It's a small world after all...

Not too long ago, we had machines of different kinds -- each for a specific purpose. There were the big printing machines to print books, there were typewriters or "compact printing machines", cyclostyle machines for making copies, slide rules for doing calculations, files, ledgers, library "index" shelves, films, photo processing studio... one could go on and on. Most of these have been replaced by one thing -- the computer. Till the mid twentieth century, machines were always custom built for a specific purpose. But sometime in the late 1940s a new notion began to take root -- that of stored program computing . The main idea here is to go "meta" -- build one machine that could do act like several other machines, depending on what it is "told" to do. This was not as novel as it sounds. Mathematicians had already been talking about going meta for several decades by that time. And indeed there were some machines which were "programmable

Once upon a time, there was a large application program universe. It was so large and so huge that it was believed that the application was countably infinite. The application program universe contained a vast variety of living beings, also called variables. There were ints, chars, structs, class variables, instance variables, auto variables, block variables and so on. Usually variables went around their work diligently, but occasionally some of them stopped to contemplate. Some of them were rudely forced to contemplate when some other variable with a larger scope looked down upon them with contempt by overriding its namespace. Finally one day, all the thinking variables of the universe decided to hold a theological convention to ponder and answer some pressing questions. Who are we? Where did we come from? What is the meaning of our lives? Is there a God? And so on.. Here we reproduce some of the proceedings of this important convention with permission from the convention organ

A man was sitting in a roadside coffee shop sipping his coffee, when he saw a strange sight. Two municipal workers were busy at work on the road. One of them diligently dug a hole, and the other filled the hole back up. They then proceeded 10 meters ahead and again repeated the hole digging and filling up exercise.  Intrigued, he went and asked them what were they up to. And one of them replied, "Well, we are planting trees. Joe here was in charge of digging the hole, while Sam who has called in sick today was in charge of planting the tree, while I am in charge of filling back the hole. We are professionals. We follow rules and we don't stop work just because one of us is absent!" *~*~*~*~*~* I'm reminded of this story quite often these days. :-)  Like the other day when we went to a shopping mall, many of which are now under increased security measures. Every entrance had a metal detector and everyone entering the mall is supposed to walk through them. We didn

Most folks who have known me realize by now my advocacy of an "idea-centric" world-view from the present "people-centric" approach to things that is practiced in the part of the world where I live. A good quote towards this end that I've come across is: Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas . (This quote is not mine; this is in retrospect one of the most useful quotes I've learnt from my grad school days). As expected, I have met with a lot of opposition. One of the most common opposition that I've encountered is that by speaking about "ideas" I am basically trying to "show off" that I am intellectually better, smarter, etc. And that it does not mean that people who don't talk about ideas are unintelligent; they may just be modest, and so on. All I can say in response is *Sigh* :-) The opposing argument is again focused on the person and his underlying motives if any and fails t