23 SEP 2023 by ideonexus
When Isolation and Disconnection are Desirable
In his article on Scuttlebutt, Bogost asks, “What if isolation and disconnection could actually be desirable conditions for a computer network?†He says this in the context of describing how Dominic Tarr, the creator of Scuttlebutt, lives largely offline in a sailboat in New Zealand, but it makes me think of the not-yet-wireless phone in my house growing up. Before I got older and started carrying around a heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread, it worked like this: You t...31 JUL 2014 by ideonexus
Memory Systems as a Shared Resource
This inspired them to depart from testing memory for lists of words and events, and to explore the amount of rich, in-depth information remembered by couples about experienced events. They found these social exchanges led to clear collaborative memory benefits, which could take three forms: “New information” such as finally snatching an elusive name of a musical thanks to a chain of prompts between the two parties. Richer, more vivid descriptions of events including sensory information. ...24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
All Human Acheivement is the Result of Networking
Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor—through trade and specialization—that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity, and knowledge base of the species. We can see this in all sorts of phenomena: the correlation between technology and connected population size in Pacific islands; the collapse of technology in people who became isolated, like n...Matt Ridley observes that isolated societies collapse, while networked societies succeed.
18 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Overview of Optical Networks
Optical fibers can transmit digitized light signals over long distances because of the purity of glass fiber combined with improved electronics technology. With some acceptable transmission loss, low interference, and high-bandwidth potential, an optical fiber is almost an ideal transmission medium. Optical communication systems may sometimes be combined with electrical components. In such systems, electrical data bits are converted into light, using a certain wavelength; when the transmissio...Agile, but requires converting light to electronic signals and vice versa.