[wg-c] Re: [wg-c[ Choosing the intial testbed

[Eric Brunner <brunner@world.std.com>]

Mr. Love,

We've a small, tedious rule most of us attempt to follow most of the time,
which is two-per-day. I've violated it, but not with quite the enthusiasm
you've shown today. If the following are forgeries or whatever, please accept
my appologies. All appear to be for mail sent on 03/22/00 (today) to WG-C.

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Now, on to something more serious than just getting worked up over being
14 minutes deep into a 15 minute period of "fame" and getting lots of mail
to sort.

[A few weeks ago I happened to write to Charlie Perkins about a MANET issue,
 both of us then being at Nokia Research, and I ended up discussing reverse
 kinematics and the sphere packing problem, so today's little note brings a
 bit of personal pleasure to me.]
 
In 1611 Kepler wrote a little booklet, "The Six-Cornered Snowflake",
in which he stated the Kepler Conjecture, posed by Raleigh to Harriot a
few years earlier. It reads:

	No packing of balls of the same radius in three dimensions
	has density greater than the face-centered cubic packing.

Now the Kepler Conjecture was Hilbert's 18th problem (of 23), and was
only proved a few years ago by Tom Hales, so it stood for just under
400 years as something inuitive, yet unprovable.

In his introduction Hilbert wrote that a test of the perfection of a 
mathematical problem is whether it can be explained to the first person
on the street. Those would have been gunners hovering over cannon-ball  
piles in the early 1600's, and greengrocers with oranges in the present.

Just what is it you propose to explain to the email-capable ballot-inclined
ICANN-interested? Can you state the issues? Can you state the issues not
to the ICANN-aware, but to the first person on the ICANN-oblivious e-street?

Droping the hard bits of policy formation on the least prepared people has
less to recommend itself than your first proposal, and it has all of the
religious baggage of demagogery.

Have you considered just how much fun (not) writing the ballot statement
that shifts the burden of disfunction and blame from the collective sets
of shoulders of this WG, the NC, and the Board, to some absurdly marginal
set of voters?

What you've missed is that for better or worse (worse, as this is a long
low-lubricant cluster-fuck), WG-C is _the_ deliberative body at present.
Take a day or two off, read and reflect, there are sides here, pick yours
and do your share of thinking before writing. We've a surfit of those, but
they don't style themselves as really serious people. Try not to shift the
blame to civilians, nor to look as if you've tried to do your homework when
handing back an exam paper consisting of blanks.

Add to the above:

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Kitakitamatsinopowaw,
Eric

P.S. Don't forget to count your ballots before casting them.