Cerfing the Net

As every schoolchild knows, the Internet began, oddly enough, as a U.S. national security imperative: RAND Corporation staffers, faced with the hypothetical problem of a communications paralysis in the U.S. following a nuclear attack, developed a proposal for a completely decentralized communications network, connected by "nodes"of equal status that could toss a "packet" of information from one node to another until the information could reach its intended destination.

A few years of noodling and testing followed, until the Pentagon asked the computer science department at UCLA to assist in building a computer network that encompassed the RAND concept of "packet switching."

While the Pentagon had national security in mind, Vinton Cerf, a grad student in computer science at UCLA in 1968, had a personal stake in this alternative method of communication. Cerf (who was born prematurely on this date in 1943) was hearing-impaired and could not differentiate between telephone voices; "electronic mail" would eventually prove to be a more friendly form of communication. Cerf worked on the first relatively crude system of computer protocols that would allow different computers speaking different languages to communicate with each other over telephone lines in service of "packet switching."

By 1971, UCLA had built a 15-host system, known as the ARPANET, which was used by Pentagon scientists and their counterparts in the university sector to communicate with each other and post information of mutual interest. In 1972, Cerf joined the faculty at Stanford, and with the help of Robert Kahn and several others, conceptualized and refined the more sophisticated TCP/IP protocols for computer communication. The Transmission Control Protocols, or TCP, convert messages into streams of packets at the source and reassemble them back into messages at the destination; the Internet Protocols, or IP, handle the addressing of packets being routed across multiple nodes.

In the mid-1970s, Cerf joined the Pentagon to implement TCP/IP as the prevailing standard for computer communication. By the mid-1980s, the Internet had become one of the most influential scientific instruments of the century, enabling the free exchange of research and even the sharing of computing facilities on a global basis at low cost and high speed; but even Galileo's refracting telescope, another influential scientific instrument, could be used for other things than its intended scientific purpose -- as a window to the beauty of the firmament, as a club to beat people over the head with, or, one supposes, if you take the lenses out of a hand-held one, an imperfect funnel.

As the Internet expanded past the original ARPANET sites to 30 million hosts by the beginning of 1998 (due in part to the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, among others, which began to give the Internet its user-friendly media and navigation characteristics), users found a myriad of decidedly non-scientific uses for the Internet, the most significant being perhaps the transaction of consumer commerce (see funnel, above) for everything from mechanical parts to flowers to real estate to pornography. Cerf later served as a vice president at MCI Communications, where he continued to develop Internet-based services and tools, and now holds the title of "vice president and chief internet evangelist" at Google.

I'm Tired of Being the Paris Hilton of My Own Blog

Who is Paris Hilton? I remember asking myself this question when, ignorant of the notoriety she had achieved via such media sources as Page Six, she started showing up staggering in and out of parking lots on Celebrities Uncensored or some such show on E!. Since then, like the rest of the world, I have come to discover that she is, of course, an heiress of the Hilton Hotel fortune (the great-granddaughter of Hilton founder Conrad), a notorious party girl and unauthorized sex-tape star, and a some-time actress/TV personality/pitchperson/pop star/model. Just an ordinary 21st century girl, really.

Interestingly, she has become a descriptive icon as well. By doing a Google search of the words "the Paris Hilton of" I have discovered that calling someone a "Paris Hilton" is far from employing a one-dimensional epithet. Indeed, the art of using Paris Hilton as a belittling tag has developed into a pattern of subtle nuances and protocols that even the Bard himself could not help but admire. Some notable examples:

• Earlier this week, Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti was calling CNN's Anderson Cooper "the Paris Hilton of television news" after he criticized Fox for airing unsubstantiated gossip about Barack Obama's early education, saying that Cooper's lecturing is "yet another cry for attention."
• Boomer Esiason called Bears quarterback Rex Grossman "the Paris Hilton of quarterbacks" on CBS's NFL Today -- to which Chicago sportswriter Elliott Harris replied, "No way the Bears QB has been sacked that much."
• The blog All Hat and No Cattle labels our current President as "the Paris Hilton of U.S. Presidents."
• Armageddon Cocktail Hour says that Rudy Giuliani, while weighing his own presidential prospects, may not have the stomach for "trying to preserve some personal dignity within a process that seems designed to make him look like a man of undisciplined appetites, like the Paris Hilton of Presidential Politics."
• Writer John Doyle of the Globe & Mail calls footie star David Beckham "the Paris Hilton of the Sports World" because "he's rich, blonde, beautiful, none too bright, and shrewd about the matter of staying famous."
• CHOW.com wonders, "How did the pomegranate suddenly become the Paris Hilton of the food world?" And so do I.
• "It"-physicist Caolionn O'Connell, flushed from the publicity she received after appearing on NOVA, worried in the pages of her Quantum Diaries that she was becoming "the Paris Hilton of physics -- totally over-exposed, but thankfully, without the sex-tape with slimy ex-boyfriend." What does it mean, dear Paris, when your life is becoming a cautionary tale to which even a physicist pays heed?
• Defective Yeti notes that "Duct tape is like the Paris Hilton of hardware: it has this huge reputation, despite having never done anything useful."
• Hampton Roads sportswriter Bob Molinaro called the 2006 Washington Redskins "the Paris Hilton of hype." Even without a detailed analysis of the merits of such a comment, one has to admit that it seems like a redundancy at the very least -- or literary overkill, at worst.
• Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is "the Paris Hilton of the federal judiciary," because he won a poll sponsored by the blog Underneath Their Robes. A former 1960s-era Dating Game contestant, Kozinski previously was elected "Number 1 Male Superhottie" of the federal judiciary in the same blog.
• In a similar vein, I suppose, legal tabloid Above the Law refers to Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal as "the Paris Hilton of the Legal Elite" for the swooning publicity over his victory before the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamsdal v. Rumsfeld.
• Iranian film actress Zahra Amir Ebrahimi is "Iran's Paris Hilton" after appearing in a sex video that ended up on the Internet.
• According to C/NET News reader "DarianKnight," the virtual reality social space Second Life is "the Paris Hilton of 3D" because "there is a lot of money involved, the media love it for no particular reason, and in the end it's famous for simply being famous."
• "Like the Paris Hilton of corporate finance, Sarbanes-Oxley is always, it seems, in the news," according to JobsintheMoney.com.
• Energy writer Byron W. King suggests that Cambridge Energy Research Associates may very well be "the Paris Hilton of the energy consulting gig" -- as if we could all be so lucky.
• Memphis Daily News columnist Lindsay Jones calls her cat Dandelion the Paris Hilton of her household because she is "pampered, indulged and reckless in her self-assurance."
• Pia Zadora was apparently "the Paris Hilton of the 80s," Marie Antoinette was "the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century," and, gynecologically speaking, Joan Crawford was "the Paris Hilton of the 30s ... only with talent and movie roles."

Matt Haber helpfully provides a field guide to various Paris Hiltons around the world, crowning new Paris Hiltons in Russia (reality TV host Ksenia Sobchak), India (Bollywood "it"-girl Negar Khan), England (the ubiquitous and big-breasted Katie Price, aka Jordan), Canada (Liberal MP Belinda Stronach) and even in "red state America" (Ann Coulter, of course -- who has also been called the "Paris Hilton of Conservatism," the "Paris Hilton of postmodern politics," and "the Paris Hilton of Fox News", among other things).

The bottom line here is that calling someone "the Paris Hilton of" something-or-other has been a useful, textured way of describing some person or thing for about four years.

Time to move on, folks. If a consumer trade journal reviewer can be tempted to write that the Karcher RC 3000 is "the Paris Hilton of robot vacuums" because "it can't clean well, it wanders aimlessly, and it's pricey -- but it sure is pretty" -- well, then we have seriously run this particular cliche into the ground.

Let's entomb it within the OED, and try to find another tiresome metaphor as soon as possible. It shouldn't be difficult. Remember, there's an "it" girl starlet around every corner, just waiting for you to publicize her. We'll be accepting nominations for the new "____ is the ____ of _____" in the comment section of this post.

Nelson's Xanadu

"The story of Ted Nelson's Xanadu is the story of the dawn of the information age. Like the mental patient in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow who believes he is the Second World War . . . Nelson, with his unfocused energy, his tiny attention span, his omnivorous fascination with trivia, and his commitment to recording incidents whose meaning he will never analyze, is the human embodiment of the information explosion." - G. Wolf.

Information theorist Ted Nelson was born on this day in 1937 in Chicago, the son of film director Ralph Nelson and actress Celeste Holm.

After studying philosophy at Swarthmore, Nelson was pursuing a master's degree in sociology at Harvard when he enrolled in a computer course and began to have visions about the future of information. There he made an attempt, before the invention of word processing systems, to create a "writing system" which would allow writers to store and edit their work; unfortunately, he took an "incomplete" in the course. In the 1960s, he became known as a computer theorist, without actually producing software, and coined the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" to refer to the linking of related texts or media -- a concept which had been explored as early as 1945 by Vannevar Bush.

With a growing reputation as a visionary, Nelson worked in and out of business and academia attempting to advance his ideas about the nonsequential, interlinked presentation of information and his predictions of millions of simultaneous users of this information, but his chronic lack of focus (he suffers from attention deficit disorder) and rebelliousness (among his favorite maxims are "most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist and everything is wrong") got him bounced from job to job.

From the late 1960s, however, Nelson has been actively supervising the design of Xanadu (named after the "pleasure dome" referred to in the unfinished poem by Samuel Coleridge, Kublai Khan), a proposed hypertext system in which all links between text are two-way and which would provide for the publication of comments on existing works to appear as anntotations; parallel retrieval and editing; version management; and an efficient system of copyright management. In effect, he had envisioned a universally accessible, self-updating electronic library/town meeting.

In its early days, the proposed system anticipated Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web; since the emergence of the Web in 1990, Nelson has offered his proposed system as a less autocratic, more multi-dimensional and interactive alternative to the Web, which he disparages as a mere "child's wagon" in terms of its power and complexity. Like Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu construction project in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Project Xanadu is "still unfinished," although it has had the backing of no less than Autodesk (for a time) and despite the fact that Nelson had predicted its release as long ago as 1976, 1988 and 1991. According to the official Xanadu website, Nelson's investors forced his work to be made available in an "open source" environment in 1999, although Nelson is seeming to insist that Project Xanadu is ongoing as an independent project.

Nelson's critics tend to portray him, at worst, as a woolly charlatan, leaving behind him a pile of unfinished projects, disgruntled investors, and a collection of clever new buzzwords (including "docuverse," "cybercrud" and "softcopy"); at best, they see him as a brilliant, compulsive mad-monk, squandering his genius by toiling away at the mystically unattainable -- like Isaac Newton in his later years, searching for the keys to alchemy.

Creepy Celebrity Worship

No, not the worship of creepy celebrities, but the creepy worship of celebrities . . .

The SMA Archive is a Baltimore, Maryland-based group whose aim is the "‘resurrection’ of actresses from the Golden era of silent cinema":

"To do this we are securing a large body of quality genetic material from a variety of sources which is subjected to rigorous testing to ensure its validity. Samples range from small tissue and blood samples to full bones and several preserved organs. We intend to work closely with science organisations to perfect safe and reliable human duplication techniques. We are already in discussion with several studios interested in becoming parents to these new stars of old."

The SMA site has pictures of its archives (see Greta Garbo's hair, accompanying this post). Also included are locks of hair from such stars as Dolores Del Rio, Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, toe nail clippings from Norma Shearer, and some kind of bone fragment from Clara Bow. Obviously, it is a hoax (perpetrated, it would seem, by playwright Gregory Whitehead), but it is such an elaborately conceived hoax, it does kind of give you a queasy feeling.

Meanwhile, Canadian performance artist Jillian McDonald has found a different way of exorcising her celebrity obsessions, editing herself into films with Billy Bob Thornton and Vincent Gallo.

On the whole, I can't decide which form of star worship is creepier . . .
(Via Metafilter.)

The Nathan Bitner Saga

Happy 31st birthday to Nathan Bitner, one of the more unusual obsessions of the blogosphere a couple of years ago.

On May 21, 2003, the publishers of a blog called X-Entertainment (focusing, in the publisher's words, on some of the "more obscure, geeky parts of [80s] pop-culture") posted an innocent piece of fluff on a 1986 contest held by Mattel Toys, maker of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line of action figures, challenging children to design a new He-Man character. The winner of the 1986 contest, and a college scholarship, was a sweet-faced 11-year old kid named Nathan Bitner, who had designed a humanoid superhero with a camera in place of its head named "Fearless Photog." In its press release, Mattel promised that it would "produce Fearless Photog as part of the Masters toy line," but as the publisher of X-Entertainment observed, Mattel never got around to making the toy.

Like countless other blog postings (the one you're reading for example), this one might have been consigned to web obscurity were it not for a diligent group of X-Entertainment readers who took it upon themselves to find out whatever happened to Nathan Bitner. One of the readers posted a follow-up pointing out that someone named Nathan Bitner was one of the lead designers of the videogame Halo (1998; a story-based fighting game) for Bungie Software. Soon, other "Nathan Bitner" Internet sightings were found: in one, he appeared to have left Bungie in 1999 to set up his own videogame company, Island Four; in another, he was posting thoughts about suicide on a newsgroup; in others, he had attended UNC Chapel Hill, or was serving in the U.S. military, possibly in Iraq.

Then came a sordid tale, posted on a Halo message board, about the collapse of Island Four, and Bitner's bankruptcy, eviction, non-sexual involvement with a prostitute named "Genesis" whom he hired as a concept artist, and mental illness. As reader Ed Franklin wrote, within hours of the original X-Entertainment posting, "I think I've found out too much already. It seems obvious that he won the contest, got the scholarship, went to UNC Chapel Hill, worked at Bungie for a bit . . . quit Bungie to start his own company, flopped, then joined the army at age 28. That's more info than I have on some of my blood relatives."

Franklin's stripped down version of the tale turned out to be true, but the Nathan Bitner mystery began to take on a life of its own, especially after Franklin found an interview with Bitner elsewhere on the Internet in which the Island Four founder boasted, prophetically, "Oh, yeah, and most importantly, I want a cult following." The story was picked up by Matt Haughey's MetaFilter blog, drawing hundreds of readers to X-Entertainment to join in on the speculation, creating a humorous blog-thread of epic proportions (comprised of thousands of individual messages) and multiplying "Bitner" references across the Web.

Old friends, a disgruntled investor in Island Four, and several runners-up in the original He Man contest all made appearances on the Nathan Bitner thread of X-Entertainment over the next several months; there was a collection of Bitner haikus ("Paid hooker, no sex/ Screwed out of Fearless Photog/ That is so Bitner"); people claiming to be Bitner flamed in and were swiftly weeded out by the "experts," and there was even one person who claimed to be Bitner's father who said that Bitner had died many years ago.

Finally, on Thanksgiving weekend 2003, 6 months and one week after the first posting, Nathan Bitner addressed the assembled bloggers with his own posting. Gallant, clearly humbled by his past travails and frankly blown away by how much of his personal life could have ended up for all to see on the World Wide Web, and how much speculation about him could have been inspired among total strangers, Bitner -- then serving as a medic in the U.S. Army at Fort Stewart -- wrote:

"Wow . . . This has got to be the most insane thing I have ever seen on the internet. And that's coming from me . . . When I first saw this, I have to admit that I was pretty devastated. I couldn't believe it. It was a harsh reminder of just how horrible everything had been not so long ago. I had done everything I could to put that life behind me and flat-out start over. Much of it was brutal to read, to say the least. I knew very well when I posted non-anonymously to alt.suicide.holiday (oh, yeah, those were the days baby) that it would be there forever -- so that's pretty easy to accept. But there are other things I never thought would be up for public discussion, and I have the very strong opinion that they never should have been. I think it was wrong, poor taste, poor judgment, kind of vindictive, and somewhat cruel. At the same time, I was guilty of at least the first three on enough occasions that it is not very difficult to understand that it happens."

While there may have been nothing all that extraordinary in the Nathan Bitner saga itself that bears memorializing, the Nathan Bitner scavenger hunt was a curious example of the speed with which gossip and pop-mania can spread, and the surprising indelibility of one's "fifteen minutes of fame" within this seething, larger-than-life electronic archive known as the Web. Behind it lurks the uncomfortable realization that there is nothing that is truly private in any of our lives. Google your own name and see.

The Nathan Bitner thread on X-Entertainment is preserved for posterity, and unauthorized Nathan Bitner t-shirts and mugs are available at Cafe Press.

A Few Bugs Here and There

On Monday, it was announced that the Republican National Committee had hired Patrick Ruffini to serve as its "eCampaign director," ostensibly to run the Party's website GOP.com.

Patrick has been the proprietor of a very useful website called 2008 Presidential Wire, which I have as a featured link on this blog. 2008 Presidential Wire is a mechanized web-wire service which apparently automatically picks up blog and mainstream media coverage of some 30 or so Democratic and Republican potential 2008 presidential candidates.

Yesterday, there was a headline on 2008 Presidential Wire that caught my eye: "Oak Creek Boy Dies When Stove Falls On Top Of Him." That's certainly an unusual headline for an article about a potential presidential candidate, I thought, so I couldn't resist checking it out. The article reads as follows:

An Oak Creek toddler died under a stove over the weekend. . . "We're looking at the possibility if there was neglect involved at any point that could have prevented this from happening," Oak Creek Police Lt. John Edwards said. . .

It is a tragic story, but one that I predict will not figure prominently in the 2008 race, unless it is determined that former U.S. Senator and Democratic veep candidate John Edwards is now moonlighting with the Oak Creek Police. I can't say I've seen too much of Mr. Edwards of late, so nothing would surprise me.

Today, there's another interesting one, listed as an article about Sen. George Allen, from my own backyard: "New Kensington Man Jailed for Alleged Stabbing." This one features the following:

Police say 44-year-old George Allen Jackson is charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment.

With or without the bugs, we wish Mr. Ruffini good luck in his new role with the RNC website.

John Edwards articles on 2008 Presidential Wire
George Allen articles on 2008 Presidential Wire