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Monday, January 23, 2006
And 99% of the remaining 1% have yet to be appreciated 
| | Vint Cerf: I believe that 99 percent of the Internet's applications have yet to be invented. |
Dept. of Confusion
You know, like disco
| | Check out the cellcos. They're already doing something very similar by hardwiring specific content sources into their services instead of figuring out a way to come up with the best overall Internet experience on their handsets where the user chooses the content. For some reason, they all think they're running a cable TV network. When are they going to realize that the Internet isn't cable TV? The old Cable TV model is dead. Hasn't anybody noticed how many of the major cable channels are making their content available through their Web sites? |
Preserving the bleed-off valve on a few billion libidos
Suicidal hills
| | This morning Doc asked about the geologic setting of a hill off Highway 101 just south of Gilroy, CA. According to the topo maps I consulted it’s called Lomerias Muertas (something died - my Spanish is rusty; Google’s translator is, too) and the southeast end of the uplift (near Hollister) is called the Flint Hills. I don’t personally have any detailed knowledge of the geology there (wrong side of the San Andreas in that region), but looking at the Santa Cruz 1:250,000 geologic map it appears to be constituted primarily of Pliocene marine rocks (probably not real strong stuff) at the northwest end and Pliocene and Pleistocene nonmarine rocks further south. These are all fairly young (geologically) and presumably are only weakly lithified - making them prime candidates for landsliding. It looks like someone teaching geology at Humboldt State likes Doc’s mountain, too - they’re using it as a teaching example in a class on using maps and airphotos to interpret geomorphology. Quite a few useful links there, including USGS orthophotos, DEMs and oblique airphotos (old B&W ones from CDMG Bulletin 158 on the Evolution of the California Landscape). I’ve also taken the initiative to overlay a portion of the geologic map (not real high resolution) in Google Earth - use the transparency slider bar to get the best effect. |
| | Looking at that overlay map, I'm guessing (without the key) that Pml is Pliocene marine layer, or someting like that. I'm just wondering why the obvious slumps and slides here aren't Qls, the customary label for Quarternary landslide. |
Well, it's youngest.
The genealogy web
| | Anyway, I was unsure about the Searls family history in respect to Eaton County. I remembered something about St. Joseph, which is a town currently not in Eaton County. But I also remembered something about Charlotte. And that there were many spellings of "Searls", including "Sarles". So I looked that up, and came up with Creation of Eaton County, which contains this: |
| | The first birth of a white child in the east part of the county was probably that of Phoebe K. Sarles, daughter of Samuel Sarles, a pioneer of Charlotte. She was born August 7, 1836, and became the wife of Jacob W. Rogers. Her death occurred may 28, 1875. |
| | It frequently occurred that settlers moving into one part of a township would live for years without knowing that there was any other family in another part. Sometimes their introduction to their neighbors came about through the straying of cattle in the woods. This was the experience of Samuel Sarles, of Sarles street, two miles northeast of the courthouse, and William Wall, five miles east of him, both in the town of Eaton. It is said that it was two years before they learned of each other's presence. |
| | Samuel Sarles (by whatever spelling), I recall, was the brother of Allen Searls, my direct ancestor (father of my grandfather, George Washington Searls, or Searles, born in Syracuse, NY, where there were also many Searls, or Searles, or Sarles, at a home on State Street). Both were sons of Samuell Searls, who also shows up as Samuel Sarles in this 1790 census of Montgomery County, NY. Which was then a big county that has since fractioned into many smaller ones. |
Cartoonists: the original A list
The anti-cell sell smell
| | I've been hearing more lately about cell phone use and cancer risk. (Mostly by email from concerned individuals.) |
| | Interesting. Look up cell phone cancer on Google, and you get a page full of legitimate results that amount to "no clear connection", while all the "Sponsored Links" on the right appeal to the paranoid. |
| | So the one clear connection, among all results posted, is between advertising and bullshit. |
| | By the way, the power radiated by a cell phone, even right next to one's brain — runs to fractions of a watt. Significant given proximity, but... |
| | On the other hand, effective power radiated by UHF TV stations (a lower value multiplied by a high-gain transmitting antenna) runs up to 5 million watts. While maximum signal strengh is concentrated in the horizontal plane, or "beam-tilted" slightly downward toward viewing populations from antennas on the tops of towers, buildings or mountains (and therefore not next to your head), there is scholarly work suggesting a connection between proximity to transmitters and cancer rates in children. This study, for example. |
| | I'm not sure if radiation will be significantly lower once every TV station moves to a new digital signal on a UHF channel. (The old "branded" VHF channels — 2 to 12 — are due to be evacuated by 2009, so those lower frequencies can be re-allocated to other uses.) The maximum power of HDTV stations runs under a million watts. But with all stations on the UHF band... I'm not sure what that will do. |
Peer age
| | One of the things that bothers me about this argument is that Bell South and Verizon, AREN'T EVEN TEIR 1 internet providers. That means their connectivity is not relevant to the running of the internet as a whole. They aren't doing any of the real internet traffic heavy lifting (OC-192, DWDM carrier to carrier type stuff). Take a handy look at this list of backbone providers: |
| | These are the companies who's peering (traffic exchange agreements) in the US drive the internet. When Verizon, or Bell South say they are going to meter access, they mean meter / degrade it to their end points, i.e... the customers who are already paying for DSL service. Which in fact means that the pipe has ALREADY been paid for. I can't stress this enough: The only traffic that Bell South and Verizon carry from Google, Yahoo, et all... IS TRAFFIC THAT IS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED BY PAYING CUSTOMERS. |
| | Frankly AT&T / SBC is the only one that we need to be concerned about on this list, however, peering with AT&T is such a nightmare to pure traffic players, they might be content not having to deal with them. |
| | This is a "pipes" dream from BellSouth. They assert that Google, Yahoo et al, "deliver" their goods over BellSouth's pipes, and thus must pay. |
| | Of course, as everyone not a Telco knows, things are not delivered to Internet customers, they are *requested* by the customer who pays for that service from BellSouth (substitute your Telco of choice, we have a microcosm of this debacle in NZ at present). Google, or any other website, server, etc. is irrelevant, they make their own arrangements independent of other users of the Internet. |
| | It is this decoupling, and the autonomous networks structure of the Internet that is one of its critical advantages. If the customer wants better performance, they pay for it. |
| | How was Bellsouth proposing to impair the performance of Yahoo! vs Google anyway? Kneecapping packets as they entered Bellsouth's portion of the Internet? |
| | As for that analyst, I agree with your assessment, after all the more bandwidth consuming applications Google and Yahoo! create, the better reason BellSouth's *actual* customers will have to buy/pay more. You'd almost expect BellSouth to encourage producers, but with so much going wrong for the incumbents, you could almost feel sorry for them, almost. |
Doodling
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