unCubeme

Suppose you are Senator Ted Stevens and you are trying to find your way through the “series of tubes” that compose the Internet. You want to have a sort of weather report that tells you where you might run into congested tubes and how to get around those congested tubes so that you might get to your destination with as little impedance as possible. Well, Senator Stevens has found some people who are on the same page as him and have been mapping the Internet.

According to technologyreview.com:

While efforts have been made previously to plot the topological structure in terms of the connections between Internet nodes–computer networks or Internet Service Providers that act as relay stations for carrying information about the Net–none have taken into account the role that these connections play. “Some nodes may not be as important as other nodes,” says Carmi.

The researchers’ results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.

And the pictures are pretty too:

And for everyone’s viewing pleasure, I forward you to a refresher course on Senator Stevens (since I made the reference above). As a commenter mentioned, his stuttering is the result of actual words trying to push through all the crap spewing from his mouth.