The story I read is that the internet is the result of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) interest in rapid dispersal of information to many places so that important information would still be available in the case a documents depository was destroyed. When the now-knighted Sir Berners-Lee had a vision for the network that has now grown to be the World Wide Web of "pages" and videos and sound files, he started our modern information network. But the basic motivation was to scatter copies of important documents in so many places that it would be very unlikely for all copies to be found and destroyed.
This scattering approach fascinated me as a kid listening to the story of a man seeing a leprechaun tending his pot of gold. When the little guy left, the excited man tied his kerchiel around the nearest tree to mark the spot while he went home for his wheelbarrow. When he got back to the area, the leprechaun had caused identical kerchiefs to be around every tree in sight. The logic of scattering a distinguishing marker all over the place is a little different from that of duplicating documents for safe keeping of information but the acting of scattering remains.
This scattering seems to have been employed in the recent incident of North Korea and the movie "The Interview". Once the movie is available all over, in many theaters and through all sorts of movie streamers as in home Roku, Amazon TV and Apple TV setups, it becomes too difficult and expensive to know who has seen the film and who hasn't.
The idea of multiple sites being of importance comes up again in trying to track down all of a deceased person's accounts and property. As a young man leaves home, travels to a new locale, gets a job and begins to save his money with a bank, he begins what may be a long and winding chain of holdings. As time goes by, he may move several times and forget some of his accounts or safety deposit boxes. After the man ages and dies, it may be a tricky task to track down all his holdings. His wealth may be scattered to many points.
There are phenomena that appear to be scatterings but are authentically more or less simultaneous occurrences that are semi-independent of each other. When you invent a popcorn machine that flavors the kernels with a little bit of Pepsi and I invent a similar machine on my own without even knowing you, it may be that conditions where just right to give both of us the same idea at the same time. Knowing whether such simultaneity is coincidence is tricky.
Of course, when divisions of a company or parts of a body act in a coordinated way, we ascribe the simultaneity to the central office or central goals or the brain.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
