101–110 of 114 posts
I know this is incredibly childish and probably impossible given the elasticity of the cables laid out BUT I would really like to tug on a submarine cable or even just a thread that goes from Euroland over to the USA and have it move and wiggle over there. And then next up: a submarine miniature tunnel/hose/pipe to send a small little vehicle across. I can't help it.
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Hmm... Not sure what could be wrong there. The links are both working for me. I wonder if anyone else is getting the 404 errors?
popsci.com seems to be redirecting for Australian-based IP addresses. Fails for me in Sydney, but works from my US-based VPS. This is the image: http://i41.tinypic.com/zx05kw.jpg and the Wayback Machine has the article: http://web.archive.org/web/20101231014805/http://www.popsci....
I know this is incredibly childish and probably impossible given the elasticity of the cables laid out BUT I would really like to tug on a submarine cable or even just a thread that goes from Euroland over to the USA and have it move and wiggle over there. And then next up: a submarine miniature tunnel/hose/pipe to send a small little vehicle across. I can't help it.
You might enjoy reading about Operation Ivy Bells: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
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popsci.com seems to be redirecting for Australian-based IP addresses. Fails for me in Sydney, but works from my US-based VPS. This is the image: http://i41.tinypic.com/zx05kw.jpg and the Wayback Machine has the article: http://web.archive.org/web/20101231014805/http://www.popsci....
Thanks very much – I am indeed trying from Australia. Seems insane that they're breaking URLs in an attempt to serve us 'local' content.
For anyone curious as to how they're actually laid, here's a simple diagram of a typical cable layer ship (CS): http://www.murmanchanin.ru/shipnoise/polar_king/polar_king.j... And a simplified diagram of how it operates: http://www.fiberinc.net/images/sea.jpg
While reading a bit about these cables I found this unusual fact on Wikipedia: > Because the [TAT-8] cable was the first fiber optic cable and not coaxial cable, the electrical interference shielding for the high voltage supply lines was removed. This removal did not affect the fiber, but it did cause feeding frenzies in sharks that swam nearby. The sharks would then attack the cable until the voltage lines killed th…
This is especially important when they are about to attack some prey. Due to the structure of their jaws that actually unhinge and push forward during an attack, they lose sight of their prey and use this sense to hone in their bite.
I remember watching video from an experiment where Sharks were fed live fish and raw meat, and the sharks kept missing the meat but almost never missed a live fish.
Here's a video of one confused by an artificial electrical field. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aYPHeK1Tyo
Here's a 1901 version of the map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_East... And somewhat related, a wonderful book called The Victorian Internet: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802716040/ If you ever wondered whether the Internet really is a "series of tubes", here are the tubes: http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/f... That photo is from an interesting article (by my namesake…
Thanks for posting the 1901 map. I'm amazed at the extent of the network back then. Of course, in 1901, each of those lines was measured in (low double-digit) words per minute. Now the metric is more like feature films per second. And the word "cable" once again means a communication line, not a message transferred over one.
1. I'm always amazed that anchors can seemingly hit a cable at the bottom of the ocean floor. Given how hard it usually is for us to find anything on the ocean floor with any precision, we seem to be able to drop anchors and cut cables with surprising accuracy.
2. Do the cables have slack in them to account for continental drift? I don't know how much we drift, but I'd imagine over time the cables would need some slack in them to make up for it.
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The reason for that is there's a an important satellite ground station on Svalbard - it's in an ideal place to communicate with polar-orbiting satellites: http://www.ksat.no/node/77 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System
Photographer Christian Hougue produced a really beautiful series on this ground stations called Arctic Technology. He mentioned that the air is some of cleanest in the world, which is a real boon to the equipment they're running. http://www.soulfood.no/arctic_technology.html#img/arctic_tec...