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Archive for January, 2010

Writing is Human Persistence

(Personal Development)

One of many tips for improving one’s creativity is to keep a notebook available to write down ideas as you get them. The rationale behind this is that if you don’t have something to record your idea in the moment you get it, you might forget it by the time you do have something to write it down on. It occurs to me that this might be another sense in which we are similar to computers.

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Take the Reins

(Personal Development)

A few days ago, Jon Crowley tweeted (and I retweeted) a piece of advice that I’ve lately found more and more relevant to my life and the lives of others around me:

@joncrowley: "I'm convinced that the key to failure is thinking of life as something that is done to you, rather than something you do."

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Context Switching

(Miscellaneous, Programming)

One of the reasons this blog is called “Live & Code” is because Computer Science (and by extension programming) is one of the lenses through which I view the world. There are often parallels between the way we think and the way computers work. I don’t think that this is an accident; the term “computer” used to refer to a human being whose profession was computing values. These people would sit and work through algorithms to calculate values that would be used in scientific research.

One of these parallels between humans and computers is the way that we multitask. Computers only seem to multitask by switching between tasks rapidly, with the exception of new multi-core and multi-processor systems, which can run as many tasks in parallel as there are cores or processors. So it was interesting to read recently that the prevailing theory is that humans multitask in precisely the same way!

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