Pre-WW1 there was a whole circuit of healing / memory power charlatanry floating about: Pelmanism, etc.

Trove is a wonderful resource - I've found stuff syndicated here, including Maxwell Gray work, that's been rounds in in UK newspapers but hsd never been findable online. - Ray

"she-pirates" Yes indeed. Anne Bonney: http://tinyurl.com/6gh8dcy Or Cheni I Sao (a.k.a. Ching Shih): http://tinyurl.com/6bo2fmp

"It is interesting to note ..." The interesting thing is how the trappings of authoritarian systems look much the same wherever you are. Imagine what Americans would make of it if some enemy country had a youth organisation that was celebrated with imagery like this: http://www.trishhaley.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/eagle_court_of_honor_post_card_postcard-p239473487082735862trdg_400.jpg

One of these devices - the Bateson Life Revival Device a.k.a. "Bateson's Belfry" - featured in the movie The First Great Train Robbery.

"Either way, it isn’t good ... This is also part of a long history of the subjugation of women" Michel Foucalt's ideas seem very applicable. He argued that sadomasochism's adoption of trapppings of historical prisons, punishment and slavery reflected a similar behavioural subtext in "strategic power". Exactly the same could be argued about this excessive hardware used in gynaecological examination and childbirth; it suggests the designers' attitudes were very creepy. Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" springs to mind.

"a gentle, evenly distributed, properly directed, precision-controlled force, that acts in unison with and supplements her own efforts"" The concept of gravity doesn't seem to have occurred to them. What a palaver, when the birthing stool does all that.

I recall it being on the radio when I was in my teens (Lordy, 40ish years ago). The "copper fingers" refer to the ending; on detection, the villain escapes the hangman by committing suicide, grabbing the live terminals of his own electroplating generator, and the fingers of his corpse become electroplated with copper.

Literary connection: the Dorothy L Sayers story "The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers" is a Lord Peter Wimsey story featuring the electroplating of a corpse. A suspiciously lifelike copper statue of a woman turns out to be the electroplated murder victim of an insanely jealous artist.

You might be interested in Breaking out of the game ( http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/breaking-out-of-game.html ) which has a couple of citations to works discussing the role of chess as a kind of theatre acting out real-world feudal hierarchy.

The self-portraits are remarkably similar to Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's "character heads" depicting extreme expressions.

I think all that you'd see as a result of firing canon would be a very bright flash of light, and here would be no smoke Oh, I don't know. Mars has enough of an atmosphere to have wind and airborne dust; the low pressure might make the gas/smoke from a conventional chemical explosive behave a bit differently, but not that much. On the other hand, the size of the Earth in the sky makes it look more like the Martians are firing from a base on the Earth's Moon.

However much it's explained to me, I have yet to intuitively grasp how a sewing machine works (not the mechanism - what it does with the thread). Even with this animation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lockstitch.gif - as far as I'm concerned, it throws the whole needle-and-machine through hyperspace to get the thread through the loop.

It's like ladies' Rollerball ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_%281975_film%29 ) minus the armour and motorbikes.

Another one for you: John Morgan Richards. This one emigrated to the UK, where he was acclaimed as a model capitalist, chiefly for promoting quack medicines including Carter's Little Liver Pills and Dr Williams' Pink Pills for Pale People. They were in themselves pretty harmless, but were sold via testimonials of amazing pulled-back-from-death's-door cures. He also was prime mover in promoting cigarettes in the UK, selling through chemists' shops (i.e. pharmacies) with a tactic of paying for the tobacconist license of shops that would stock his cigarettes. See "The writer, the cancer-merchant, his eccentric wife, and the faux castle" ( http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/writer-cigarette-pusher-his-eccentric.html ).

I wonder if the style of the first image was an intentional imitation of a cameo carving? Also, interesting that the much later classic Wedgwood Blue pottery uses exactly the same scheme.

Oops! Sorry, that link was meant to be to Wikipedia's Teamsters article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teamsters

The social context is quite interesting. The ATA was formed in the 1930s, and I can well imagine this PR was aimed at taking the moral high ground in relation to the major truck drivers union, the radicalised and corrupt Teamsters ( http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2009/04/breaking-out-of-game.html ).

"Happy birthday, Ray!" Thanks! I'd forgotten FaceBook gave that away - eeurgh, 54 (I'm still 18 inside). It's a very interesting, quite possibly pivotal, era in US history that saw socialist movements stamped on. Newman & Byrne's "Back in the USSA" - http://segalbooks.blogspot.com/2008/07/newman-byrne-alternate-histories.html - is a lovely pastiche and exploration of the idea.

This is in an era given prominent mention in James W Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, an expose of historical whitewashing in US school textbooks: "What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable. When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like women's suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson administration's Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries. "Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson's presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua's president and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the United States."

Yes, very good. The prevalent belief that wars would be played out through a twin emphasis on aerial bombing and gas warfare - I guess extrapolated from World War I - is well-exemplified in HG Wells' "Things to Come".

Interesting to consider, though, how many of Poe's assumptions could equally apply to a modern chess program, and are clearly wrong: for instance, "a pure machine ... would always win". The determinacy point is wrong too. A mechanical randomizer (or pseudorandom lookup table) wouldn't be hard to contrive.