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 <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university