![Software developer and Ray Bradbury fan Tim Bray has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451 that would reflect Internet censorship.
Bray’s recommendation is that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons, the user is given the status code 451:
We can never do away entirely with legal restrictions on freedom of speech. On the other hand, I feel that when such restrictions are imposed, they should be done so transparently; for example, most civilized people find Britain’s system of superinjunctions loathsome and terrifying.
While we may agree on the existence of certain restrictions, we should be nervous whenever we do it; thus the reference to the dystopian vision of Fahrenheit 451 may be helpful. Also, since the Internet exists in several of the many futures imagined by Bradbury, it would be nice for a tip of the hat in his direction from the net, in the year of his death.
The proposal will be considered in July by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the body that makes such decisions.
[guardian]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6521pJjF61qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
Image: NOAA, Rose Eveleth
So scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Hawaii at Manoa (U.H.) who are monitoring that mass have modeled where it might go and when it might get there. You can see one of the scenarios, based on a model from the U.H.’s International Pacific Research Center Institute, in this video. For the model, scientists estimated that the tsunami left around 900,000 metric tons of floating debris in the ocean, although it is impossible to ever know the exact amount. Red areas highlight where the collection is densest, blue where it is least dense.
It is possible that most of that junk—which is not radioactive—will break up and sink before it gets to the U.S. west coast. And if it does, it will be almost impossible to tell whether it came from the tsunami, or from somewhere else, says Dianna Parker, who works with NOAA’s marine debris program. “We get debris from Asia all the time,’ she says, and even the most recent reports of buoys that many suspect came from the disaster could have come from elsewhere. “We’ve seen those kinds of buoys before the tsunami, too,” she adds.
