RE: Is Cyberspace Rich Enough?

[Blanc Weber <blancw@microsoft.com>]

From: Timothy C. May

"(Actually, cyberspace is partly getting "bigger" and partly
"increasing in dimensionality." Dimensionality of a space can be
related to how many neighbors one has....think of the two nearest
neighbors one has in a 1-D space, the 4 (or 8 if diagonals are
considered) neighbors in a 2-D space, the 6 in a 3-D space, and so on.
Arguably, if one has "100 close neighbors" in a space, it is roughly a
50 dimensional space. An equivalent formulation is in terms of the
radius of the n-sphere that everyone fits into. For example, the "six
degrees of separation," the 6 "handshakes" that separate nearly any
two people in America, suggests that American society is in some
important sense roughly a 15-17 dimensional space, because in some
sense all 250 million Americans "fit into" a hypersphere of radius 3
(diameter 6) when the dimensionality is around 17. (Or slightly lower,
as the slight corrections to V = r ^ n have to be included, which I'm
not bothering with). What "increased connectivity" does is to increase
dimensionality, about as one would expect from our usual metaphors
about "a multidimensional society" and "the world is
shrinking"...indeed it is shrinking, even as the absolute volume
increases.)"

         Well, what I want to know about this, is:
          what are the symmetries involved in the product?

          (I learned that question this weekend)


"What Cypherpunks should be pushing for, in my view, is this increased
dimensionality. More places to stick things, more places to escape
central control, and more degrees of freedom (which has a nice dual
meaning I once used as the working title for a novel I was working
on)."

I think that this proliferation of places will increase as people find 
immediate, practical or entertaining uses for home pages and places to 
stash info, before they will seek to find places to hide, to evade 
detection, to escape notice, or to blend into the milieu as the aim of 
their cyberspatial activity.

And shouldn't there be some mention of the "hardware" involved in 
making cyberspace possible?  Wouldn't there some requirement for more 
cables underground to places which don't yet have them, and utility 
companies to manage the flow of electricity, etc?   I don't know a 
great deal about these things, but it's hardly ever mentioned here, as 
though electricity just flows by itself somewhere called 'cyberspace' 
and all one ever has to think about (besides crypto and software 
commands) are how to plug oneself in, like 3C-PO.    But somebody has 
to install the plugs in, first.

    ..
Blanc