The document summarizes and compares the development of medieval shipping and the modern internet. It notes that both arose from a desire to transport materials (cargo for ships, data for the internet) more efficiently and reliably over long distances. While shipping was developed gradually over centuries to traverse oceans, the internet was conceived more recently in a laboratory, though it also took on a freewheeling nature through random discoveries by users. Both fulfilled a need for major organizations initially and only later became used more casually. The document argues the internet functions similarly to medieval trade ships in transporting the most vital goods of the current era.

1. Product:SUNDAY Date:02-25-2007Desk: SPC-0001-CMYK/24-02-07/18:14:05
D1 !SU0 250207ON D 001Q!
SUNDAY ON SU0 COMPOSITECMYK FEBRUARY 25, 2007
IDEAS SECTION D
4THE NIXON DOLLAR
Americans launch their own loonie:
a coin honouring dead presidents
THE LEGAL TENDER OF INVENTION
BOOKS TWIN FREAKS
On Oscar night, Davids Lynch and
Mamet on the madness of movies 5
MICROSCOPE Smart bugs, radioactive dentistry, and how hazelnuts could fight cancer. D3
10 THINGS
WE LEARNED
THIS WEEK
* Hostage lunch: a meal,
often pizza, paid for by the
company and delivered to
employees whose bosses
require them to attend a
meeting on their lunch
hour. E.g.: “I was planning
on running some errands
over my lunch hour, but the
VP is keeping us in a meet-ing.
At least he ordered us
hostage lunch.”
(UrbanDictionary.com)
* Thursday is Pig Day. The
saying “sweat like a pig” is
a misnomer: pigs can’t
sweat. Their well-known
method of cooling off (roll-ing
around in the mud) has
contributed to the miscon-ception
that they’re dirty.
(brownielocks.com;
pbs.org)
* Sir Isaac Newton is
credited with inventing the
cat flap. (mentalfloss.com)
* Fig Newtons were not
named after the inventor of
the cat flap. Rather, they
took their moniker from
Newton, Mass., a town
near the regional bakery
that created them. (As one
wag noted, “Thank it
wasn’t near Belchertown.”)
(straightdope.com)
* Belch.com has accumu-lated
“the largest collection
of digitally recorded belch-es
on the Net:” 550.
(belch.com)
* Thursday is National
Beer Day in Iceland. It
marks the end of a 75-year
prohibition of the beverage,
which expired on March 1,
1989. (www.geogra-phia.
com/iceland)
* On this day in 1940, a
hockey game was televised
for the first time. Viewers
of New York station
W2XBS saw the Rangers
beat the Montreal Cana-diens,
6-2, at Madison
Square Garden. (Hockey
Night in Canada debuted on
CBC-TV in 1952.) (ny-times.
com/learning)
* Dry ice weighs about
twice as much as regular
ice.
(dryiceinfo.com)
* How cool are you if
you’re as cool as a cucum-ber?
The inside of the fruit
can be up to 20 degrees F
(11C) cooler than the out-side
temperature. (foodre-ference.
com)
* Yuppie food stamps: “the
$20 bills that everyone
gets from ATMs. They be-come
an issue when a
group goes out to eat and it
comes time to pay. Each
person owes $11 and no one
has anything smaller than a
$20.” (BuzzWhack.com)
— John Sakamoto
it is unlikely that you
think about the medi-eval
shipbuilder
when you plug a pe-ripheral
device into your com-puter’s
USB port. Yet every time
you do that or “surf” the In-ternet,
“navigate” through a
website, or place your iPod on
its “dock” to recharge it or get
more downloads, you are con-necting
with a thought that men
of the Middle Ages had:
If they could build with less yet
carry more, go farther and faster
and with an increasing degree of
reliability, they could improve
their lot.
That thought has been a cata-lyst
in human striving through
all the ages. And in the Middle
Ages, great progress was made
by diverse people separated by
language, geography, climate
and politics. Between the fall of
Rome and the 16th century Re-naissance,
they borrowed, im-proved
and invented all the soft-ware
and hardware needed to
traverse the vast oceans that di-vided
the globe.
The fruits of their labours
would result in what some de-scribe
as the greatest invention
of the modern age: the full-masted
sailing ship. This engi-neering
and navigational mar-vel
would merge the “old”
worlds of the Mediterranean
and the North Seas, and would
seize for those communities the
power and economic domi-nance
of the New World.
A strikingly analogous experi-ment
was repeated in the latter
part of the 20th century. Not
with wood, canvas sails, charts
and compasses, but with tran-sistors,
monitors, programming
language, fibre optics, radio
waves, and Web browsers.
The inventors of our time had
the same concerns but over a
different medium. They were
not challenged by the vast ex-panses
of ocean and unknown
shores, but they too were con-cerned
about transporting ma-terials,
in their case data rather
than cargo. The idea was that it
should fit in a transmission wire
or airwave, and be transported
unharmed to a receptor that
could successfully unpackage it.
Unlike physical ships and ship-ping,
the Web was conceived of
in an organized laboratory — it
has an acknowledged inventor,
Tim Berners-Lee — and its cre-ator
was not concerned with
mimicking the exact point-to-point
contact that concerned
the medieval seaman.
But like the development of
ships, and their forays over
many centuries, a freewheeling
randomness is vital to the World
Wide Web.
On the one hand, it helps make
it attractive to us — discovery,
personal and professional, is a
routine and valued experience
among all of us who are Web
surfers.
And notwithstanding the plea-sures
and benefits Internet us-ers
enjoy, it is the World Wide
Web’s potential as an efficient
trade route to our doors that has
made it commercially viable.
Pursuit of pleasure didn’t drive
development of shipping or the
Web. Back in the 10th century,
the shipbuilder was not much
concerned with travel or explo-ration
just for the heck of it.
Travel for pleasure or knowl-edge
would have been consid-ered
a luxury, and not a fun one
at that, even much later than the
Middle Ages.
“A man who went to sea for
pleasure would just as soon go
to hell for a vacation,” a British
privateer, Woodes Rogers,
wrote in the time of Queen Anne
(the early 1700s).
Early computer developers
and hardware manufacturers
were similarly disposed, with
the goal of their efforts being to
solve big problems for big play-ers.
The computing technology
of the 1950s and 1960s — bulky
and slow by later standards —
was created with the intent of
performing scientific magic
such as calculating ballistic-missile
trajectories, or big-pic-ture
business functions like
managing banks’ books or book-ing
airline tickets.
Computers, like medieval
transport ships, were for big op-erators
such as governments or
the most ambitious private en-terprises,
not for personal or
frivolous use.
It is Berners-Lee’s
idea about a
network that could
access any data
plugged into it
from any location
that is most
evocative of the
spirit that inspired
the post-medieval
mariners
What is the World Wide Web but
a full-masted ship transporting
the most vital goods of the age?
Essay by Caz Zyvatkauskas
‰Please see World Wide, D11
From
ships
to
chips
A convenient truth: A small idea to fight climate change
Okay, climate change is a given
— we, the public, are way ahead
of the politicians on this one.
But if we’re the culprits — and
there’s not much “if” there, ac-cording
to every recent, reputa-ble
scientific study (let’s just
cast aside, once and for all, those
funded by the petroleum indus-try)
— how do we fix it?
Notice, there’s no “they” in
that sentence.
Hoping for leadership from
politicians who measure their
term in office in three- to five-year
increments is whistling in
the dark; it takes statesmen, vi-sionaries,
maybe wild-eyed loo-nies
to effect that kind of
change.
And to do it on a global scale?
Forget it.
So maybe we’re looking for
leadership in the wrong place.
Maybe looking in the mirror is
the right place to start.
After all, Al Gore’s An Inconve-nient
Truth not only got two
Academy Award nominations,
the documentary has become a
bona fide hit. And in the two
countries most excoriated for
contributing greenhouse gases
that trap heat in the atmosphere
— Canada and the U.S. That
means it wasn’t just politicians
in the audience.
But are we able or willing to
make the kind of changes it will
take, in the short timeframe de-manded
of us, in order to avert a
climatic tipping point?
Tall order, for sure.
Sure, most of us are willing to
make little changes, buy a few
spirally, low-energy light bulbs,
consider a smaller car, ride rapid
transit more often, turn down
‰Please see Carbon, D4
Leaders are lagging so we the people
should act, suggests Peter Martyn
ILLUSTRATION BY DUSAN PETRICIC