JohnBs personal blog

One of the things I look forward to watching on TV over the Christmas period are the Royal Institute Christmas lectures in association with Microsoft Research.

This year one of the lectures was titled ‘Untangling the web’ – bearing in mind the lectures are quite ‘child’ focused the way it explained various topics was excellent and as usual excellent use of practical demos (not using a computer!)

One demonstration was how PageRank works using a series of tubes and water levels – basically each tube (differently coloured) represented a page and these were linked with tubes (which corresponded to links) so when a valve was opened the tubes with more inbound links ended up with a higher water level etc.

An equally more simplified demonstration was  Key encryption using a brief case with big pad locks – which makes it trivial to understand. Person A has a brief case with a Red key and a Blue key, he needs to get the private key over to Person B who has a green key. So person A plays a blue key into the brief case, locks it with a red padlock and then sends it over to person B. Person B then locks the briefcase with a green padlock and sends it back to person A, who then unlocks his original red padlock and sends it back to person B who is now able to remove their green padlock and obtain the blue key from inside. Simple huh?

Next up a demo of bandwidth and routing – can’t remember the specifics but it was really easy to understand.

I can’t find a link to the video online but if you’re in the UK you’ll probably be able to find it on Channel 5’s onDemand service.