Next I fired up an S3 client on my machine to look at the data from another vantage point. It couldn’t connect successfully.  Uh oh.  With a little more digging I found my way to Amazon’s Services Health Dashboard, which showed that there was in fact some kind of service disruption.  “Elevated error rates,” it said.  A few minutes later, this turned into “Service Disrupted”.  All over the web, sites relying on Amazon S3 were either not showing vital data or crashing and burning.

In the end, the outage lasted almost 7 hours.  Every other discussion group has someone flaming about how they’re going to have to find some other solution, that S3 and “the cloud” won’t cut it after all, and so on.

Me?  I’m not so upset.  I think it’s not so surprising that there should be a major outage with something as new and complicated as this, and Amazon provided updates every 20 minutes or so for the duration of the downtime.  If anything, it’s good when we’re more aware of our dependencies, and act with full knowledge of what could happen.  I’m not at all happy about my site being unavailable because of Amazon’s problems (and I am anxious to see a real explanation posted, not just status updates), but I compare that with the bad situations I’ve had with some other hosting providers, and I feel I am still getting my money’s worth.  Is it perfect?  No. Does it enable businesses like mine to scale without huge up-front capital investments?  Yes… and that’s why I picked AWS, accepting the risk and the dependency that goes with that.  We’ll have to see where they take it from here.

Altogether I logged 1,660 access points during the train journey, one of which was named “Jesus”. The naming of wireless routers should rightly occupy an odd little niche in social anthropology. When you look at this many access point names, a couple of points become clear. People name these things with an awareness that the names are publicly visible. At the same time, these names belong to private spaces, and a lot of the names have private significance. A wireless name is a little like a button with a personalized slogan, only you can’t see the person wearing it.

As a rough jump-start to this discipline, here’s an organized digest of some of the access points that I rolled past:

Home Sweet Home

• Jimmy's Place
• Kobes-Castle
• rejectbarn
• rockpile
• HoMe
• homey
• DAWGHOUSE

Shout-outs

• CATS_bklyn
• Harrison Represent Yo (near Harrison, NY)
• OakHill_Boomerang

Network Sweet Network

• Mi Gente Network
• YupNet
• Ken's Extreme Network

Screen Names/Handles

• lillamb
• Fruity
• kittyup
• katburki
• spoiledone
• toughguy
• SirKnight
• Sweetness
• Geek06583_Clark

Cultural References

• Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
• Napoleon Dyno
• Night Rider
• Me van a Matar por las Mujeres

Cryptic

• ManTown
• Sitivity
• apSSIDiointerpol
• Deshmukh (I had thought this could be Klingon, but a reader pointed out that it’s a common Hindi surname. Possibly the network owner is bilingual in Klingon and Hindi.)
• Numbers

I miss…

• Texas
• Florida
• Sonoma
• phoenixarizona
• dakotaboy1
• riven (some people spent a lot of time there)

We Want Your Business

• Pay3$@javajoes
• H@rv3yguns (why the hacker orthography?)
• Holiday inn Bridgeport (also could be read as the very unlikely concept, “Holiday in Bridgeport”)

We Don’t Want Your Business

• Dont Touch This Router
• Mine
• Not For You
• BuyYourOwn (amazingly, this network was not encrypted)
• fuck you

Islands In The Crowd

• redsox (at the western end of Connecticut)
• yankees (at the eastern end of Rhode Island)

Okay… here we go… not writing anything… la, la, la… it’s… not… working…

It’s hard to write nothing. Harder than writing something, in fact. Why would that be? Probably for the same reason it’s hard to think nothing, I’d guess.

I’ve been reading The Symbolic Species by Terrence Deacon. Deacon is both a neurologist and anthropologist, and he has an interesting take on the nature of symbol use in humans and how it might have developed. His core thesis is that our apparently innate faculties for language spring from an earlier, nascent capability for symbolic learning, and that this “learning style” and language encouraged each other’s development, co-evolving from small beginnings rather than suddenly springing forth full-blown in Homo sapiens. He deconstructs the nature of symbolic learning, showing how different it is from “indexical” and “iconic” learning in which obvious similarities and perceptual correlations rule the roost. Deacon believes that once communication of learned symbolic knowledge — such as tool use or location of food — began to improve people’s chances of survival, tremendous evolutionary pressure was brought to bear on the improvement of both symbolic learning and symbolic communication. On this view, thought, speech production, hearing and linguistic analysis evolved together seamlessly, resulting in what today appears as a near-miraculous “language instinct”, but what is in fact a pieced-together collection of incremental improvements just like what is found (non-miraculously) in any other successfully adapted organism.

The internal, bodily change that drove all this, according to Deacon, was the “prefrontalization” of the brain: the increasing volume and area devoted to a bunch of neural circuits in the front of our heads that, in effect, perceive and influence our own perceptions and intentions. If the quality we think of as “red” is a natural phenomenon of consciousness that emerges from our having a visual sense, then one might say that the innate sense of “symbolism” or “meaning” emerges naturally from our having this other, special meta-sense: the perception of our own mental activity as a phenomenon in its own right, fed back into consciousness.

No wonder it’s hard to write or think nothing. Left to its own devices, meditating or sitting in front of a keyboard, a brain is going to perceive some random activity within itself… and that’s a perception in its own right, fed back into consiousness… and that’s going to generate more activity… and… la, la, la…

Given that starling song seems much more complicated than the rest of what starlings do (and I might just be ignorant), I have to wonder what all that complexity is for. And I wonder how much of the complexity of our own behavior would appear just as purpose-free if viewed by some other species with the ability to reflect.

Starlings have an interesting history. They were introduced into North America in the 1890s by one Eugene Schieffelin, for the dubious reason of bringing all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays to the New World. The starling caught on here (and has wreaked havoc on native species), while a lot of the others didn’t get any ecological traction.

Maybe Eugene Schieffelin was acting kind of like a starling, in his own way: in importing Shakespearean birds, he gave vent to some kind of lyrical motive, although not one that would make sense to most other species — or maybe even most other individuals. Come to think of it, he was probably trying to impress a mate.