Monkeys, birds, flying pigs and coffee pots

Online monkeys, birds, flying pigs, and coffee pots, that is.

Why would you want to connect any of those things to the Internet anyway? You might want to hook up the coffee pot for the same reason other cyber pioneers have connected toasters, refrigerators and air conditioning: to control it remotely. You might want to connect the monkeys to see how long it took them to write as well as Shakespeare or the average sitcom scriptwriter. You might try using the birds to facilitate telephone conversations. And the pigs? According to "The 12 Networking Truths," (#3): 

<< With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead.>>

Those are just some of the ponderous, obtuse, and amusing things I'm learning in cyberschool this year, thanks to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where this year's online class is "Development and the Internet: The Digital Divide." The classes are free, open to all, and noncredit.

So far we've learned the standard protocol for using birds as Internet service providers, control coffee pots remotely, how the writing monkeys might work, and the 12 Networking Truths, many of which are probably familiar, such as #7 (It is always something) or #10 (One size never fits all). The bird thing started out as a joke, but 11 years after the protocol was written, a carrier pigeon club in Bergen, Norway, successfully used birds with packets of computer data printed onto paper attached to their legs, and transmitted a 64 byte "ping" in only 1 hour and 42 minutes.