To all you Steampunk Canucks!

I hope everyone get's to enjoy a fine day with good company and good times!

Canada is a land that was tied together by steam even as it was being born. A land where innovation, creativity, and inventiveness must be matched by hard work, endurance, and an appreciation for the beauty and magnificence of a sometimes hostile environment.

For 147 years we have struggled to carve out our home and native land from rocks, deserts, forests, rocky coastlines, vast prairies and soaring mountains. We have used every technological tool available at the time to do so.

 Steam made it possible, in trains, paddle steamers, power plants, mine hoists, ocean ships, factories and even the lowly, but all important, domestic heat needed for 9 months of every year!

As Steampunks we celebrate the inventiveness and creativity of the exotic and the "might have been". What better place to do it than in a country for which such activity is not a luxury but a necessity.

Happy Birthday Canada!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced!
KJ

H/T to The Steampunk Scholar for the image!

This is going to be fantastic!

Update Nov 20, 2013!
This is fantastic!
First episode is out.



Enjoy!



This series starts shortly so keep an eye out.
Details here:
The World of Steam

Ignore the stupid cover photo it should look like this:

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Awesome!

The fourth annual Victoria Steam Expo will be held in Victoria British Columbia in a couple of weeks.

This is Canada's premiere Steampunk event check it out!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Victoria Steam Expo IV

Scavenger-hunt in Darkened Alleys, Secret Lodges, The Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes, Steampunk Beer Launch, Burlesque Diva Lydia DeCarllo, and More!

The premiere steampunk event in the Dominion of Canada is back for a fourth year in Victoria, British Columbia. Where previous years have been encased in palaces of cut-crystal and gleaming brass, this year it's the gritty back-alleys of the 19th century colonial capital which are brought to the fore – after-hours corners and upstairs dives where the paths of explorers and inventors cross with those of airship scoundrels & duplicitous courtesans.
The weekend is wrapped around Alleyways: An Alternative Reality Game / scavenger hunt specially designed for this event  – sending the braver of attendees through brick alleys, half-forgotten nooks, and opulent lodges of secret societies in pursuit of treasure-unlocking puzzle-clues.  At the Exposition's old-brick 1909 headquarters there will be merchants, outfitters, panels, artists and authors, speakers and performers, history lections, and craft activities for families.

FRIDAY:

The Weekend kicks off with Friday Night Reception at the 1885 Bard & Banker, with a history lecture of Victoria's seedy underbelly presented by Chris Adams of Ghostly Walks. Hear the real story of Her Majesty's colonial capital with tales of murder, madness, arson and opium.

SATURDAY:

On Saturday, we switch venues to the 1909 old brick Victoria Event Centre: set in the dark heart of a labyrinth of storied alleys of the capital's Old Town. Speakers, panelists, merchants, booksellers, artists and artisans will all be on hand to display, discuss and trade in wares.  Saturday morning will see the briefing of the scavenger hunt, and teams will be presented with their initial "rabbit holes."
We are proud to announce there will be an exhibition of Bartitsu – the  authentic 19th century mixed martial art of Sherlock Holmes – presented by Vancouver's David McCormick of Academy Duello.
Saturday evening Longwood Brewery presents the 19+ Steampunk Cabaret Burlesque, a costume ball and raucous dance suited for this year's theme of discretion, decadence, deviousness & debauchery. Vancouver Burlesque star Lydia DeCarllo will tease and titillate, followed by the riotous Folk Glam Gypsy Marching Band Bucan Bucan – in celebration of the launch of Vancouver Island's very own Steampunk Beer.

SUNDAY:

More presentations, final round and prizes for the scavenger hunt, family craft activities and the fashion show!

This is the text of a short speech that I gave as part of the open house for the new Protospace here in Calgary  yesterday.  Along with Monica Willard of SASS we were invited to give talks on Steampunk.  It was well received and seems to have got a lot of "wheels turning".
You can see more about Protospace at their website and Facebook pages.
http://www.protospace.ca/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/43079798204/

The speech I gave is based on a my musings from last Sunday.

Enjoy
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is an honour to be able to join in the festivities to mark the opening of this new home for Protospace.
It's also great to see so many Steampunks in the room today.

I can tell you that many of us are really looking forward to getting our hands on the fantastic equipment Protospace has to offer.  Oh the possibilities! 

Now the more I wear my Steampunk clothes out in public, after the obligatory "Why are you dressed like that?", the more I get asked "What is Steampunk anyway?"

I've given a variety of answers. Things like; it is neo-victorian, or quasi-victorian, or an alternate history, or techno-fantasy.

Or... It is like the Wild-Wild-West and Sherlock Holmes movies, or the stories of Jules Verne or H.G.Wells etc.

While these are all reasonable catch phrases to use to describe Steampunk, they are just that, "catch phrases", and not really  a very informative description or explanation. When I get a request for more information, I usually fall back on the traditional "What If" comments...

"What if Babbage's mechanical computer had worked."
or
"What if the technological development had stopped with Steam?" or things like that.

This difficulty with explaining Steampunk, is not an uncommon problem. Anyone who has ever looked up "What is Steampunk?" on Google will turn up many pages worth of different descriptions and explanations.

So why is it so difficult to distill Steampunk down to a neat and tidy explanation?

It should be easy to explain, the "What ifs" and Neo-Victorian costuming should be enough but it doesn't feel right, it is too simplistic.

I think it's because the Steampunk scene is actually a "World" in the big sense of that word. It is not only a costume style, or an alternative music scene, or a design aesthetic. Steampunk encompasses all of these, as well as the diversity and complexity of the social Goth and Punk movements. It is also not simply a matter of being "Goths who discovered brown" as a friend once snidely remarked. Nor is it strictly speaking a "Geek" thing or an "historical re-creation gone bad" thing, or a basement tinkerer's thing.

There is vastly more here that should be explained. Steampunk is of surprising interest to many people. People that one would not at first expect to be interested at all, are donning a corset and goggles, or a top hat and cravat, and heading out for tea at the nearest fancy hotel, or quaffing a pint at an English style pub. People who would never think of taking their car apart for fun, are tearing apart old clocks and gluing and sewing their gears to their hats and delving into the arcane mysteries of Babbage's Difference Engine, or watching Youtube videos of old steam engines, airships and early motor cars, and becoming intimately acquainted with the smell of brasso, leather,steam heated oil, and coal smoke.

I've noticed an interesting pattern, when there is one Steampunk there will shortly be more!
The same can be said about cockroaches of course, but hey...

Once people see that it is OK to dress up and pursue their interests, in the way the Steampunk scene allows them to do, it doesn't take long before they start to do just that.

My own reasons for being active in the Steampunk Scene are probably not the same as anyone elses, and like most things in life, our motivations are idiosyncratic, the result of our own history and experiences. So trying to distill "Steampunk" down to a soundbite is just as hard as doing that for our everyday lives, and perhaps, just as futile.

A better way, is to contrast the Steampunk Worlds with our everyday world. I'm going to do that through two of the great pillars of invention in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Thomas Alva Edison and Nicola Tesla were men of outstanding genius and creativity, but, they were radically different in how they worked and how they saw progress and invention.

I can't say much more than this...

Caveat Emptor!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your wallet closed!
KJ

Sometimes looking back in History can be pretty scary.
If this analysis is correct this was a very  near miss?
There have been many extinction events in Earth's history, most are safely buried millions of years in the past, but this one was pretty close to our time!

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your EYES ON THE SKIES!
KJ

Billion Tonne Comet May Have Missed Earth By A Few Hundred Kilometers in 1883
A re-analysis of historical observations suggest Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago

10/17/2011
From: Technology Review at MIT

On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.

Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. (Since then, others have adopted Bonilla's observations as the first evidence of UFOs.)

Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.

But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometres away.

That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.

Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That's just a hair's breadth.

What's more, Manterola and co estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tonnes or more, that's huge, approaching the size of Halley's comet.

That's an eye opening re-examination of the data. Astronomers have seen a number of other comets fragment. The image above shows the Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 comet which broke apart as it re-entered the inner Solar System in 2006. There's no reason why such fragments couldn't pass close by Earth.

One puzzle is why nobody else saw this comet. It must have been particularly dull to have escaped observation before and after its close approach. However, Manterola and co suggest that it may have been a comet called Pons-Brooks seen that same year by American astronomers.

Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations.

Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: "So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event."

A sobering thought.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1110.2798: Interpretation Of The Observations Made In 1883 In Zacatecas (Mexico): A Fragmented Comet That Nearly Hits The Earth

From the BBC: 
World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers



A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.

The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties.

Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers.
The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science.

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead author Dr Tobias Schaedler.

Low-density
The resulting material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

By comparison the density of silica aerogels - the world's lightest solid materials - is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.  The metallic micro-lattices have the edge because they consist of 99.99% air and of 0.01% solids.

A fascinating blog filled with stories taken directly from Victorian newspapers.
Enjoy!
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed an your water iced
KJ

An Extraordinary Incident is a collection of news stories from Victorian publications (and a few earlier ones). It features the unusual, the amusing, the macabre, the tragic and the hair-raising. You’ll find accounts of daredevil aeronautics, dastardly crimes, encounters with wild beasts and all manner of pith-helmeted heroics. All the stories were printed in real newspapers but that, of course, is no guarantee of their veracity. They are presented verbatim for your interest and enjoyment.

An example from the The Dundee Courier and Argus, Tuesday 7 June 1898

An unusual spectacle in the air
THE LADY AND THE PARACHUTE

EXCITING BALLOON ADVENTURE

Miss Maud Brookes ascended in a balloon from Trafford Park, Manchester, the other evening with the intention of descending by means of a parachute in the neighbourhood, but on reaching an altitude which she estimated at 9000 feet she got into a current which would not permit of her descent. She was carried gradually higher, until she encountered a cloud and hailstorm. She did not under the circumstances attempt to use the parachute for about twenty minutes, and meanwhile she was carried across country. She then left the balloon for the parachute in the hope of rapidly descending, but the force of the current carried her along to Oldham. The unusual spectacle in the air attracted the attention of thousands of spectators. The parachute gradually descended, until it collided with the warehouse of Phoenix Mill, Brunswick Street, situated about the centre of town. A couple of young men ran to Miss Brookes’s assistance, and seized her as she was about to touch the earth, and thus saved her from serious personal injury. Miss Brookes was taken to the Central Fire Station, and was provided with refreshment. In reply to inquiries, she stated that she had sustained slight injury to the back of her head and an abrasion of one of her elbows, but was otherwise unhurt. The balloon is supposed to have travelled in the neighbourhood of the West Riding of Yorkshire.