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Depends on what dimension you're measuring. For fun, I pick time.
I leave a definition of fractal time to the more mathematically creative out there.
You're the one using it, so why would you ask us to try to guess what you mean?
Actually, since I'm not the one trying to use "fractal time", or fractal anything else, for that matter, in any coherent sentence, I abdicate any responsibility for its use, which I probably wasn't clear enough in saying, I guess. As to my wild-ass guess of picking of time as a dimension, it seems to me that the latency, load, whatever of the network can be measured in dropped packets, or time or something, and the network certainly *looks* like a geodesic one, with multiple nodes plugged into lots of lines routing packets in arbitrary directions instead of up and down a hierarchy. That and having read Huber's idea (or at least Huber is where I saw it first) that decreasing switch prices creates geodesic networks. But, of course, I don't know nearly enough about how packets move across the network, even after reading some pretty good stuff on network/ISP settlement, like, say, <http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/1e/1e_1.htm>, to make any actually informed claims about it.
Unless you are saying you were just hand-waving, which would make Choate's point, much as I am loathe to admit.
Of course I just wave my hands a lot. And, if there's anyplace where handwaving is an art, cypherpunks is it, right? Note that I've never published a paper on any of this, though I've had my rants published as opinion pieces in various places, and I do know *where* to publish these hand-wavings, if I had enough of a clue, or discipline, to do so, having helped start a conference or two on financial cryptography, but only on the business, and certainly not the content, side. So, like I said before, everything I know, I stole from someone else. These days, I make no claims to *any* original ideas, ever. That's because every time I think I've thought of something new, it turns out someone else has thought of it already. For instance, I've always thought it was me who realized, on my own, that Chaum's blind signatures got you internet bearer financial instruments. It turns out that Nick Szabo figured it out, quite explicitly, long before I did, and that I probably got my own "discovery" of same from watching his stuff fly by on either cypherpunks or www-buyinfo in 1994 or so. His corpus of work in that regard is what informs a lot of the capability based work being done by Mark Miller and the language E, or Tyler Close with his Ferex securities underwriting system, for instance. About the only things I like to claim as my own these days are merely hypotheses. One, that in order for internet bearer transactions to replace book-entry ones, they need to be three orders of magnitude cheaper, and, two, that our social structures map directly to our communication architectures in a quite mechanical and, yes, Virginia, determinist fashion. Frankly, I expect that if those ideas are provable at all, someone's probably already proven/disproven those in the literature somewhere, long before we get actual data to that effect in the respective instances of bearer transactions and the internet. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.8 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQEVAwUBOjJImsUCGwxmWcHhAQGd+Qf/WQCF84VBDidEMJIdvBgDRiiFifMFvEQP 3JRQRa1W71Ev+/psgF38u6xdP6cyk+N522GQovy6xGhH98SPqPEggSoQnhllmctp kTi5QkMhTqvTfoLwtKmOw8awKDb5JZhXmvP61sJs98itp2aDf0dtGbbtW1dHbts0 sxwZfR951imOBvuqiEvrxnvXy/rr1iwrdsHouiacaJYB3Fcr6qPPYc0GTSPZWD8W 2Kn4w30sMDvzZZ8fXVSTZEmFarYBUYi8keQ/nZWpt9E/3cR0GKwUSzb58MXeugdl Qj3xDWNwLzsJAOXlDKMQBOToipmXELTqB7gxBmJhdd8VYbDUSex6aA== =WgBd -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'