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Doors of McMurdo
81–90 of 131 posts
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#82Funny that this should pop up just as I’m reading the illustrated version of “At the Mountains of Madness” (H.P. Lovecraft)…
I tought the same.
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#83This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.
Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them . But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.
In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of options, and one of its key components, the congestion control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client choice. Both of these facts have led to significant improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by dumping TCP altogether, in large part because TCP ossified due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when it isn't. TCP, at least, is an anti-example to your point!
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#84This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.
“The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. The system has been incrementally developed almost continuously since its inception. As the system has matured there have always been new features to add to those under consideration as others were implemented or discarded.”
— Donald E. Eastlake, ITS Status Report, AI Memo 238, 1972: https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#85I dunno who's writing this, but they write very well and about interesting things. Really enjoying keeping up with this blog!
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#86This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.
You may be interested in "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott, an entire book about this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
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Re: Doors of McMurdo
#87How can I do a stint in McMurdo?
I kept hoping I could trick NASA into sending me down there for a few weeks. Surely a senior Linux/Unix admin would be useful there? Ah, well, there's always the tourist option.
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them . But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.
In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of options, and one of its key components, the congestion control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client choice. Both of these facts have led to significant improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by dumping TCP altogether, in large part because TCP ossified due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when it isn't. TCP, at l…
So is IP - which version are we talking about?
The out-of-address-space v4 that wasn't future-proof enough to conceive of more than 4 billion computers?
Or the reinvented ipv6 that seems to have gone way too far in the other direction (and not just in terms of address size)?
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#89This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.
I was thinking about this playing Cities Skylines today. I feel like I hate "master-planning" things when I start the game, but then my cities end up being chaos and needing lots of demolishing to fix broken stuff.
I might just be bad at Cities Skylines.
Re: Doors of McMurdo
#90When I hear McMurdo Station, I think of a single solitary building with maybe a dozen people. I had no idea McMurdo was so large with so many buildings! I spent a few minutes trying to find a decent map of the entire station, but came up short.
OSM seems to have it quite well mapped: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=-77.846323&mlon=166.6682...
It feels strange watching the roads cross onto what looks at first glance to be water.
The other weird thing is seeing the map as a Mercator projection, since Antarctica is usually displayed in a polar projection.