#and now M is a poor unfortunate casualty of this as well given that he can not unsee this and how it recontextualizes their >

[halfbaked00q]

situation in which M catches wind through the gossip mill that Bond and Q are Involved TM and he has sort of a passing thoigh of hm should he be worried about this should he look into this, for form's sake if nothing else- this could be a case of a field operative taking advantages with support staff blah blah. not that Q can't take care of himself, but, well. you know,. Bond. It shouldn't hurt to just check in with Q, right?

but like the next possible moment M might have to check in with Q is when they're about to have a joint briefing and Bond is about to show up at any moment. M is like debating with himself if he should bring it up- but then Bond comes sauntering in, so he's lost the moment.

anyway in the course of the briefing, M is surreptitiously observing the two to see if there's any red flags- none that he can see, they are their usual snarky selves. but then Bond leans in a certain way or leans into Q's space a certain way, and against his will, he catches a glimpse of... leather? against Bond's throat underneath his shirt collar. And unfortunately now that he saw it, he can't unsee it, nor the like subtle things in which they are interacting with each other... So he has gone from hm should I at least as a formality be worried about this, to quickly learning/realizing (1) he did NOT need to know this about his two subordinates slash friends(? -inasmuch as spies can be friends and a boss can be friends with his subordinates even if the trials they've been through together have blurred the lines on that and forged bonds amongst them), and (2) yeah no this was a foolish worry, Q has the situation well in hand (hah)

[violetcrownchronicles]

Capitol Construction Accident

13 MAY 1887. Austin Daily Statesman.

CAPITOL ACCIDENT. Damage to the Building Not So Great as at First Estimated. Official Reports Upon the Cause of the Occurrence--Inquest Upon the Man Who Was Killed.

The report which THE STATESMAN furnished yesterday morning concerning the accident of the night before was as complete as it was possible to make it, considering the fact that the information had to be gathered and the whole account written after midnight. While the crash occurred just after 10 o’clock, not a whisper of it was brought down town for more than two hours afterwards. And yet, THE STATESMAN’S report was correct and complete except in a few minor details. When the beam which carried the weight of stone broke, and precipitated the mass, it went downward with a rush until it struck squarely upon a stone wall, extending from the ground, in the basement, to the level of the first story. This resisted successfully the tremendous force, breaking it and dividing the debris in two parts. One of these, in which was the pile of stone that caused the break, fell on the south side of the wail, broke the floor, and sank into the basement. The other portion, consisting of cross beams, timbers and bricks from the arches, fell on the other side and rested on the floor. It was on this side that the workmen began first to search for the body of Tom Gamble. Not finding it in the mass of rubbish they turned their attention to the other side, and after three quarters of an hour of arduous labor, came upon the body of the unfortunate man. He was found in a sitting posture. Both legs were mangled and crushed, one of them being turned back nearly to the shoulder, while the other had been stretched out from the body. The trunk was inclined, the shoulders almost touching the thighs, and the head hanging down between the limbs. The frame, while crushed and gashed, was still not so badly broken as might have been expected, there not being very many cuts, beyond the crushing of the thighs and a bare wound in the back between the shoulders. Death must have been caused at the top of the building when the beam collapsed, and the poor creature was hurled downward with the 50,000 or 60,000 pounds of stone around him.

The jury of inquest, summoned by Judge Calhoun, viewed the remains as it lay in the debris in the basement, at half past two o’clock yesterday morning. It was weird scene that, and one which only a morbid mind would care to look upon. The big building was shrouded in gloom, save in the one small room where two or three lanterns threw pale gleams upon the scene, revealing a group of ten or fifteen men surrounding the body of the dead man as it rested crushingly in the mass of debris. Judge Calhoun, having sworn the jury, discharged them until yesterday, when evidence was taken at his office.

James Trigg testified that he was on the building on a level with Gamble, who was engaged in unloading the scale board. He had been racing with the other hands, and had been rushing them for twenty minutes. Just before the accident he whistled to give slack to the scale board, but before the response could come the girder gave way and was followed by the crash. Witness ran towards the place, but could see nothing of the man, and, calling, could hear nothing of him. He was standing on the pile of stone by the scale board, when the break occurred. J. M. Swisher and Wash. Baker testified substantially to the same facts as given by Mr. Trigg, and the jury rendered a verdict that Tom Gamble, aged about 21 years, came to his death by falling from the roof of the new capitol building, the fall being caused by the floor giving way.

Considering the length of time that this building has been under construction, its height and dimensions, the number of casualties that have occurred around it has been very small. This is the second death that has been caused, while, according to data obtained from Secretary Dickinson the number of injuries not fatal has not exceeded five or six. The number of deaths that have occurred on the capitol at Albany, New York, is reported to be eighteen, and on the capitol at Indianapolis, Ind., at fourteen.

General Walker, superintendent of the building, made an investigation of the accident yesterday morning, and, as a result, submitted the following report to the capitol commissioners:

AUSTIN, May 12,1887.

Messrs. Lee and McLauren, Capitol Building Commissioners:

Gentlemen—In compliance with your request of this date asking a report from me as to the accident that happened at the capitol building last night, I have the honor to submit the following:

The wrought iron girder that spans that portion of the fourth story ceiling of the north projection of the building, and which broke in two, was carrying nearly its entire capacity by the weight of the iron floor beams and brick arches already imposed upon it. This weight was as follows: Weight of iron beams, brick arches, etc., 15,011 pounds. The factor of safety for this girder to carry is 15,560 pounds. In order to find the weight at which this girder would break, it is a well established rule to multiply the safety load by four, which gives 62,240 pounds. From all the data in my possession I am sure there was not less than 50,000 to 60,000 pounds imposed; even had there been less, a sudden blow from the scale board, while being lowered in emptying material on top of the building, would have caused the break.

It is proper to state that this was the ceiling of the fourth story on the north projection of the building, and no additional weight, save that of the plastering, would ever have been imposed upon it. By examining the above figures it will be seen that the construction was amply safe. These calculations are made from Carnegie Bros.’ standing tables.

These loads of stone were put on this ceiling at night, on a temporary planking that the contractor has been placing over the building as the work progresses, on which to work during the day, and on which, at night, stone and other material is hoisted and placed during the night for use the following day.

I have frequently cautioned the subcontractors about allowing their workmen to place too many loads of stone and material on this planking over the ceiling, believing that too great a weight might be imposed, when no such weight was intended to be permanently carried in the building.

While this accident is to be regretted, on account of the killing of a workman engaged in unloading, yet had it occurred during the day, when a large force of men are at work in each story, and where this man was at work, the fatal results would have been much greater.

The damage done to that portion of the building will be entirely repaired by the contractor at his own expense, and will be done in such a manner as to render the building in every respect the same as it was before the accident happened.

This accident demonstrates that the masonry of the building is first-class in every respect, inasmuch as many of the iron anchors holding the fallen beams were torn apart, leaving a portion of the anchor in the wall, and the extension wall sustaining no injury therefrom. Had the masonry not been excellent the exterior wails would have been considerably injured and might have given way, but they remain intact and unimpaired.   Respectfully,

R. L. WALKER.

Superintendent of Construction.

The commissioners have submitted the following report to the governor:

AUSTIN, TEXAS, May 12, 1887.

To His Excellency, Gov. L. S. Ross, Executive Office.

Dear Sir:—We regret the necessity of reporting to your excellency an accident that occurred last night shortly after 10 o’clock to a portion of the north projection of the capitol building. While a colored man known by the name of Tom Gamble was unloading stone from a derrick above the center of the fourth story, that portion of the building above mentioned, which was temporarily planked over, the weight became too great for the iron beams and brick arches ‘beneath to hold it, and they gave way, precipitating all this piled up stone, which went through to the basement, carrying the iron beams and brick arches of the fourth, third, second and first floors with it in a space about 17x31 feet- The  exterior walls were not affected by the accident.

The laborer fell to the basement beneath, and was found dead in the debris. From observations made last night, shortly after the accident, and again this morning, it appears that the ceiling of the fourth story, where the accident happened, was too heavily loaded with stone, being hoisted upon the building last night to be used on various portions of the building to-day.

The debris is now being removed, and a more extended investigation will be made of this accident and a report submitted to your excellency.

All the broken and injured material and work will be replaced by first class material and work and the damage will be entirely repaired without any injury, whatever, to the building, at the cost of the contractor.   Respectfully,

JOSEPH LEK,

M. H. McLAUREN,

Capitol Building Commissioners.

In the conversation with Mr. Wilke night before last he gave it as his opinion that the damage to the building would amount to $5,000, but after a closer examination yesterday he found that the loss was not so heavy as at first estimated. He now thinks the break can be repaired and made as good as it was at first at a cost of not more than $1,000.

[petrifyingpoint]

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastics, and so on—but that she could not accustom herself to the disappearance of the old. “Where have all the horses gone?” she would sometimes say. Born in 1892, she had grown up in a London full of carriages and horses.

I have similar feelings myself. A few years ago, I was walking with my niece Liz down Mill Lane, a road near the house in London where I grew up. I stopped at a railway bridge where I had loved leaning over the railings as a child. I watched various electric and diesel trains go by, and after a few minutes Liz, growing impatient, asked, “What are you waiting for?” I said that I was waiting for a steam train. Liz looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Uncle Oliver,” she said. “There haven’t been steam trains for more than forty years.”

I have not adjusted as well as my aunt did to some aspects of the new—perhaps because the rate of social change associated with technological advances has been so rapid and so profound. I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

In his novel “Exit Ghost,” from 2007, Philip Roth speaks of how radically changed New York City appears to a reclusive writer who has been away from it for a decade. He is forced to overhear cell-phone conversations all around him, and he wonders, “What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say—so much so pressing that it couldn’t wait to be said? . . . I did not see how anyone could believe he was continuing to live a human existence by walking about talking into a phone for half his waking life.”

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

February 11, 2019

A few years ago, I was invited to join a panel discussion about information and communication in the twenty-first century. One of the panelists, an Internet pioneer, said proudly that his young daughter surfed the Web twelve hours a day and had access to a breadth and range of information that no one from a previous generation could have imagined. I asked whether she had read any of Jane Austen’s novels, or any classic novel. When he said that she hadn’t, I wondered aloud whether she would then have a solid understanding of human nature or of society, and suggested that while she might be stocked with wide-ranging information, that was different from knowledge. Half the audience cheered; the other half booed.

Much of this, remarkably, was envisaged by E. M. Forster in his 1909 story “The Machine Stops,” in which he imagined a future where people live underground in isolated cells, never seeing one another and communicating only by audio and visual devices. In this world, original thought and direct observation are discouraged—“Beware of first-hand ideas!” people are told. Humanity has been overtaken by “the Machine,” which provides all comforts and meets all needs—except the need for human contact. One young man, Kuno, pleads with his mother via a Skype-like technology, “I want to see you not through the Machine. . . . I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

He says to his mother, who is absorbed in her hectic, meaningless life, “We have lost the sense of space. . . . We have lost a part of ourselves. . . . Cannot you see . . . that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine?”

This is how I feel increasingly often about our bewitched, besotted society, too.

As one’s death draws near, one may take comfort in the feeling that life will go on—if not for oneself then for one’s children, or for what one has created. Here, at least, one can invest hope, though there may be no hope for oneself physically and (for those of us who are not believers) no sense of any “spiritual” survival after bodily death.

But it may not be enough to create, to contribute, to have influenced others if one feels, as I do now, that the very culture in which one was nourished, and to which one has given one’s best in return, is itself threatened. Though I am supported and stimulated by my friends, by readers around the world, by memories of my life, and by the joy that writing gives me, I have, as many of us must have, deep fears about the well-being and even survival of our world.

Such fears have been expressed at the highest intellectual and moral levels. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and a former president of the Royal Society, is not a man given to apocalyptic thinking, but in 2003 he published a book called “Our Final Hour,” subtitled “A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—on Earth and Beyond.” More recently, Pope Francis published his remarkable encyclical “Laudato Si’, �� a deep consideration not only of human-induced climate change and widespread ecological disaster but of the desperate state of the poor and the growing threats of consumerism and misuse of technology. Traditional wars have now been joined by extremism, terrorism, genocide, and, in some cases, the deliberate destruction of our human heritage, of history and culture itself.

These threats, of course, concern me, but at a distance—I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

Nonetheless, I dare to hope that, despite everything, human life and its richness of cultures will survive, even on a ravaged earth. While some see art as a bulwark of our collective memory, I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour. ♦