Assigned Meaning

In an article on what traits a computer programmer needs to be successful the following comment was made on the outcome of the study.

Dehnadi and Bornat's thesis is that the single biggest predictor of likely aptitude for programming is a deep comfort with meaninglessness:

What makes computers so interesting to me is that all you have is a gazillion on/off switches. There is no alphabet in your computer. There are only switches. So how does the computer send an e-mail? Meaning has been assigned to certain patterns in the switching matrix. Now it helps (sometimes) if the meanings assigned are consistent. But the essence is: there is no intrinsic meaning to anything going on in the inside of a computer. Short version: meaning is dependent on context. And that is very profound in all kinds of situations. Like how do you communicate with someone who has a far different set of contexts? In computing you ask: is that block of bits you have supposed to be interpreted as numbers or text? What kind of numbers? What (human) language? To get the meanings entirely correct the context has to be spelled out in detail. Which is to say that communications between humans is very difficult. We assume contexts which may not be relevant. This leads to miscommunication.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Strength Of Character

Here is an interesting YouTube. Watch it at least half way through. It is a stunner. Especially note the laughter and deprecation at the beginning. All I can say is that beauty does not correlate with talent. I would embed it, but that is not allowed for this particular video.

Water On The Brain

IBM says that water cooling is the answer to an overheated brain.

IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory recently demonstrated 3D chip stacks that are cooled with water. The company expects to commercialize such stacks for its multicore servers as early as 2013.

IBM plans to stack memory chips between processor cores to multiply interconnections by 100 times while reducing their feature size tenfold. To cool the stack at a rate of 180W per layer, water flows down 50µ channels between the stacked chips.

"Electrical interconnects are in a wiring crisis. The wiring does not scale the way transistors do it because the wire width is shrinking while their length is not," said Thomas Brunschwiler, researcher, IBM Zurich. "Our solution is to go to 3D to stack multicore dice and have the interconnections go in between them vertically, which can decrease their length by up to 1,000 times," he added.

IBM's paper on the approach, "Forced convective interlayer cooling in vertically integrated packages," received a Best Paper award at the IEEE ITherm conference, held recently in Florida. This marked the third consecutive year that the IBM's Advanced Thermal Packaging team has won the awards. The Zurich group claimed to be fixated on water cooling because it is up to 4,000 times more effective than air in removing heat from electronics.

Water cooling the brain seems to work very well for humans too. Something to take note of in hot weather. Keep hydrated. Get your salt. And a wet wash cloth to the forehead is always nice.