The Maps of Our World

There are later stages of an origin, the ones after the moment is no longer innovative but still interesting enough to be spread out into the world, that can matter. Our universe began with a Big Bang, but the longer simmer was equally fascinating.

John Mather and George Smoot won 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in cosmic background radiation. In 1964, Penzias and Wilson had unexpected noise when conducting radio experiments. This disruption caused by the prevalent background radiation of the cosmos, was the first evidence to support that the universe was expanding as opposed to being in a steady state. If the universe was expanding then it would cool as it grew since atomic particles would have further to travel before collisions. When the temperature dropped enough to allow protons and neutrons to form hydrogen atoms, roughly 400,000 years after the start of the Big Bang, radiation became transparent that caused the noise discovered Penzias and Wilson. In 1989 this radiation was better mapped by satellite called COBE that John Mather and George Smoot were the principle investigators. The world indeed looked to be expanding.

The Internet also has had a simmer after the great bust.

Its beginning came out of the defense department and existed for a couple of decades to mostly connect scientists with the people who gave them grants. The origin was more like the beginnings of eukaryotes. The primordial soup long had been fermenting for a billion years and testing out various evolutionary recipes until it stumbled across a combination that worked like Johnny and The Moondogs kept trying new drummers until they found this guy named Ringo Starr and changed their name to the Beatles. They had early hits like “She Loves You,” just the Eukaryotes who billions of years earlier formed their own super group called multi cellular organisms had early hits like “Mitosis”) The internet’s big hit, a web browser, was remarkable in that it was the first piece of technology to come with a built in metaphor about arachnid domiciles already built in. Technologist and hack writers, like this author, have been abusing language ever since. The first major linguistic abuse was putting the letter “e” in front of words like commerce, bay, or pets. This lasted for a few years until the venture money ran out or Bush got elected, and quickly the visionaries shifted by switching to the letter “i” in front of words like tunes and pod. Only a brave futurist will guess whether the next Internet wave will start with the vowel “o” or move into a more exotic constant like “h.” or “j”

For the less brave futurists, the Internet is harder to grasp. It seems to exist everywhere in a constant hum of emails, text messages, podcasts, pictures, and videos – the background radiation of our modern world. One of the great cables that is used to extend it is Ethernet, and the term captures the umbilical chord nature of the wire that goes out of our machine into a place that we really aren’t sure. It is ether.

But what has been happening recently is that there is a branch of the Internet that is being tied to maps. Granted driving instructions have been around for a while, but with Google Maps it is now possible to create your own version of world and link the markers and routes of your existence. (This is a good set of instructions). This technology is being combined with blogs (Outside.in), events (eventpedia.net ), and cute girls in Colorado(hottiespots.com). http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com// has a more complete list.

I have started to add my own such as haikus made about cheering marathon runners and a race I did in Alaska. But I am a relative latecomer compared to those who have built out maps for the world of warcraft or where Oscar winners were born. The new branch of the Internet is more of an Intraweb with the ideas of the world now mapped to physical locations. We had that kind of context before in yellow pages, but what makes it different other than being able to search for everything near a given location is that anyone can contribute. The world has expanded to where the information has been broken down into protons and electrons, and people are free to build out new mashups of their own by mixing particles of knowledge and geography.

Now if someone could just create a site that could find my keys…