[LINK] A good read

[JanW]

At 08:42 AM 2/06/2014, Karl Auer you wrote:

>http://idlewords.com/bt14.htm

A few corrections:
"Eisenhower had been very impressed with the German Autobahn network 
during the war. When he was elected President, he pushed for the 
creation of the Interstate Highway System, a massive network of fast 
roads that would connect every population center in the country. "

Actually, it was built in the cold war, not for the purpose of the 
'family car', but for defense purposes and I believe built with money 
from the defense budget. The reason Eisenhower loved it was because 
the German system allowed him to move troops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_highway_system

Maybe we need a 'defense' reason for the NBN?? It's one of the 
reasons DARPA developed the internet (computer networking) in the 
first place. (DARPA was also begun by Eisenhower. I didn't know that. 
I guess he understood networks??? Or the people hired at ARPA/DARPA did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

This is quite normal for technology advancement in the US, at least. 
Military -> Business/commercial -> citizen.
----

The photo following the houses in the pastel colours appears to be 
taken from Tempe, Arizona (Camelback Mountain in the background). 
It's surely a place of sprawl, but the relationship to Interstate 
highways and cars is a bit of a stretch. We only had one multi-lane 
freeway for decades, which changed it's name/number in places for the 
appearance that we had more than one. The urban sprawl and population 
growth in the Phoenix valley was due to a far different technology: 
air conditioning. I will agree that the Phoenix area, like LA, is car 
dependent due to the lack of a decent public transport system other 
than buses until quite recently, with the addition of an attempt of a 
lightrail.

----

[his graphics choices are fun, though -- love the 2001 HAL shot]

If you need a reason to read this article, this is it:

Google's answer is, wake up, grandpa, this is the new normal. But all 
they're doing is trying to port a bug in the Internet over to the 
real world, and calling it progress.

You can dress up a bug and call it a feature. You can also put dog 
crap in the freezer and call it ice cream. But people can taste the 
difference.
========

There's a Super example of the problem of using correlations for 
decision making (ref. current Federal Budget).

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Another good one, that is quite true, as evidenced by the 
anti-Snowden comments on many of the articles about his exposures:
Much of the current debate around the NSA involves making minor 
changes to this secret mechanism. Americans have an almost perverse 
faith in the rule of law. They believe that, as long as the secret 
courts are making sure the secret police obey the secret laws, our 
democracy is safe.
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Thanks, Karl.
Jan






Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

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