I will never get a ping time to American servers from my home here in Melbourne of less than the distance times two divided by c.
Funny you should mention that. I spent years working in IT, and this knowledge was actually useful once. I tried to ping a DNS router in Europe (I forget where) from California, and it came back in 1ms and I thought “Ummmmmm… no. You lie.” It turned out one of the smart switches on the local network was fucked up and was somehow returning all pings itself.
Behold! Even a pop-sci understanding of physics controlled my anticipations in a way that was useful for accomplishing goals in the world.
That is pretty awesome, but I also don’t think it’s necessary to think about light speed to solve that problem. Anyone who spends a lot of time debugging networking problems knows that 1ms is unreasonably fast for any communication with a machine more than a couple router hops away, even if it’s physically nearby.
I see that this is getting upvoted, but your example sounds like someone who realizes that a device doesn’t work because it’s not plugged in, and then makes a self-satisfied comment that his knowledge of electromagnetic theory usefully controlled his anticipations in this situation.
In other words, it’s about simple conventional nuts-and-bolts technical knowledge, not an improvement on such knowledge brought by more advanced understanding of anything. There’s no way someone who works in network administration wouldn’t know that a “<1ms” ping coming from around the world is anomalous.
it’s about simple conventional nuts-and-bolts technical knowledge, not an improvement on such knowledge brought by more advanced understanding of anything. There’s no way someone who works in network administration wouldn’t know that a “<1ms” ping coming from around the world is anomalous.
Actually, yes: I think this is correct.
But, I think I would have noticed something was wrong even if I hadn’t worked in IT before. But I’m not certain of that.
Funny you should mention that. I spent years working in IT, and this knowledge was actually useful once. I tried to ping a DNS router in Europe (I forget where) from California, and it came back in 1ms and I thought “Ummmmmm… no. You lie.” It turned out one of the smart switches on the local network was fucked up and was somehow returning all pings itself.
Behold! Even a pop-sci understanding of physics controlled my anticipations in a way that was useful for accomplishing goals in the world.
That is pretty awesome, but I also don’t think it’s necessary to think about light speed to solve that problem. Anyone who spends a lot of time debugging networking problems knows that 1ms is unreasonably fast for any communication with a machine more than a couple router hops away, even if it’s physically nearby.
I see that this is getting upvoted, but your example sounds like someone who realizes that a device doesn’t work because it’s not plugged in, and then makes a self-satisfied comment that his knowledge of electromagnetic theory usefully controlled his anticipations in this situation.
In other words, it’s about simple conventional nuts-and-bolts technical knowledge, not an improvement on such knowledge brought by more advanced understanding of anything. There’s no way someone who works in network administration wouldn’t know that a “<1ms” ping coming from around the world is anomalous.
Actually, yes: I think this is correct.
But, I think I would have noticed something was wrong even if I hadn’t worked in IT before. But I’m not certain of that.
This great story is related.