-reaching Goal,” a sentiment that sums up the quiet patience with which the Chinese state proceeded in Ash Wednesday.
ASH WEDNESDAY
Is there a Chinese version of a Rolls-Royce, like Tang Tang’s limousine?
The automobile company Hongqi (“red flag”) has a long history of producing Chinese versions of Western vehicles, sometimes licensed (Audi, Toyota, Lincoln) and sometimes not (see accompanying photograph of the Hongqi H9, eerily similar to a Roll-Royce Ghost, even down to the characteristic two-tone paint scheme). However, unlike with sensitive Western technologies as varied as the W-88 nuclear warhead and the 7-nm 5G silicon chip, this was not necessarily the result of illicit espionage—in 2018, Hongqi hired Rolls-Royce’s former chief of design.
But the similarities with R-R are only skin deep: Jeremy Clarkson, testing a Hongqi for the British television program “Top Gear,” noted that the power-to-weight ratio was only equal to that of the lowly Peugeot 308 diesel, and that there was no official 0-60 time because the car probably couldn’t make it that fast.
ASH WEDNESDAY
Are there off-road Harley-Davidsons like the one Zara leaves for Jarrow to escape to Mexico?
Until recently Harley-Davidson was, and had been since WWII, strictly a builder of street bikes. However, custom Harley conversions of the type Jarrow rode are common, not just in the U.S. but globally, usually using the H-D Sportster as a base model since the Sportster is, for a Harley at least, relatively light. The accompanying photo shows one of these conversions by an Australian customizer, Purpose Built Moto, dubbed the “Signature Series Harley Sportster Scrambler,” and instantly identifiable as genuinely off-road capable.
Lately, Harley-Davidson has dipped a tentative toe into the off-road market with the introduction of the Pan America—not as hard-core as PBM’s Scrambler, but no longer confined to asphalt alone.
ASH WEDNESDAY
Do CIPHER keys exist?
At the time Ash Wednesday was written there was no practical application of optical refraction as a means of secure encryption that the author is aware of. So it remains today, although there has certainly been research on the subject, notably in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature Communications, April 7, 2023. That paper can be accessed here.
The fictional CIPHER key (Commercial & Industrial Phased Energy Refraction) is imagined as a molded crystal-like structure (like quartz crystals, pictured) but with a randomized internal density matrix (so not a true crystal). After manufacture, the refracted laser pulse’s properties would be empirically matched to a receiver responding to that precise output alone which, when coupled with the key, would form a secure mechanism. Since the proposed density matrix would be infinitely variable (instead of a finite combination of 0s and 1s), the coming of quantum computing would not be the threat to encryption by light refraction that it is to existing digital encryption.
In the CIPHER key, the only things being ‘encrypted’ are the laser pulse’s properties post-refraction—it is just a lock. Zhang et al.’s Nature Communications paper proposes to encrypt data, something much more ambitious and applicable broadly in computer network and telecommunications traffic. But the underlying principle is, like the CIPHER key, an “…optical security strategy…which fully exploits the abundant degrees of freedom of light as well as the spatial dislocation as key parameters“
Given the overarching theme of Ash Wednesday, it is interesting to note that all the authors of this paper are members of research institutions operating under the aegis of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
ASH WEDNESDAY
Was there an inspiration for Drake’s desert house?
Drake’s house is based on Taliesin West (pictured) in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the Frank Lloyd Wright room at the Met Museum in New York City.
ASH WEDNESDAY
Are the Firedrake technologies real?
The storage of energy generated by solar or wind power is usually done in banks of batteries: expensive to build and whose capacities diminish with use, and environmentally toxic as trash but difficult to recycle. An alternative arrangement that instead stores the energy as mechanical potential which can be converted back to electricity whenever required, such as the Firedrake mercury turbine, has obvious advantages but is not much done in practice. As far as the author is aware, the idea of turbines driven by ambient-temperature mercury—a non-reactive liquid metal whose heft, rendering the driving impulse proportionally higher, could potentially result in a compact, low-maintenance, and long-lasting alternative—is original to ASH WEDNESDAY. “Mercury turbines” as understood today are something different: not part of a mechanical energy storage system but instead components of a thermodynamic power cycle, with the mercury vaporized. The Firedrake system is to employ electricity from solar cells to pump mercury up which is released as needed to flow down again through a power-generating turbine, analogous to hydroelectric plants.
The other Firedrake technology—heat sinks for thermal energy storage, as in the Devil’s Dance Canyon—has been implemented on a minor scale in a handful of locations, although usually the energy is delivered to the storage as electricity from solar panels. In the fictitious Firedrake system, it is instead delivered directly as solar heat, without the complexity, expense, and inefficiency of conversion to electricity for transport and then reconversion back to heat for storage. We tend to underestimate the power of the Sun because its heat is quickly dissipated in the surrounding atmosphere. Consider a car left out on a clear day, too hot to touch, and then imagine that if instead of surrounded by air it was surrounded by a transparent insulator: the heat would keep going in but little would be released, and so it would get ever hotter. This is the idea of the Firedrake heat system: the exposed surface is heated, then transfers that heat by conduction to a high-specific-heat storage medium that is insulated: the heat streams in but little is released, concentrating it to the point that it can melt rock, as in ASH WEDNESDAY. But how to turn it into a practical system?
There is a hundred-and-forty-year-old operating template for how this could be achieved: the steam system that underlies Manhattan. This grid, paralleling the electrical grid, carries energy in the form of heat, as steam (this is why steam is so often seen rising from curbs and gratings in New York City, as in the accompanying photograph taken by the author of the Queensboro Bridge approaches, where it mysteriously emerges from an otherwise apparently purposeless pipe). The use of steam as a relatively safe heating system (virtually fireproof) is plain enough, but what is less intuitive is that many apartment buildings also use steam to power their central air-conditioning. Some buildings even have their own electricity generators, driven by steam, and are completely off Consolidated Edison’s electrical grid.
In New York City, the steam is generated in fossil fuel-fired plants, but this could at least be augmented, if not wholly replaced, with heat sinks of suitable design.
ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA
Is Isola della Piselli a real island?
Isola della Piselli, and the anatomatoria buried beneath it, are fictional. The subtle linguistic distinction between bìsi (with an accent, meaning peas) and bisi (without the accent, meaning snakes) is accurate, and both terms are specific to the Venetian dialect—neither of them would mean anything to a non-Venetian Italian, who understands peas to be piselli and snakes to be serpenti.
Poveglia is real, as is Isola di San Giorgio in Alga, including its history as a former lazaretto and lunatic asylum run by a sadistic physician who committed suicide by flinging himself from the tower. The Napoleonic ottagoni also exist, although none are named Ottagono Barberoni.
The reference to the papal bull De Sepulturis, issued by Boniface VIII in 1299 to prevent atrocities of the type that occurred in the anatomatoria, is historically accurate.
ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA
Is it possible, as Margot claims, to attend first-class graduate lecture series for free in Paris?
Yes. The Collège de France, a five-hundred-year-old institution located right next to the Sorbonne, has offered free lectures open to all since it was founded by François première in 1530. “Free” normally infers mediocrity, but that is not the case here—just the opposite: the Collège de France is usually regarded as France’s foremost research institute, and a professorship there is highly prestigious. Nor are the lectures always in French; they are usually in English if the lecturer is not a fluent French speaker.
The accompanying photograph, taken when the author recently attended a lecture there, illustrates both of these points: the title (in English) is “The Higgs Mode and Quantum Criticality in Condensed Matter”—second in a series of ten lectures on a topic that is at the cutting edge of science, and the professor, Assa Auerbach (shown at left), is a leading theoretical physicist in the field.
Nor is the audience response unchallenging, such as guest lecturers normally receive—following this presentation, there was a vigorous but objective interchange of the type that characterizes good science.
ANDROMEDA GRAPHIKA
What was the inspiration for Rothermore Abbey?
As an abandoned abbey off the British coast, the fictional Rothermore is analogous to Lindisfarne, although the physical characteristics of Rothermore’s island—stark, steep, and hazardous to landing—are based not on Lindisfarne’s Holy Island but rugged Skellig Michael, located in the Atlantic off the southwestern tip of Ireland. Geographically, there are no islands that correspond to Rothermore’s position off Scottish Aberdeenshire; the closest would be the Orkneys.
As for the abbey itself, Normandy’s Mont Saint-Michel is an obvious source, but it is another monastery named for the same saint that was the primary basis for Rothermore: Sacra di San Michele—inspiration for the abbey in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose—located not on an island but atop a towering pinnacle in the Piedmontese Alps, isolating it as effectively as would the sea (see photo; Elio Pallard, via Wikimedia Commons).