Re: Gordon Sinclair

["John S. Quarterman" <jsq@quarterman.org>]

>> http://sinclair.quarterman.org/who/gordon.html

>After this article being quoted in condensed form on the list, I decided to 
>go and check out the _full_ version at the abovemenioned website address.
>
>I can only describe the speech as "quaint", now I know the time period it
>refers to, i.e.; the US withdrawal from the Vietnam War.  I don't have the
>number of Australian soldiers killed or injured in that war, but it was
>many, given our small population.  Mr. Gordon Sinclair was obviously
>unaware of many pertinent facts at the time.  It also seems clear that he
>was very emotional and upset.
>
>It is laughable to quote that text as being anywhere near relevant to the
>situation today as since those times, we, in fact many countries, have

[ Excess quotations omitted. ]


Lots of people found his speech by whatever means.  At least in the
above page they see it in context.

>>In fact, it got slashdotted last week.

Somebody asked me what does slashdotted mean.  Slashdot is a web site,
 http://slashdot.org/

It describes itself as "News for Nerds.  Stuff that Matters."
There's a well known effect on the Internet that whenever something
gets mentioned on slashdot *many* people try to look at it all at once.
This slashdot effect can overwhelm a web server.

In this case, it wasn't slashdot that mentioned the above Gordon Sinclair
page (as far as I know).  However, whoever did mention it (and I think I
know who) caused a similar effect.

Nonetheless, the effect did not overwhelm the web server that handles
sinclair.quarterman.org, for a fairly simple reason: it's connected via
an ISDN link, which slowed down the resulting traffic sufficiently that
the web server had no trouble keeping up.  Viewers no doubt saw quite
slow retrieval of that page during that week.  I am seting up a mirror
server to avoid this problem in the future.

>>  Here are total web hits
>>on the server that supports it, per day that week:
>>
>[...]
>> 363883	total
>>
>>Of those, 44,445 were retrievals of the Gordon Sinclair page.
>
>It's a worry....

My interpretation is that a lot of people wanted to see something
reassuring, and that speech filled the bill.

>The call for a calm, measured reaction is a wise one.

Notice the George Washington quotation at the top of the page.

>Cheers,
>
>Ian Newman
>Perth, Western Australia

John S. Quarterman <jsq@quarterman.org>

>(Reference:  Vietnam War/Gulf War/Recent US bushfires/Somalia/East
>Timor/ANZUS Treaty [for starters]) 

[ This is the Sinclair family discussion list, sinclair@quarterman.org
[ To get off or on the list, see http://sinclair.quarterman.org/list.html