[Yet another ridiculously good essay by James Bridle. The man blows my mind. -egg]
The process of laying cables across the ocean is a fascinating and venerable one, that proceeds in stages out into the deep ocean and back, ploughing trenches into the littoral to lay fragile cable under the sand in shallow areas, and paying it out across the deep seabed far from shore. These cables are fat bundles of optical fibers – millimetre-thick strands of glass, through which light is bounced all the way to its destination.
The most resonant moment comes when the ship reaches shore. When a cable-laying ship is a few hundred metres off shore, the last segment of cable is put on a small boat and brought to the beach. And there, thousands of miles from its origin, a man emerges from the ocean, carrying the internet over his shoulder. Sunbeams, indeed.
![“In 2010, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff released a paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt.” […] This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. […]
“This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”
Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems. | Next New Deal, via Dan W.](https://i0.wp.com/25.media.tumblr.com/73ad0c8e0e1866ac056ba00785196430/tumblr_mldyrcE4Iy1qjjis9o1_500.png?w=625)
