It's all a bunch of tubes! Underwater tubes!

A friend of mine, who's not terribly tech-savvy, and I got into a discussion the other day about the Internet. Basically, her assertion was that most if not all of the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific internet traffic was sent via satellite, not cable. She had in her lifetime seen dozens of shuttle launches and other rockets going into the sky. On the other hand, it seemed utterly inconceivable to her that we had a substantial world network of underwater cables: the distance from North America to Japan, for instance, was seven hours by flight. And she'd never heard of a significant cable-laying operation.

In some respects, her impressions aren't wrong: the water across the Pacific basin is crushingly deep, the distance is long, and the temperature and chemical composition of the deep ocean corrodes and degrades machinery. Shuttle launches are big, pretty, and expensive. In contrast, ships leave harbor every day.

But just as there's only so much bandwidth available in the US for radio, television, emergency communications, cell phones and WiFi, there's only so much bandwidth between one country and another across a satellite. Unless we were using precision lasers, in which case we could treat satellites like fiber optic cables, but the space-to-ground retargetting has never been reliably tested for commercial use, and in case no quasi-optic communication satellites are currently flying.

The military had a quasi-optic satellite constellation on the drawing board; launch of the first of five was scheduled for the second quarter of 2013; the entire constellation was supposed to have a throughput of 40GB/sec. The "Transformational Satellite Constellation," originally planned in 2003, would have handled approximately 1% of the current output of a medium-sized US city, at a budget of $14 billion dollars.

In contrast, the cable management company Global Marines Systems this week began work to lay a new fiberoptic cable between the US and the UK. The estimated cost of the project is $300 million, a bargain compared to the satellites, and at 10TB/s, 3000 times the communications density, it's also cash-efficient.

This particular cable won't be available to most of us, though; it's strictly for financial operations between Wall Street and London's financial district, to give high-speed traders the edge they need to beat those who don't have access to the cable. The company funding the effort says the new cable will reduce transoceanic transaction times from 65 down to 59 milliseconds. That's 6 thousandths of a second difference, and computational traders are already signing contracts 50 times greater than traditional communications for access to it.

To see just how much of the world depends on these cables, check out Greg's Cable Map, a clearing house website for information about submarine cables. Just clicking on a cable will show you when the cable was built, and its peak bandwidth. Most of the cables are around 4TB/s, although there are some nearly twenty years old that measure throughput in GB/s or, one from Palermo, Italy to West Palm Beach (WTF?) has only 560MB/s.

The Internet is really a set of underwater tubes.

Moments in Advertising

So, that's what they're calling it these days.

I have the mind of a twelve year old boy sometimes. In all my years, I don't think I've ever actually given an "organic, protein-enriched facial." It never struck me as having a point or being particularly pleasant.

She's one millisecond away from sneering at you.

Omaha informs me that this is an effective niche market: specialized eyeware for gamers, glasses that match your prescription and correspond to a 3-D game's output. Forgive me for stereotyping, but that model looks like she neither needs prescription lenses nor games extensively, and her expression verges on disdain for her subject. As for the media company, someone should tell their designer that desaturation is so 2009.

A retrospective on gardening season...

Sep 25: The Amazing Snack Plant

I threw about $150 and barely twenty hours of labor into maintaining my garden this summer. That's ten minutes a day; some days I spent an hour or two, some days I spent none.

Was it worth it? I'd say it was. I got many good lunches of salad greens, both spinach and lettuce, out of the garden. Four heads of broccoli, two cauliflower, and two cabbage. Not many onions or carrots, and something kept eating the corn. The strawberries didn't produce much, and were a struggle to keep slug-free.

On the other hand, the tomatoes were spectacular. Despite having the poorest soil of all the beds, the four plants here grew tall and leafy and climbed up the wall and produced almost a table bowl full of tomatoes daily. These were amazing, sweet tomatoes, the likes of which you cannot buy. Even the one big "heirloom" plant produced a few huge, tasty results, thick with flesh and bare on seed, that combined with ground sirloin or bacon to make memorable sandwiches. You really have to click on the photo to see just how heavy with fruit these plants are.

I'll be adjusting the plan for next year. The beds are still a little productive, and there's still tomatoes to be had. I haven't dug up the horseradish yet, but that's coming soon. First week in October.

The weather is turning cool. We're already getting nights below 50°F, which is death for tomato plants. But still, it has been a good summer of eating and enjoying, and I and my family appreciated much of it.

Burly Men With Lightsabers

Impending Doom

Two trees in the undeveloped property behind my back yard died awhile back due to ivy suffocation. Those trees were hanging over our fence, and the one on the left measured out that if it fell, it would smash the house in half, going right through the kitchen.

We hired an arborist to come and take care of them. With a team of three other men, he climbed the one on the right, which was more sturdy, and reached a point where he felt he could fell the tree without hitting the fence. He cut off the top third of it. With much more weight than he himself alleviated, he secured ropes to some branch stumps he cut himself, then swung to the other tree.

The ropes gave him a safety margin as he climbed the riskier tree. It had the greatest lean, and looked ready to come down at any moment. He was fairly amazing with the chainsaw, which he needed at times to cut through the ivy. He weilded it like a lightsaber, and some of the newer chainsaws have really small handles and light blades; they may as well be lightsabers. He reached a point where he thought the danger tree would clear the house, and cut.

He was off only by a bit. The very tip of the tree, which was less than two inches thick, hit the porch, breaking a flower pot.

Other than that, the entire operation from that point went smoothly. They cut the trees down in an orderly fashion, and dropped the wood in the woodpile.

It was expensive, but a heck of a lot less expensive than restoring a broken house to working order.

Pinker and Wright vs The Forces of Darkness

The other day, I pointed to an essay in which Steven Pinker documents the slow decline in human violence over the past two millenia, both interstate and interpersonally. One of the commentors at the Edge's page (evolutionary psychologist John Tooby), states:

I'm also worried that the initial sort of liberal revolution that led to this sort of openness and a cosmopolitan direction also leads culturally to people in these democracies who are now largely unwilling to defend themselves. If you look at Europe, Secretary of Defense Gates said they are unable to sustain a campaign of more than a few weeks outside of Europe. ... even in the U.S., blue-staters are European. If you look at who goes into the army, there are all of these myths that it is stupid people or ignorant people or the poor, but it's not. It's middle class, rural people who are slightly better educated than average and who are religious. Those people are getting fewer in the liberal cosmopolitan revolution.

If the commentor is correct, then we are all doomed. (Disclaimer: I do not believe the commentor is correct.) "Red State" values tend to short-circuit the intellectual development necessary to sustain a high-tech culture; the sexual permissiveness of red state values (that is not a typo) (source; Christian pundit wringing his hands at the data) leads to a disruption of the average educational prospects of those who hold to them. Consequently, this makes them well-suited only to jobs nowadays more effectively done by machines, and thus leads to a generalized impoverishment of those who hold red-state values.

The consequences of this trend can be seen in the way that, of the top ten states that receive more federal money for projects that the state generates in the way of tax revenue, eight of them are considered "red states." Likewise, of the ten states that generate the most tax revenue compared to their tax of federal project money, seven are considered "blue states." (Source) Tooby's source of raw military material is economically dysfunctional in a world that demands less physical labor and more creativity.

It also leads, now that I think on it, to a contraction of perceived economic independence. Red state values include autarky (both at the personal and state level) as a virtue. In Robert Wright's thesis, which independently supports Pinker's, we start to value and perceive the humanity of those with whom we have a mutually beneficial economic arrangements, and it has been the spread of credit and interconnected webs of trust and commerce that have led to the spread of peace.

Pinker documents that Tooby's thesis is fundamentally flawed: the world has been getting progressively more peaceful over time. Both Pinker and Wright give us reason to believe that, barring a major catastrophe, this trend should continue. And the more people want the benefits of a modern technological society, the more pressure is put upon so-called "red-state" values to disappear entirely.

A Genuine, Warranted Snark

As an aside to the previous post, Jeffery Tooby, while discussing the general effeteness and inadequancy of "blue state," "European" men, added in his question to Pinker:

Dennis Miller has the line that we have our pet medications Federal Expressed to our front doors, and al-Qaeda looks at that, and thinks, we can take those guys.

Dennis Miller? Dennis Miller? Have you even heard a recent broadcast of Dennis Miller? Without his HBO passel of writers, the man is as funny as a toothache and as insightful as a zombie. There's a reason he's on Clownhall Radio in the deathly unlistened-to hours of noon to three.

I guess Tooby doesn't have much to do in the middle of the day.

What the hell is it with these quasi-intellectuals who suddenly find themselves parroting the very worst talking points of the conservative movement? Tooby right's up there with Mamet, getting some bizarre frission by imagining himself with a knife gripped in his teeth as he defends the West against slathering brown-skinned hordes. Tooby's questions to Pinker come from deep within the epistemic closure, and are seeking only validation of answers Tooby already has.