As I promote wireless broadband in my own valley and cheer on Nick in his "hilly, wooded, region of New England", I am reminded of the admonition Nicholas Negroponte offered us some 25 years ago regarding the upside down/inside out nature of our communications networks and their "inevitable" inversion.
Essentially, he pointed out that technological and usage trends in networking would cause that which currently went over the airwaves (primarily broadcast TV and Radio?) to go over hardwired networks and that which went over hard lines (primarily telephony and sensor networks?) to move to wireless. I think his reasoning was mostly about scale-free networking (without invoking the term), reserving the common aether for shorter range, more ad-hoc communication (e.g. bluetooth links amongst your fitness band, headphones, mobile device, and laptop) while creating more private sub-aethers (fiber lines as waveguides for modulated EM) for the higher bandwidth, longer-reach stuff. In spite of the recent thread here "debunking" Scale Free networks being natural (or was it inevitable, or pervasive?), I do believe that a scale-free packing is an optimal use of a *conserved* 2 or 3 D space to move 1 or 2D objects (atoms or bits or water droplets or people or cars or cargo ships or airlines. - Steve ============================================================ 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-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
