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Tag Archives: computer evolution

Take it to the bridge!

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Writing a song is a lot like writing a computer program. They both require clever management of control flow. The simplest sheet music reads as a straightforward top-to-bottom list of instructions. You start on measure one and read through to the end sequentially. That’s fine unless the music is very repetitive, which most popular music [...]

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The natural history of the Funky Drummer break

Monday, May 25, 2009

So far as I know, the most-sampled recording in history is “The Funky Drummer Parts One And Two” by James Brown and the JBs. It’s a great funk tune, but it’s not as catchy as James Brown’s big hits like “Sex Machine” or “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag.” In fact, “The Funky Drummer” doesn’t [...]

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The desktop metaphor is, like, so five minutes ago

Saturday, May 23, 2009

When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness. User interfaces are the first line [...]

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So what is the big deal with this Einstein guy?

Thursday, May 21, 2009

I’m a humanities guy, but I’ve never lost my childhood love of math and science. I’m looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider being fired up next year the way normal male Americans look forward to the NBA playoffs. I like to be an informed fan, and since Einstein is the Michael Jordan of scientists, [...]

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Soft failure and the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Why do computers crash? What can you do about it? It’s very rare for your computer to physically break. Most of the routine glitches you experience happen at the software level, as different running programs compete for your computer’s finite memory resources. To understand and hopefully avoid crashes, it first helps to know a little [...]

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Be brave, go ahead and divide by zero

Thursday, May 14, 2009

When you learned division in school, the teacher probably brushed off the issue of dividing by zero in one sentence: you can’t do it, moving on. You might feel like you got shortchanged by that explanation. Why not? What happens when you divide by zero?

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The Minus World and the Blue Screen Of Death

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

When the computer crashes, it hasn’t stopped working. It appears to be stuck because it isn’t responding to you, but it continues to hum along as fast as usual. The computer is too busy to take input because it’s in a loop, executing the same short list of instructions over and over. It’s hard to [...]

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Brain vs computer: which is better?

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Do computers think? Is the brain a computer? We use computers as metaphors for the brain and vice versa. Is the comparison apt? Brains and computers can imitate each other in limited ways. Deep down, how much similarity is there?

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How transistors think

Saturday, March 28, 2009

The parts of the computer that do the “thinking” are mostly made of little electronic switches called transistors. If you connect two wires to a transistor, you can use the voltage on one wire to control the voltage on the other. What’s especially handy for engineering purposes is that the presence or absence of a [...]

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Is technological progress good or bad? Yes.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Technology keeps getting better. Do our lives get better as a result? In certain specific ways, maybe yes, but in general, I would say, not really. How is that possible? I think there are two big things at work. Technology is evolving semi-independently of the humans that produce it. We don’t control the evolution of [...]

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