The Dead Media Notebook

by Bruce Sterling

  Source: Associated Press article by Mike Feinsilber, Sept 17 1997; Wirespeak by Richard Harnett

  Whistling Networks of the Canary Islands

  From David Casacuberta

  Spanish whistling networks; a fascinating subject, but seldom studied by linguists is speech surrogates. They are communication systems that replace the use of speech by other sounds, sometimes made with musical instruments, like drums or, in this case, by means of whistles. Whistle language has been observed between some ancient Central and South American tribes and also in some of the South Pacific Islands (I don’t know much about these other surrogates, so any further information is welcome).

  However, it was also a living system of communication in the Island of la Gomera, in the Canary Islands (Spain). This island is almost covered with ravines and cliffs, so movements and communication through the island can be very complicated.

  Nevertheless the inhabitants developed a whistled speech system, that helped them to avoid ravines. The idea is very simple: they simmulate the patterns of tone and rythm in spoken language, so, with some practice, they can have long conversations about almost any topic.

  Therefore, it is not a simple system of signals to say “here, danger” or something like that, but a real surrogate language: Spanish spoken with whistles instead of phonetic sounds. The name of this surrogate is “silbo canario” (zeel- bo ka-na-reeo) or just “silbo”, which in Spanish is the name to designate a very high whistle. Unfortunately, this old language may disappear soon: the local government tries to save it, as it is a very interesting cultural phenomenon unique in the island, but it is not an easy task, when one considers strong competitors, like cellular phones.

  Also, it is not considered “fashionable” between young people.

  Source: Crystal, D (1992) An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages, London, Blackwell; and personal communications.

  Talking Greeting Card; Manually-Powered Sound Tape

  From Dan Howland

  “Talking Card Says ‘Happy Birthday’ “A talking birthday card is an ingenious novelty now on the market. Extending from the mouth of a picture of Charlie McCarthy, famous ventriloquist’s dummy, printed on the card, is a notched sound tape. When a person pulls his thumb nail along the tape, as shown above, the words ‘Happy Birthday’ are clearly reproduced.”

  [Dan Howland remarks: Photograph shows card, about 3” x 5” with strip of tape about 18” long extending from Charlie’s mouth. Tape is maybe 1/8” wide.]

  Source: Popular Science magazine, April 1939

  Monastic sign language

  From Richard Kadrey

  “The Monasteriales Indicia is one of very few texts which let us see how life was really lived in monasteries in the early Middle Ages. Written in Old English and preserved in a manuscript of the mid-eleventh century, it consists of 127 signs used by Anglo-Saxon monks during the times when the Benedictine Rule forbade them to speak. These indicate the foods the monks ate, the clothes they wore, and the books they used in church and chapter, as well as the tools they used in their daily life, and persons they might meet both in the monastery and outside.

  “The text is printed here with a parallel translation. The introduction gives a summary of the background, both historical and textual, as well as a brief look at the later evidence for monastic sign language in England. Extensive notes provide the reader with details of textual relationships, explore problems of interpretation, and set out the historical implications of the text.”

  Source: Monasteriales Indicia The Anglo-Saxon Monastic Sign Language Edited with notes and translation by Debby Banham ISBN 0-9516209-4-0 96 pages

  cardboard artificial intelligence

  From Derek Robinson

  The Logoscope (or the “Grouped Symbol Associator”) was invented by an English surgeon, Dr. F. A. Nash, in 1953. It was, in his words, “an apparatus to assist the logical faculties” in performing clinical diagnosis. It could be considered the first medical (or any other type of) expert system. Dr. Nash was awarded a British patent on his invention in 1953, and published a brief note describing the device in The Lancet for April 24, 1954, pp. 874-875. The Logoscope appears to have been offered as a commercial product for at least a few years, though I doubt many were sold, given the paucity of references to the device. In 1958 Dr. Nash demonstrated the Logoscope at the “Mechanisation of Thought Processes” Conference, held at the Teddington National Physical Laboratory, U.K. This was the second conference to be convened on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (the first was the Dartmouth conference of 1956, where the field got its name) and it was well attended by many important early contributors to the fields of cybernetics, information theory and artificial neural nets. However there is no evidence that anyone who saw Nash’s demonstration realized that the Logoscope was an instructable associative memory, of the type that W. Grey Walter, A. M. Uttley, Donald MacKay, W. K. Taylor and W. Ross Ashby were then attempting to reproduce by means of analogue electronic “nerve nets”. The Logoscope was a graphical or “panoramic” index, consisting of a set of long thin strips of card, each labelled with a medical symptom and marked with a pattern of bars along its length. The strips were place-coded inverted files, where the positions of the bars corresponded to specific diseases, listed on a separate register card. Dr. Nash prepared the coded diagnostic strips using information abstracted from three or four standard handbooks of differential diagnosis. It was in fact just like a bibliographic index, with symptoms as its “keywords” and diseases as “page numbers” or “documents”, broken apart into individual, binary-coded inverted files, to allow selecting out any subset of keywords (search terms), with their associated inverted files of contexts, on demand. The Logoscope was applied as follows. When a patient presented a set of symptoms, the examining clinician would select the corresponding strips from a cardboard sleeve, then would align the selected group of strips with the register card. The most probable candidate would show up immediately as an unbroken or nearly unbroken line running across the coded strips, with the weaker candidates similarly apparent as correspondingly less solid lines. The diagnostic logic of the Logoscope was rediscovered by Marsden Blois, who in the early 1980s implemented a computer-based medical expert system, RECONSIDER, using information derived, again, from standard differential diagnostic texts. Apparently it performed as well as or better than expert systems constructed at the cost of many programmer-years of effort in the AI labs. Blois described the system in his book, “Information and Medicine” (U. California Press, 1984). The Significance of the Logoscope: By demonstrating that diagnosis can be construed formally and procedurally as multi-key look-up using inverted files, Nash showed that any cognitive process that can be regarded as diagnostic can be realized, procedurally, as an index. But having gone this far, dignifying the Logoscope as a prototypical “neural net”, a “cardboard brain”, we might as well elect the 13th Century Dominican friar Hugo De Santo Caro as the honorary godfather of AI, for having compiled the first Concordance (a.k.a. inverted index) of the Bible, in the year 1247.

  Source: The Lancet, April 24, 1954, pages 874-875; Information and Medicine by Marsden Blois (U. California Press, 1984)

  Spook Shows

  From Bill Wallace

  From the late 1920s through the 1970s, theaters across America were haunted by performers with names like Dr. Evil, Dr. Silkini, Chan Loo and His Horrors of the Orient, and Ray-Mond’s Zombie Jamboree. Descended from spiritualistic entertainers like the Davenport Brothers, Midnight Spook Shows are an obscure footnote to film history.

  In his book Ghostmasters (Cool Hand Communications, ISBN 1-56790-146-8), Mark Walker traces the colorful history of this vanished entertainment form. Beginning with the ghost shows of El-Wyn in the early 1930s, through spectacular traveling productions in the late 40s and 50s, to the last practitioners of the art levitating teeny boppers atop drive-in concession stands, dozens of spook-showmen worked the heartland.


  Besides one or two horror films, the typical spook- show performance featured a stage magic show, sometimes including gore effects borrowed from the Grand Guignol, interlaced with comedy, hypnosis routines, and costumed ghosts and monsters. The actual contents changed with the decades.

  With spiritualism still fresh in the American consciousness, the earliest shows featured ghosts, slates, cabinets, and other mediumistic effects. Voodoo and zombies were popular themes of the 1930s, following the publication of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island.

  By the 1940s, most of the shows had become Monster Shows, with “live” appearances by Hollywood creatures like the Frankenstein monster and Count Dracula, sometimes played by real actors like Bela Lugosi and Glenn Strange. At least one of the torture shows of the late 1940s purported to show what happened in a Soviet prison.

  Materializations of James Dean were common in the late fifties. While most of the mechanisms were those of the stage magician, the highlight of all these events was the “blackout,” when the theater would be plunged into absolute darkness, usually after the audience was warned monsters or ghosts would walk among them.

  With the lights out, luminous shapes filled the theater: ghosts, bats, UFOs in the 50s, sometimes huge eight and 10-foot tall monsters, accompanied by shrieks, gunshots, and total pandemonium. The blackout usually ended as the feature film began. Blackout effects were achieved with phosphorescent figures on extended poles, projectors, and confederates hidden among the audience. Wilson’s book is filled with great anecdotes of crazed audiences and drunken magicians and illustrated with demented ads and mementos of the age.

  There was a trade publication, “The Ghost,” and a supply house, run by Bob Nelson, who also ran a radio psychic scam on Mexican super station XEPN under the name of Dr. Korda Ramayne.

  One of the later showmen, Joe Karston, produced two horror films, “Monsters Crash the Pajama Party” and “Teenage Psycho Meets Bloody Mary”, that featured “HorrorVision,” a technique that apparently allowed monsters from the film to emerge from the screen, snatch a girl from the audience, and re-enter the film. Spook Shows fell victim to the usual suspects, dangerously rowdy audiences, growing liability insurance rates, and a populace with burgeoning home entertainment.

  Their descendants include Halloween “haunted houses,” Rocky Horror midnighters, and maybe the S&M stage shows that are becoming more common at music clubs.

  At a matinee in 1962, I had the privilege of seeing one of the greatest late masters of the field, Philip Morris, Dr. Evil himself, at an old theater in Sulfur Springs, Texas. The show offered magic, live appearances by the Mummy and King Kong, and a twist contest, with a “real dead body” as a prize.

  The lucky winner was blindfolded and presented with her prize, a chicken carcass. The blackout was brief but spectacular, with an explosion of ghosts and skeletons, like something from a Dave Fleischer cartoon. It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

  Source: Ghostmasters by Mark Walker Cool Hand Communications ISBN 1-56790-146-8

  Vinyl Multimedia

  From Dave Morton

  “British record companies have released records, both 45s and LPs, with one side recorded with music and the other side recorded with a computer program. The flip side can be run on the specified computers (such as a Sinclair, Apple, or BBC Micro) to display graphics accompanying the music. Loading the program directly from the record is difficult, and errors can be caused by wear or dirt in the grooves, but the program can be recorded onto a cassette tape and loaded into the computer through a cassette recorder.”

  Source: IEEE Spectrum March 1984, page 24 New Flip Side for British Pop Records

  Basque Talking Drum

  From David Casacuberta

  I just got from a friend detailed information about another surrogate language system, this one from Euskalerria (the Basque Country). It is extinct as media, but still used as musical instrument.

  Not so long ago, in Euskalerria, the Basque Country (a nation that now is part of the Spanish State), the Txalaparta was used a communication medium. The Txalaparta (the “tx” is pronnounced like a “sh”, but stronger, with the tip of the tongue in the upper teeth) is a percussion instrument, made with a set of big wooden planks, usualy leaning over logs.

  The txalaparta is then hit with 50 cm. sticks called “makilak”. Like a xylophone, according to where you hit, you get a different tone and sound. Like the Canary silbo, this is also a surrogate language, that uses tones to codify sentences. It was developed for the same reasons: the existence of ravines and cliffs that are so common in the Atlantic part of the Basque Country.

  People living in “caserios” (the typical country houses in the basque country, usually quite far one from the other) used the drums to communicate with the neighbours, by means of txalapartas put on the top of some hills. However, let us mention that the possible meanings that could be sent with the txalaparta are more limited than the ones aviable in the Canary silbo.

  Now, due to the advancing of telephones and other media, txalaparta is extinct as a medium, but is still used as a musical instrument. It is normally played by two people, but sometimes they can be even four. The sound is really beautiful and impressive, and you can hear a txalaparta in almost every traditional “fiesta” in Euskalerria.

  If you have a good record store around and are interested to hear a txapalarta, there are some UNESCO records of it, and there is also a rock band from Euskalerria that recorded a txalaparta in one of their songs.

  The band is called “Hertzainak,” the LP “Onena” and the song, “564.” However, the common lore says that the best txapalarta players (in Euskera they are called txalapartak) in the Basque Country are the Artza brothers. If you have the luck to find a record by them, go for it!

  Source: personal communication Hi Bruce.

  Peek-a-Boo Index Cards: Optical Parallel Computers of the 1950s

  From Derek Robinson

  “Peek-a-Boo” indexing cards were introduced commercially in the mid-1950s by a number of American, British and European vendors (some of whom also supplied mechanical sorting, punching and viewing equipment for the cards). Systems and cards were sold under the names Keydex, Termatrex, Minimatrex, Omnidex, Findex, Selecto, Sphinxo, Sichtlochkarten, Ekaha, Vicref, Find-It, Brisch- Vistem and Trio Cards.

  Generically they were called Peek-a-Boo cards, a term chosen by Wildhack and Stern of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards c. 1954, as being “non-commital as to origin, and descriptive of the operating principle, which appears to have a rather long history”.

  They were also known as aspect cards, optical coincidence cards, and Batten cards (after W. E. Batten, who in 1947 described the use of “interior-punched” index cards to carry out rapid manual searches of chemical patents). The basic principle of Peek-a-Boo card systems is that key-words (subject terms, distinctive properties, taxonomic characters or attributes) had their own index cards. The cards were divided up into a grid, where individual grid locations corresponded to specific documents, species or data records. The grid assignments remained fixed across the entire deck.

  To identify the subset of records satisfying multiple search terms, the subject term cards were removed from the card deck, aligned, and held up to a light. Items having all the subject terms (i.e., set- intersection, the Boolean “AND”) would show up as illuminated spots at their respective grid locations. Conventional punched cards and tabulating equipment made individual cases the basic “unit of information storage”. Punched cards like the IBM (Hollerith) cards used coded fields for recording different descriptive terms or numerical data. Each card corresponded to an individual database record.

  Peek-a-Boo cards reversed the standard procedures by using conceptual categories rather than documents as the unit of information storage. Logically, this “reversed” system corresponds to an (inverted) index, the basis of book indexes, text retrieval systems, library catalogs, and Internet search engines. Co
mmercial cards were available in capacities ranging from 400 to 40,000 items or grid locations.

  For handling databases of greater size, the Omnidex system used cards with 540 locations, 500 for individual data records and the remaining 40 locations reserved for a system of sub- files, to allow multi-level searches of databases of any size. One advantage of Peek-a-Boo index cards is that researchers could readily prepare their own decks using mimeographed sheets or stencils at very little cost, presenting an attractive alternative to “batch processing” in the days before PCs.

  A literature search could be performed in minutes, using equipment that could easily fit into a jacket pocket, rather than waiting overnight for a central mainframe to process a deck of IBM cards. At least one manufacturer produced Peek-a-Boo cards made from translucent plastic. This created a ranking of search results from the best, most relevant items (brightest spots) to the least relevant (dim spots).

  This system was an optical analog of the Logoscope’s graphical best-matching or set-superposition search method.

  One of the earliest applications of the Peek-a-Boo principle seems to have been a system for bird identification, for which a patent was issued in 1915. (Taylor, H., “Selective device”, US Patent 1,165,465.)

  In 1916, the French recreational mathematics journal Sphinx-Oedipe published a description of a number guessing game which exploited the optical coincidence principle. (This window system is described in “Mathematical Recreations”, Maurice Kraitchik, Dover Books, 1953, pp. 63-65.)

  An optical coincidence card system for identifying mineral specimens was developed by C. J. Gray, and described in the Transactions of the South African Geological Society, 1920.