“Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”

As Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica puts it, in response to a stunning piece of political correctness (chock full of factual incorrectness), "The Wall Street Journal has earned a reputation for producing in-depth and meticulously fact-checked news coverage. Unfortunately, it doesn't always apply that same high standard of quality to their editorial page."

Opening with SciAm blogger Michael Moyer, in a post titled Yes, Government Researchers Really Did Invent the Internet

“It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet,” writes Gordon Crovitz in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Most histories cite the Pentagon-backed ARPANet as the Internet’s immediate predecessor, but that view undersells the importance of research conducted at Xerox PARC labs in the 1970s, claims Crovitz. In fact, Crovitz implies that, if anything, government intervention gummed up the natural process of laissez faire innovation.
...
But Crovitz’s story is based on a profound misunderstanding of not only history, but technology. Most egregiously, Crovitz seems to confuse the Internet—at heart, a set of protocols designed to allow far-flung computer networks to communicate with one another—with Ethernet, a protocol for connecting nearby computers into a local network. (Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox PARC who co-invented the Ethernet protocol, today tweeted tongue-in-cheek “Is it possible I invented the whole damn Internet?”)
...
Other commenters, including Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica and veteran technology reporter Steve Wildstrom, have noted that Crovitz’s misunderstandings run deep. He also manages to confuse the World Wide Web (incidentally, invented by Tim Berners Lee while working at CERN, a government-funded research laboratory) with hyperlinks, and an internet—a link between two computers—with THE Internet.

But perhaps the most damning rebuttal comes from Michael Hiltzik, the author [of] “Dealers of Lightning,” a history of Xerox PARC that Crovitz uses as his main source for material. “While I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book,” writes Hiltzik, “it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project.”

Alex Pareene at Salon writes

So, basically, the government had its grubby innovation-suppressing paws all over the creation of the Internet, a fact reinforced by Michael Hiltzik’s response to Gordon Crovitz in the L.A. Times. (Hiltzik is the author of a book cited by Crovitz in his column.) Basically Crovitz got everything wrong:

Crovitz then points out that TCP/IP, the fundamental communications protocol of the Internet, was invented by Vinton Cerf (though he fails to mention Cerf’s partner, Robert Kahn). He points out that Tim Berners-Lee “gets credit for hyperlinks.”

Lots of problems here. Cerf and Kahn did develop TCP/IP — on a government contract! And Berners-Lee doesn’t get credit for hyperlinks–that belongs to Doug Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute, who showed them off in a legendary 1968 demo you can see here. Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web–and he did so at CERN, a European government consortium.

And finally, Ethernet was “by no means a precursor of the Internet.” So: Government created the Internet, just like we thought before. Even the ornery libertarian-leaning geeks of Slashdot concede the point.

(One more fun fact: Al Gore genuinely did have a formative role in creating the Internet! The 1991 bill that funded, among lots of other important-for-the-development-of-the-Internet things, the creation of Mosaic, the mother of all web browsers, was known as "the Gore Bill." And Mosaic was created by a government-funded unit at the public University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The government invented the Internet.)

People familiar with the history of the Internet will, obviously, barely notice this attempt at partisan revisionism. But I am very confident that “The Government Had Nothing To Do With Inventing The Internet That Is a Liberal Lie” will become one of those wonderful myths.... You’ll be seeing this one pop up — as common knowledge, probably — in Corner posts and Fox News hits for years to come. When some random idiot Republican candidate in 2014 or 2016 makes the rounds on the blogs for claiming that the private sector invented in the Internet, just remember that it all started right here, in the Wall Street Journal.

UPDATE: Oh, lord. Two minutes after publishing I see that Fox’s John Stossel is on board with the new narrative!

Steve Wildstrom sums it up:

The history of the internet is not particularly in dispute and we have the great good fortune that most of the pioneers who made it happen are still with us and able to share their stories. (For example, my video interviews with Cerf and Kahn.) In a nutshell, the internet began as a Defense Dept. research project designed to create a way to facilitate communication among research networks. It was almost entirely the work of government employees and contractors. It was split into military and civilian pieces, the latter run by the National Science Foundation. By the early 1990s, businesses were starting to see commercial possibilities and the private sector began building networks that connected with NSFnet. After initially resisting commercialization, NSF gave in and withdrew from the internet business in 1995, fully privatizing the network.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can look it up in a book–or a web site.

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Round up the usual suspects

The Aurora, CO theater shooting unfolded

when a man strode to the front in a multiplex near Denver and opened fire. At least 12 people were killed and 58 wounded, with witnesses describing a scene of claustrophobia, panic and blood. Minutes later, the police arrested James Holmes, 24, in the theater’s parking lot.

There will of course be the usual news cycle, but only until our attention wanes and we have another financial industry or celebrity scandal. Gun massacres are simply a recurring and accepted part of the American landscape, a fact captured by cartoonists
Tom Tomorrow (This Modern World):

I wrote this cartoon after the Gabby Giffords shooting in January of 2011. It remains tragically relevant.
Sigh

and Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug):

And of course, here we go again. I did this comic shortly after the Columbine [1999] shootings.
Teen inkblot goes on rampage across U.S.

And after the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

On The Monkey Cage blog, political scientist Patrick Egan argues The Declining Culture of Guns and Violence in the United States

The massacre unleashed by James Holmes in Aurora, Colo. shortly after midnight on Friday is a tragedy of national proportions. Like other mass shootings before it—Columbine in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007 come to mind—it leaves us desperate for explanations in its wake. There are those who blame our nation’s relative paucity of gun control laws and others decrying the power of the gun lobby. Cultural explanations abound, too. On the right, one Congressman has pinned the blame on long-term national cultural decline. On the left, fingers are pointed at America’s “gun-crazy” culture.

But as pundits and politicians react, they would do well to keep in mind two fundamental trends about violence and guns in America that are going unmentioned in the reporting on Aurora.
First, we are a less violent nation now than we’ve been in over forty years. In 2010, violent crime rates hit a low not seen since 1972; murder rates sunk to levels last experienced during the Kennedy Administration. Our perceptions of our own safety have shifted, as well. In the early 1980s, almost half of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) they were “afraid to walk alone at night” in their own neighborhoods; now only one-third feel this way.
...
Thus long-term trends suggest that we are in fact currently experiencing a waning culture of guns and violence in the United States. This is undoubtedly helping to dampen the public’s support for both gun control and the death penalty. There are growing partisan gaps on attitudes regarding the two policies, but enthusiasm for both has declined recently in lockstep with the drop in crime and violence. The total effects of these trends on opinion and policy remain to be seen, but one thing is clear: they defy easy ideological explanation.

Finally, here is incontrovertible proof of the Founders intent regarding 100-round assault-rifle magazines, based on this previously undiscovered transcript of a June 12, 1787, debate on the Second Amendment at the Constitutional Convention.

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NOAA Releases Report on Extreme Weather Events

From the AAAS Policy Alert (18 July 2012):

NOAA Releases Report on Extreme Weather Events. The July 2012 study [PDF] by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2011 From a Climate Perspective," found that climate change increased the likeliness of the occurrence of recent extreme weather events. For example, scientists concluded that climate change made the 2011 Texas drought 20 times more likely to occur, and Britain's 2011 November heat wave 62 times more likely to occur.
NOAA also announced recently that the 12-month period between July 2011 and June 2012 was the hottest in U.S. recorded history.

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So papa, how do you like the iPad we got you?

From a German comedy show (but no need to understand the language to get it).



(Thanks to Jesse)
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Why There is Something Rather than Nothing

Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin'
If you wanna be with me

—BILLY PRESTON
"Nothing From Nothing"
(Billy Preston and Bruce Fisher)



(Tap the above image to link to the NASA page for more image options)

In an eSkeptic column, Michael Shermer summarizes scientific thinking on the question of...

Why is there something rather than nothing? The question is usually posed by Christian apologists as a rhetorical argument meant to pose as the drop-dead killer case for God that no scientist can possibly answer. Those days are over. Even though scientists are not in agreement on a final answer to the now non-rhetorical question, they are edging closer to providing logical and even potentially empirically testable hypotheses to account for the universe. Here are a dozen possible answers to the question....

Nothing is Negligible: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing

In the meantime, while scientists sort out the science to answer the question Why is there something instead of nothing?, in addition to reviewing these dozen answers it is also okay to say “I don’t know” and keep searching. There is no need to turn to supernatural answers just to fulfill an emotional need for explanation. Like nature, the mind abhors a vacuum, but sometimes it is better to admit ignorance than feign certainty about which one knows not. If there is one lesson that the history of science has taught us it is that it is arrogant to think that we now know enough to know that we cannot know. Science is young. Let us have the courage to admit our ignorance and to keep searching for answers to these deepest questions.

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The Higgs boson explained with animation

From Open Culture, The Higgs Boson Explained

Here we have Daniel Whiteson, a physics professor at UC Irvine, giving us a fuller explanation of the Higgs Boson, mercifully using animation to demystify the theory and the LHC experiments that may confirm it sooner or later.

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How long does it take to become a native?

The article Killed by Thousands, Varmint Will Never Quit is interesting...

Nutria are now believed to be in 17 or more states. They are endemic throughout the Gulf Coast, and there are pockets in Oregon and Washington. Louisiana’s population, once estimated to be the largest at 20 million, has fallen after instituting a bounty program for pelts.

...but in the animated short Hi! I'm a Nutria by the filmmaker Drew Christie, a rodent living in Washington State defends criticism that he is an invasive species and asks, “How long does it take to become a native?”
"I know I'm not supposed to be here, but neither are you."
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"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

As prompted by the Vanity Fair article, Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
"Stack Management"

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

"Fumbling the Future" *

According to Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn’t right for Microsoft. “He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls.
“Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”

* For a refresher on the above etymology, I've pulled a few excerpts from the book Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer (1988):

Lonesome George (1912? - 2012)

The New York Times reports A Giant Tortoise’s Death Gives Extinction a Face

The world took notice when Lonesome George died, marking the end of his subspecies. But for researchers and workers in the Galápagos Islands, his death also takes a personal tone.

George’s death was a singular moment, representing the extinction of a creature right before human eyes — not dinosaurs wiped out eons ago or animals consigned to oblivion by hunters who assumed there would always be more. That thought was expressed at the shops and restaurants that are the research center’s neighbors on Charles Darwin Avenue.
“We have witnessed extinction,” said a blackboard in front of one business. “Hopefully we will learn from it.”

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"Thanks, nature"

CERN has announced discovery (at a five sigma level — or 1 in 3.5 million probability of chance) of the Higgs boson, based on "a breakneck analysis of about 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the last two years."
Dennis Overbye writes in The New York Times:

Physicists had been icing the Champagne ever since last December. Two teams of about 3,000 physicists each — one named Atlas, led by Fabiola Gianotti, and the other CMS, led by Dr. Incandela — operate giant detectors in the collider, sorting the debris from the primordial fireballs left after proton collisions.
Last winter, they both reported hints of the same particle. They were not able, however, to rule out the possibility that it was a statistical fluke. Since then, the collider has more than doubled the number of collisions it has recorded.
The results announced Wednesday capped two weeks of feverish speculation and Internet buzz as the physicists, who had been sworn to secrecy, did a breakneck analysis of about 800 trillion proton-proton collisions over the last two years.
Up until last weekend, physicists at the agency were saying that they themselves did not know what the outcome would be. Expectations soared when it was learned that the five surviving originators of the Higgs boson theory had been invited to the CERN news conference.
The December signal was no fluke, the scientists said Wednesday. The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, as measured by the CMS group, and 126 billion according to Atlas. Both groups said that the likelihood that their signal was a result of a chance fluctuation was less than one chance in 3.5 million, “five sigma,” which is the gold standard in physics for a discovery.
On that basis, Dr. Heuer said that he had decided only on Tuesday afternoon to call the Higgs result a “discovery.”
He said, “I know the science, and as director general I can stick out my neck.”
Dr. Incandela’s and Dr. Gianotti’s presentations were repeatedly interrupted by applause as they showed slide after slide of data presented in graphs with bumps rising like mountains from the sea.
Dr. Gianotti noted that the mass of the putative Higgs, apparently one of the heaviest subatomic particles, made it easy to study its many behaviors. “Thanks, nature,” she said.

From Overbye's blog post, What in the World Is a Higgs Boson?

Last winter Lisa Randall, a prominent Harvard theorist, sat down with me in a sort of virtual sense to talk about this quest. Everything she said is still true.
Q.
In 1993, the United States Congress canceled a larger American collider, the superconducting super collider, which would have been bigger than the CERN machine. Would it have found the Higgs particle years ago?
A.
Yes, if it had gone according to schedule. And it would have been able to find things that weren't a simple Higgs boson, too. The Large Hadron Collider can do such searches as well, but with its lower energy the work is more challenging and will require more time.

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