Questions of size...

Ben Laurie ben at algroup.co.uk
Mon Dec 11 13:48:43 PST 2000


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:
> 
> --- begin forwarded text
> 
> Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2000 19:04:12 +0200 (EET)
> From: Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni at cc.helsinki.fi>
> To: Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net>
> cc: <cypherpunks at cyberpass.net>
> Subject: Re: Questions of size...
> Sender: owner-cypherpunks at cyberpass.net
> Reply-To: Sampo A Syreeni <ssyreeni at 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 at iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university
> 
> --- end forwarded text
> 
> --
> -----------------
> R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at 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'

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list