February 2012 – Dave Kellam

Submarine Cable Map

The Submarine Cable Map, just in case you wanted to know where your bits are going. Here’s an excerpt from the description of the site:

TeleGeography’s free interactive submarine cable map is based on our authoritative Global Bandwidth research, and depicts active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations. Selecting a cable route on the map provides access to data about the cable, including the cable’s name, ready-for-service (RFS) date, length, owners, website, and landing points. Selecting a landing point provides a list of all submarine cables landing at that station.

The source is available too.

The newsgroup post announcing the WorldWideWeb app

An excerpt from Tim Berners-Lee’s post to comp.sys.next.announce concerning the release of the WorldWideWeb app:

This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data available, as part of a truly world-wide web.

A revolution in information access indeed.

You also might be interested in this post from the eightface archive: The oldest page on the internet.

Psilocybin makes the brain work less

Researchers at Imperial College London have been exploring the effects of psilocybin on the brain. A quote from professor David Nutt:

Psychedelics are thought of as ‘mind-expanding’ drugs so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity, but surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas. These hubs constrain our experience of the world and keep it orderly. We now know that deactivating these regions leads to a state in which the world is experienced as strange.

Here are links to abstracts from the first and second study.