A New Theory of Computing

Anybody reading this blog knows I'm a coder.  I've been doing it for almost 30 years starting out from little toy programs straight out of tutorials to publishing papers on computer graphics to 7 years in gaming and 4 years in motion pictures...  and now embedded graphics platforms.  I've been around the block and gotten extremely jaded over the years.  Every experience I've been through has its moments which ring loudly with the words "Don't let this happen to you."  I could tell you stories about the way I've worked for people who were so utterly dense they believed that an octagon has 5 sides (yes, I'm being serious), and worked on codebases that were so riddled with cyclical dependencies that you couldn't link anything unless you compiled everything twice.  There is just so much power in the tools we have, but when you use that power irresponsibly, you get the kind of crappy software so many of us feel every package is.  Then I stumbled upon something new that really revolutionized my view of computing.  I want to share it with you today.

In one sense, it is entirely new, but in another sense, it is a rebirth of old ideas first hinted at as a deeper truth which underlay the works of al-Khwarizmi, Aryabhatta et. al.  It's really a very simple series of principles that many of the great technical minds out there like Bill Gates, Alan Turing, Steve Wozniak, Donald Knuth, Linus Torvalds, Dennis Ritchie and others have known for years.  It is something that the mainstream software engineering industry doesn't want you to know!  It is a truly intuitive, natural, and holistic approach to coding and it will completely overturn everything you thought you knew about writing software!  It is not a fad like eXtreme Programming, or Scrum, or anything else that appears as the new big thing every so often only to disappear shortly after.  And unlike all the charlatans out there, this isn't totally fake, and I'm going to give you the real secret right here, right now.  I am not being paid to provide this, nor am I trying to sell you a book.  This is free of charge and available to anyone and everyone.  The secrets will really be revealed here and now, just below the jump.

Bare Necessities of Math

My wife of nearly 3 years, at one point in a certain job interview here in the US, was required to produce her college transcripts for review.  This itself was expected, since she'd received her degree in India.  In the course of a cursory review, one of the comments she received was that there were no fundamental algebra courses on her transcript.

Her response?  "Well, of course not!  It's a college transcript."

The very idea of basic algebra being a college level course was both shocking and horrifyingly appalling to her.  As well it should be.  I'm a product of the public schools in this country, and I recall that I had to be pushed two years ahead of the standard schedule to get to the point where I was taking algebra through middle school and high school.  And even then, the limiting factor was the schools, which simply didn't offer anything beyond basic differential and integral calculus in high school (and they limit you to 2 years ahead so that you at least have a math course every year of school).  You had to go at least to a community college to get anything beyond that.  Although I wasn't there, I can only imagine my wife's mouth must have been wide agape for several seconds in shock at the idea that the U.S. considers algebra a college-level subject.

And then today I read a little op-ed piece on the NY Times, that espouses doubt on the value of making algebra a necessary math course.

KFC redefines Irony

Kentucky Fried Chicken (or apparently now officially called KFC) has, on numerous occasions attempted to feign being health-conscious.  When Atkins was the hot thing, they did a commercial campaign featuring dramatizations which made it appear as if eating deep-fried chicken was the path to miraculous weight loss.  Well, I suppose one could grant that it is low-carb.  More recently, they tried to revive their grilled chicken product (which actually proved something of a commercial failure before) through a comparatively smarter advertising campaign.  Now, they've shown they're committed to finding a cure for juvenile diabetes.  How?  By helping to cause it!

Real Life Covers Real Life

It'd been a long time since I'd read Greg Dean's Real Life -- a webcomic that oddly enough, has very little connection to reality.  For crying out loud, it has a guy who reconfigures space-time within a localized field to make a small room several thousand square feet in altered space and travels light-years in seconds by warping the fabric of reality, and all in all, defying the laws of physics.

It does include a few instances of real life, of course...  The protagonists of Greg and Liz got married in the comic the same day the cartoonist got married in reality, and similarly so with Liz's pregnancy in the comic.  Then again, some of them were just plain off the wall, and then you realized that you knew a person just like that.  One of the oldest comics in the series (and also one of the earliest in color) involved Greg snacking on sticks of butter that had been dipped in melted butter...  I think it was a silly joke to signify his lack of cooking skills, but yet, I knew someone who actually did that.

Anyway, I got around to reading up on several of the comics that I'd missed, and went back through them, and ran across this one that really hit the bullseye.