Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
Hi Steve, So that's pretty adventurous in 1991 -- as an Net participant since December 1995, after doing AOL and Prodigy and local bulletin boards, I appreciate the fabulous progress since, which is accelerating, from what I see every day on summaries from Phys.org Newsletter -- no genius left behind -- Here's one of my longer toxicity alerts, tossed into the global fray last night: Table 5.2 is the key chart -- ADH1 enzyme at high levels in 20 tissues in body and fetus makes methanol into formaldehyde right inside cells, initiating over 20 human diseases, with full text references, WC Monte paradigm: Rich Murray 2013.03.21 http://rmforall.blogspot.com/2013/03/table-52-is-key-chart-adh1-enzyme-at.html [ See also:, http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/03/13/unlabeled-aspartame-use.aspx# 2013.03.13 292,095 visits in a week ] [ welcome to a scientific bouquet -- some tasty dishes are presented twice... ] A liter of diet drink gives the same methanol (wood alcohol) as the smoke from a pack of cigarettes, 60 mg -- methanol has a half-life in the human bloodstream of 3 hours, showing that its elimination is slow, while it reaches every part of the body and the fetus every minute. Methanol is actually less toxic than ethanol, except when it goes easily into cells that also happen to have high levels of free floating ADH1 enzyme, in 19 specific human tissues, including inner walls of blood vessels in the brain and eye, as well as in the rods and cones of the retina -- the methanol is made quickly into free floating formaldehyde inside these cells, where it naturally wrecks havoc, interfering with all biochemistry, just as in its well known uses for embalming and sterilizing medical tools. The resulting stew of formaldehyde modified proteins activates the inflammation process of the immune system, producing complex evolving pussy lesions -- brain in Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis, inner walls of blood vessels in atherosclerosis, skin fibroblasts in lupus, pancreas in diabetes 2, retina in macular degeneration, joint fibroblasts in rheumatoid arthritis... Methylation of DNA and RNA leads to cell dysfunction and death, many later cancers, and birth defects, spina bifida, autism, preterm birth, Fetal Alcohol Sydrome. Two key ATP enzymes are impaired in mitochrondria, shutting down aerobic energy metabolism, leading to reduced metabolism and anaerobic buildup of lactic acid, resulting in acidosis. [ much more... ] within the fellowship of service, Rich On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Jean-Baptiste Quéru's (accurate and complete to my study) description of the details (down to the physical layer) of what happens when you go to Google's homepage reminds me of how, roughly 22 years ago, at LANL: long-winded technical anecdote We wrote a simple PERL script to act as a daemon (a program running all the time, listening on a logical port (conventionally 80) on the network) to field this new thing called the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
Sorry for the double post, but I thought a bit more info from below the fold of essay would help: For non-technologists, this is all a black box. That is a great success of technology: all those layers of complexity are entirely hidden and people can use them without even knowing that they exist at all. snip That is also why it's so hard for technologists and non-technologists to communicate together: technologists know too much about too many layers and non-technologists know too little about too few layers to be able to establish effective direct communication. snip That is why the mainstream press and the general population has talked so much about Steve Jobs' death and comparatively so little about Dennis Ritchie's: Steve's influence was at a layer that most people could see, while Dennis' was much deeper. snip Finally, last but not least, that is why our patent system is broken: technology has done such an amazing job at hiding its complexity that the people regulating and running the patent system are barely even aware of the complexity of what they're regulating and running. snip On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: From HN, a pointer to a delightfully clever essay that would be loved by Nick and others who are often bewildered by the hacker alphabet soup of acronyms and buzz words. Well, what _does_ happen when you got to a web page? https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5408597 This has the possibility of a new book that somehow makes it all reasonably clear. Maybe. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands anything. Even if it's true that no one understands anything, it's not a particularly useful way to approach things. It astonishes me that we as (mainly) software people who glory in abstractions even consider this insightful. *-- Russ Abbott* *_* *** Professor, Computer Science* * California State University, Los Angeles* * My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688* * Google voice: 747-*999-5105 Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/ * vita: *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach *_* On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 11:17 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Jean-Baptiste Quéru's (accurate and complete to my study) description of the details (down to the physical layer) of what happens when you go to Google's homepage reminds me of how, roughly 22 years ago, at LANL: long-winded technical anecdote We wrote a simple PERL script to act as a daemon (a program running all the time, listening on a logical port (conventionally 80) on the network) to field this new thing called the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It would then parse the request (e.g. HTTP GET SomeGoodStuff), whereupon the daemon did a directory search of the Gopher directory structure for a directory (or file) at the root named SomeGoodStuff... assuming it was a *directory* rather than a *file* it then returned the directory listing enclosed in a UL tag and each directory or file name enclosed in LISubdirectoryOrFileName/LI tag, sending that back over the network to whomever so requested it. If it were a *file*, it would return the contents of the file. I think this was before MIME types, so the requesting client was left to decide what to do with the contents based on some assumptions about the file extension (.txt, .html, .jpg, etc.) and/or the Magic Numberhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_%28programming%29#Magic_numbers_in_files (a simple signature in the first several bytes of the file). When we redirected the Directory Name Services (DNS) server for www.lanl.gov and put it up for public access, we alerted Tim Berner's Lee at CERN and we became the 50th listing on his homepagehttp://info.cern.ch/of other World Wide Web servers. It wasn't long after that that the Web exploded, growing (geometrically?) to rapidly to follow, both in number and complexity of servers and in content type. Our own Chad Kieffer here on this list, entered the picture as a freshly minted Graphic Designer interning at LANL. I helped to teach him to hand cut HTML along with a half-dozen other designers there, and within a year, they outstripped my knowledge of all things Web, along with hundreds of individuals around LANL learning/creating on their own. When we retired that PERL Script in favor of an early Apache (a Patchy) server with dedicated (including the Gopher branch) content, I was already losing track of the details that Queru (this has to be a taken name or a psuedonymn doesn't it?) outlines here, and I was right smack in the center of that vortex. As I remember it, Chad took lead on handling the LANL Science Museum's presence and half a dozen others took on equally important branches in our growing bush of nonsense. In parallel, Alan Ginsparghttp://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/%7Eginsparg/blurb/pg14Oct94.htmlwas building xxx.lanl.gov which was NOT a pornography web server, though LANL and DOE administrators were *sure* it either *was* or would be mistaken *for* such. It was an archive for scientific papers which would eventually become what everyone today knows and loves as ARXIV.orghttp://archive.org. Alan's xxx.lanl.gov may have been up fielding requests before www.lanl.gov even, it was hard to reconstruct the history later down the line. Those of us who saw the barest hint of the future knew Alan was on to something and that LANL bureaucrats would do all they could to FF it up. Several of us went to bat with the administrators to keep them off Paul's back, but he didn't need any help or protection, he was a force of nature. It has been a very short but very long 22 years! I could dig up a screenshot of one of our early pages (even find a few of them on Brewster Kahle's Wayback Machine, but they are quite ugly/clunky and I would just embarass myself). If you do go to the Wayback Machinehttp://archive.org/web/web.php, you will note that LANL was being crawled a LOT during the 2005-2006 tenure of Retired Admiral Dr. Peter G. Nanos when Doug was using his Pester Power
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands anything. snip Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble. I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web page, and shows the dirty little secret. I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology. Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats and protocols. And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does not happen without the standard formats and protocols. I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks. Can you do it? Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong. But most folks understand contracts, and that leads into protocols formats. I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy. Registrars, Name Servers, TLD hierarchy. His questions kept leading deeper into details, and made it all impossible. My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in tears. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to minuses) :P On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands anything. snip Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble. I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web page, and shows the dirty little secret. I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology. Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats and protocols. And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does not happen without the standard formats and protocols. I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks. Can you do it? Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong. But most folks understand contracts, and that leads into protocols formats. I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy. Registrars, Name Servers, TLD hierarchy. His questions kept leading deeper into details, and made it all impossible. My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in tears. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
The standard example is that most people can drive a car even though they don't understand how internal combustion engines work -- and they would even if the car were powered by an electric motor. I have no problem with putting that in terms of contracts: turn the steering wheel and the car wheels turn. One doesn't have to know how power steering works. *-- Russ Abbott* *_* *** Professor, Computer Science* * California State University, Los Angeles* * My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688* * Google voice: 747-*999-5105 Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/ * vita: *sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ CS Wiki http://cs.calstatela.edu/wiki/ and the courses I teach *_* On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.comwrote: where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to minuses) :P On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.netwrote: On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands anything. snip Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble. I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web page, and shows the dirty little secret. I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology. Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats and protocols. And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does not happen without the standard formats and protocols. I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks. Can you do it? Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong. But most folks understand contracts, and that leads into protocols formats. I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy. Registrars, Name Servers, TLD hierarchy. His questions kept leading deeper into details, and made it all impossible. My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in tears. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] You just went to the Google homepage. What actually happened?
Probably the issue pops up when turning the wheel doesn't have the desired effect. Without knowing more about how the car works all the user can say is it doesn't work, and all the mechanic can say is bring it in. Having an idea of how things are supposed to work one or two levels down can be useful when dealing with them when they don't. And knowing who to talk to, and what to say. Sure you can drive without knowing about how internal combustion works, but having an idea that gas is necessary component and when it isn't present the car won't go is also useful and could save you a headache down the road. Seems to me the more interesting question is what level of detail should we understand something like a web page or a car. We have a fairly worked out basic level of understanding needed for operating a vehicle, but even here that level of understanding is generally going down as we lock up more and more of the operational decisions in black boxes instead of requiring the human to attend to them. So the question is where do we stop this trend of not knowing, or do we just want to live in a point and click world where everything either works or no help but to go to the experts when it doesn't. --joshua On Mar 21, 2013, at 5:11 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: The standard example is that most people can drive a car even though they don't understand how internal combustion engines work -- and they would even if the car were powered by an electric motor. I have no problem with putting that in terms of contracts: turn the steering wheel and the car wheels turn. One doesn't have to know how power steering works. -- Russ Abbott _ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles My paper on how the Fed can fix the economy: ssrn.com/abstract=1977688 Google voice: 747-999-5105 Google+: plus.google.com/114865618166480775623/ vita: sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ CS Wiki and the courses I teach _ On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 3:47 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: where's the part of you beem into the google page: it instantly forms metrics about you and presents you with useful adds (as aposed to to minuses) :P On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 12:40 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: I disagree with Jean-Baptiste Query's presentation, which implies that you have to understand all levels of any process to understand the process itself. If that were true we would all have to understand quantum mechanics to understand everything. But no one understands quantum mechanics. So no one understands anything. snip Well, the point is that for non tech folks, it is a tower of babble. I like the presentation because it starts with a simple idea: view a web page, and shows the dirty little secret. I believe it should be the intro to a book that does what I think you might prefer: top down, breadth first introduction to digitology. Or in other words: modularity, and its implementation in standard formats and protocols. And no, modularity .. tho nice in program structure .. does not happen without the standard formats and protocols. I have found it hard to explain modularity to non geek folks. Can you do it? Most start with code, which as I say, is wrong. But most folks understand contracts, and that leads into protocols formats. I tried to explain DNS once to a very very smart guy. Registrars, Name Servers, TLD hierarchy. His questions kept leading deeper into details, and made it all impossible. My poor friend actually got dizzy and ended up in tears. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
