Andrew Blum > Quotes

“There’s a certain amount of vulnerability involved with being a network on the Internet. When two networks connect, they have to trust each other—which also means trusting everyone the other one trusts. Internet networks are promiscuous, but their promiscuity is out in the open. It’s free love. Jon Postel, the longtime administrator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, put this into a koan, a golden rule for network engineers: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“2015, ECMWF’s scientists had squeezed out another day from the future, which meant the six-day forecast was now as good as the two-day forecast in 1975. Then they moved the goalposts: By 2025, ECMWF wants to have a model capable of predicting high-impact events two weeks ahead. (It predicted Sandy eight days ahead.) This is the truly remarkable thing about the place: not merely that ECMWF had the best global weather model in the world but that it had been constantly improved, for forty straight years.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“The Internet has a seemingly infinite number of edges, but a shockingly small number of centers. At its surface, this book recounts my journey to those centers, to the Internet’s most important places. I”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“When the Weather Company sells its global forecasts to Facebook, and Facebook is a nation’s major source of news, where does that leave the nation’s weather service?”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“taken. For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations—perhaps a university and a telephone carrier, say, or a telephone carrier contracted to a university. The networks carry networks. One”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“The complexity was again staggering. There seemed to be this endless list of challenges in building the models: better observations, more observations, better use of observations, more efficient use, better calibration, higher resolution, higher accuracy, faster computers, or more frequent outputs. There was never one thing to tweak. Every time I thought I might have a handle on how things worked, I would hear about another layer.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“The weather machine is a last bastion of international cooperation. It produces some of the only news that isn’t corrupted by commerce, by advertising, by bias or fake-ness. It is one of the technological wonders of the world. At the beginning of an era when the planet will be wracked by storms, droughts and floods that will threaten if not shred the global order, the existence of the weather machine is some consolation.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“(They were also prohibited from using government funds for catering, even at meetings—so, no lunch.)”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“the networks that compose the Internet could be imagined as existing in three overlapping realms: logically, meaning the magical and (for most of us) opaque way the electronic signals travel; physically, meaning the machines and wires those signals run through; and geographically, meaning the places those signals reach. The”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“We were waiting for a guard to escort us, and Nipper thought the security rigmarole was overkill. “It’s only a telecommunications hub,” he said. “Data going through here is transient, you see. It’s not like a disaster recovery center for a bank, where data is stored—that really has to be secure. Even if this completely fails, it will of course cause an impact on the Internet, but perhaps no email will be lost, just your browser will hang for a second or so, then everything is rerouted.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“The glaring exception to that custom was the United States, even before the Trump-era retreat from the international community. The National Weather Service sent not its director but its deputy director, a gesture universally understood as a slight to the weather community as a whole. To compensate, or maybe rather to reiterate the arrogance of the gesture, the United States contributes 20 percent of the WMO’s budget, double the next largest member (Japan) and three times the amount from G7 states like France and Germany. (The formula is determined in parallel with funding to the United Nations as a whole.)”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast