Internet Adventures

Olivia.DOW
Mar 1, 2022
4 min read

IP Addresses, Plastic Wrap, & Story Settings

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My Dear Lovelians,

What a fascinating world we live in, one with a habit of being both shockingly small and breathlessly vast simultaneously. So how might a person explore it even without the master’s degree, means, or months of free time to research or visit all the diverse people, cultures, and settings? Why the internet of course! Though pictures and information can by no means replace the degree or experiencing them for yourself, they can still stagger and ignite the imagination. It is an excellent tool for storytelling that’s for sure, but the internet also provides information to utilize in daily life. My internet adventures this past week took me to many random places.

I admit, I do not consider myself a tech-savvy person. I do not talk binary, or IP Addresses, or have any idea how the cloud works, though it has been explained to me several times. It still sounds like an invisible storage unit in the sky to me. Needless to say, the processes behind how computers communicate with each other flew right over my head until, while trying my hand at learning code, I stumbled upon a Khan Academy video explaining this very subject by none other than the internet’s co-founder, Vint Cerf. Granted, it was about a thousand-foot view of how the whole thing operates, but it provided a basic foundation of knowledge for me in terms I could understand.

Imagine sending your nephew a birthday card. The address lines on the envelope are printed in a specific order for a reason:

First Last Name

House Number Street Name

City, State Zip Code

Why? Because the mail system reads it like this. Then the mail truck comes and takes the letter from your mailbox and scoots off to have it delivered to your nephew’s house. Well, a computer asking Google for the biography of George Washington works the same way. Think of the internet as the highway or road connecting your device to the servers containing the information in Google’s basement. Your computer’s “address” so to speak is called an Internet Protocol, or IP, Address. Remember, this is a thousand-foot view. There is so much more to learn about the odds and ends of this subject, but this is the simplified version.

An IP Address looks something like: 192.43.258.13 (video example). It is ordered similarly to a home address:

Country/Network.Region/Network.Subnetwork.Device

Note: Nowadays, the full IP Address of a device or website contains letters and is a lot longer due to shortages because the original could only be 32 bits, so programmers figured out how to extend the bit limit. The last four values still look like this, though, with the four numbers separated by periods. I just looked mine up on my cell phone.

The point is, IP Addresses work the same as home addresses. Wi-Fi connects your device to the internet, or street if you will, which then connects to the “street” Google’s servers are located at, enabling your computer to “send” a request and “receive” information…in about 5 seconds if your connection is good. Isn’t this fascinating? I already feel less intimidated by the subject just by knowing and understanding a little bit about it in everyday life terms (see what I did there? Yeah, okay, terrible pun. Moving on).

I find it interesting how casually I use the internet without really understanding how it works. For example, the other day I made tea cakes and for the life of me could not adhere plastic wrap to my metal mixing bowl, so I looked it up and learned the science behind it. Note: this took about 5 minutes of browsing the commonly asked questions in the results with a frustrated search that looked something like why won’t plastic wrap stick. Remember, this is not a research paper. This is life. Being curious does not need to be complicated with “scholarly sources.” BBC’s Science Focus magazine ended up being the source of my commonly asked question in this case.

Turns out, plastic wrap utilizes static electricity to stick to things and cannot stick to metal because metal is a conductor and disperses the electric charge. Plastic wrap is an insulator, so it requires another insulator to stick to like wood, glass, rubber, or anything else that blocks electric currents. Mind officially blown. I feel so sciency!

Lastly, my internet adventures for the week ended with researching images for a setting in my story, taking me to Ireland’s Cliffs of Mohr and Ancient China’s rice patty Steppes. Talk about stunning.