Tuesday's Assignment: Mission Impossible!

Reading a chapter in a textbook is simple. Other forms of homework are less simple. Watching the news, for one can be an ordeal. Living on campus, TV is less a ready source and more a lottery draw. As luck would have it, the TV's in the basement were often being used during the hours at which the news ran. On Sunday, the Cable TV was available, but I soon learned why: the cable cord had been pilfered. Luck continued to "favor" me as it turned out that one of the few key items my roommate had forgotten was his cable cord. Seeing my plight, however, he went up stairs declaring he'd see what he could do. He returned after around 10 minutes with a cable cord. No questions asked, I watched WFTV 9. Dominating the news at the time was a strange and controversial story about a woman leaving her baby in the oven after her boyfriend, whom she just a dispute with was going to move out. The baby was not killed, nor seriously harmed. The uncle of the baby (the live-in brother of the baby's father) found the baby in time and rescued her.

The news had a huge debate about whether or not the uncle's story was true, or if he hadn't conspired with the baby's father and put grease on the baby's clothes to supplement the story they told the police. There was also an argument about the mental stability of the suspect. None of these issues appeared on the website (http://www.wftv.com/news/10706729/detail.html) the next day. The only debate I found there was whether or not the mother had turned on the actual oven or had just turned on the top part of the stove. In any case, this story disturbed me about as much as it did the newscasters, whom brought up some other cases, particularly those that didn't turn out so favorably for the baby. Basically, the difference between the television and web media was that reading the article makes it seem as less severe and flat, while the tv gives you the emotions of the newscasters and is that much more real.

The Interwebs

The internet is not older than dirt. It's not even older than Sean Connery. Al Gore invented it. And look how we abuse his creation. He clearly made it so that we wouldn't waste as much paper to help slow our destruction of the planet. America has abused this gift and Gore is, by this time, threatening to take it away. So, help heal the planet, or you lose all your internet.

1958- ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Formed by US to try to get a boost in the cold war's technology race. The idea was to create a large network, perhaps even one of global proportions.

1969- The first "node" of the internet, called ARPANET, was created, and still contributes to today's internet.

1978- Britain catches on to the network phenomenon and a huge collaborative effort of the BPO, Tymet, and WUI results in IPSS, which covered a large portion of the civilized world by the time 1981 came around.

1983 "Birth of the Internet" NSF creates a network running through TCP/IP, which was available to businesses by 1985.

1989 Tim Berners-Lee, "Father of the Internet" begins work on the first web pages, as well as HTML and HTTP.

1991 World Wide Web project gets public showing.

1993 Browsers for the public are available.

1996 Internet is a household term, although its usage is largely mistakenly used, when World Wide Web would be the appropriate term.

2000 64% of Americans are online.

2004 Highspeed internet is availabe to 77% of Americans.


And to think Vannevar Bush was skeptical of the possibility of creating such a network, not to mention nuclear capabilities (i.e. fitting a bomb into the nose cone of a missile). Bush predicted a giant brain of knowledge whose mechanics would rival the Empire States building in size and require a coolant system equivalent to Niagra falls.


Sources Referenced: Wikipedia.org (not the most credible) and PEW Internet.

This is a post.

Hail my originality.