Thoughts And Trivia

How and what our mind, recalls, is a great mystery. Sometimes we marvel at it, when it dredges out long forgotten things - in mint fresh condition. Other times, we rue its incapability to recall the name of a person, we seem to know quite well. How is it different from the way a Computer recalls data from its data-base.
In computer a data-base is organised in such a way that each piece of information and its closely related data (together called a record - the thing you see in a row of data in printed form)is stores in memory that is assigned an address number. Thus basically if you know the memory address of that data, it can be retrieved. But Data-Base software shield you from this memory address problem and allows you to recall whole record if you know even one piece of data in that record.
But human mind does not function this way. It has no user accessible memory location address. It fetches data if you know the contents of that data itself (then there is no need to retrieve it) or other pieces of data which your mind thinks were linked to that data at the time of storage. Thus at the time of storing, mind forms association of that data with other data. This association is the key to retrieval. Therefore for recalling a data mind requires triggering hints or a series of them
The number and complexity of such associations is peculiar to each human.
When younger, I had phenomenal memory for faces, although I never recalled the name.
Even if I saw a person once, 20 years later, I could recall the place where we had met and other persons associated with both of us. Also what had he said to me at that time!
I was also good at weird linking of obviously un-connected data.
At the same time I was very poor in medium term memory - where had I put my reading glasses yesterday?? My mind would give seemingly weird hints. "I had placed it at secure place, where nobody can accidently step on it". "When I was helping my wife in kitchen". "What about eating an orange?" I used to tear my hair deciphering these hints - I don't want to eat an orange, I want my reading glasses. Of course I was butt of various family jokes about this memory failure. Reading glasses were finally found in the Refrigerator Freezer!!!
Things have changed a lot during last 40 years. Pressures of job and wife have made me very good at medium term memory. A picture immediately flashes, where had I put my glasses. But I have also to a large extent lost that complex connectivity of data in brain. I neither remember the name nor the face of a person I had spent hours with only last year.
Mind is a pliable tool, the way you use it, it responds to the needs of your life.
As they say - Use It Or Loose It.
Take Care!!

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Maybe due to some psychological programming, we fail to notice the human side of authority figures like - Parents, Teachers, Police Officers and of course Bosses. As we plod towards our own grave, each new experience could help us understand, more and more the Human, that our Father was. And that would help us understand the Human inside us!
(Substitute "Parents" for "Father", if you like).
It is when, we have the first look at our first child, in the hospital crib, that we understand the basis of the love our Father had for us. That way we can better understand our own bonding with this bundle of our own flesh.
As we go through the growth of our children, we can understand why our Father was so restraining to our activities (Don't, Don't, Don't) - his fears of us getting hurt. We can let our children out a bit more, due to this understanding of fears of our father. We can say 'yes go ahead' and wince and pray to GOD for their protection.
(On the other hand, understanding children is much easier, since we have gone through the same set of fears and emotions when we were their age.)
As we and our spouse grow up over years of marriage, we can realise the feelings of our Father as a man. We can now understand, why he many times mistreated our mother - as we saw it. It can help us to be more forbearing about the 'all-to-human' frailties, of the human, that our spouse is - as she does for ours.
It is difficult to come to terms with the realisation that Father was as much a human of flesh and blood, as we ourselves - not a mere card-board cut-out figure.
He lead a human life of his own - which to him was the main drama-stage of life. As ours is to us and our children's is to them and our spouse's to her. All feel that the rest of the characters are there to play a role in our drama-stage - only a little better than the stage props.
We feel cheated, if we realise that, role players in our lives, on the sly, also have a drama-stage of their own - in which we are only a bit-role-player - no more. Why do they have to "two-time" us in my Drama-stage and work as Hero in another Drama Stage of their own -much like a Boss learning of moon-shining by a subordinate.
We are now able to withstand the fears that made father err. Yes, now we empathise with his rights and wrongs, so much, that we need to look into mirror to separate us from him - even then sometimes the resemblance is too close.

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At the end of 19th century, the growing number of horse drawn carriages in London, lead one mathematicians to calculate the horse shit that will be generated 100 years hence, if the horse drawn carriages kept on increasing at the same rate. He predicted that by the year 1992, London would be under 16 feet of horse dung.

These things should be taken with a pinch of salt - the forecast, I mean, not the horse shit. A change of technology to Internal Combustion Carriages (Automobiles) could not have been envisaged then.
I strongly suspect that the environmental prophets of doom are committing that same mistake. They are creating s similar picture of doom due to pollution by the cars.
In any case a single volcanic eruption or a Tsunami can cause much more environmental pollution than a decade of pollution by cars.
I am confident that humanity will be able to discover the next source of energy sooner than later - which would make internal combustion engines a museum piece.
In any case the recent spate of natural disasters has refuted our belief that nature, if left to it, is benign to Human civilization. Nothing of that sort. Nature could wipe out the Human civilization, as suddenly,as unpredictably, as quickly, as remorselessly as it had wiped the dinosaurs.
Step on the gas man, till you you have time!!!

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Information Technology has epochally transformed our Society. This tranformation is as seminal as the transformation of Society from Stone-age to Bronze-age. I am lucky to have been Witness to this transformation from the 2nd generation (discrete transistor circuits) Main Frames to present Web-enabled systems. I dirtied my hands with Machine Code, Assembly Level Language, FORTRAN, Cobol, RDBMS and now Web-enabled systems - paralleling India's journey from being 30 years behind to a front-line runner. What was it Like??

• 1969 - there were a handful of Main-Frames in India. A new one ICL-1909 came to IIT-Delhi. I learnt FORTRAN-IV and Programmed for my Graduation Project on "Simulation of Diesel Engines"


• Computers consisted of Large Cabinets with panels containing blinking lights and switches . These were housed in Large air-conditioned halls with cables running underneath false floor.


• Memory used be made-up of ferrite rings strung on cross wires - solid-state memory came in next generations. Being physical, these used be housed in huge cabinets. 12 KB memory was all that we had.


• Tape drives were huge things, about six-feet tall. I being only 5ft 3in tall, had to stand on tip-toes to load the tapes. Being sensitive about my height, I used to make sure there is no one around, before I did that. Vacuum columns kept the tension on tape constant.


• Line printer was huge and shaped like a Dodo-Bird. It made a racket while working and threw out printed paper like a demented demon.


• Fresh Input was thru Cards, but in IIT we used Paper Tapes. We were taught to read the hole patterns on the tape and the cards for corrections. Wrong portions of tapes were substituted with correct portions by manually splicing the tape. Tapes were punched on a teleprinter like machine.Later IIT acquired card reader and Card Punching machines. This looked like a major improvement


• We sincerely followed the steps of flowcharting, coding etc.


• Computers operated on 6 bit BCD Byte. Mostly computers had fixed word length of 8 bytes, but the computer , I worked on in Railway (IBM-1401) had variable length word, end being marked by a word-mark byte. Blocks of words were marked by Group-Mark byte.
  
• There were no Operating System or firm-ware in these computers. Only one Programme could work at a time. Multi-threading and Multi-tasking came in later generations of computers.

(To be editted)

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