David A. Brewer

Counting, Resonance, and Form, A Speculative Manifesto (with Notes)

The recent quantitative turn in literary studies has reminded us of the breadth and variety of the literary field of the past. In so doing, however, it has necessarily levelled out the felt distinctions between various texts, and so risks working against the very sort of literary history that its new vistas promise: one which does justice to the workings of form across time and space. In particular, the presumptive interchangeability of texts that is required to put them into a series susceptible to quantitative analysis ignores the massively different footprint left by commercially successful (and socially canonical) texts as we move beyond their moment of initial publication. Evelina, for example, may have been just another novel of 1778 when it first appeared, but it loomed far above all other productions of that year a decade later (or anywhere beyond the metropole). Such footprints, I argue, changed the significance of their texts’ form, making it seem richer, thicker, more resonant or definitive—perhaps, for some, more stifling or oppressive—than that of their apparently similar but less successful counterparts.

The aluminizing system for the 8.4 meter diameter LBT primary mirrors

The recently commissioned system for aluminizing the 8.408 meter diameter Large Binocular Telescope mirrors has a variety of unusual features. Among them are aluminizing the mirror in the telescope, the mirror is horizon pointing when aluminized, boron nitride crucibles are used for the sources, only 28 sources are used, the sources are powered with 280 Volts at 20 kHz, high vacuum is produced with a LN2 cooled charcoal cryo-panel, an inflatable edge seal is used to isolate the rough vacuum behind the mirror from the high vacuum space, and a burst disk is mounted in the center hole to protect the mirror from overpressure. We present a description of these features. Results from aluminizing both primary mirrors are presented.