1. Product:SUNDAY Date:02-25-2007Desk: SPC-0011-CMYK/24-02-07/17:09:37
With ships came viruses
Sitting at our laptops now, we
connect seamlessly for the most
part to other computers, servers
or PDAs located anywhere from
the next desk to two continents
away. To an extent, geography
has been eliminated, as long as
there is access to the technology.
But, alas, there isn’t. The elec-tronic
signals, like the physical
ships, simply don’t reach every-where,
their technology can fail
and, importantly, policies exert
influence upon them.
Notably, regional censors in-tervene,
filtering, blocking,
controlling, and watching what
is published, to varying degrees,
virtually everywhere. But the
freewheeling nature of the Web
makes blockage systems leaky,
and prone to circumvention for
good or evil.
In the Middle Ages, unautho-rized
use of ships was, to an ex-tent,
taken care of by natural
barriers: the high cost of con-struction
and operation. (By
overcoming this and other bar-riers,
perhaps the outlaws of the
seas, pirates, earned their place
in lore).
Unlike the Web’s builders, who
settled on a seamlessly integrat-ed
operating system, shipbuild-ers
of the early Middle Ages
went off in different directions.
While the first North Sea ship-builders
were hacking away at
logs with axes, to construct
hulking cogs, their Mediterra-nean
counterparts were sawing
through plank after plank with
much greater efficiency.
The northerners were assem-bling
broad, hulking ships that
could withstand the rigours of
the North Sea and the Atlantic.
In the Mediterranean, the
need to travel quickly with luxu-ry
goods resulted in the devel-opment
of smaller ships that
used less labour and fewer ma-terials.
Their ships with triangu-lar
sails (known as lateen rigs)
allowed for greater manoeuvra-bility
than the square-rigged
cogs and knars, but they lacked
the strength to make them con-tenders
on the open oceans.
Eventually, approaches to hull
construction would merge, as
would that of sails, and the re-sult
would be a ship able to carry
bulk cargo, tough enough to
travel the open seas, easy to
steer, stayed upright, and able to
increase speed and efficiency by
harnessing the maximum in
wind power.
The concept wasn’t hatched
over night in the medieval Ship-ping
Laboratory but through a
slow and thoughtful process
that required the interaction
and experimentation of thou-sands
of men over hundreds of
years.
In that sense, the evolution of
shipping may be more analo-gous
to open-source software
than the Web. But it would be
wrong to think that the minds of
the Middle Ages did not consid-er
the benefits of pooling diverse
resources together to create one
Internet-like master invention.
All over Europe places of high-er
learning were emerging,
where people went to study log-ic,
law and medicine (universi-ties
being products of the ages,
that remain venerated).
There were visionaries who
wanted to do the same for ship-ping.
Henry the Navigator, the sea-faring
son of King John I of Por-tugal,
understood. His school in
Sagres, Portugal, where it was
said navigators and mapmakers
were trained, appears never to
have existed in the glorious way
it is sometimes portrayed.
But we do know of Henry the
Navigator’s thirst for knowledge
of navigation, cartography and
shipbuilding. He was an avid
map collector, and encouraged
merging charts with descrip-tions
of coastlines from actual
sailors.
But, like modern Internet cap-italists,
Henry was more con-cerned
about profit than edifica-tion;
as a merchant, he was
looking for the best trade routes.
The Venetians also adopted
the laboratory or big-box
approach to shipbuilding with
their Arsenale — a world-re-nowned,
one-stop construction
and design shop for shipbuild-ing
and armaments.
By the 15th century, it claimed
its own governing body and
even ensured quality control
over the timber used to build
ships by commandeering neigh-bouring
mainland forests. It
would have been the Silicon Val-ley
of its day, but the Venetians
were unable to harness the full
potential of what was emerging.
“Microsoft or Apple would
have loved the Arsenale,” says
Mathew Zaleski, a doctoral stu-dent
in computer science at the
University of Toronto. “Boys
like building bigger and better
than the next guy, and they love
to be working on the cutting
edge of technology.”
But the forests of Europe were
never the same after the ship-builders
ravaged them, some-thing
Zaleski thinks serves as a
cautionary tale in our own In-ternet
age.
“If we’re not careful with how
we continue constructing com-puters
and their components,”
he says, “I think we will face a
similar problem. Not so much
with resources but with dispos-al.”
(Complex electronics pre-sent
our age with a waste-dis-posal
challenge quite unlike the
bottom falling out of a ship).
Closer to the Renaissance, the
Italians did contribute an inglo-rious
but crucial development
of what we might call software.
In the Middle Ages, information
was stored and swapped as a
mishmash of letters, cartas and
declarations, most of which
were recorded in Latin.
The Italian mathematician
Lucas Pacioli, who was a friend
and colleague of Leonardo da
Vinci, straightened out the mess
with one simple book: the dou-ble-
entry accounts ledger. Pa-cioli
advanced accounting into
modernity. His Summa of Arith-metic,
Geometry and Propor-tion
replaced unwieldy Roman
numerals with the Arabic ones
we use today.
It was written in the vernacu-lar
of his day rather than Latin,
and he had it mass-produced on
the most modern equipment of
the day, the printing press. The
double-entry ledger was vital
software for sea trade, a serious
business where a clerk could
lose his right hand over a wilful
mistake.
By the 16th century, fishermen
from the Basque country of Gas-cony
(now an area in extreme
southwestern France) had mas-tered
the Atlantic in their new
ships and were sending whaling
boats over to Newfoundland.
The Portuguese government
was underwriting shipbuilders,
and the Spanish would capture
our imagination with their trea-sure
galleons.
However, in spite of the Arse-nale
and Henry the Navigator’s
“school,” there would be no con-sortium
like the one that Web
creator Tim Berners-Lee estab-
‰ World Wide From D1
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IDEAS COVER STORY SOCIAL EATING
Like modern Internet
capitalists, Henry the
Navigator was more concerned
about profit than edification.
As a merchant, he was looking
for the best trade routes
lished as a “neutral open forum
where companies and organiza-tions
to whom the future of the
Web is important come to dis-cuss
and to agree on new com-mon
computer protocols. . . a
centre for issue raising, design,
and decision by consensus. . . ”
It remains to be seen whether
the World Wide Web will stay as
open and uplifting as all that.
Ships became formidable,
feared materiel for conflict and
war. And while there were for a
time many players — the Portu-guese,
Spanish and Dutch would
create some fantastic ships and
the Venetians some prized
weapons — it was the British
who eventually won domination
of the seas and the coveted trade
routes to India, China and the
New World.
There are perhaps a few soft-ware
companies and Web
search engines that come to
mind when we talk of such mar-ket
control.
But it is Berners-Lee’s idea
about a network that could ac-cess
any data plugged into it
from any location that is most
evocative of the spirit that in-spired
the post-medieval mari-ners.
If the World Wide Web is still
in its infancy — Berners-Lee
himself thinks so — what those
mariners brought to the world
other than mere goods also
serves up a cautionary note.
“The full-masted ships
brought many viruses and other
deadly problems to important
civilizations that were not living
too badly before the coming of
these ships,” reflects Isabelle
Cochelin, a professor at the Uni-versity
of Toronto’s Centre for
Medieval Studies.
“Similarly, we should probably
be wary of the quality and depth
of the culture that is brought to
the entire world through the
World Wide Web. Will the en-tire
world really be enhanced
with it?”
Longer-term drawbacks were
not much in the mind of the me-dieval
and renaissance mariners
who would make their living ex-ploiting
ships’ capabilities.
A seaman named John Davis
saw only the upside in his book
The Seaman’s Secrets, published
around 1594. He argued that “by
navigation, common ties
through mutual trade are not
only sufficiently sustained, but
mightily enriched.”
Davis suggested that with
“great esteem ought the painful
seaman to be embraced, by
those whose hard adventures
such excellent benefits are
achieved, for by his great haz-ards,
the form of the earth, the
quantities of countries, the di-versity
of nations, and the na-tures
of the zones, climates,
countries and the people, are ap-parently
all made known to us.”
Davis hoped to see “the great
benefit of mutual interchange
between nations, of such fruits
and commodities, and artifi-cial
practices wherewith God
has blessed each particular
country, coast and nation, ac-cording
to the nature and situ-ation
of the place.”
Berners-Lee, interviewed
by Technology Review in
2004, sounded like a 21st-cen-tury
John Davis. Envisioning
the future of a Web still in its
Middle Ages of development,
Berners-Lee predicted it
would be “. . . a more creative,
flexible medium, (with). . .
new portable devices. . .
speech-based technology, and
a lot of other things.
“You’ll be able to combine the
data you know about with oth-er
data that you don’t know
about,” said Berners-Lee. “Our
lives will be enriched by this
data, which we didn’t have ac-cess
to before.”
In other words, the World
Wide Web is creating a new
full-masted ship that will
change our relationship with
the world and each other. It is
as exciting a time as that de-scribed
by John Davis four
centuries e ago.
Caz Zyvatkauskas studies
medieval history at the
University of Toronto. ILLUSTRATIONS BY DUSAN PETRICIC
Does the sight of others eating lead kids to eat more? A new study says yes — up to 30 per cent more
Do children eat more when
they’re in groups?
Puppies do it. Chickens do it.
Even preschoolers do it.
That is the finding of a new
study that looked not at falling in
love but at how children eat
when they are in larger groups.
Like animals, the researchers
found, the preschoolers ate
more.
The researchers, who report
their findings online in the Ar-chives
of Disease in Childhood, say
it has often been observed in
animals and adults that con-sumption
goes up as the num-ber
who are eating increases.
People will even keep eating
past the point when their appe-tite
has been satisfied.
But it was not known whether
this held true for young chil-dren,
a question that may have
implications for fighting the
obesity problem.
The researchers, Dr. Julie C.
Lumeng and Katherine H. Hill-man
of the University of Michi-gan,
set out to answer it by
studying more than 50 children
at a preschool.
The tools of the study were
simple and few: hungry chil-dren,
a snack area, and that
mainstay of childhood, graham
crackers.
The researchers looked at how
children ate when they were in
groups of three or nine.
They found that in the larger
groups, the children ate 30 per
cent more.
There are two main theories
for why people eat more in big-ger
groups.
One is that in larger groups,
people socialize more, extend-ing
the length of their meals
and their contact with food.
The other possible explana-tion
is called the arousal theory
and suggests that the sight of
others eating leads to more and
faster consumption, especially
in animals, which may feel they
are competing for food.
“In animals, you’re going to be
a little more frenzied when you
eat in a group,” Lumeng said.
This also appears to be the
case with preschoolers — not
that the researchers saw snarl-ing
and clawing as the graham
crackers were put out.
But they did note that the chil-dren
in larger groups ate not
only more but faster.
— The New York Times
CP PHOTO
Would he eat more if he were
hanging out with eight friends?