[Edu-sig] Microsoft's KPL

[Arthur]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kirby Urner [mailto:urnerk at qwest.net]
> Sent: Sunday, October 09, 2005 4:09 PM
> To: 'Arthur'; 'Laura Creighton'
> 
> > > In Fuller's (RBF's) lexicon, some of which I've adopted, per
> Synergetics
> > > Dictionary (EJA), we speak of the East India Company
> >
> > Yeah those folks are a big part of the story.
> >
> 
> Correctamundo.  Especially in Japan.

What it boiled down to is the in the time these shots were getting called
the most advanced technology available to allow a decent determination of
what was when, which is intimately tied to the question of what is where
(longitude measurement, etc.) - was the underwater cabling.  The history of
the East India Company was the main reason that the Brits laid and
controlled the bulk of those cables.  So that even the French had in the end
to go to through the Brits infrastructure when they wanted to map there own
Empire.

Which in the end gave the Brits the power to call the shots as to what time
it is in Tokyo today.

All of which - BTW - is only a sub-thread of the Galison book.   Which is
more directly about the efforts to apply technology to precision timekeeping
and its direct relation to the formation of theoretical physics - most
directly  the contributions of Poincare and Einstein.  

Turns out that the fact that Einstein happened to get a day job in a patent
office in Switzerland - where the timekeeping action has always been  -
seems to have been the kind of serendipity that contributes to a Leap
Forward.  That day job got him to where he got much more directly than it is
generally understood.

Which doesn't even yet touch on the Poincare thread - which is the heart of
the book.

Good read.

Art