A diagram for the internet

I have drawn my schematic of the internet, above. I don't believe anyone else has tried to do this. It's pretty simple, really, but since no one has made so simple, yet unobvious, a statement, I thought it was worth publishing.

I drew the figure a long time ago, for independent reasons. It represents the growth of logic, and the logic of growth. It does seem, at least to me, to represent also the growth so far in the internet, as the notes on the diagram indicate. Each stage--there are four of them in this version, but more can be derived--comprises all the prior stages within it. The encirclements grow in development in a logical manner.

In the top stage, the encirclement is marked in two places, once by a line and once by a point. I conceive of these as preferred entrances of preferred sites. Over time it becomes apparent some sites are preferred, because they better express the value of the web than others.

Can you infer what the next stage is like? And the one after that? Etc....

opposition to my actions as First of Chicago's Mafia

During the past 16 years, I have held the belief that the opposition I was sensing to my actions as First of the Mafia in Chicago was wrong, that it was a manifestation of a wrong perception of me on the part of someone who should have known better. It is my updated view, today, that the opposition is not wrong, but must be assumed as a part of being First, and that the thing to do is get on with it. I don't advise people to oppose my actions, however, nor do I wish to take a laissez-faire attitude toward it. On the other hand, I must accept that being First necessarily entails deeply unpopular actions, even among the personnel of the Mafia itself, or else nothing ambitious is being done, no risks are being taken, and nobody's reputation is on the line. From the very beginning, me being First in Chicago, something ambitious was being done, risks were being taken, and somebody's reputation was on the line. So while at the start I was put off by the opposition I felt, now I see better that that is only natural, and a part of the landscape for a position as important as First of the Mafia in Chicago, if one takes it seriously, and how can one not?

This in no way lessens the reasonableness, from its own point of view, of any particular position of opposition to my actions as first, but neither does it substantiate such opposition. Furthermore, the opposition is not expected to diminish just because it gets my blessings, as a certain perspective might put it. But also it may happen that the drag on me of opposition stops being so aggravating as it was before, when I took it as something in need of attention down to the most minute detail.

This development comes in parallel with continuing progress in my home bureau on some major quantitative work which has been slowed up considerably by the opposition of poor comprehension, a condition which seems, with successive rounds of discovery of better ways to express the work, to be, possibly entirely, caused by departures from perfectly expressive form, this being my own responsibility. The perception of the work is rife with imperfections of logic, my own closely held logic and the logic held somewhat less closely which may be more proprietary to the greater universe in which I operate, a universe not normally seen in so personal a way by those who are not mentally ill. It must correspondingly be pointed out, however it may seem that this is an admission of my having pathological symptoms of mental illness, that the work I have done enables me to say that these less closely held logical phenomena have been brought considerably closer and under better control, as a result of my complete theory of mental illness, as partially revealed in the obelisk statement (update: obelisk now removed.) in the sidebar. This is a vast subject and I am not about to leap into it at this time.

my background in computers

My first experience with computers was just out of high school. I got a summer job, as a good physics student, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, which was in its beginning stages of formation and hadn't even broken ground yet for the accelerator.

My boss was a physicist, Dr. David F. Sutter, from Cornell. Dave taught me the basics of circuits, and of logic. I was his only student. He would tutor me in his office. My own space was in an adjacent butler building, or large warehouse type structure. It was large and so was my space. Dave gave me a project to build a circuit, a high frequency clock. He stepped me through it at first and I finished it off. Then we debugged it together until it worked. I managed the lab supplies, getting requisitions for all the stuff Dave wanted us to have, getting some of it from the lab stock house, and ordering some of it from mail order catalogs, Allied and some other house. I learned to use the shop in the lab, drill press, band saw, bending machine, punch, etc. The manager of the shop was Bill Carter, a sturdy, unfrilled but warm and fatherly man, and he was very helpful. Another Cornell man came to work with us, Howie Pfeffer. He amazed me with his ability to debug quickly things I thought were real complicated. It always involved the oscilloscope because everything we did involved high frequencies.

Then I was put to work on my own project, a comparator and interrupt of a small minicomputer. I designed the circuit, with clear steering by dave, built it, and scouted out the computer interrupt. To do that I had to learn to program the computer in its own machine language. It was a Variandata 620i computer, with a language called DAS, for data assembly system. Another physicist, Chuck Schmidt, taught me how to run and program it. It was located in another building, supported by air pressure alone for some technical reason. You entered through a pressure-maintaining door.

i was thrilled with the work involving the computer. I picked it up real fast. One of the electronic technicians told me he was really impressed with how fast I picked it up.

There was a teletype terminal that I typed the programs with. It produced a paper tape that was fed into another input. The computer had switches on its frame that enabled you to step through your programs to debug them. These were called sense switches.

Then in the back there was an interface for the interrupt. My circuit had to connect to it there, and there were eight switches on my circuit. these created eight bits, zero or one each, that when the computer clock got to that number in eight bits, it was interrupted. This process was necessary to enable accelerator control to divert local control stations from their routine operations and have them do something special that came up, which it might in such a large machine. The accelerator was to be four miles in circumference.

That's all for this post.