Dizzying but invisible depth

This is part of the things that I list under "human-built things I technically understand (more or less) but are still completely baffling if I stop and think about it".<p>Amongst these:<p>- same example with Google Instant: the fact that what I type goes to Google and back that fast and that I <i>never</i> get somebody else's page is pretty amazing;<p>- CRT monitors: a flow of electrons is bent with electric current to hit a specific point on the screen, for millions of dots at least 30 times a second and it never misses its targets; (leaving aside that we were able to get a constant flow of electrons in the first place…)<p>- car engine: fuel is injected, compressed, lit up in cylinders at 3000rpm to make a 4,000 vehicle move at 65mph and the engine barely ever have hiccups.<p>- cell phones: I'm driving in California and can talk to my Dad who is in a high-speed train in France. It works and you can't even notice a significant delay.<p>And there are obviously so many more things like these…<p>It's like this Louis C.K. bit about people who complain about being stranded 40 minutes on the ground before taking part of "the miracle of flight". We should spend more time amazed at when it works than pissed at when it doesn't.

The technology that civilization creates is only possible because humanity specializes. Humans aren't so smart by themselves, but we can do a lot of thing if humans possess specific knowledge.<p>For example, one guy specialize and dedicate his life to metalworking. If I try to know everything in the world, I could barely scratch the surface of what that guy learned.<p>People can even specialize in multidisciplines. They don't know as deeply as a specialist in a subject area but they know two area well and combine them into useful combination.<p>It would seems that today's problem is more about the limit of human beings' ability to store and synthesize information across vast disparate field. In other words, we generated so much knowledge, but so much is just kept there not being used.<p>Spaced repetition is a good example. It's a very powerful memorization technique, but it is not being used in colleges and schools, except those who discover it on accident.<p>It's also a timesaving tool in the programming profession. Instead of googling and wasting 5 minutes for answers to our programming problem, we can save 5 minutes for many common tasks we memorize. It won't save us from debugging woes but at least we get to the important programming problems faster.<p>There's also a storehouse of reliable information on self improvement written by psychologists who done experiment and research things like willpower and discipline, why it fails, and so on. Instead, we got distracted by techniques that seems to work but have no scientific basis, or we get distracted by self improvement gurus that have no idea what we're talking about.<p>We are specialists but we miss a ton of useful stuff that would be useful to our specialization. It's like missing a thousand useful book every year because you can never read them fast enough.

Reminds me of "Nobody knows how to make a pencil":<p><a href="http://alexbarnett.net/blog/archive/2006/11/18/Nobody-knows-how-to-make-a-pencil.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://alexbarnett.net/blog/archive/2006/11/18/Nobody-knows-...</a><p>It's the same thing at every human technology. And this in turn reminds me of Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams, where the protagonist finds himself in a simple rustic village. He is unable to reproduce any of the technology from his civilization and settles as a sandwich maker.

This article brings to mind "If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?" discussion - <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2919708" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2919708</a><p>Perhaps by making technology a Black box, we unintentionally shielded those who deserve the credit (social and monetary) from receiving it. Maybe even allowed some grey-area experts from controlling an industry with ones and zeros at its core.

I have my 14 months old daughter playing right next to me. Two cells merged and there was life, giggles, tears, words, laughter.<p>Now, _that's_ dizzying.

The real problem is in people patenting ideas that are of dubious innovation. In fact, the patent office should negate patent applications if identical ones appear within months of one another. This is because it shows that there is no genuine leap of innovation that has occurred.

In my opinion this post ignores the significant divide between the general understanding of hardware and software.<p>Most people have a general idea of how an internal combustion engine works, how their fridge works, how a tv works, hell, even about how a nuclear power plant works. Most people wouldn't know how to make any of these things, but it's not exactly a "dizzying invisible depth" either, and most people are capable of making informed decisions without being engineers.<p>When it comes to software however, most peoples understanding remains completely at the surface. I don't believe this is something we should accept as "normal", because this is exactly what leads to many of the issues our society is currently struggling with. Not just software patents, but many of the current security and privacy issues or the huge unemployment.<p>The general understanding of software was not, and still isn't part of peoples culture and education in the same way a basic understanding or hardware has always been. This significantly undermines the decision making on all levels of society, from government policy to personal choices. The patent mess is just a symptom.

I often try to explain this to friends, but in a shorter way:<p>Driving a car is essentially a controlled explosion taking place every second about three feet in front of your face—and yet this very dangerous and messy process "just works" for millions of drivers every day. We are more afraid of other cars than we are of the fireworks right in front of our face. That's pretty amazing.

Obligatory XKCD: <a href="http://xkcd.com/676/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/676/</a>

Reminds me of a thought I had about babies: How does that little bunch of cells grow into a living, breathing human being? Surely there isn't enough information in there to do that.<p>Answer: It can't, and it doesn't. Not without the mother.<p>(I have no idea if this is indeed true, but I like the loopyness of the idea).

Sort of puts arguments about "leaky abstractions" in the appropriate perspective. Even assembly has a lot of turtles holding it up...

Well, this kind of puts a new spin on the saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"!

I found this disheartening. Life is complex but its not unknowable.<p>One of those 'life choices' I faced when I entered college was whether or not I wanted to 'program' computers or to 'build' them. These would guide the choice of EE or CS degree. My father asked if people with EE degrees were allowed to program computers, I said of course they were. Then he asked if people with CS degrees were allowed to build them, and the answer was no they were not generally. So if I didn't know what I wanted to do, I should get an EE degree since then I could do either.<p>Turned out to be pretty sage advice and knowing <i>how</i> the computer does what it does really helps program it. Especially if you are trying to wring every erg of performance out of it. When I graduated with my EE degree (and a minor in CS) I was proud of the fact that I could write a database in a languge for which I wrote the compiler on a computer architecture that I designed using circuits that I understood down to the physics of the PN junctions that governed the behavior of semiconductors. (It really is math all the way down sadly)<p>That being said, I firmly believe the human brain has a limit (which may be case by case) of how much stuff it can hold at one time. And the notion of abstraction, especially modularization and testable components, makes complex systems possible.<p>This comes up in a variety of contexts. Sometimes I interview folks who can draw a nice architecture on the white board with boxes and arrows and such. So I ask them do go into one of the boxes, and lets draw that out in detail. And then those sub boxes I want to go into their detail as well. My goal is to understand that the candidate understands that 'boxes' are only a good way of thinking about something if you understand what the box is really modelling.<p>A good example of this is that naive people treat a hard disk drive like a box. It has a port you tell it to read logical block A or write logical block B and it does some magic and makes it happen. But really it screws up now and then, and it has very variable performance. So if you can't explain how you have accounted for these properties of your box then you're not thinking deeply enough about it.<p>Sometimes an 'architect' type (you know the type, Joel called them Architecture Astronauts as I recall) they dismiss your whole area of expertise as a box in their model. This can lead to some pretty dismissive thinking by the 'doers' in the crowd, but it is important to know that without abstracting that thing you're working on, the architect person wouldn't have enough brain capacity left over to see the 'bigger' picture. As long as their picture of your box is accurate, you should cut them some slack.<p>The bottom line for me is that it can be 'amazing' at how the complex system runs but words like 'mystifying' and 'dizzying' make me nervous. If you're a software developer and its 'mystifying' how your program can do what it does that is a problem you should address. There was an excellent pointer to 'what every programmer should know about memory' and there should be equivalents to 'networks', 'processor architecture', and 'disks'.

As Matt Ridley puts it in his TED talk ( <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.htm...</a> ) :<p>Nobody on earth knows how to build a computer mouse (all by himself).

Same submission from a few hours ago: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115176" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3115176</a><p>(Apparently multiple sign-on URI leaked on my earlier submission)

People who got somewhat of a buzz reading the above may enjoy James Gleick's new book @ <a href="http://around.com" rel="nofollow">http://around.com</a>

This is similar to one of my favourite interview questions. I usually ask my candidates to explain everything that happens from the time they type an address in their browser till when the page they requested is rendered. You can find a lot about candidates with this question.

We need a new human layer to truly make meaning and create value over all the technology.We need all this to come together to change our lives in ways that parallel the invention of the wheel and the computer.Its clear the next big thing is Personal webs!

Keep going and it gets simple again.<p>You put a bunch of leptons and quarks in a specific ordering and they start arranging other atoms in ways to help them understand their own specific arrangement.<p>That they can is why I think it is simple. in the sense of elegant.

I've understood this for quite awhile but have had a really hard time articulating it. This piece is a godsend.

I simply could not get past the Groundhog-day intro.

Google "I, Pencil".

Was I the only one who was thinking: "Jeez, I've seen some of the code that runs these complex systems, and the really amazing thing is that they ever worked at all!" :)

I actually find the <i>simplicity</i> of computing devices staggering and beautiful. If the earth was wiped out tomorrow, one would only need to remember what a turing machine is and how to make a semiconductor to rebuild them.<p>Also, the rant becomes too broad to have a point.