How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an event to get us on the evening news. I remember Run for the Arts, where I tried to talk people into donating money on the theory that I could run, which I could not. I'm about six months into trying to change that and I'm good for a mediocre 5k now, but I don't think that's going to shift the balance on K-12 art funding.

I also remember a domain name: bridger.pps.k12.or.us

I have quipped before that computer science is a field mostly concerned with assigning numbers to things, which is true, but it only takes us so far. Computer scientists also like to organize those numbers into structures, and one of their favorites has always been the tree. The development of wide-area computer networking surfaced a whole set of problems around naming or addressing computer systems that belong to organizations. A wide-area network consists of a set of institutions that manage their own affairs. Each of those institutions may be made up of departments that manage their own affairs. A tree seemed a natural fit. Even the "low level" IP addresses, in the days of "classful" addressing, were a straightforward hierarchy: each dot separated a different level of the tree, a different step in an organizational hierarchy.

The first large computer networks, including those that would become the Internet, initially relied on manually building lists of machines by name. By the time the Domain Name System was developed, this had already become cumbersome. The rapid growth of the internet was hard to keep up with, and besides, why did any one central entity---Jon Postel or whoever---even care about the names of all of the computers at Georgia Tech? Like IP addressing, DNS was designed as a hierarchy with delegated control. A registrant obtains a name in the hierarchy, say gatech.edu, and everything "under" that name is within the control, and responsibility, of the registrant. This arrangement is convenient for both the DNS administrator, which was a single organization even after the days of Postel, and for registrants.

We think that we're converting time into energy... that's the engineering principle.

In the 1820s, stacks, ovens, and gasometers rose over the docklands of Dublin. The Hibernian Gas Company, one of several gasworks that would eventually occupy the land around the Grand Canal Docks, heated coal to produce town gas. That gas would soon supply thousands of lights on the streets of Dublin, a quiet revolution in municipal development that paved the way for electrification---both conceptually, as it proved the case for public lighting, and literally, as town gas fired the city's first small power plants.

Ireland's supply of coal became scarce during the Second World War; as part of rationing of the town gas supply most street lights were shut off. Town gas would never make a full recovery. By that time, electricity had proven its case for lighting. Although coal became plentiful after the war, imported from England and transported from the docks to the gasworks by horse teams, even into the 1960s---this form of energy had become obsolete. In the 1980s, the gasworks stoked their brick retorts for the last time. Natural gas had arrived. It was cheaper, cleaner, safer.

The Docklands still echo with the legacy of the town gas industry. The former site of the Hibernian gasworks is now the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, a performing arts center named for the British-owned energy conglomerate that had once run Ireland's entire gas industry as a state monopoly. Metal poles, the Red Sticks, jut into the sky from the Grand Canal Square. They are an homage to the stacks that once loomed over the industrial docks. Today, those docks have turned over to gastropubs, offices, the European headquarters of Google.

Out on the water, a new form of energy once spun to life. In December of 2009, a man named Sean McCarthy booked the Waterways Ireland Visitors Centre for a press event. In the dockside event space, and around the world through a live stream, he invited the public to witness a demonstration of his life's work. The culmination of three years of hype, controversy, and no small amount of ridicule, this was his opportunity to prove what famed physicist Michio Kaku and his own hand-picked jury of scientists had called a sham.

Where we left off, Albuquerque's boosters, together with the Forest Service, had completed construction of the Ellis Ranch Loop and a spur to the Sandia Crest. It was possible, even easy, to drive from Albuquerque east through Tijeras Pass, north to the present-day location of Sandia Park, and through the mountains to Placitas before reaching Bernalillo to return by the highway. The road provided access to the Ellis Ranch summer resort, now operated by the Cooper family and the First Presbyterian Church, and to the crest itself.

The road situation would remain much the same for decades to come, although not due to a lack of investment. One of the road-building trends of the 1920s and 1930s was the general maturation of the United States' formidable highway construction program. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 established the pattern that much of western road building would follow: the federal government would split costs 50:50 to help western states build highways. This funding would bring about many of the US highways that we use today.

A share of the money, called the forest highway fund, was specifically set aside for highways that were in national forests or connected national forests to existing state highways. By 1926, the Federal Lands Transportation Program had taken its first form, a set of partnerships between the Bureau of Public Roads (later the Federal Highway Administration) and federal land management agencies to develop roads for economic and recreational use of federal land. For the Forest Service of the era, a forest without road access was of limited use. The following years saw a systematic survey of the national forests of New Mexico with an eye towards construction.

The Federal Aid Highway Act presaged the later interstate freeway program in several ways. First, the state-federal cost sharing model would become the norm for new highways and drive the politics of road construction to this day. Second, despite the nominal responsibility of the states for highways, the Act established the pattern of the federal government determining a map of "desirable" or "meritorious" road routes that states would be expected to follow. And finally, the Act enshrined the relationship between the military and road building. The first notional map of an integrated US highway system, developed mostly by the Army for the Bureau of Public Roads, was presented to Congress by esteemed General of the Armies John Pershing. This plan, the Pershing Map, is now over 100 years old but still resembles our contemporary freeway system.

The Rotary Club will take immediate action on the Ellis ranch loop project. The Rotarians reached this decision at their weekly luncheon, held yesterday at the Albarado hotel.

The club's plan is not merely to give Albuquerque a good, short road to the Ellis ranch... They embrace the building of a seventy-mile scenic loop. ¹

Many Western cities are defined, in part, by their mountains. Those moving from town to town often comment on the disorientation, the disruption, caused by a change in the city's relation to the peaks. If you have ever lived in a place with the mountains on the west, and then a place with the mountains on the east, you will know what I mean. We get used to living in the shadows of mountains.

One of the appeals of mountains, perhaps the source of their mysticism, is inaccessibility. Despite their close proximity to Albuquerque, steep slopes and difficult terrain kept the Sandias a world apart from the city, even to this day. Yet we have always been driven to climb, to ascend to the summit.

Humans climb mountains not only as a matter of individual achievement, but also as a matter of infrastructure. Whether the inaccessibility of mountain peaks is a good thing or a bad thing depends on the observer; and even the most challenging mountain ascents are sometimes developed to the scale of an industrial tourism operation.

And somewhere, in between, are the Sandias. Not technically part of the Rocky Mountains but roughly aligned with them, the Sandias lack a clear peak. Instead, the range is an elongated ridge, making up the entire eastern boundary of the city of Albuquerque and extending some distance further north into the Sandia Pueblo. The highest point is at 10,679', relatively modest for the mountain states---but still one of the most prominent in New Mexico, moreso even than the higher-elevation Mt. Taylor and Wheeler Peak.

Few aspects of commercial telecommunications have quite the allure of the T-carrier. Well, to me, at least, but then I have very specific interests.

T-carrier has this odd, enduring influence on discussion of internet connections. I remember that for years, some video game installers (perhaps those using Gamespy?) used to ask what kind of internet service you had, with T1 as the "highest" option. The Steam Hardware Survey included T1 among the options for a long time. This was odd, in a lot of ways. It set T1 as sort of the "gold standard" in the minds of gamers, but residential internet service over T1 would have been very rare. Besides, even by the standards of the 2000s T1 service was actually pretty slow.

Still, T1 involved a healthy life as an important "common denominator" in internet connectivity. As a regulated telephone service, it was expensive, but available pretty much anywhere. It also provided a very high standard for reliability and latency, beyond many of the last-mile media we use today.

Telephone Carriers

We think of telephone calls as being carried over a pair of wires. In the early days of the telephone system, it wasn't all that far off to imagine a phone call as a single long circuit of two wires that extended all the way from your telephone to the phone you had called. This was the most naive and straightforward version of circuit switching: connections were established by creating a circuit.

The era of this extremely literal form of circuit switching did not last as long as you might think. First, we have to remember that two-wire telephone circuits don't actually work that well. Low install cost and convenience means that they are the norm between a telephone exchange and its local callers, but for long-distance carriage over the phone network, you get far better results by splitting the "talk" and "listen" sides into two separate pairs. This is called a four-wire telephone circuit, and while you will rarely see four-wire service at a customer's premises, almost all connectivity between telephone exchanges (and even in the internals of the telephone exchange itself) has been four-wire since the dawn of long-distance service.