Coverage of Thursday’s internet outage in the Middle East and South Asia, caused by a ship that dragged its anchor off the coast of Egypt, has included some nifty maps. ForeignPolicy has this close-up of the Mediterranean cable network:
And The Guardian UK included this large map of the global cable network.
The source for both maps, TeleGeography, has some pretty impressive maps of the global data network for sale; unfortunately their prices are just as impressive.
Energy independence for Europe is going to be increasingly important geopolitically. The Russian South Stream pipeline was just approved in Bulgaria, which means the European Nabucco pipeline is economically unfeasible.
Russia has already used its control over the oil flowing into Europe as a political tool in Ukraine and Belarus, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t continue to do so in the future.
The situation in Kenya has apparently deteriorated into low-level ethnic warfare. This map from FP raises more questions than it answers:
The Kikyu (the group to which President Mwai Kibaki belongs), and the Luo (the group to which the opposition leader Raila Odinga belongs) and the Kalenjin (who support Odinga as well) don’t live near each other. So where is the fighting going on? So often, these conflicts are fueled by the desire to control natural resources or territory, as well as ethnic or religious differences. Are those factors at play here? What about the seven other ethnic groups, and “other,” which make up 55% of the population, and appear to reside in the vast majority of the country? Are they siding with one group or the other?
Great passage from a great article, The Autumn of the Multitaskers, by Walter Kirn:
In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.
Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.
The early psychologists also described the mind in terms of hydrodynamics. I wonder what the next metaphor will be — I’m surprised that the brain as world wide web, full of ephemeral interconnections and communicades, between actors who rise and fall in influence and activity, hasn’t surfaced as a metaphor yet (not that such a metaphor would necessarily be any better than the old ones). Maybe that metaphor is not simple enough.
Update 2008-02-20: My friend Kelly pointed me at Your Brain Works Like the Internet, which shows that this metaphor is present in the wild.
You can design your own O’Reilly book covers. I couldn’t resist:
Some other gems: HTML5, X-UA-Compatible, Complete Rewrite, Crashing Servers, Turtles, Coding Drunk
The Internet Explorer team has announced a meta tag that instructs Explorer 8 to render the page as if it were a previous version of Explorer. The idea is to maintain the exact same rendering, bugs and all, of previous versions of Explorer, so that layouts designed for older renderers never change.
Conversation between music nerds, overheard, 2037:
A: “What kinda music do you like?”
B: “Oh, mostly Folkwave and Waltzcore these days. I used to be into Dark Country, but then it got dumb.”
A: “Yeah, me too. I like a little Punk-Hop and Crackabilly, but you know, the scene is so tired.”
B: “When did this Soft Metal thing start getting popular again? It’s so, like, 2033.”
A: “That and Polkabilly. Nerds.”
B: “Laaame.”
This poster from Reporters Without Borders is exactly the message that the Bush administration needed to get a few years ago:
The colored regions even match the real Kurdish (white), Sunni (blue) and Shiite (red) regions pretty well:
or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the XMLHTTPRequest…
This is the first part of what will become an ongoing series.
If you’ve built a website in the last few years, most likely you’ve adopted an architecture similar to Model-View-Controller, or MVC. If not, well, either your website is terribly simple, you haven’t had to modify it yet, or your code is spaghetti and you should be fired. Just kidding. (Or maybe you’ve come up with an even better architecture, in which case you should share your insights with us mere mortals.)
In MVC architecture, the model reads and writes data to and from a back-end data-store, and organizes the relational data in a nice, hierarchical fashion to be used by the controller. The view accepts input from the controller and generates output HTML, XML, RSS, JavaScript, SVG, PDF, or whatever you want to send to the user’s browser. And the controller accepts browser input, figures out what to query the model for, and picks which view to use and what data to send it.
