Stephenson:Neal:Snow Crash:Raven

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A Snow Crash page for Raven

Stephensonia

A Possible Raven
Peter Steele, singer
Type O Negative *Ned Land -- Jules Vernes' harpooner -- is not as cool as Raven. Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel that way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this is liberating. He no longer has to worry about trying to be the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

In Cryptonomicon Lawrence Waterhouse imagines Raven-like abilities for his bunkmate ... Waterhouse does not stop to estimate the probability that he, who needs a place to live, should happen along at the exact moment that a room has become available. Cryptanalysts wait for lucky breaks, then exploit them. After the departing soldier has disappeared round the corner, he knocks on the door and introduces himself to the lady. Mrs. McTeague says (to the extent Waterhouse can penetrate her accent) that she likes his looks. She sounds distinctly astonished. It seems clear that the improbability of Waterhouse's having happened upon this vacant room is nothing compared to the improbability of having his looks liked by Mrs. McTeague. Thus, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse joins a small elite group of young men (four in all) whose looks Mrs. McTeague likes. They sleep, two to a room, in the bedrooms where Mrs. McTeague's offspring grew from the brightest and most beautiful children ever born into the finest adults who walk the earth except for the King of England, the General, and Lord Mountbatten. Waterhouse's new roommate is out of town just now, but by glancing over his personal effects, Waterhouse estimates that he is paddling a black kayak from Australia to Yokosuka Naval Base, where he will slip on board a battleship and silently kill its entire crew with his bare hands before doing an Olympic-qualifying dive into the bay, punching out a few sharks, climbing back into his kayak and paddling back to Australia for a beer. The next morning, at breakfast, he meets the fellows in the next room: a redheaded British naval officer who shows all the earmarks of working at Central Bureau, and a fellow named Hale, whose nationality cannot be pegged because he's not in uniform and he's too hung over to speak. ...*

Authored entries

Snow Crash's Raven

Dmitri "Raven" Ravinoff is a character from Snow Crash.

Raven is a huge guy of tribal heritage, and is considered one of the most dangerous persons in the world, since he carries an atomic bomb in his motorbike's sidecar. The bomb is rigged to his brain, so that it will go off if anything bad happens to him.

He has a descriptive tattoo on his forehead. Raven is involved in a brief dalliance with YT. He is the archetype for a Bad Guy.

Wikipedia: Obsidian

Obsidian is a type of naturally occurring glass, produced from volcanoes when the right kind of lava cools rapidly, e.g., by flowing into a body of water . It consists mainly of SiO2 (silicon dioxide), 70% or more. Obsidian is mineral-like, but not a true mineral because it is not crystalline . It is otherwise very similar in composition to granite and rhyolite. It is sometimes classified instead as a mineraloid.

The color of obsidian varies depending on the presence of impurities. Iron and magnesium typically give the obsidian a dark green to black color. The inclusion of small, white, radially clustered crystals of cristobalite in the black glass produce a blotchy or snowflake pattern (snowflake obsidian). It may contain patterns of air bubbles remaining from the lava flow, aligned along layers created as the molten rock was flowing before being cooled. These bubbles can produce interesting effects such as a golden (sheen obsidian) or rainbow sheen (rainbow obsidian). Small nuggets of obsidian that have been naturally rounded and smoothed by wind and water are called "Apache tears." Obsidian is relatively soft with a typical hardness of 5 to 5.5. Its specific gravity is approximately 2.6.

Obsidian is commonly used for ornamental purposes, for it possesses the peculiar property of presenting a different appearance according to the manner in which it is cut. When cut in one direction it is of a beautiful jetty black; when cut across another direction it is glistening gray.

Obsidian was highly valued in certain Stone Age cultures because, like flint, it can be fractured to produce sharp blades or arrow heads. Like all glass and some other types of naturally occurring rocks, obsidian breaks with a characteristic conchoidal fracture. It may also have been polished to create early mirrors.

In Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican obsidian use was extensive and sophisticated with carved and worked obsidian for tools, as well as for decorative objects. The ancient Mesoamericans also made a type of sword with obsidian blades mounted in a wooden body.

Obsidian is currently used in cardiac surgery, as well-crafted obsidian blades have a cutting edge much sharper than high-quality steel surgical scapels. It produces a cleaner cut and less tissue trauma, which translates to faster healing and less scar tissue.

Wikipedia:Atlatl aka Spearthrower

The atlatl is a weapon that uses leverage to achieve greater speed in spear-throwing. It consists of a shaft with a hook, in which the butt of the spear rests. It is held near the far end from the cup, and the spear is thrown by action of upper arm and wrist. Some later improvements on the original design included loops of thong to fit the fingers.

Wooden spears were known at least since the Middle Palaeolithic (Schöningen, Torralba, Clacton-on-Sea and Kalambo Falls). They could be used up to distances of about 15 m with enough power to hurt or kill an animal. The atlatl is believed to have been in use since the Upper Palaeolithic (late Solutrean, ca. 18,000-16,000 BCE). Most stratified European finds come from the Magdalenian (late upper Palaeolithic). In this period, elaborate pieces, often in the form of animals, are common. With a spearthrower, effective distances of up to 30 m could be reached.

In Europe, the atlatl was replaced by the bow and arrow in the Epi-Palaeolithic.

The atlatl has been used by early Native Americans as well. It seems to have been introduced during the immigration across the Bering Land Bridge, a wide section of exposed seabed that connected Asia and North America during the last Ice Age. The word atlatl is derived from a Nahuatl (the Aztec language) word for spearthrower. The Aztecs used spearthrowers in warfare. Inuit and the tribes of the Northwest Coast utilized them in historical times as well. Complete wooden spearthrowers have been found on dry sites in the western USA, and as waterlogged environments in Florida and Washington State.

The people of New Guinea and Australian Aborigines used spearthrowers as well. The common name on Australia is given as woomera.

In modern times, some people have resurrected the spearthrower for WikiPedia:sports, throwing either for distance and/or for accuracy. Throws of almost 260 m (850 ft.) have been recorded. There are numerous tournaments, with spears and spearthrowers built with both ancient and with modern materials.

Wikipedia: Aleut

The Aleuts (self-denomination: Unangan) are the indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands of WikiPedia:Alaska.

The homeland of the Aleuts includes the Aleutian Islands, the WikiPedia:Pribilof Islands, the WikiPedia:Shumagin Islands, and the far western part of the WikiPedia:Alaska Peninsula.

Aleuts constructed barabaras, partially underground houses that functioned well, as Lillie McGarvey, a 20th-century Aleut leader, wrote “keeping occupants dry from the frequent rains, warm at all times, and snugly sheltered from the high winds peculiar to the area”.

Hunting, weapon-making, boat building, and weaving are some of the traditional arts of the Aleuts. 19th-century craftsmen were famed for their ornate wooden hunting hats, which feature elaborate and colorful designs and may be trimmed with sea lion whiskers, feathers, and ivory. Aleut seamstresses created finely stitched waterproof parkas from seal gut, and some women still master the skill of weaving fine baskets from rye and beach grass.

After the arrival of missionaries in the late 18th century, many Aleuts became Christians by joining the Russian Orthodox Church. One of the earliest Christian martyrs in North America was Saint Peter the Aleut, who was killed in San Francisco, California in 1815 because he would not abandon his faith.

It has been stated that before the advent of the Russians there were 25,000 Aleuts on the archipelago, but that the barbarities of the traders and foreign diseases eventually reduced the population to one-tenth of this number. Further declines led to a 1910 WikiPedia:Census count of 1491 Aleuts.

In 1942 Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska Islands in the western Aleutians, and later transported captive Attu Islanders to Hokkaido, where they were held as POWs. Hundreds more Aleuts from the western chain and the Pribilofs were evacuated by the United States government during World War II and placed in internment camps in southeast Alaska, where many died. The Aleut Restitution Act of 1988 was an attempt by United States Congress to compensate the survivors.

The Aleut language is in the family called Eskimo-Aleut languages. It is related to the Inuit and Yupik languages spoken by the Eskimo. It has no known wider affiliation, but supporters of the Nostratic hypothesis sometimes include it as Nostratic.

External Links

Literature

D. Garrod, Palaeolithic spear throwers. Proc. Prehist. Soc. 21, 1955, 21-35.
U. Stodiek, Zur Technik der jungpaläolithischen Speerschleuder (Tübingen 1993).