MDDM Ch. 75 Messages

Mon Sep 9 13:22:46 CDT 2002

   "'You receive Messages from us, by way of your
Magnetic Compasses.  What you call the "Secular Change
of Declination" is whatever dim'd and muffl'd remnant
may reach you above, of all the lives of us Below,--
being less liv'd than waged, at a level of Passion
that would seem, to you, quite intense.  We have
learn'd to use the Tellurick Forces, including that of
Magnetism,-- which you oddly seem to consider the only
one.'
   "'There are others?' Mason perking up." (M&D, Ch.
75, p. 740)

Cf. ...

"'These Data arriv'd but this Instant, by the German
Packet,-- the latest Declination Figures.  Our
easterly movement, in Pennsylvania, as it's been doing
in latter Years, decelerates, yet,-- here, 'tis four
point five minutes east,' as Dixon attentively gazes
over her shoulder, 'when in the year 'sixty, 'twas
four point six.  If you head South, 'twill be three
point nine at Baltimore.'
   "'Were these measur'd Heights,' her murmurs, 'a
very Precipice.'
   "'What Could be causing it, do you imagine?'
   "'Something underground, moving Westward...?'"
   "'Hush.'  Her Eyes rapidly sweep the Vicinity.  'No
one ever speaks of that aloud here,-- what sort of
incautious Lad are you, exactly?'" (M&D, Ch. 30, p.
299)

"Secular Change of Declination"

Main Entry: dec·li·na·tion 
Pronunciation: "de-kl&-'nA-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English declinacioun, from Middle
French declination, from Latin declination-,
declinatio angle of the heavens, turning aside
Date: 14th century

[...]

6 : the angle formed between a magnetic needle and the
geographical meridian

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

See, e.g. ...

http://www.geolab.nrcan.gc.ca/geomag/e_magdec.html

http://nationalatlas.gov/decsecularm.html

http://www.geocities.com/magnetic_declination/

>From Patricia Fara, Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic
Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in
Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1996), Ch. 3, "The Direction of Invention: Setting
a New Course for Compasses," pp. 66-90 ...

"Several projectors submitted magnetic schemes for
approval ....  They mostly relied on long-established
observations indicating that the earth's magnetic
power varies both spatially and temporally.  Natural
philosophers trying to establish a regular pattern for
these fluctuations used two measures of terrestrial
magnetism, the variation and the dip.  The variation
at any particular place and time was the angle between
geographic North and the direction a compass needle
was pointing.  The dip, discovered later and
experimentally far harder to ascertain relaibly, was
the angle between the horizontal and a magnetic needle
free to rotate in a vertical meridional plane. 
Mariners had acknowledged the problems presented by
variation at least since the time of Christopher
Columbus.  They realized that the value of compasses
and charts was limited, since they did not know
exactly where a compass needle was pointing: its
precise orientation depended on the ship's location on
the surface of the terraqueous globe...." (p. 67)

And here skipping ahead to Ch. 4, "An Attractive
Empire: Mapping Terrestrial Magnetism," pp. 91-117 ...

"In England during the eighteenth century, two
important English global magnetic charts were
produced, bith in several versions: Halley's and
Mountaine and Dodson's.  Although their makers claimed
that they had been derived empirically, they were
affecetd by theoretical considerations.  Mapping the
emasurements of terrestrial magnetism entailed solving
probability problems similar to those involved in
analyzing population data: how to derive a
representative average with a great number of
observations; and how to cope with gaps in the records
or with readings disobeying a general pattern.  Halley
and Dodson were both involved in commercial and
political projects using mortality figures to
calculate appropriate insurance premiums.  Enmeshed in
the London culture of projectors, maritime insurers,
and government financiers, they developed techniques
for coping with large disorderly sets of figures. 
When they compiled their magnetic charts, they used
similar tactics to persuade their data to demonstrate
their ideas.
   "Halley was world-famous for his innovative maps
..." (p. 108)

"Swift later articulated contemporary skepticism about
traditional maps:

   So Geographers in Afric-maps,
   With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
   And o'er uninhabitable Downs
   Place Elephants for want of Towns.

"But Halley had already given his chart a modern
authority by dropping the old-fashioned rhumb lines
and eliminating the pictorial cartouches...." (p. 110)

And see here ...

http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit8/17.jpeg

http://usm.maine.edu/maps/exhibit8/nrcomp.html

"whatever dim'd and muffl'd remnant may reach you
above, of all the lives of us Below,--"

Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her
Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge
UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
dangerously close to losing the teasing
epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
only she had looked' (179) ....

[...]

   "The Tristero underground has so far been implies
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

"Tellurick Forces"

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/forces/funfor.html

http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/fforces.htm

http://www.chembio.uoguelph.ca/educmat/chm386/fundment/fundamnt.htm

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/cosmology/forces.html

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec17.html

Okay, time to (ac)count (for) sheep ...

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