Danny Silverman says,
Senator Ted Stephens' recent characterization of the internet as tubes reminded me of this picture I took a couple years back at a museum in Ann Arbor.
When the kid pressed the button a bunch of balls propelled by air shot through the tubes randomly and arrived at the other end in a different order, demostrating a packet-switched network.
Perhaps Senator Ted isn't senile, he's just taken a recent trip to a kid's science museum in Michigan. After all the tubes in this exhibit aren't very wide, so if one takes the exhibit at face value, they could get some pretty interesting ideas about how the internet truly "works."
Previously:
T-shirt design: "The Internet, a Series of Tubes"
Sen. Stevens' hilariously awful explanation of the Internet
Reader comment: Eli Neiburger says,
I'm the tech manager at the Ann Arbor District Library, and we do projects with the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum (aahom.org) where the air-powered packet traffic exhibit is.
There's a very cool detail about the exhibit that I wouldn't want boingboing readers to miss… The kids are supposed to put 8 balls into the chute, and they choose from black and white balls to send a single ASCII character through the intertubes! There's an ascii chart at the sending and the receiving end showing the real 8 bits required for any letter to help the kids encode and then decode their 1-character message. The lesson isn't that the bits arrive in a different order, but that the packets can take different paths and still get put back together at their destination in the right order to deliver the intended character.
Now, like any other Hands-on museum, most kids don't pay any attention to the intended larnin' and just shove random balls through as fast as they can, although the mechanism restricts them to 1 8-bit packet at a time. Perhaps the Senator might have observed some of the less studious visitors to the museum.
The exhibit guys at the Museum are Bernoulli masters… they built a 25-foot tall exhibit for one of our libraries that kids can shoot balls up a tube to a suspended vortex cone. Very cool stuff.
Angus Graham says,
The science museum in Tokyo's Odaiba district has a tube-internet too. It's got billiard-ball-gravity-powered routers that look like daleks! You can compose binary messages out of black and white billiard-balls and send them to the station of your choosing by setting the address-billiard-balls!
The Japanese are way ahead ahead of us in tube-internet technology. Link
Update:
Snip from THE INTERNET TUBES KEEP MOVING MY FURNITURE, a guest commentary by Sen. Stevens on iowahawk blog:
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all the celluloid clogging the internets on the way to the Western Union, and by the time the Internet-o-gram boy got the to my office it was already Senate nap time so he just shoved it under my door. This is what happens when you rely on internets, and when our young internet delivery boys start smoking the marijuana and lose all sense of responsibilty.
And when my aides woke me up for this vote, do you know what I realized? The internet had sneakily rearranged my office furniture, and I was unable to find my spectacles and pill organizer.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. Let's talk about how cold it is in here. We are supposed to use this internet to communicate, but now suddenly the Axis is using the internets to turn down the Senate thermostat.
