Neanderpundit

Two of my dearest old friends, about whom I have been concerned for a while:

It was so nice to hear your voice.

And because of the question you always ask me every time we talk, I give you The Power of The Dog by Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie–
Perfect passsion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart to a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet’s unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find–it’s your own affair–
But … you’ve given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone–wherever it goes–for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve:
For, when debts are payable, right or wrong,
A short-term loan is as bad as a long–
So why in–Heaven (before we are there)
Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear?

The Power of the Dog
by
Rudyard Kipling

Have about a third of the stump out.

Discoved that the chainsaw don’t run so well out of gas.
Took the whole bar etc. apart and sharpened it. And then it wouldn’t cut worth a tinkers damn.

Backwards.

Swapped and it worked fine.

Resharped on the saw, put it away, tomorow will get gas and hopefully finish.

bugger of a job in this heat.

yesterday’s post talked about the basics of vision, and the way the act of identifying an image can be somewhat simplified; Now I want to address Ed’s idea of Quantum computers, which is an inspired one.

Everything that takes place in a computer has to do with a 0, or a 1. All personal computers are made like this, and it hasn’t changed in years.

Not too far around the corner, are quantum computers, which will be able to deal with a lot more than just 0 and 1. Imagine a person who is paralyzed and can only move his eyeball. It can look left, and it can look right, and people can interpret that left and right as yes and no.

Now imagine that the person develops the ability to move his eye to multiple positions. he can look at a screen, and a camera can record the position of his eye. The screen can be full of letters, and he can look at each letter in turn.

Old way of communicating:

a? no
b? no
c? no
d? yes

the first letter is d

a? no
b? no
c? no
d? no
e? no
f? no
g? no

all the way to
r? yes

the first letter is D, the second is R
until the poor bastard spells “Drink” by which time he has died of thirst.

With the letterboard, the person can swivel his eye to “D_R_I_N_K” in a few seconds. Replace the letters- or suppliment them- with words, and now you can get to pretty normal communications fairly quickly. This, by the way, is similar to the way Stephen Hawking communicates.

Now think of a computer that has the ability to process data not one bit at a time but by having the ability to look at multiple possibilities at once for every input. This isn’t exactly the way it works but the analogy is close enough for comparison. A piecre of data comes into a transistor and makes the transistor output either a 0 or a 1, a piece of data comes into a Quantum “transistor” (for lack of a better term) and can be any value between 0 and 1, or it can be 0, or 1, or 0 AND 1.

So like Ed says, instead of going to each of 100 rooms and answering the yes/no question of “Are my keys here’ each time until you find the keys, you can ask the Quantum computer ‘Which room are my keys in?” and it looks in all of them at once.

I think Ed is on to something here, in that this is the way the human mind works; I additionally think the distinction between memory and processor is blurred as to be almost nonexistent, and the same brain cells that store the information can also process it. Tis makes our whole wetware system a sort of a quantum supercomputer that can not only store, retrieve, and process information, but do so running at clock speeds that are astounding, when compared to the most powerful computers today.

But that’s changing.