Send some love!
If you are internet-functional enough to be able to load this page on a browser, you have almost certainly seen a LOLcat before… probably forwarded a link to one and maybe made a few of your own. The phenomenon is fairly old in Internet terms: about two or three years as normal human beings reckon time. It has since spread out beyond its initial audience of geeks: the ecosystem has broadened to include lolhamsters, LOLCorgans (for fans of the Smashing Pumpkins frontman), and, o yes, lolgays.
LOLcats have two essential elements: a picture of a cat, and a caption in a sort of slang dialect sometimes referred to as LOLspeak (others use the pseudo-scientific term kitty pidgin). LOLspeak derives heavily from leetspeak and internet memes (as well as the bastard cousins of those two folkways: txt shorthand and image macros). embedding these wordlets, words and phrases into a loopy syntax that sort of smacks of engrish (which is, of course, another internet meme). LOLspeak is sufficiently mature that it makes sense to think of it as a language or dialect all its own: as one observer puts it, it is possible to get LOLspeak wrong.
Human society uses dialects, slang and argot as a way of establishing who’s in and who’s out, and as a way of maintaining connection among those in the in-group. Anybody who speaks a regional dialect has noticed that jokes (even ones that aren’t that good) are usually funnier when they’re said in dialect. In addition to the a-ha of the joke itself – the source of the humor – there’s the recognition of seeing your own subcultural signifiers.
LOLcats themselves, of course, have an appeal that transcends online geekiness. Even to those outside the subculture (say, your Mom), there’s enormous cuteness value to a picture of a cat with a caption, however cryptic (“Im in ur noun, verb-ing ur related noun”). In this way, much as sports culture, say, or the movies have fed back into the broader culture, so too has LOLling become increasingly part of the modern experience.
LOLcats are immediately recognizable as a type: self-aware, crazed with hunger, improbably mischievous, and terrible liars. They are, in short, quite possibly the template for 21st century American society, kulturbärers of our time. LOLSpeak sounds perfectly natural coming out of George Bush’s mouth, and as we lose faith in the power of our institutions to manage the chaos of the world, we find a kind of solace in the buffoonery of loleconomists and lolgeeks.
In sum, there are clues we can draw from a scorned subculture with a weird ethos and a private set of symbols and signifiers: the early Christians of the first few centuries A.D. As the fish, the lamb, and utlimately the crucifix passed from secret sign to universal symbol, it carried the Christian message to millions.
LOLcat religion? DO NOT WANT. But, on the other hand… we could certainly do worse than to venerate Ceiling Cat.
kthxbai
Science’s understanding of the universe is that most of it is totally invisible. There have been two popular theories of what this stuff might be (named with typical physicist dork-wordplay): tiny WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, infinitesimal particles everywhere that we just can’t detect) versus enormous MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects — planetoids, dead stars, big stuff out there that doesn’t emit light). Scientific understanding is pointing more and more towards the WIMP theory… problem is, we haven’t ever seen any.
Today, physicists announced that they found evidence of WIMPs for the first time. In an experiment in Antarctica, they detected electrons with the right amount of energy that would have been created by a WIMP crashing into a… normal thing.
Why do we care about what we can’t see? For one reason… most of the universe appears to be made up of it:
The standard model of the way the Universe was created hangs together pretty well if dark matter – about which we know, like, next to nothing – is included. If there’s no such thing as dark matter… well, what we know explains 4% of the Universe. Humbling.
If the experiment did actually find evidence of dark matter, it’s a big boost to the idea that there are many other “compact” dimensions in addition to the four we all know and love. The mathematics used in superstring theory, for example, needs at least 10 dimensions to begin to work out. Modern physics is based on two big theories – general relativity and quantum mechanics – that don’t fit together. As superstrings are one of the leading contenders to make the two pieces fit, this discovery could be big news.
As WiFi gets increasingly ubiquitous, people are becoming more and more aware of its real limitations: speed, distance and security. A technology known as WiMAX (WiMAX is a backronym for “Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access,” and no, I don’t know what it means either) offers the possibility to improve access to mobile users as well as extend coverage to areas that currently have no broadband Internet.
WiMAX – also known as the IEEE 802.16 standard – is like WiFi but offers better throughput, longer shots and can support a great many more users. WiMAX seems ideally suited to areas where there is not currently a wireline infrastructure and pulling new cable is cost-prohibitive: in the developing world, sure, but also in the dense urban cores of much of Old Europe, where cable TV was never run.
A WiMAX system consists of two parts:
WiMAX, like WiFi, carries data via wireless (radio) signals. While the fastest WiFi connection can transmit up to 54 megabits per second under the best conditions, the WiMAX protocols can support up to 70 megabits per second. Furthermore, WiMAX is capable of much greater distance transmissions: potentially covering a radius of up to 30 miles: subject, as all wireless systems are, to obstructions like terrain, weather and large buildings. With a well-planned, properly installed infrastructure, though, WiMAX can provide seamless coverage over extremely large areas.
WiMAX is also (archaically) known known as WirelessMAN, for Metropolitan Area Network. As the name implies, it is potentially a step along the path to a global area network (GAN). The proposed IEEE 802.20 standard lays out the guidelines for how a GAN would function. It would bear a lot of similarity to present-day cell phone networks, allowing people to travel long distances while retaining connection to the global Internet.
The technology has been in the ramp-up stage for a very long time, and it remains to be seen if providers can get a large number of WiMAX networks deployed so that it can be seen as a viable technology. Like the spread of faxes two decades ago, the more WiMAX networks there are, the more valuable the technology will become. Without wider adoption, there’s always the risk of it going the way of ISDN (remember that?)
Nevertheless, as a “last mile” technology with special applicability to rural comunities and the developing world, WiMAX can play an analogous role to cellular phones in spreading communications technology to underserved areas.
I want to explore some of the basics of transmitting digital signal over a satellite link, both for general interest and also as a way of getting these concepts more solidly integrated into my own understanding. For the most part, in my work supporting a couple of over-the-air IP networks, the mechanics of the space link are often a sort of amorphous set of givens, much like the “cloud” graphic used to depict the Internet in network diagrams. My goal here is to remove as much of the fuzziness as I can without getting too lost in details of things like link budgets and Reed-Solomon codes.
Communicating digitally over a satellite connection can often feel a lot like using an old-school modem: your sleek, digital broadband datastream gets snarled in a slow, often balky analog link. Indeed, the mechanics are the same – data is modulated, passed over a long (in this case, very long) distance, where it is demodulated and passed along to its destination. When you begin to get a sense of all the things that can (and often do) happen to an electromagnetic signal on the way to and from a satellite 35,000 kilometres above the Earth, you may be struck, as I was, at what a miracle it is that the data can pass at all, let alone at a decent speed and error rate! Read the rest of this entry »
