Structured Cabling Quotes

Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life.

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life. We visited the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, the Sistine Chapel. My instinct was to worship, to venerate. That was how I felt toward the whole city: that it should be behind glass, adored from a distance, never touched, never altered. My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy—Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.

A spider web is a natural structure that works by ultimate tension, and an eggshell is a structure that works by ultimate compression. Both use the minimum and the appropriate material with maximum efficiency. Just as we learn to build suspension bridges with ropes and cables in imitation of spider webs, we can learn to build domes in imitation of eggshells, building in maximum tension or compression.

Yet, of course, and more especially, the executioners themselves became notorious. The first known public hangman was one Bull, who was followed by the more celebrated Derrick. “And Derrick must be his host,” Dekker wrote of a horse-thief in his Bellman of London (1608), “and Tiburne the land at which he will light.” There was a proverb—“If Derrick’s cables do but hold”—which referred to an ingenious structure, like a crane, upon which twenty-three condemned could be hanged together. This device was then put in more general use for unloading and hoisting vessels on board ships, and still bears the executioner’s name.

Returning to my yarn stash, I select a pair of ebony needles and a lustrous ball of handspun alpaca. Then I quickly cast on to create a light, resilient fabric. We don’t have much time before the students get back, which means the gauge has to be right the first time around. When you’re weaving or knitting enchanted fabrics, gauge is critical. Gauge—the relative density of the fabric—determines the degree to which a magical object can utilize or redirect fields of energy. But magic often requires a mix of skill and sacrifice. It’s not enough to knit a pattern without making a mistake: you also have to give up something of yourself. A heart shroud is a complex spell, filled with twisty cables mimicking the structure of the human heart.

Online’ sales on the Internet are only an improvement of the old mail order catalogues, which were introduced in . . . 1850; they do not represent a structural change. Similarly, the Internet, multimedia cell phones, cable television, smartcards and the general computerisation of society — even genetic engineering — do not represent structural changes. They are all only developments of what already existed. There is nothing in all this to compare with inventions that really turned the world upside down, the real techno-economic metamorphoses introduced between 1860 and 1960 that revolutionised society and the framework of life: internal combustion engines, electricity, the telephone, telegraph, radio (which was more revolutionary than television), trains, cars, airplanes, penicillin, antibiotics, and so forth. The ‘new economy’ is behind us! No fundamental innovation has taken place since 1960. Computers only allow us to accomplish differently, faster and more cheaply (but with much greater fragility) what was already being done. On the other hand, the automobile, antibiotics, telecommunications and air travel were authentic revolutions that made possible what before had been impossible.

The human brain is the most complex entity in the universe. It has between fifty and one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, each branched to form thousands of possible connections with other nerve cells. It has been estimated that laid end to end, the nerve cables of a single human brain would extend into a line several hundred thousand miles long. The total number of connections, or synapses, is in the trillions. The parallel and simultaneous activity of innumerable brain circuits, and networks of circuits, produces millions of firing patterns each and every second of our lives. The brain has well been described as “a supersystcm of systems.” Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. For this reason alone, biological heredity could not by itself account for the densely intertwined psychology and neurophysiology of attention deficit disorder. Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. As the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “Much of each brain’s circuitry, at any given moment in adult life, is individual and unique, truly reflective of that particular organism’s history and circumstances.” This is no less true of children and infants. Not even in the brains of genetically identical twins will the same patterns be found in the shape of nerve cells or the numbers and configuration of their synapses with other neurons. The microcircuitry of the brain is formatted by influences during the first few years of life, a period when the human brain undergoes astonishingly rapid growth. Five-sixths of the branching of nerve cells in the brain occurs after birth. At times in the first year of life, new synapses are being established at a rate of three billion a second. In large part, each infant’s individual experiences in the early years determine which brain structures will develop and how well, and which nerve centers will be connected with which other nerve centers, and establish the networks controlling behavior. The intricately programmed interactions between heredity and environment that make for the development of the human brain are determined by a “fantastic, almost surrealistically complex choreography,” in the apt phrase of Dr. J. S. Grotstein of the department of psychiatry at UCLA. Attention deficit disorder results from the miswiring of brain circuits, in susceptible infants, during this crucial period of growth.

Yatima found verself gazing at a red-tinged cluster of pulsing organic parts, a translucent confusion of fluids and tissue. Sections divided, dissolved, reorganised. It looked like a flesher embryo – though not quite a realist portrait. The imaging technique kept changing, revealing different structures: Yatima saw hints of delicate limbs and organs caught in slices of transmitted dark; a stark silhouette of bones in an X-ray flash; the finely branched network of the nervous system bursting into view as a filigreed shadow, shrinking from myelin to lipids to a scatter of vesicled neurotransmitters against a radio-frequency MRI chirp. There were two bodies now. Twins? One was larger, though – sometimes much larger. The two kept changing places, twisting around each other, shrinking or growing in stroboscopic leaps while the wavelengths of the image stuttered across the spectrum. One flesher child was turning into a creature of glass, nerves and blood vessels vitrifying into optical fibres. A sudden, startling white-light image showed living, breathing Siamese twins, impossibly transected to expose raw pink and grey muscles working side by side with shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric actuators, flesher and gleisner anatomies interpenetrating. The scene spun and morphed into a lone robot child in a flesher's womb; spun again to show a luminous map of a citizen's mind embedded in the same woman's brain; zoomed out to place her, curled, in a cocoon of optical and electronic cables. Then a swarm of nanomachines burst through her skin, and everything scattered into a cloud of grey dust. Two flesher children walked side by side, hand in hand. Or father and son, gleisner and flesher, citizen and gleisner... Yatima gave up trying to pin them down, and let the impressions flow through ver. The figures strode calmly along a city's main street, while towers rose and crumbled around them, jungle and desert advanced and retreated. The artwork, unbidden, sent Yatima's viewpoint wheeling around the figures. Ve saw them exchanging glances, touches, kisses – and blows, awkwardly, their right arms fused at the wrists. Making peace and melting together. The smaller lifting the larger on to vis shoulders – then the passenger's height flowing down to the bearer like an hourglass's sand.

Hi, I’m Bob Howard. I’m a computational demonologist and senior field agent working for an organization you don’t know exists. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; diving through holes in spacetime that lead to dead worlds and fighting off the things with too many tentacles and mouths that I find there; liaising with procurement officers to draft the functional requirements for our new classified document processing architecture; exorcising haunted jet fighters; ensuring departmental compliance with service backup policy; engaging in gunfights with the inbred cannibal worshippers of undead alien gods; and sitting in committee meetings.

Whereas many of the particles inside you are in the constant complex motion that corresponds to your being alive, others move only in less-elaborate ways, such as many of the ones that make up your skin and help keep the other particles from flying apart. This means that your spacetime tube is a bit like those electrical cables where the inner strands are braided together and the shared insulation on the outside resembles a hollow tube. Moreover, most of your particles get regularly replaced. For example, about three-quarters of your body weight is water molecules, which get replaced every month or so, and your skin cells and red blood cells are replaced every few months. In spacetime, the trajectories of these particles joining and then leaving your body make a pattern reminscent of the familiar silk strands attached to a corncob. At both ends of your spacetime braid, corresponding to your birth and death, all the threads gradually separate, corresponding to all your particles joining, interacting and finally going their own separate ways (Figure 11.4 right). This makes the spacetime structure of your entire life resemble a tree: at the bottom, corresponding to early times, is an elaborate system of roots corresponding to the spacetime trajectory of many particles, which gradually merge into thicker strands and culminate in a single tubelike trunk corresponding to your current body (with a remarkable braidlike pattern inside as we described above). At the top, corresponding to late times, the trunk splits into ever-finer branches, corresponding to your particles going their own separate ways once your life is over. In other words, the pattern of life has only a finite extent along the time dimension, with the braid coming apart into frizz at both ends.

All of the patterns we've discussed of course exist in four dimensions rather than three, and the metaphors about braids, cables and trees, shouldn't be taken too literally. The key point is simply that you can be an unchanging pattern in spacetime-the specific details of this pattern are less important for the points we're making. This pattern is part of the mathematical structure that is our Universe, and the relations between different parts of the pattern are encoded in mathematical equations. As we saw in Chapter 8, Everett's quantum mechanics endows you with an even more interesting-but no less mathematical-structure, since a single you (the tree trunk) can split into many branches, each feeling that they're the one and only you--we'll return to this later.

...you think cabling is unnatural--that's what your arguments all come down to. But it's not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It's like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn't a coincidence, it can't be. They fit together so easily--like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound...

7. Lighting • Carry out a site survey whenever possible to assess the conditions in which an exhibition will take place, and familiarize yourself with any existing lighting infrastructure and daylight parameters. • Examine existing electrical installations and determine whether they are adequate to support new lighting. Considering the routing of cables carefully. • Plan the lighting early on. It is easier to add it at the beginning of the the design process than at the end. • Create a lighting scheme that supports the exhibition structure and helps the convey the show's concept. • Ensure that all graphical information that is intended to be read and adequately illuminated, and check the readability of the information. • Consider the amount of heat the lighting will generate. Hot lamps may harm the exhibits and if the heat build-up is too great, additional air-conditioning may be needed. • Make your collaborators aware of the lighting solutions you intend to provide by circulating your lighting plans to all relevant parties.

By one estimate, approximately 20 billion synapses are pruned every day between childhood and early adolescence. It’s survival of the busiest. Like a cable TV subscription canceled because nobody’s watching, synaptic connections that aren’t used weaken and vanish. Here is where the power of genes falls off rapidly: genes may lead neurons to make their initial, tentative connections and control the order in which different regions of the brain (and thus physical and mental capacities) come on line, but it’s the environmental inputs acting on the plasticity of the young nervous system that truly determine the circuits that will power the brain. Thus, from the earliest stages of development, laying down brain circuits is an active rather than a passive process, directed by the interaction between experience and the environment. The basic principle is this: genetic signals play a large role in the initial structuring of the brain. The ultimate shape of the brain, however, is the outcome of an ongoing active process that occurs where lived experience meets both the inner and the outer environment.

People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe. What they want is information that confirms their preexisting biases, falsely presented through the structure of traditional broadcasting. It had to look like objective journalism, but only if the volume was muted. Moreover, the bias expressed cannot be subtle or unpredictable; partisan audiences want to know what they’re getting before they actually get it. Unless cataclysmic events are actively breaking, the purpose of cable news is emotional reassurance.

My favoured method is: 1. Create a cage with chicken wire or netting and a single wooden structure as the base (a pallet works just fine). 2. Cover the pallet with wire mesh or similar to avoid materials falling through. 3. Make an upright hoop of the mesh that will sit on the pallet and secure the ends with cable ties. 4. Fill the cage up with leaves. Make sure they are moist. If they are really dry, water them and check every few months, repeating the process if you find any dry spots. Remember that leaf mould takes a bit longer to decompose than most other organic substances as it’s primarily decomposed by fungal activity. To speed up the process you could add something nitrogen-rich like grass clippings or coffee grounds and it will help to get leaf mould quicker.

Earthing and lightning protection aren't just about safeguarding structures; they're about grounding safety and peace of mind in the face of nature's unpredictable power." - Pioneer Power International

Considering the long-shot nature of its petition against Fahrenheit 9/11, it is worthwhile to consider whether Citizens United was mainly interested in hectoring the marketing strategy for that film, or whether it had ulterior motives in mind. One possibility is that Citizens United had recognized an opportunity to test whether the FEC would grant a “media exception” from the electioneering rules to companies producing documentary films. The BCRA allowed such exemptions for material that appeared “in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of a broadcast, cable, or satellite television or radio station.” Though it was banned from traditional “electioneering” due to its corporate structure, Citizens United might have believed in 2004 that the FEC would distinguish between documentary films and campaign advertising, allowing corporate producers of the former to air ads with candidate images. Such a decision would have allowed it to create and market similar movies advocating conservative ideas.

This need for control also played itself out when Google went public. Brin and Page set up a two-class stock structure (mimicking monopoly cable firms such as Comcast) in which their own shares had ten times the voting power of the shares offered to the public.

Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads. (...) Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges. (He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome. The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval. And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction. When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers. (...) For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command. “Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile. (He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small. His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.

American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867-1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world's foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, 'a supernova.' Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also high­lighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifi­able classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain. One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies -- the part of the neuron that con­tains the chromosomes and the DNA -- decoding machinery -- are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mush­room's 'head'), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces. A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched struc­ture that is a nerve cell's signal 'receiver') extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron's 'information-sending output cable') extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom's 'stalk'). Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neu­rons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus. (In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the an­tennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) -- and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration. Kenyon's 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected. Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as full­grown trees -- only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain's ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee's brain -- and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the informa­tion flow through the brain by learning and memory. It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon's, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information pro­cessing inside a brain. Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplish­ments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved be­tween institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship. Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for 'erratic and threatening behavior' toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later -- as Nick Strausfeld writes, 'unloved, forgotten, and alone.' It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.

The cause-effect information is defined as the smaller (minimum) of the cause-information and the effect-information. If either one is zero, the cause-effect information is likewise zero. That is, the mechanism's past must be able to determine its present, which, in turn, must be able to determine its future. The more the past and the future are specified by the present state, the higher the mechanism's cause-effect power. Note that this usage of 'information' is very different from its customary meaning in engineering and science introduced by Claude Shannon. Shannon information, which is always assessed from the external perspective of an observer, quantifies how accurately signals transmitted over some noisy communication channel, such as a radio link or an optical cable, can be decoded. Data that distinguishes between two possibilities, OFF and ON, carries 1 bit of information. What that information is, though - the result of a critical blood test or the least significant bit in a pixel in the corner of a holiday photo - completely depends on the context. The meaning of Shannon information is in the eye of the beholder, not in the signals themselves. Shannon information is observational and extrinsic. Information in the sense of integrated information theory reflects a much older Aristotelian usage, derived from the Latin in-formare, 'to give form or shape to.' Integrated information gives rise to the cause-effect structure, a form. Integrated information is causal, intrinsic, and qualitative: it is assessed from the inner perspective of a system, based on how its mechanisms and its present state shape its own past and future. How the system constrains its past and future states determines whether the experience feels like azure blue or the smell of wet dog.

For two days we explored Rome, a city that is both a living organism and a fossil. Bleached structures from antiquity lay like dried bones, embedded in pulsating cables and thrumming traffic, the arteries of modern life.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.

Tensegrity, a principle elaborated by Snelson and Buckminster Fuller, produces structural integrity by placing tension on independent units. Snelson’s sculptures consist of hollow metal rods, none of which touch one another, connected by means of a continuous wire cable that is tightened until a stable structure is achieved. (The children’s toy Skwish is a tensegrity structure based on Snelson’s idea.) Then, about 1990, Ingber and Heidemann realized that the proteins that give cells their structural integrity have many of the properties of Snelson’s sculptures. These proteins are also made of alternating rigid rods linked by flexible regions. They proposed that proteins may have the properties of tensegrity sculptures, an idea sufficiently provocative to have illustrated the cover of Scientific American in January 1998.