Calculus and Some Jackass Monk

Everybody knows that Isaac Newton invented calculus in the late seventeenth century after an apple fell on his noggin.  The man also invented the cat door because his damn cat wouldn't shut up about wanting to be let out, but that's not important right now.  Okay, to be fair, not everyone thinks Newton invented calculus, some rather give that claim to a German fella by the name of Gottfried Leibniz who was obsessive compulsive about mathematical symbols.  All right, to be fair neither one of these jack offs were truly the inventor of calculus, but rather, just as with all of science, were the ones who took the next step from the work of numerous people before them.  However, we can all straight up agree that calculus is definitely an invention of the modern era, or at least that's what everyone thought until 1915 when mathematicians and physicists discovered documents proving that Archimedes had come up with a lot of it some 1,900 years before Newton and Leibniz were even born.  

Archimedes was a Greek scholar who lived in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily around 240 BC.  Generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the ancient world, Archimedes was the first recorded person to come up with not only many of the modern mathematical concepts we today take for granted, but also for using said math to invent a whole bunch of really cool stuff.  All of this is rather unimportant for the current story, but it’s worth looking up if you have the time.  Anyways, unfortunately for Archimedes, and really the whole world for that matter, the Romans invaded Syracuse in 212 BC and straight up murdered his ass.  The soldiers had been ordered to spare his life, but you know how it is once people get a murder boner.  That might've been the end of everything, but luckily Archimedes was a prolific writer.  Throughout his lifetime he had written down copies of all of his work, including his calculus theories, and sent them to the Great Library of Alexandria, repository of all that was worth knowing in the ancient western world.  There, Archimedes’ works were safe until the library was burned down by the Romans in 275 AD.        

It was at this time that the Romans kind of became the good guys, because in the years between murdering the greatest genius of his day and burning down the greatest center of knowledge in the world they did manage to make copies of Archimedes' work which ended up in the city of Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire.  There, none other than the architect of the Hagia Sophia, that big ass church in the middle of Istanbul, combined all of Archmides' theories on calculus into a single volume called the Archimedes Palimpsest.  This volume was copied by scholars numerous times over the next several centuries with the final copy being created in 950 AD.  Unfortunately, after that period the whole idea of book learning kind of fell out of favor, even in the Byzantine Empire, and the last copy was lost amongst the numerous piles of old manuscripts in Constantinople's library.  

In 1204 AD, a group of Crusading knights got a little side tracked from their vows to save the Holy Land and instead sacked the city of Constantinople, burning many of its buildings, including its library, to the ground.  Fortunately, there is an awful lot of luck in this story, some of the documents, including the Palimpsest, were snuck out of the city during the chaos.  They traveled around for a time before finally finding their way to an Eastern Orthodox Christian monastery in Jerusalem in 1224.  Unfortunately, the monks being in need of parchment, unbound the Palimpsest, scraped and washed its pages, folded them lengthwise, and used them to make a prayer book.  The prayer book stayed in the general area of Jerusalem until around 1840, when given its age, it was brought back to the city of Constantinople, which by then had been renamed Istanbul.

It was here soon after that a German biblical scholar noticed that the prayer book had a whole bunch of faded mathematical notations in it.  Thinking it was rather cool, he ripped a page out and took it home with him, as one does with really old books.  This page got passed around amongst various scholarly circles for a time until it caught the notice of Europe's foremost Archimedes expert around 1905, which was probably the most exciting thing you can imagine happening if you are a foremost Archimedes expert in the world.  Anyways, this expert soon after traveled to Istanbul and confirmed that indeed, one of the great lost works of the ancient world had been found again.  After years of study he published a transcript of Archimedes' work in 1910.  However, being in Danish, nobody read it until 1915 when it was translated into English.  As for the prayer book itself, it was lost during the Greco-Turkish War of 1922, not turning up again until 1970 when the daughter of a French businessman found it in her dead father's cellar.  By that time the book was badly damaged by mold, and several pages were covered by forged evangelical portraits meant to increase its value as a fucking prayer book.  It was later sold to a private collector in America in 1998.    

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ArPalimTypPage.jpg  

The Savior of the World

In 1981, Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States, an achievement he celebrated by launching a massive dick wagging campaign pointed directly at the Soviet Union.  Reagan’s goal was to convince the Soviets that he was an insane man, who much like the cowboys he had once played in shitty movies, was more than willing to shoot first and ask questions later.  Soon after taking office, he launched a major expansion of the U.S. military, the objective being to force the Soviets, who were rather strapped for cash at the time, to do the same.  To further antagonize the bear, Reagan also began launching what he not very cleverly called Psychological Operations, wherein U.S. Navy vessels performed clandestine missions near Soviet waters and U.S. bombers flew directly towards Soviet airspace on a weekly basis, only peeling off at the last minute.  The Soviet leadership, being a bunch of paranoid old men, many of whom were nuttier than a pile of squirrel shit, of course freaked the fuck out.  The past three U.S. presidents had largely worked to avoid nuclear war at all cost.  The Soviets had no idea what to do with a man who seemed ready to hit the big red nuclear button. 

By the time 1983 rolled around, things had escalated pretty badly and the whole world was beginning to believe that it was just a matter of time before mushroom clouds started sprouting.  In March of that year, Reagan declared that the Soviet Union was an evil empire that needed to be thrown in the ash heap of history.  In April, he assembled a powerful naval armada in the North Pacific and had U.S. jets fly over a Soviet island.  The Soviet's retaliated by doing a similar flyover of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.  In early September, the Soviets shot down a civilian passenger plane that flew into their airspace.  Convinced it was a spy plane, the disaster killed all 269 people aboard, including 61 Americans and a U.S. Congressman.  The rhetoric from Reagan only worsened following the incident, and the Soviet leadership prepared itself for what it thought was an inevitable nuclear assault.

On the night of September 26, 1983, Soviet early warning satellites picked up a nuclear launch from a U.S. missile silo in North Dakota.  The long feared war had at last begun.  Deep in an underground bunker near Moscow, the monitoring of the early warning satellites that night was being done by Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov, a 44 year old father of two who had served in said bunker since it had been built eleven years prior.  Stanislav's orders regarding such an event were simple and clear.  If a missile launch was detected, he was to inform his superiors immediately so that retaliatory strikes could be launched, assuring that neither side would escape unscathed.  Time was of the essence.  From the time of detection there was only 23 minutes before the missiles would hit.  All Stanislav had to do was pick up a phone, but he didn't.  Something didn't feel right.  

Throughout the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and United States operated under a doctrine of Assured Destruction, or better stated as: if you fuck me then I'll fuck you too.  For Stanislav, the launching of only one missile didn't make any sense.  Why would the Americans only launch one?  Logic dictated that if they were going to attack, then hundreds if not thousands of missiles would be coming the Soviet’s way, angling to destroy as much as possible before any retaliatory strikes could be launched.  While Stanislav was sitting around with his thumb up his ass, the satellites picked up four more launches from North Dakota.  He had to make a decision.  The launches couldn't be verified until they were within radar range, and by then they would only be minutes away.  Stanislav was a soldier.  He knew his duty.  He didn't do it.  He decided it had to be a computer error.  He sat and waited, 23 minutes, for the world to end.  

The world of course didn't end on that day.  It was later discovered that the satellites had detected the reflection of sunlight off of some clouds.  After no nuclear bombs hit, Stanislav drank a bottle a vodka, slept 28 hours, and went back to work.  While he was at first praised by his superiors for his quick thinking, he was later reprimanded for failing to fill out the proper paperwork during the incident.  Stanislav was ordered never to speak of it.  He told nobody about it, not even his wife.  He was reassigned to a less sensitive post and took early retirement a year later.  He soon after suffered a nervous breakdown, because holy hell how could he not.  Stanislav's actions remained unknown to the world until his superior officer put it in his memoirs which were published in 1998.  In 2004, some bullshit organization gave him a bullshit award and $1,000 in thanks for not destroying the world.  He died quietly in 2017, an event not reported until six months after the fact.     

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stanislav_Yevgrafovich_Petrov.webp       

The Swarm

Imagine yourself as a farmer on the Great Plains in 1874.  It's the early summer and your fields are filled with your green crops waving gently in the wind.  To the west, where you can just catch a glimpse of the distant Rocky Mountains, you notice what appears to be a great cloud of white vapor moving its way towards you.  As it gets closer it becomes clearer.  Trillions of individuals, sunlight flashing off their wings.  Before you can even utter what the fuck they're on you.  Trillions of hungry mouths.  Where once stood your beautiful fields there is now nothing but bare dirt.  They swarm over everything.  Consuming, gnawing, and destroying.  The trees are all stripped bare.  You and your family try to save the vegetable garden by throwing blankets over it, but the mass just consumes both the blankets and vegetables.  Then they start to eat the clothes off your back.  Leather harnesses, the wool on sheep, pitchfork handles, and even paint.  All is sucked into the millions of unquenchable maws.  They start to pile up, more than a foot deep in some places.  You and your family retreat into the house.  They follow, battering themselves against the windows, crawling in through every nook and cranny.  They're unstoppable.  It lasts for days.  When the skies finally clear you emerge to find the world of green transformed into grays and browns, the bare ground littered with their dead.  Are you in hell?  No, just a victim of the 1874 Rocky Mountain Locust Swarm.

A locust in reality is just a grasshopper.  A grasshopper which, under the right conditions, multiplies by the millions, spreading across vast areas, destroying all in its path.  Emerging periodically from the high mountain valleys of Montana and Wyoming, the Rocky Mountain Locust was once one of the most virulent of its breed.  Throughout recorded history the swarms had periodically appeared across the Great Plains, usually every five to ten years.  A series of wet years and mild winters would be followed by drought and the monsters would appear, blown eastward by the wind.  Settlers first began coming to the Great Plains in the 1860’s.  Under a government promise of free land, they emigrated en masse, cutting the vast grasslands with the plow.  The locusts were nothing new.  Swarms swept across various areas, but nothing compared to the monster that was unleashed in 1874, a force of nature the size of California which swept across the Great Plains like a battering ram of shit.

As the earliest reports of the devastation moved east, farmers in the swarm’s path began to gird themselves for battle.  Their efforts were born of a mad desperation.  Some of the more clever people rigged up vacuums or other devices to try and kill as many as possible.  Others dug long trenches and started fires in hopes that the smoke would keep them at bay.  Others just fired shotguns into the air or swung boards wildly about their heads.  The vacuums clogged, the fires were smothered, and the rest made about as big of a dent as one would expect.  By the fall, the locusts had crossed Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas.  Farmers were forced to pull up stakes or face starvation.   The state of Kansas lost a third of its population.  The U.S. Army was ordered in to help those who remained by delivering food and blankets.  The livestock survived by eating dead locusts, though it made the animals sick and ruined their meat.  Even some of the people ate the locusts, fried and stewed, sprinkled with pepper and salt.  The locusts came again the next year, and the year after that.  Eggs laid by the original swarm across the Great Plains hatched, releasing a terror that increasingly moved its way eastward each year.  

Partial salvation from this terrible plague came from the Mennonites, a religious group that had been expelled from Russia for being a cult.  With them they brought seeds from the wheat they had grown back home in Russia.  At the time, most of the Great Plains were planted with corn and spring wheat, which is wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.  The Mennonites brought with them winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and harvested in the summer, before the locusts descended from the Rockies.  Within only a few years the farmers of the Great Plains en masse switched to winter wheat. 

Salvation also came from the state governments.  Bounties were put on locusts killed during the spring time, before their numbers could become overwhelming, with payouts made by the bushel.  By 1878, the last remnants of the Great Swarm of 1874 were gone.  That same year, the U.S. government created a special branch to study the phenomenon.  It proved unneeded.  The Rocky Mountain Locust never appeared in such numbers again.  Farmers moved up into the high valleys of Montana and Wyoming, farming the isolated sanctuary habitats where the swarms had their starts.  A few small swarms appeared here and there, but by the start of the twentieth century the Rocky Mountain Locust was extinct. 

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locust_Plague_of_1874#/media/File:Kansas_farmers_versus_grasshoppers_carte_de_visite_photograph.jpg