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mschild

Highly recommend an article by The Verge on how these things are repaired and maintained.

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

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Also the GOAT of cable laying articles: Neal Stephenson doing gonzo journalism on the topic in the 90s

https://euripides.dk/setebos/frx/matrix/ai/books/stephenson_...

Oh, so that’s why Cryptonomicon has so much detail/plot points about submarine cable laying!

Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere. I remember Reamde spending a full two pages on the benefits of lashing tires to your fishing craft.

> Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere.

Stephenson discussed this a bit in the Long Now launch event[0] for "Polostan" and more or less confirmed what you suspect. He also went on to say that he has learned to reel that in and avoid those "rabbit holes". He avoids such digressions in Polostan, in my opinion to the detriment of the book.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTK1vuv96Rc

Oh wow, this was just from a couple weeks ago. Nice one.

This used to be relatively common, I think it's Les Miserables that spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the Paris sewer system.

Hundreds of pages

Personally, that's exactly why I love his works! "Fictionalized Wikipedia" is an underappreciated genre :)

I remember reading this and preceding 'In the Kingdom of Mao Bell' https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ and imagining making those articles went down like in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' book/movie :-)

56 pages on internet cables? Wow

Thank you!

great article but man I hate all that scrolljacking

who ever thought this was a good idea?

For this reason, I usually default to reading text-heavy websites on archive.today (https://archive.today/IpfNq [0]). It disables javascript and statically renders even a dynamic page to the extent that it can.

[0] mirrors: https://archive.is/IpfNq / https://archive.ph/IpfNq / https://archive.vn/IpfNq / https://archive.md/IpfNq / https://archive.fo/IpfNq

I cannot access the link, it times out.

Added mirror links.

Thank you!

Absolutely unreadable because of this. I often just read segments of a paragraph to see if it contains interesting information and scroll on - or back if I think I missed something - but this scrolljacking breaks everything. I've rarely seen a page as bad as this one.

I was thinking: "They really should add two toggles to the top of the page: one which makes the images static so that the scroll-problem disappears and one where all the non-relevant, non-technical information is hidden."

I think here it is bearable because the page is more like a presentation. The worst is when nothing special happens, and you only notice scrolling is off.

I really enjoyed the book

  > A Thread Across The Ocean by John Steele Gordon

It's a historical account of the first transatlantic cable

The Digital Antiquarian has a great series of articles on communication, starting with telegraph and finishing on first Web Browser. Reminded me of James Burke Connections.

A Web Around the World, Part 1: Signals Down a Wire January 7, 2022 https://www.filfre.net/2022/01/a-web-around-the-world-part-1...

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