Thoughts from a Finals Week-addled Brain

There I was, minding my own business, just reading about the implementation of Relational Database Management Systems (RBDMS's). Y'know, as I am wont to do. Now, computer scientists are funny people. They live in a world of abstraction, and view as the primary skill one can learn in life the ability to forget the trees for the forest. And then have the forest need to be restarted every 10 minutes.

But this is not a lesson about computer scientist's people skills (it would already be over) nor forestry, and considering what I ended up getting on that final, certainly not one about RBDMS's. Instead, I quote a very learned source (Database Systems, The Complete Book, by Garcia-Molina, Ullman, and Widom), talking about the order in which to take computer statements and save their results. (this is on page 973, section 18.8.4) It says that in certain situations the type of software it describes must "[abort] T (if T would violate physical reality)".

::blink::

If T would violate physical reality? What? if I do this wrong, are monkeys going to begin flying out of my butt? Or stop flying out of The Leviathans? Would Foster start being funny? How could that result from the sequence of pretend actions a typewriter-on-steroids chooses?

The answer, of course, is that this is just an example of a poorly chosen metaphor. But, y'know, so is my typewriter-on-steroids one. So is, in fact, almost everything about computers: windows, mail, sites, engines, mice, the information superhighway, Al Gore. These are all like their real-life counterparts, but slightly different, off-putting and boring.

It is only when we get to IM'ing, xanga'ing, googling, dot-coms that we find a place where the computers are willing to forge truly new paths. They are not replacements for everything from the ploughshare to the stapler, they are computers. They are not HAL, they are not WOPR, they are not Microsoft Bob. They are computers.

And if you still feel the need to anthropomorphize computers (please don't: they hate that), then just think about one thing a computer can do that no human ever could:

If you tell a computer not to think about a pink elephant in a magenta tutu dancing the tango... it won't.