Post0418

DoS made a video about a map of computer science. The narrator of the video, Dominic Walliman, broke the field of computer science into "Theoretical computer science", "Computer engineering", and "Applications" and presented concepts within each topic. This idea of creating a map of a particular field interested me because it brought together various disparate concepts into one cohesive representation.

I enjoy it when computer science is taught as a story. Trends in processor speed, number of transistors, and memory latency over time. The conventions and theoretical computing machines that led to the conception of modern computer architecture, such as the Turing machine and finite automata. The development and miniaturization of the transistor and the reception of that technology. The mathematical study of classifying, measuring, and optimizing algorithms. The story of RISC and CISC and the evolution of ISAs over time. Development and evolution of programming languages. The co-design of hardware and operating systems.

I had an idea today of building small little gadgets, maybe as small web applications, to capture the beauty of certain ideas in computer science. Some ideas are designed elegantly (e.g. pipelined stages of a processor), others can capture so much power with so little (DFAs/NFAs), others can be represented beautifully (e.g. performance of various sorting algorithms), others can be presented without words and simply be understood through observation.

Today, I installed manim, the math animation software created by Grant Sanderson, the creator of 3 Blue 1 Brown. Some day, I would like to explore all of its features and build some animations with the software. I also spent an hour improving my resume.

Obviously, the resume is a document that captures one's professional career and experience. But, less obviously, because it is a distillation, the selection of details within it reflects how the creator views his or her own professional life. That is to say, the interplay between one's resume and a person's career is not a one-way relationship: one's career influences one's resume, but the way one communicates his or her story influences how that person views his or her own career.

We rely on stories to communicate and conceptualize ourselves and the world. Stories, like resumes, are distillations that capture the essence of a series of events or a period of time. Certain actions, emotions, and occurrences have a more powerful impact on the human mind than others. The execution of a habit in its steady-state is not eventful because it does not mark a departure from the past; it is simply more of the same. But, certain elements of life, like a trend of improvement or decline in a character's life or the emergence of an unexpected tragic event, or the telling of a lie, are interesting because they bring with them uncertainty about the future.

Successful people have interesting stories. Entrepreneurs, innovators, thinkers, politicians--innumerable persons from each category have fascinating stories. I suppose they told stories well, both to themselves and to others, thus making their life stories appealing to many more beyond themselves. (Or, perhaps, their stories were merely told in an interesting way, because people are more interested in their life from the start.) Maybe successful people have the analytical power to grasp what goals and potential events in their life would be meaningful and the tenacity to relentlessly pursue the intangible meaning they hope to achieve through the pursuit of their goals.

One surprising thing about life is that one day it just ends. For everyone. Everyone will one day stop perceiving and lose their consciousness to the world. Just as, through birth, a new consciousness is created out of nothing, consciousness can also cease to exist. Physically speaking, all the information contained within one's consciousness is lost to nature as the neurons and synapses decompose. With the departure of consciousness, all of our desires, guilt, and accumulated experience fade away. Humans seem to wish to prolong the idea of human existence, to extrapolate consciousness beyond life through the concepts of heaven and hell. When people die, other people usually hold ceremonies and rituals to honor the death of the person and remember that person's life story. We want to think that each of our lives matters and that some part of us will exist beyond our own selves.

I was reading through Turing award winners since the origin of the award. I was surprised to see that out of so many recipients, only three or so were women. I don't know why that is nor why it matters. I suppose different people will have different answers. It's just something I noticed.

I also noticed that many recipients have pretty significant and interesting contributions to computer science. Some worked on programming language design and compiler construction. Other people made strides in cryptography, networking, or artificial intelligence. Yet others presented innovations in deep neural networks that gave them the power they hold today. Fernando Corbato attended UCLA in the late 1940s, was recruited to fight for WWII and worked on implementing time sharing in OSs, a concept that is taught in every OS class.