Josh Burton has supplied the reference ("The Guns of the South", by Harry Turtledove) and a pertinent quote: Gorgas looked baffled and unhappy, like a hound that has taken a scent and then lost it in the middle of an open meadow. "General Lee, I do not know. I thank you for being thoughtful enough to provide me with more of these carbines and a stock of ammunition. I already had one, and a couple of magazines, from Andries Rhoodie. I have been puzzling at it since before he departed for Orange Court House. And-I do not know." "What perplexes you so about the rifle?" Lee asked. He had his own list; he wanted to see what the Confederacy's ordnance wizard would add to it. "First, that it springs ex nihilo, like Minerva from Jove's forehead." Colonel Gorgas evidently had a list, too-he was ticking off points on his fingers. "Generally speaking, a new type of weapon will have defects, which may in some cases be amelioriated through modifications made in the light of experience. The next defect I discover in this AK-47 will be the first. The gun works, sir, which is no small wonder in itself." "I had not thought of it in those terms," Lee said slowly. "You mean it gives the impression of being a finished arm, like, for example, a Springfield." "Exactly so. The Springfield rifle musket has a great number of less efficient ancestors. So, logically, must the AK-47. Yet where are they? Even a less efficient rifle based on its principles would be better than anything we or the Federals have." "That is the case, I have noticed, with much of the equipment borne by Andries Rhoodie and his colleagues," Lee said, remembering a tasty tin of desiccated stew. "Carry on.” So my memory was incorrect on at least one point (the engineer who expresses puzzlement is working for the Confederacy, not the Union). Jim Propp On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 11:01 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
"Rope Punk", anyone? :-)
Going back to the original theme of fictional worlds in which 20th century technology gets discovered in the 19th century, there's some sci fi novel (can someone provide a reference?) in which a white time traveler from South Africa travels back to the time of the Civil War and arms the Confederacy with anachronistic technology to help them win the war. One of the Union scientists trying to cope with the South's sudden possession of superior weaponry is perplexed by the sudden introduction of something that is recognizably a mature technology.
I don't know whether the ability to recognize the difference between a mature technology and an immature one is itself anachronistic in the context of late 19th century engineering.
Jim Propp
On Saturday, September 13, 2014, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I spent a few moments with this paper (thanks for posting!) today & noticed that it showed only NOT, OR, AND, RS flipflop and "multiplex" gates.
Is there an elegant XOR in this logic system?
Also, it would be interesting to work out an _invertible_ rope&pulley logic system, much closer to (perhaps isomorphic to?) the billiard ball model.
Pulleys must be very, very old, as ships & ropes are very old. We know that the Greeks&Romans already had "odometers" in which the number of turns of a wheel would "count" a number of balls, or at least wind a certain amount of rope. Given that we now know they had sophisticated gear trains, it is conceivable that they also had sophisticated rope & pulley mechanisms.
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