On Fri, 8 Dec 2000, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>>(RAH might have called it a geodesic political culture if he hadn't got
>>>this strange Marxist idea that politics is just an emergent property of
>>>economics :-)
>
>Just by the way, how widespread is this use of the word 'geodesic'?
Not very, I think. It seems it's RAH's specialty. It's quite poetic,
actually.
>Offhand, I'd refer to many of the things I've seen it used for here
>as 'distributed' or 'fractal'. Is 'geodesic' an accepted term of art
>for a network or protocol in which all the parts work roughly the same
>way?
Although 'geodesic' does have, through its use in general relativity, some
faint echo of 'operates purely based on local information', I think it's a
misnomer. People should rather use the term 'distributed' literally, as it's
used in computer science. That's the meaning RAH is after, not true?
Sampo Syreeni <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university
