Taming the Wild Blue Ether

I keep coming back to the title I’ve chosen for this blog, the meaning behind it, and related concepts and ideas that come to mind upon hearing or reading it.  Well, here are a few more thoughts on the subject.

Frances FitzGerald (who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam) wrote a book in 2000 about my favorite president, entitled Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War.  It was a Finalist for the Pulitzer in 2001.

Also, a few articles (with interesting titles, at least) on “cloud computing”:

• Computing Heads for the Clouds (BusinessWeek, Nov. 16, 2007)
  
• Computing pushes into the ether (The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept. 22, 2008)
• Google’s Chrome browser gets us closer to computing in the clouds (The Chicago Tribune, Sept. 4, 2008)

Essentially, what I hope to focus on in this space is that ever-changing “New Frontier” — the idea of always pressing outward, expanding the boundaries of human knowledge, capability, and existence — and how we are getting there.

On the computing frontier, before too long, we will all be “living” (working, operating) “in the cloud(s)” or “in the ether” (on the Internet).  It is that Wild Blue Ether, that we are even now in the process of taming, that is the subject of this blog.

What, you ask, is the meaning behind the name of this blog?

From Webster’s:

ether

Etymology:
Middle English, from Latin aether, from Greek aithēr, from aithein to ignite [or perhaps ignite -JJM], blaze [or perhaps blaze -JJM]; akin to Old English ād pyre — more at edify

1 a : the rarefied element formerly believed to fill the upper regions of space b : the upper regions of space : heavens

2 a also ae·ther : a medium that in the wave theory of light permeates all space and transmits transverse waves b : airwaves

(Emphasis and links mine)

From Wikipedia:

The general structure for an ether

(Link mine)

Do either of these clippings (or both together) represent an omen? 

UPDATE:  Another snippet from Wikipedia, which I should have thought of at the outset:

Ethernet is a family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). The name comes from the physical concept of the ether.