Booty Booty

New thread in D&D about a recent Forbes article on Network Neutrality. During the discussion, various analogies were thrown around: highways, telephone networks, classified ads, etc. Forum Superstar LaFarga issued the following challenge: All analogies for computer technology suck and people need to stop using them. If you can’t explain the situation without an analogy then you don’t fucking understand it properly in the first place… When everybody in this thread can agree what the best analogy for the internet is, let me know. My response is worth archiving here: Here’s the best analogy: John Carpenter’s The Thing. No, wait, hear me out. The Internet was built by ARPA for a very clear reason: they needed a communications network that was plastic and dynamic and could still operate under sustained heavy damage. Even if you knock out one or two central servers, network traffic could still flow end-to-end. As long as the network is still coherent (that is, as long as there is some connection between the end points), then your communications network was still operational. In other words, the internet is built the way it is in order to be almost impossible to kill. The solution to this problem is IP, the internet protocol. The key to IP is that it is dumb as rocks. A packet only knows its desitnation, but it doesn’t give a damn how it gets there. It is up to the network to determine the path between endpoints, and with a sufficiently connected network, there are always tons of paths to take. The upshot is that there are no preferred paths between end users, so if you kill some paths, there are always alternates available. This is absolutely essential to the way the internet works. And its just like The Thing. The Thing contains […]

You may have heard of the ‘bomb scare‘ in Boston last night over the imminent threat of a Mooninite attack. While the situation is both hilarious and depressing, the law that the Mooninites violated is also pretty funny: (b) For the purposes of this section, the term “hoax device” shall mean any device that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such device is an infernal machine. For the purposes of this section, the term “infernal machine” shall mean any device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire or explosion, whether or not contrived to ignite or explode automatically. For the purposes of this section, the words “hoax substance” shall mean any substance that would cause a person reasonably to believe that such substance is a harmful chemical or biological agent, a poison, a harmful radioactive substance or any other substance for causing serious bodily injury, endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both. So yes, a lite brite is now an ‘infernal machine’. 9/11 changed everything. Also: 70’s haircuts.

Eh, one more combo post for the night. Click both links for video. Robotic arm rides, 5 cents (Engadget) Also via Engadget: A Tiny Robotic Hand (Technology Review) “It is the world’s smallest robotic hand, and [it] could be used to perform microsurgery,” says Chang-Jin Kim, the lead researcher at UCLA, who says the device is safe for biological applications. Since it runs on gas pressure instead of electricity, it can be used in both dry and wet environments. The “microhand” measures one millimeter across when closed into a fist. It consists of four “fingers,” each of which is made from six silicon wafers, with polymer balloons doing the work of “muscles” at the wafers’ joints.

Of course. The world goes on even when you aren’t paying attention. Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively (NYT) When a court-appointed special master last year rejected the claim of an Alabama couple that their daughter had suffered seizures after a vaccination, she explained her decision in part by referring to material from articles in Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia. The reaction from the court above her, the United States Court of Federal Claims, was direct: the materials “culled from the Internet do not — at least on their face — meet” standards of reliability. The court reversed her decision. Oddly, to cite the “pervasive, and for our purposes, disturbing series of disclaimers” concerning the site’s accuracy, the same Court of Federal Claims relied on an article called “Researching With Wikipedia” found — where else? — on Wikipedia. … More than 100 judicial rulings have relied on Wikipedia, beginning in 2004, including 13 from circuit courts of appeal, one step below the Supreme Court. (The Supreme Court thus far has never cited Wikipedia.) In doing some background research on this article, I stumbled on this metawiki page, which is worth a look.

Disinfect the core I can beat the computer about 75% of the time. I cannot imagine that completing my prelim would be any more satisfying.

I’ve been slacking off on this blog, but I have been seriously lacking inspiration recently. And that hasn’t changed. But people still visit the site, so I might as well put that to good use. My cat Gus is partially an outdoor cat, but I am afraid to just let him run wild lest someone thinks he is a stray and take him away. So I’d like to brand him in some way. The traditional method for branding a domesticated house pet is a collar, but he’s already gone through two collars, and Gus simply will not take to them. He’ll wear it for a day or two, and then sneak away and take it off and bury it or something, and I’ll never see it again. So I am wondering if it would be just entirely inhumane to make him wear a harness. For a demonstration of a cat harness, click here. Cat harnesses are designed to walk a cat, but I am neither foolish nor sadistic enough to actually try to walk Gus. Rather, I am starting to think that making Gus wear a harness is the only way I can ensure that a collar will stay on. Does this make me a horrible, evil person?

Hippocrates, 400 BCE 13. The greatest and most dangerous disease, and the one that proved fatal to the greatest number, was consumption. With many persons it commenced during the winter, and of these some were confined to bed, and others bore up on foot; the most of those died early in spring who were confined to bed; of the others, the cough left not a single person, but it became milder through the summer; during the autumn, all these were confined to bed, and many of them died, but in the greater number of cases the disease was long protracted. Most of these were suddenly attacked with these diseases, having frequent rigors, often continual and acute fevers; unseasonable, copious, and cold sweats throughout; great coldness, from which they had great difficulty in being restored to heat; the bowels variously constipated, and again immediately in a loose state, but towards the termination in all cases with violent looseness of the bowels; a determination downwards of all matters collected about the lungs; urine excessive, and not good; troublesome melting. The coughs throughout were frequent, and copious, digested, and liquid, but not brought up with much pain; and even when they had some slight pain, in all cases the purging of the matters about the lungs went on mildly. The fauces were not very irritable, nor were they troubled with any saltish humors; but there were viscid, white, liquid, frothy, and copious defluxions from the head. But by far the greatest mischief attending these and the other complaints, was the aversion to food, as has been described. For neither been described. For neither had they any relish for drink along with their food, but continued without thirst. There was heaviness of the body, disposition to coma, in most cases swelling, which ended in […]

From Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture (2006). A bigger excerpt and (hopefully) full discussion can be found here. Almost a decade ago, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling established what he calls the Dead Media Project. As his website explains, “The centralized, dinosaurian one-to-many media that roared and trampled through the twentieth century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment.” Anticipating that some of these ‘dinosaurs’ were heading to the tar pits, he constructed a shrine to “the media that have died on the barbed wire of technological change.” His collection is astounding, including relics like “the phenakistoscope, the telharmonium, the Edison wax cylinder, the stereopticon… various species of magic lantern.” Yet, history teaches us that old media never die- and they don’t even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content- the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling’s project lists falls under this category Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies. To define media, let’s turn to historian Lisa Gitelman, who offers a model of media that works on two levels: on the first, a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology. Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems. Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an even more complicated information and entertainment stratum. A medium’s content may shift (as occurred when television displaced radio as a storytelling medium, freeing radio to become the primary showcase for rock […]

Well, punk, are you? The apparent unanimous agreement with my position makes me suspicious that my argument somehow makes a strawman of Dreyfus’ position, but I can’t see it.