superscalar brains, redux

So, I finished that article the other day. I said I'd come back and write what I thought about it, with no real intent of doing so, but that's a cop out and I've resolved to stop doing that, so here I am.

I think that the article makes some truly salient points about the brain's ability to process multiple data streams at the same time through a crude form of parallelism being the root cause for focus and memory issues that seem to be much more commonplace in today's developed societies. To borrow a word from Mr. Colbert, this has a good 'truthiness' to it.

I do not mean to disparage Mr. Kirn in any way, but it is his job to be entertaining, and his piece is an opinion piece and very entertaining as well. He makes loose references to some presumably more rigorous studies, including a UCLA experiment that he gives little detail about, so presumably there is factual basis behind much of what he's writing, but it's not intended to be a representative article.

Do I believe him? Sure. But I also once believed in a man who is proven to be a con artist now, so I'm perhaps not best equipped to make snap judgments like this.

It's an interesting piece nonetheless, and very entertaining, and likely could form the basis of a good conversation.. maybe I'll have to give it a shot the next time I find myself in a social situation.

google is a little creepy sometimes

I just enabled AdSense on this page. As far as I know, I have zero readers, but I figure, "What the hell?"

I don't know how they pick what ads to serve if they can't get a good sense of what your site is all about, but I just looked to see what's there and there are two ads for Audi. How in the hell would Google know that I've been looking at Audi cars a lot recently? I haven't written anything about Audi on my page, I haven't linked anything, I haven't received any emails about their cars in my gmail account...

I think I've determined that I can't afford an Audi, but it's creepy nontheless.

the superscalar brain

Back in the days of my education, when I was learning how to create microprocessors that were superscalar (roughly: able to dispatch two or more instructions within the same clock to disparate parts of the same CPU - achieving better than one-instruction-per-clock throughput) I can remember thinking about how the brain functions in a superscalar manner as well.

See - I'm kinda old. Not old in the sense of what modern medicine considers old -- I have quite some time before I reach that threshhold -- but measured with Moore's Law, I'm hella old indeed.

This was in the days before multiple core processors. Hell, this was before the days of the much-vaunted Intel Hyperthreaded CPUs. You had one CPU and you had one pipeline into it. However, if you were very clever, you could cheat a little bit. The pipeline into the CPU was wider than many of your instructions needed. You could therefore create a new instruction, a SUPER instruction that was two instructions concatenated together. This super instruction would then also pass data to two separate and functionally isolated parts of the same SINGLE CPU. The FPU and ALU could both be active in the same clock, so it seemed more efficient to try and use them in parallel.

This is the heart of the superscalar architecture and how we were able to design in more throughput than you could get from a single clock normally. This is why AMD Athlons had numbers like 1800+ even though they ran at clock speeds far below 1.8Ghz, which was what the competing Intel clock ran at.

But I digress...

I bring this up because today I'm reading an article (literally.. as I write this, I'm reading it in a different pane, I haven't finished it yet) and listening to some music and monitoring the stock ticker to see when I'm going to be rich enough to buy a house, and checking my email inbox and waiting for an IM to tell me when lunch will be happening and I realize that I have only one brain.

And I'm abusing the hell out of it, using some of those same kind of tricks.

Superscalar thinking is addictive, but not very effective. You can do it, but at the expense of not doing other things very well.

But I remember a time, not all that long ago, when I was not old, when I lived in the countryside and hadn't yet been spoiled by the good food and constant entertainment that the city provides, and when I could _concentrate_ on things.

My ability to concentrate has been damaged. I'm still good at all of the things that I've spent time becoming good at, but I'm not quite as good, and new things are hard. Some new things, like trying to change the way I react to situations, or how I think about certain things, or how I perceive things, are very, VERY hard.

This is the article I'm reading: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

Normally I'd wait until I finished it to blog about it, but this seems particularly apropos.

I'll let you know later what I think of it when I'm done.

blogging..

I'm pretty sure that I don't much like this Blogger software.. I could write something or adapt something and make something better, but it doesn't seem like a great way to spend my time.

This is 'good enough'.

But it does have some faults. I just deleted a bunch of older posts, and there's no way to get them back.

I shouldn't have done it, I regret it now, but I had this idea that I was going to re-purpose this, again, and that all of these miscellaneous posts were cruft that should be removed.

At least I didn't get rid of them all.. I'll just tag and move the rest away and then use this for blogging my thoughts on technology like I started to, instead of unrelated musings.