Declassified U-2 spy plane photos are a boon for aerial archaeology
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412866&mode...
"Interestingly, the walls of the kites are not high enough to actually block the animals. Rather, they just seem to channel herds in the right direction. Modern wildlife managers in the same region have used a similar approach by laying pipes on the ground to direct gazelles into a corral, Avner reports."
Or in other words, surveillance capitalism social media.
A famous one in Alberta is the Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump: https://headsmashedin.ca/
Fantastic bit of nominative determinism:
Jason Ur is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, and director of its Center for Geographic Analysis. He specializes in early urbanism
As well he might:
Around 2007, a PC-104 embedded computer running Linux was integrated into the OBC camera to allow correlation of flight data with the imagery, as well as supply an OBC camera status page on the cockpit multi-function display.
With electro-optical (EO) sensors, great care must be taken to reduce the quality of the final product when it is publicly released so that adversaries do not gain a complete understanding of the what the sensors are capable of.
Film creates "better" images, but modern EO sensors are more capable in certain circumstances.
There is all kinds of computational and electronic trickery one can do to obtain images that may be impossible to capture on film that you want to keep secret, like fusing short wavelength IR with visible light or using it to discipline visible light to correct or reduce atmospheric distortion. Other EO technologies can determine what an object is made of from great distances.
Technologies like that you want to keep secret.
In a hypothetical Cuban Missile Crisis set in 2019, US analysts would have visible, near- and short wavelength-infrared, thermal, and pan-chromatic imagery to look at, but the 2019 version of Adlai Stevenson would still only show the visible images at the UN.
The ability to more easily declassify film stock is due less to the technology and more to the bureaucracy within intel communities. The film stock is owned by a single agency and so the declassification authority is relatively straightforwards. Digital imagery is shared instantly with a host of different agencies, many of whom still do not talk to each other regularly, and is stored in countless archives. Declassifying a digital file is therefore an administrative burden in comparison to a roll of film kept by a specific agency.
The embedded Linux system that was added to the OBC also provided a continuously variable Velocity over Height (V/H) control that allowed the OBC to collect imagery at lower altitudes than what it was originally designed for. This improves the quality of the imagery but at a lower area coverage rate as a tradeoff.
Film from the OBC is digitzed, ortho-rectified, and exploited as soft-copy. Back in the day it was done on mechanical light tables.
A good video that shows some of the film and other details is located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uemrNDEWgzA
> The Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the Middle East was established in 1978 by Professor David Kennedy under the patronage of Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan. The archive now consists of over 91,000 photographs and several hundred maps of a dozen countries. The vast majority of this material can be viewed online in our digital archive at Flickr.
Not to forget Buddha of Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
It is disheartening to think that, these sites & artefacts which were preserved for thousands of years are destroyed during our lifetime.
Perhaps because of its familiarity we value it higher, but powerful people in several parts of the world have been systematically destroying historical objects of value to a culture or civilisation to push forward their ideology.
Edit : Edited to be succinct.
This is a particular feature of utopian ideology; marxists, islamists, fascists, etc. seek to carve utopia from reality, and the artifacts which prove that there's something else are just in the way. A look at what's preserved in Taiwan should make you weep to know what was lost just a little bit to the west.
I'm an adult, why would I have the worst history books I've ever read, which were on loan from the school when I was in school, in my personal library to share specifics from?
I'd not made any demands to the latter point, though there are times when keeping a spectacularly bad example around for debate, discussion, or reference can prove handy.
I'd put specific store in rough order "steelman" or best-case defenses or arguments for the indefensible, officially sanctioned references (as with textbooks), or with particularly poular bad examples, even if not particularly cogent.
Knowing your enemy, testing your own beliefs and biases, and walking into battle fully armed, are all benefits.
You don't need to find endless such examples (see also: Gish Gallop), but a carefully selected few can be exceedingly useful.
This applies to other areas as well, tech included.
Sure, to be clear, I grew up with two older brothers and a younger sister, in three different major cities, in three different provinces in Canada, and the history curriculum has largely lacked much particular detail. My history curricula, and that of my brothers, included little or no international history, ancient history, or national history. The main topics of every history textbook (the only source for each curriculum, in my experience) I've seen in Canada (including my brothers', for years I didn't attend in a given school district) have been an obscure subset of clean indigenous stories, and a handful of stories about early Québec.
I'm not saying these history textbooks are especially bad among government school history textbooks, but that they are bad in a general sense, and fail to give much perspective on the origin of the tapestry of nations in Canada, or the story of our legal and governmental traditions.
A better job could be done with an in-depth reading of a mature historical author's work, the kind of thing you would read if you had a personal interest in understanding the history of something.
By James W. Loewen.
Or J.S. Mill: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
That was the taliban.
Of course in that case, the ideology that prevailed was "one can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs", which is more palatable to us that Isis ideology of course, but in the long term that makes little difference I'm afraid.
Example, Qin Dynasty China, Burning of books and burying of scholars (213 BCE):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...
Or the destruction of the Mayan codices by Bishop Diego de Landa in July 1562:
Review: http://www.historyinreview.org/ggerster.html
ISBN-Book sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-89236-81...
Linking the old post is useful when it has some interesting comments (I sometimes quote partially the most interesting comment.) But in this case the older post got only 2 points and no comments.