Grab Bag 1

Part 1. Interesting Things You Never Knew About Weaving

Part 2. Telegraphy & Imperialism

Part 3. Alohanet Perhaps Leads To Clustered Datacentres

Amasis Painter, ca 550-530 BCE. MET

Amasis Painter, ca 550-530 BCE. MET

Also, see this video

(btw here's a nice little step-by-step from growing flax to making linen )

wikimedia commons

Some Weaving terms

  • warp - the vertical threads, held in tension
  • weft - the horizontal threads
  • shed - the space created when some warp threads are lifted up
  • shuttle - a wooden block used to pull the weft threads through the shed
  • comb - pushes the threads tight together once the shuttle has passed through
  • drawloom - enables individual warp threads to be drawn up

Implications of a drawloom?

  • 2 person set up
  • slow - care, feeding, value?
  • how much land devoted to flax, to mulberries, to sheep, etc?
  • reproducibility?
  • training?
  • think in terms of assemblages, things coming together

The Silk Industry of Lyon

Jacques de Vaucanson - 1709- 1782

Joseph-Marie Jacquard, 1752-1834

Napoléon as First Consul, 1804

J's looms

1801 uses foot peddles to lift the threads

1804 uses cards & a mechanism to achieve this

Jacquard Loom in Action

no audio on this; captions in the video.

Did Jacquard invent the punch card?

  • no. Louis Faucon/Falcon in 1728, but in his arrangement, the draw boy had to hold the card in place manually; Faucon improving an idea by his master Basile Bouchon using a paper tape with holes in it.

Did Jacquard invent automatic lifting of threads?

  • no. Vaucanson's metal cylinders could do that

What the hell did Jacquard invent?

  • An approach that applied threaded together punch cards to the automatic control of the loom.
  • 24 x speed increase! (ie 2 feet per day)
  • replicable patterns, complex patterns, multiple machines producing identical swathes of silk

ok, let's take another look at telegraph stuff

Buying and selling goods to buying and selling parts of companies: The Stock Market

Extending the Wires

Interactive map for US

" We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate" - Thoreau

International Telegraphy

How the hell do you lay a cable across the Atlantic?

"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough" - Thoreau, again.

interactive map of history of cable laying

Individual states begin to realize that control of international communications matters.

Britain especially advantaged: control of gutta pecha, colonies around the world to control start/end of long distant lines

1875 President Grant explains why a French cable company was denied permission to land a cable in US: they gotta let us use their cable in return

Implications for colonialism

  • takes about 100 days to sail from London to Hong Kong
  • if distance is collapsed
  • if messages can be transmitted thousands of miles within seconds/minutes
  • then what is to stop a state from expanding its reach?
  • Marx & Engels 1848: 'The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.'

By early 20th century, there were 200,000 miles of undersea cable;

which took about 27,000 tons of GP;

meaning 88 million trees destroyed.

  • (60' tree only provided on average 312 g of latex)

The patterns laid down by the road system

become the patterns laid down by the railroads

that become the patterns that underpin the telegraph that

that become the patterns that underpin the telephone

that become the patterns that underpin the internet

Remember Alohanet?

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center adapts Alohanet method for wired communcation around its facilities.

Cerf and Kahn oversee a series of meetings and seminar to hammer out details amongst interested parties

  • datagrams from cyclades
  • error correction and random access from ethernet/alohanet,
  • and also: no more imps or network control protocol. The host itself has to handle this.
  • Transmission Cotnrol Protocol (TCP) hammered out by 1973
  • reflects design philosophy of Cyclades and Ethernet
  • original design of ARPAnet had extremely reliable network connections, but that was not something that could be counted on for inter networking. Also, IMPs delivered things in sequence. If they were out of sequence, chaose. New protocol handles this.

But: at the boundaries between networks, this requires the creation of gateways

and they work a whole lot better if they are in physical proximity

Map of undersea cables, evolution

You can see these things on Google maps, too. Halifax Landing Point

Another map of the physical internet

Anything strike you about this?

And all of this might one day disappear

Carrington Event

...all those auroras we've been having lately...

Takeaways from this Grab Bag of Interesting Things?