What???? Chambers defines geodesic as "the shortest line on a surface between two points on it" and that is precisely the meaning in general relativity. Saying that it has anything to do with distributed systems is making it up as you go along. And if RAH is now going to claim that's what he meant then he's making it up as he goes along, too (well, we knew that anyway, but redefining geodesic in this way is going too far). Cheers, Ben. "R. A. Hettinga" wrote:
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Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 19:04:12 +0200 (EET) From: Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni@cc.helsinki.fi> To: Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> cc: <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net> Subject: Re: Questions of size... Sender: owner-cypherpunks@cyberpass.net Reply-To: Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni@cc.helsinki.fi>
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
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-- ----------------- 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'
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