Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   4

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102
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
$7.5 million just four years 
later. He got a sweet deal for 
“eFlowers.com,” too: $25,000 
plus monthly fl ower  deliver-
ies to his wife—for life. (See 
also p. 121.)
✖  ✖  ✖
Contrary to popular legend, 
Al Gore did not invent the In-
ternet. Instead, credit the 
Brit Tim Berners-Lee with 
the creation, in 1980, of a hy-
perlinked fi ling system that 
formed the basis of what he 
christened the “World Wide 
Web.” Th
 ere would’ve been 
far less confusion as to the 
Web’s inventor, however, if 
Berners-Lee had just stuck 
with his original name for it: 
“TIM”—an acronym for “Th
 e 
Information Mine.”
✖  ✖  ✖
In 1998, then-upstart Google.
com founders Sergey Brin and 
Larry Page approached Yahoo 
with  a  humble  merger  off er 
but were brusquely sent pack-
ing.  Five  years  later,  Google 
was worth an estimated $20 
billion. Yahoo has to live with 
the fact that their main rival 
could once have been acquired 
The Search for 
 Intelligent Life on  
the Internet
Sure, computers are big time 
savers; but they’re even bigger 
time wasters. Fact is, however 
obsessively you check your e-
mail, gamble on the Internet, or 
play  video  games,  your  CPU 
processor spends more time 
each day doing nothing than 
doing something. In 1999, one 
group came up with a way to 
put all that wasted processor 
time  to  use:  by  looking  for 
aliens. Each day SETI@Home 
receives a huge chunk of data 
from a Puerto Rican radio tele-
scope aimed into space, breaks 
it down into much smaller 
chunks (about 250 kilobytes 
apiece) and distributes those to 
more than fi ve million Internet-
connected participants world-
wide. During what would oth-
erwise be down time, these 
millions of processors analyze 
their data chunks for irregulari-
ties that—just maybe—could 
be radio transmissions from 
aliens. As of 2005, the project 
had logged a comprehension-
defying two million days of

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103
with a handful of stock—just 
as  many  of  us  have  to  live 
with embarrassing tattoos ac-
quired while intoxicated. . . .