Networks& Maps

Some maps I like from an interesting talk by Matt Jones...

 

http://www.cix.co.uk/~mhayhurst/jdhayhurst/pneumatic/book1.html

This is a map of the pneumatic tube network for sending post around Paris (image source). It started in the 1880s. I think there were 40 or 50 offices at its peak.

These are the tubes that went down the pipe (image source; the same site as before). The capsule would go down the pipe to an office, and someone would lift it out and put it in the pipe to the next office, and so on. In 1931, they introduced conductive bands that went around the tube, encoding the destination address electronically. That way, capsules could be routed automatically.

Another network I like. This is the London hydraulic power network (source), which formed in 1877 and peaked in 1939. It was started by the Wharves and Warehouses Steam Power and Hydraulic Pressure Company, in 1871 (then the London Hydraulic Power Company).

Any time somebody needed mechanical power, they could tap into the network. It powered lifts, carrying packets around stores, that kind of thing. It opened the curtain at the Royal Opera House.

What happened to this network: The pipes were sold to Mercury, if you remember them, in 1985, and Cable & Wireless bought them later. So they’re full of optic fibres now. That’s a great part of the story.

This is another network, the metabolic cycle. You can explore this image online.

It’s a map of all the biochemical reactions of earth. I have no idea what it means, like how to read it. Some people memorise parts of it; I just love looking at it.

In the centre – that circle right in the middle – is what’s called the Krebs cycle. This is a fossil of the whole cycle. Out of it comes fats, sugars and amino acids. If an organism can’t do all of this cycle, it has to eat something that does. Everything must participate in the whole of the Krebs. We’re going to zoom in on the bottom left of that circle.

This is tile F6 (zoom in to F6 for the source). There’s citrate there. You can see ATP, which carries energy around the body, in a few places.

This is what I love about the cycle: It’s a closed cycle. It’s the engine of life. Every ecosystem must complete this cycle to keep going. When we look at animals and plants, we start thinking things like “oh, they have to eat something” and “they turn that into muscle and energy” so we have input and outputs. But here, it’s self-complete. There is no input but sunlight. It eats and transforms itself. It’s just an instantiation ofConway’s Game of Life turning over and over. (I wax lyrical about the metabolic cycle.)

It’s like the combustion engine: Sunlight (or petrol) in, everything else out. Life eats life. It just perpetuates. And each step of the cycle – between the bodies of life – is mediated by a chemical.

And citrate, that’s lemons, right. The Krebs cycle, this fossil of metabolism, is also called the citric acid cycle because it’s mediated by that chemical. When you taste a lemon, you’re looking end-on at the very centre of the ecosystem. You looking end on at the total interconnectedness of present-day life on Earth.