Train Whistle Research Articles

The Train Whistle

The Train Whistle

The girl who talked to the train whistle

Advances in science allow for better prospects for those with rheumatic diseases. A different reality from that experienced by artist Maud Lewis, who transformed her horizons through art.

Intelligent Whistling System of Rail Train Based on YOLOv4 and U-Net

The whistle of the rail train is usually directly controlled by the driver. However, in long-distance transportation, there is a risk of traffic accidents due to driver fatigue or distraction. In addition, the noise pollution of the train whistle has also been criticized. In order to solve the above two problems, an intelligent whistling system for railway trains based on deep learning is proposed. The system judges whether to whistle and intelligently adjusts the volume of the whistle according to the road conditions of the train. The system consists of a road condition sensing module and a whistling decision module. The former includes the target detection model based on YOLOv4 and the semantic segmentation model based on U-Net, which can extract the key information of the road conditions ahead; the latter is to carry out logical analysis of the data after the intelligent recognition and processing and make the whistling decision. Based on the train-running data set, the intelligent whistle system model is tested. The results of this research show that the whistling accuracy of the model on the test set is 99.22%, the average volume error is 1.91 dB/time, and the Frames Per Second (FPS) is 18.7 f/s. Therefore, the intelligent whistle system model proposed in this paper has high reliability and is suitable for further development and application in actual scenes.

Our Town, South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California

<i>Our Town</i>, South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, California

Assessing Occupational Noise Exposure and Blood Pressure of Cabin Personnel of an Indonesian Diesel Train

Noise may cause serious health problems, including physiological responses, specifically in the cardiovascular system. This study aims to assess occupational noise exposure and analyze the correlation between occupational noise and blood pressure in cabin and station personnel. The participants were 30 cabin personnel (train drivers) and 30 station personnel. The cabin had a Leq of 90.3 dBA while the noise level at Poncol Station was still below the threshold limit value (TLV), i.e., 75.8 dBA. The noise exposure assessment also included noise exposure profiling. The Chi-square test showed that noise influenced systolic and diastolic blood pressure changes. Furthermore, for train drivers, the t-test showed a difference in systolic and diastolic between before and after the activity. As for station personnel, there was a difference in systolic, but contrarily it was not the case in diastolic. According to the noise profile, the train whistle had the most significant noise level at 120 dBA. Moreover, the use of a train whistle regularly may raise the noise level exposure to cabin staff and even station workers. This study contributes to scientific evidence that occupational noise might affect blood pressure

Railways and the Urban Soundscape: Montreal, 1850s–1950s

Recent work on the history of railways has focused on the ways in which they changed the experience of space. Studies of urban settings have examined the role of railway tracks in delineating and reaffirming identities of class and ethnicity; they have also looked at the housing and neighborhoods that grew up around railway yards. This article contributes to the literature on railways and urban space by exploring the meanings of train sounds, in particular those produced by bells and steam whistles, in Montreal. The sounds made by trains were among the loudest to arrive in the 19th-century world, and had a particularly dramatic impact upon urban areas. Train whistles and bells had diverse meanings, depending on the precise moment and place at which they were sounded, the duration of the sound, and who was listening. These meanings were integrated into various forms of urban knowledge, and constituted one element of what historian David Garrioch calls “a semiotic system,” part of a larger “urban information system.” This article explores the confrontation between two interpretations of the sounds made by train bells and steam whistles in the region of Montreal between 1850 and 1950, namely, the conflicts between those who saw bells and whistles as elements of a language of safety for railway workers and city dwellers, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who increasingly viewed them as an unwelcome source of urban noise.

Acoustic-Based Train Arrival Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks With Attention

In the places of railroad crossings, audible warning signals such as train whistles and railway alarms are utilized to warn the road users of paying attention and giving priority to the approaching train(s). However, road users may sometimes be unaware of warning signals due to various reasons, resulting in inappropriate cooperation or even traffic collision between railway vehicles and non-railway vehicles. This work studies deep learning-based approaches to develop systems for acoustic-based train arrival detection (A-TAD). Firstly, we develop a novel audio dataset of train horns, railway alarms, railway noise, and other urban noises to conduct A-TAD experiments. We then examine the efficiency of handcrafted acoustic features (i.e. MFCC and Mel-spectrogram) in building A-TAD&#x2019;s audio classifier, the MSNet, which is based on two-dimensional convolutional neural networks (2D-CNN). Next, we propose to apply the attention mechanism and utilize MFCC and spectrogram simultaneously to enhance the classification accuracy, in which the combined use of acoustic features is considered at the input level (with InCom-TADNet), high-level feature level (with FCCom-TADNet), and decision level (with DLCom-TADNet). Our experiments have shown the efficiency of MSNet and attention mechanism as the MSNet trained with the single feature is more performant than the baseline models and applying attention modules results in better accuracies. Also, the combined use of MFCC and spectrogram significantly improve the system&#x2019;s accuracy and robustness. A-TAD systems can be utilized to extend the safety function of the railway crossing systems, private cars, and self-driving cars, and particularly be useful for hearing-impaired road users.

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Memorials and the Mine Disaster in Monongah, West Virginia: From Trauma to an Italian Global Memoryscape

Jazz, Politics, &amp; Love

Jazz, Politics, & Love Stephanie Rauschenbusch (bio) Notes on Hard Times Paul Austin Village Books Press www.villagebookspress.com 62 Pages; Print, $12.00 How rare to open a book of poems and turn down the page corners for every other poem, as if to say, “I like this one, too.” This was my experience upon reading Paul Austin’s latest collection of poems — Notes on Hard Times. Writing about jazz, politics, love, and the solitary figure or “isolato” (as D. H. Lawrence calls him), Austin is always clear, forceful, and insightful. His first poem,” Nightfall,” is an invocation and a blessing. It goes like this, “Nightfall” leave the lamp unlit,unclose the window curtain,look beyond the glass. can you not agreethe uninhabited nightpulses with desire? can you not allowthe blue anticipationmurmur in your ear? let go your heart’s fear,give of your eyes to vastness,that it may be seen The sparseness of the poem and its almost complete suspension of punctuation is striking, as is the simplicity of its complex meanings. We don’t know exactly where we are, or with whom, or who is speaking and to whom. There is a lamp, a window, two lovers, and an invitation to see the night pulsing with desire. In our imaginations, we can expect the lovers to consummate their love or to go outside to explore the night with its “blue anticipation.” We who are reading are also being invited to enter the book as if it were uninhabited and pulsing with desire. The second poem in this book plunges us into history — “Warsaw Ghetto, 1942.” It is a straight narrative poem about the encounter between a Jewish boy and a storm trooper who terrifies him into losing control of his bladder and wetting his pants. The point is humiliation, not murder, though by the end the crowd of witnesses is impatient for the man to commit the murder he has promised them. Both “The Jazz Lover” and “As It Should Be” are poems about jazz that are inflected with the rhythms of jazz. The first narrates the life of a woman who hangs out in jazz clubs and bars, while the second contrasts the sounds of a bass in the night with the song of a wood thrush in the morning which does not include “the flatted fifth” of the jazz bass. The long poem called “Wittgenstein” seems to parallel a biography of the philosopher, and emphasizes his wish to purify, clarify and “decontaminate” language itself. It starts with his habit of slapping his forehead by which he hoped “to knock loose the right word.” He searched for a “virtuous language”: “He played the game of language, / in the music hall of his mind, / slip-sliding on false starts, / prat-falling over bad choices, / Spinning verbal cartwheels/hoping to reveal hidden truths / in what, for him, was the natural / state of the nonsensical.” One of the longest poems in Notes on Hard Times is “Dreaming Angel,” a prose poem full of freely associating thoughts of an absent woman. The poet imagines he has become this woman: “the inner me is actually you.” He eventually begs her to write him, calling him “Harvey White.” Meanwhile, he worries about a female suicide bomber who is on the radio news. He imagines being on the same bus that blew up: “Everything is bright, bright and white like gold, bright white gold. And hot. The whole bus is steaming and shimmering and vibrating…” “Tell Me Who I Am,” described as an “installation”, seems like a scenario or script for a movie. A color-coded woman (“Black pants, black shirt with Chinese collar. Black slippers, white socks. Scarlet red scarf…” picks up and briefly skims a green book, then a blue book, then a red book. She keeps being interrupted by distracting external street noises — a jet flying over, a train whistle blowing, an ice cream truck playing music. She “closes the red book in anger.” This well-imagined set of actions, in a white writer’s studio where the books form color squares like those in Josef Albers’ paintings, seems painterly, a sort of...

Albert Murray’s The Spyglass Tree and the 1923 Armed Defense of Tuskegee Institute

In Albert Murray’s novel The Spyglass Tree (1991), which is set in a town similar to Tuskegee, Alabama and at a college similar to Tuskegee Institute in the 1930s, the protagonist hears a tale in a barbershop of how the campus community defended itself from the Ku Klux Klan in the previous decade. The protagonist uses this story, which is an approximately accurate re-telling of the historical defense of Tuskegee Institute from the Klan in 1923, as a model for heroic action. Murray thus revisits a theme from his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), in which the same protagonist learns to appreciate and be guided by African American vernacular traditions and published forms of discourse in equal measure.

Albert Murray: Literary Reconstruction of the Vernacular Community

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Whistling Tea Kettles, Train Whistles, and Organ Pipes

The object on the right-hand side of Fig. 1 is the whistling mechanism of an old-fashioned tea kettle. This started me thinking about similar devices in which a thin blade of air strikes a sharp wedge and a resonator is used to pick out specific frequencies. This note tells how I went about using the frequency spectrum application on a smartphone to learn more about these systems. This would seem to be a good line of small-scale research that would appeal to the introductory physics student who is searching for a science fair project.

Doppler effect in a solid medium: Spin wave emission by a precessing domain wall drifting in spin current

The Doppler effect is a fundamental physical phenomenon observed for waves propagating in vacuum or various media, commonly gaseous or liquid. Here, we report on the occurrence of a Doppler effect in a solid medium. Instead of a real object, a topological soliton, i.e., a magnetic domain wall (DW) traveling in a current-carrying ferromagnetic nanowire, plays the role of the moving wave source. The Larmor precession of the DW in an external field stimulates emission of monochromatic spin waves (SWs) during its motion, which show a significant Doppler effect, comparable to the acoustic one of a train whistle. This process involves two prominent spin-transfer-torque effects simultaneously, the current-driven DW motion and the current-induced SW Doppler shift. The latter gives rise to an interesting feature, i.e., the observed SW Doppler effect appears resulting from a stationary source and a moving observer, contrary to the laboratory frame.

Let’s Go to Morocco, and Trains

Let’s Go to Morocco, and Trains Anzhelina Polonskaya (bio) —translated from the Russian by Andrew Wachtel Let’s Go to Morocco Let’s go to Morocco.Maybe things are different there:mountains and seas, other streets.Lions don’t fall into traps,and hares don’t whine like babies.And people don’t have scars from collarbone to shoulder.An old lady will come up to us: “let me tell your fortune?”“Predict your future luck.”Sorry, I don’t know those terms.Better take this coin and buy yourselfa bright scarf and some loose pants.And we will go, sail away, leave.But still, Morocco will never end.Under a deep blue sky we’ll become like an almond branch.This will extend your life, and mine as well; at least for a time. 2013 [End Page 312] Trains It’s good there are trains.With conductors in fraying jacketsand worn heels.Green and raspberry streamers.You can go away somewhere on them,my friend, somewhere.To avoid thinking about an empty glass or a plowed field.On your bunk you can turn your back on everyone.The lady selling potatoes at the rainy station,the priest peddling eternal life.Or, if you have no ticket,you can breathe in the piney smell of the ties,without leaving the bedsof hortensia and white lilies.Lying in your bed, you can hear the train whistle,and the night owl moaningof the oil-filled tank cars.And you really could go somewhere. 2013 [End Page 313] Anzhelina Polonskaya Anzhelina Polonskaya was born in a small town near Moscow, where she is currently preparing a new volume of poetry for publication. She is a member of the Moscow Union of Writers and the Russian PEN center. Her book, A Voice, appeared in Northwestern University Press’s “Writings from an Unbound Europe,” and was shortlisted for the 2005 Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation. Polonskaya’s work has appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, International Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is also the recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship. Andrew Wachtel Andrew Wachtel is the president of the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Previously he was dean of the Graduate School and director of the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University; he is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Wachtel’s interests range from Russian literature and culture to East European and Balkan culture, history, and politics to contemporary Central Asia. His most recent books are The Balkans in World History (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Russian Literature (with Ilya Vinitsky, Polity Press, 2008). He has translated poetry and prose from Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, and Slovenian, and is currently working on a cultural nationalism project in Central Asia, particularly Kyrgyzstan. Copyright © 2014 Middlebury College Publications

Presbycusis, Part 2: Can You Hear the Music of Life?

T he results of our open-ended avenues of inquiry in preaudiology screening of 10 participants revealed they were incapable of hearing sounds in the environment nor were they able to engage in meaningful conversation with caregiver(s). The results of postaudiology screening show that all 10 could hear sounds in the environment by various pitch ranges and rhythms. Many sounds had been long forgotten, such as household appliances, street traffic, train whistles, and birds. Another benefit to hearing technology was socialization. Participants said they attended Sunday worship services and heard the sermons (either in church or by television) and participated in singing sacred songs. Other comments participants gave concerning their morale, life satisfaction, and social support were the following:Communication has improved and I'm happier, less confused, and less sad because now I can hear what other people are saying to me.Now, I can play cards with my grandson!I can carry on a conversation now-before I was pretending to hear-now I hear and participate in conversations.I can return to driving to visit my friends.I will now engage in theatrical and music performances because I can hear.CAREGIVERSDespite caregivers' concerns that the caregiver scale (see Appendix A) and the annoying problem behaviors log calendar (see Appendix B) were too difficult to understand and complete, 7 of 10 caregivers were (a) compliant in tracking the number of hours participants wore their hearing aids (see Table 1) and (b) compliant in tracking participants' annoying problem behaviors and assigning a value from 0 (least) to 4 (most) that reflected their frustrations with participants. Table 2 illustrates the outcome of caregiver logs over an 8-week period and the total number of hours that participants wore their hearing aids for the study. The results of three remaining caregivers were dissimilar: (a) a caregiver and parent withdrew 1 week into the study; (b) a caregiver and parent spent 4 weeks waiting for ear canal impressions and hearing aids so that by the time the hearing aids were fitted and worn for 4 weeks, the study had ended. This prevented the student researcher from measuring results; and (c) a caregiver only completed one out of eight log sheets on her parent during the 8-week period for reasons that are speculative.Results of Caregiver ScaleAll eight participants, for which there were completed caregiver logs, revealed either some annoying problem behaviors lessened or they disappeared altogether with the use of hearing technology in less than 30 days. There was an equal division among analyses by caregivers in the pretreatment Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) dementia instrument of participant behaviors.On the one hand, one half of caregivers rated their parent or spouse as not having dementia behaviors: (a) not suspicious of other people hiding and stealing their property, (b) cognizant of living in their own homes, and (c) never demonstrating behaviors of paranoia or suspiciousness.On the other hand, one half of caregivers rated their parent or spouse as having dementia behaviors: (a) believing someone other than himself or herself was hiding their property, (b) talking to imaginary people, (c) hoarding or hiding property from caregivers, and (d) hearing voices or imagining conversations with other people.Yet after wearing hearing aids for 30 days, these annoying problem behaviors lessened or they discontinued altogether.Because the primary investigator did not administer the MMSE scale before and after to 10 participants, measurement of cognitive test scores are unavailable. However, based on the student researcher's observations of participants throughout the study, she has rated participant behaviors in both pretreatments and posttreatments (see Table 2). The student researcher did not observe behavioral signs of dementia in three participants for 8 weeks. …

Visualizing the perception filter and breaching it with active‐learning strategies

When we walk down a street, we may see many faces, but we ignore almost all of them. Unless we are purposefully looking for someone, only the occasional face will impinge on our consciousness. Similarly, a creaky floor or a nearby railroad crossing where the train whistle blows at 2 AM may annoy us when we first move into an apartment or house, but our mind soon learns to ignore these sounds and lets us sleep. These are examples of our perception filter at work. Our perception filter operates in all realms of our consciousness. It plays an important part in what and how our students learn and should play a central role in what and how we teach. This may be obvious, but having a visual model of a perception filter can guide the way we think about education. For me, the most satisfying definitions of science acknowledge the generation and testing of models of how the natural world behaves. Often in the molecular life sciences, models are diagrams of mental images that represent real objects and relationships we infer but cannot see. Like cartoons, they capture essential components and ignore others. A model's utility lies in its ability to predict and explain observable phenomena. As I transitioned from being primarily a research scientist to being primarily a science educator, I was introduced to other models that would have helped me as a teacher, if I had been aware of them. Among them are the Perry Model that describes the intellectual and ethical development of college students [1], Bloom's taxonomy that provides a hierarchy of cognitive ability [2], and classification of personality types that helps understand how people interact [3]. Models in education tend to be more textual, like concept maps, with lines connecting ideas. Recently, at a process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL) workshop, I was introduced to an information processing model [4, 5] that captured my attention (penetrated my perception filter). Although I had seen its component ideas in words before, the presentation of these ideas and their relationships as a diagram allowed me to visualize a perception filter as shown below. Unlike molecules depicted in biochemical models, a perception filter is an abstraction. There is no physical entity in the brain that we can call the perception filter. Yet, the idea, presented as a picture, makes sense to me. When I scan the table of contents of a journal, most of the titles fly by without a second look while I stop at others, reread the title, and maybe go on to read the abstract and article. Why? I presume there is something in the title that connects with prior knowledge in my long-term memory that has generated the perception filter. It is as if my mind were looking specifically to build on things it already knew. Some call it scaffolding. Once I am looking at the abstract, I am engaged. The material has slipped through my perception filter, and it is being processed and is available to add to or alter my long-term memory. Perception filters are important. I don't want to read every article in a journal. However, when it comes to education where we as teachers are the table of contents and we don't get past students' perception filters, there is a problem. Although some skillful orators manage to captivate an audience, few teachers have that ability. Unless the listener processes the incoming information in their working memory, preferably with interaction with other people, it may not get transferred to long-term memory. Hence the common instructor remark after an examination, “I covered that, but they didn't get it,” as if it were only the students' fault.1 Information Processing Model modified from Johnstone [4, 5]. Since being introduced to the visual imagery of a perception filter developed by Johnstone [4, 5], I have shared it with faculty colleagues and my students. The imagery works for them as well. I assert that the objective of active-learning strategies like problem-based learning or POGIL is to generate situations and activities that open holes in the perception filter and allow information to invade the student's working memory space. There they can address misconceptions accessed from long-term memory or store new information that has been processed more deeply.

Albert Murray's Magical Youth

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's a short walk from 125th Street subway station to Harlem home of Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch's literary father man whom Henry Louis Gates Jr. dubbed King of Cats in New Yorker a few years ago. Murray, a student with Ralph Ellison at Tuskegee in 1930s later Ellison's sparring partner for decades (their long-running cultural dialogue was published in 2000 as Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison Albert Murray), began publishing novels after he retired from Air Force in 1962. may be best known for his trilogy Train Whistle Guitar (1974), The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996), but his critical writings include South to a Very Old Place (1972) From Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure American Identity (2001), as well as countless articles. I was calling on him in my research for a documentary on Federal Writers' Project, his early friendship with Ellison. As I covered blocks I mentally retraced my phone calls with Murray, searching for some encouragement. Found none. was generally indifferent to questions about his friend's early days on Federal Writers' Project. Murray wasn't interested in politics and all that bullshit, he warned. But he was gracious enough to welcome a visit. I lowered my expectations kept walking. The apartment building dominated an otherwise patchy block. I signed in at desk took elevator up. Mrs. Murray let me in graciously before letting herself out to go to market. Their apartment was packed to transom with books artwork, including a striking collection of African art Romare Bearden prints of Ellington Ulysses. What dominated place, though, was spectacular south-facing window, wide as living room, its down-island vista of all Manhattan. Murray moved slowly used a walker, occasionally he rambled. But at ninety, his mind was agile. Out of nowhere, he launched into a discourse on Booker T. Washington's philosophy for Tuskegee, outlining the talented tenth idea, taking it back to Frederick Douglass, then forward to his own essay in From Briarpatch File, award he received as a notable Alabama writer. Not black writer! Alabama writer. was proud of that. gave an impersonation of Washington (Yes, Lord made Earth, but Dutch made Holland) laughed. said that Washington's point, missed by many of his detractors, was that blacks should work to secure their own property economic base. Murray remained uninterested in my list of questions. Emergency relief work on FDR's New Deal was too ideological for an artist, he said. Murray is famously allergic to labels, especially label of black writer, resents political baggage. knew Ellison not as a black writer, but as an artist intellect beyond categories, beyond simple views of race--like multiracial characters in Ellison's unfinished second novel, published posthumously in 2000 as Juneteenth this year as Three Days Before Shooting. Everybody's related in United States, see? Murray said. Everybody is part white part black ... Those abstractions [white black] get you around But epic literature of thing will deal with metaphors that help you to cope with complexity. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When I asked about 1930s more generally, he directed me to a photo album across room. That's Tuskegee, 1939, he said, pointing to a photo of him in a suit, looking flash. That's way I dressed. The suit was from the swankiest store in Atlanta, a four-hour drive away. Long before Murray met Ellison to discuss books, he first noticed older boy because of his style. He was a junior when I was a freshman, Murray told me. Ellison had worked briefly at a haberdashery in Oklahoma City, which is what attracted me to him. …

Energy and Everything Else: Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society

Energy and Everything ElseVaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society Peter A. Shulman (bio) The other day, my twenty-one-month-old son received a gift of a toy locomotive engine. It was connected by shiny, dome-shaped magnets to an accompanying coal tender. The two pieces fit neatly in his hands, and for several minutes he attached and detached them and made the sounds of a train whistle. He then noticed that the engine had a face (as do most trains he seems to encounter as toys or in books). He looked at the coal tender, then at the face, and said, “Eat it?” I said yes (surely confusing him more), just as he eats food for energy, the train “eats” coal. He still seemed puzzled, so I tried a line from one of his books, “The tender carries the coal that burns in the firebox.” With that, he gave up on me and returned to the sounds of a train whistle. While there are important differences between digestion and combustion, they do indeed both represent the transformation of energy from one form into another. Chemical to kinetic to heat and so on and on—these transformations constrain and enable everything from plate tectonics to photosynthesis to the material development of human societies (and, of course, locomotives). But is it correct to state, as did the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892, that “In the last analysis everything that happens is nothing but changes in energy?”1 Can energy serve as the fundamental common denominator for understanding the universe, from the galactic scale to the cellular and the natural to the social? Such a comprehensive analysis forms the basis for Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society, a complete revision of his General Energetics: Energy [End Page 915] in the Biosphere and Civilization, published by Wiley in 1991.2 While the new book is not a work of history, it is informed by Smil’s knowledge of the past. Smil is not himself a historian, but a scholar reaching across disciplines to understand the role of energy in the physical and human worlds, past, present, and future. Others before Smil have developed holistic studies of energy in natural and social contexts, and their works have proved provocative but also deeply flawed. In the early 1890s, for example, Ostwald constructed an elaborate and controversial theory of “General Energetics” to embrace not only the unification of natural phenomena, but human consciousness, eugenics, and pacifism.3 In the 1970s, the ecologist Howard Odum became the most prominent advocate of a kind of energy determinism in which “energy is the source and control of all things, all value, and all the actions of human beings and nature.”4 Neither Ostwald nor Odum saw their energetic views widely accepted. There is simply too much history—human, natural, and planetary—inexplicable in energetic terms alone. Unlike Ostwald and Odum, Smil constructs a more plausible analysis by making energy central without being determinative. Smil is unequivocal that the world, natural or social, historical or contemporary, cannot be reduced merely to energy considerations. He justifies focusing on energy as a unit of analysis because “everything in the observable universe can be seen, analyzed, and explained in energy terms.” Tempering this universality, “even such a fundamental entity as energy . . . cannot be an adequate surrogate for valuing space, time, qualitative attributes of materials, biodiversity, mental labor, ideas, social order, cultural riches, and morality” (pp. 366, 345–46). Smil’s work, then, may be read as a demonstration of both the ubiquity of energy and its limits as a conceptual tool for understanding the world. The chapters of Energy in Nature and Society progress from cosmic to human scales and, as in previous works, Smil makes good on his promise of interdisciplinarity.5 After introducing his (extensive) terminology and [End Page 916] providing a potted history of the concept of energy in chapter 1 (in its simplicity one of the weakest in the book), Smil turns in chapter 2 to describing the energetics of planet Earth—its solar fluxes, internal heat, and the geophysical processes powered by these energy flows. Chapters 3 through 5 present energy in...

Joyce's Noises

Joyce's Noises Derek Attridge (bio) Molly Bloom is lying restlessly in bed, her head next to her husband's feet, counting the days until she will next be with her lover, Blazes Boylan: "Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday" (Joyce, U 18.594-95).1 The next item we see on the page—one can hardly call it a word—is a bizarre string of letters: "frseeeeeeeefronnnng" (U 18.596). All in lower case, it begins the fourth of the so-called sentences of the final episode of Ulysses. Its challenge to our reading of the episode is multiple: it is unpronounceable, at least according to the norms of the English language; it is meaningless; and it is hardly conceivable as part of Molly's thought processes in the way that everything in the chapter up to this point has been. Joyce does not leave us mystified for long, however: the verbalized thoughts that follow this strange irruption explain what it is doing here: "train somewhere whistling the strength those engines have in them like big giants" (U 18.596-97). Distant train whistles may more usually evoke associations of travel, separation, nostalgia, or longing, but Molly's response is clearly colored by her active desire for the man she has just called, with obvious relish, a "savage brute" (U 18.594). Are we to take this series of letters as representing the actual sound of a train whistle—perhaps on two notes, higher then lower—as it penetrates the bedroom of 7 Eccles Street? (The train is too distant, I think, for the double tone to be a product of the Doppler effect.) Would it be legitimate for an audio version of the book to substitute for the reader's voice at this point a recording of the real sound? Surely not: although one could argue that the succession of e's and the subsequent o do mimic the higher and lower notes of the whistle, and that the prolonged nasal of the second syllable imitates a change in timbre in the second note, Joyce's choice of letters can hardly be said to aim at exact representation. The spelling is connected in some way with Molly's own perception of the sound. Is this how she would write it down if she felt the need to do so? (As I've argued elsewhere, there are many suggestions in the episode that the apparent flow of uncontrolled thoughts is constantly mediated by the constraints and characteristics of writing).2 This supposition is strengthened by the sudden change of tack in Molly's ruminations: "… like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng" (U 18.596-98). Given the obvious association between the imagined steam locomotive and Boylan's thrusting masculinity, we may well misread "like the end of …"; then, as so often in "Penelope," we have to correct our interpretation, as we realize that the comparison Molly is making is between the sound of the train whistle and one of the songs she'll be performing on the forthcoming concert tour with Boylan (and has probably been singing to him earlier). (Molly herself, of course, is in no doubt about what is like what; it's only the reader who may find a grosser meaning in "end." The result of Joyce's removal of punctuation in this episode is not, as is often thought, a more accurate rendition of mental processes, but a game of constant guessing and reassessment that has little to do with Molly's subjectivity.) The "onnnng" of the train whistle, it turns out, is there less as an attempt at mimesis than as an indication of the already forming connection with the "onnnng" of the song. (That the word of the song in question is "song" is, of course, another Joycean joke.) The implied downward change in pitch in the move from e to o is what links this sound in Molly's aural imagination to the singing of "sweet song." The strength of the association between sound and song is made clear...

The Johnstown Flood

A t about 4:00 PM on May 31, 1889, a wall of water and debris more than 35 ft high roared through the western Pennsylvania mill town of Johnstown, population 30,000.1 In minutes the city was annihilated. Fires among the debris added to the carnage. An accurate death count was never possible-the number of dead exceeded 2200. Johnstown lies on a flood plain at the confluence of 2 small rivers. Although both rivers had been at flood stage for several days, the deadly deluge issued solely from the gorge of one, the Little Conemaugh. The cause was an earthen dam that had given way. The south fork of the Little Conemaugh had been dammed in the early 1850s to provide reserve water for the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, built in 1836. Earthen dams were used to create supplemental water supplies for 19th century canal systems. Many of these dams can still be found in the hills along the routes of long-abandoned canals. The train whistle was the death knell for canals. In 1852 the Pennsylvania Railroad opened a link from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and the Main Line Canal became superfluous. The canal was abandoned and its properties and appurtenances sold to private interests. Eventually, the Little Conemaugh property came into the hands of a consortium of wealthy Pittsburgh industrialists calling themselves the Fork Fishing and Hunting Members included Andrew Carnegie, Henry Frick, and Andrew Mellon. They repaired the dam, which had been breached during its years of neglect, and built palatial lake side cottages and a 40-room clubhouse. Unfortunately, the dam repairs were not enough to hold back waters from the record rains of May 29 to 31, 1889. An estimated 20 million tons of water was released on the afternoon of the 31st. Devastation in Jamestown was complete. Those who escaped drowning, fire, or trauma were left homeless. An accurate count of the dead was impossible; bodies were discovered years after the disaster. The cleanup took more than 5 years. Among others, Clara Barton arrived from Washington DC with a team of 50 doctors and nurses repre senting the newly organized American Red Cross. The dam failure was traced to shoddy repairs by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Its members were never held liable. More than a century later, the flood remains the deadliest US flood, and one of the dozen most lethal floods in human history.