At 8:46 AM -0800 12/8/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, petro wrote:
Mr. Brown (in the library with a candlestick) said:
(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'?
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?
Distributed, fractal, peer-to-peer, nonhierarchical, geodesic, silk road, agoric, anarchic, are all terms basically describing the same sort of thing. Which term is whizzier is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I got tired several years ago of hearing everything described as a "fractal geodesic network." I don't know whether the term was coined by its chief user, Bob Hettinga, or by a similar propagandist, George Gilder, or by someone else. The naming issues are parallel to the issues with "open systems," "bazaar and the cathedral," etc. But I imagine others are tired of hearing me talk about crypto anarchy. I'm not sure "geodesic" captures the important issues. Are merchants in a Baghdad bazaar part of a "fractal geodesic network"? I suppose. But this is just a basic open market, with no top-down rules set. Is the Law Merchant a fractal geodesic network? Whatever. --Tim May -- (This .sig file has not been significantly changed since 1992. As the election debacle unfolds, it is time to prepare a new one. Stay tuned.)