About life, the universe and computing

If you have heard/read/seen the H2G2 series, you'll love this speech by Douglas Adams on Youtube. I have to confess that much as I'd like to be one of the people who have read the H2G2 series, I suffer from a severe case of attention deficit disorder. I am very rarely (read once in 10 years) able to sustain my interest in a book long enough to read it cover to cover. It is a shame really, because I miss out on a lot of brilliant thoughts that people have had over the ages, unless someone has distilled them into TV shows, radio shows or movies. It is a debilitating foible when it comes to examinations... As an engineering student I always had trouble completely reading chapters, with the effect that if something you skipped appeared in the university exams, you were done for. Anyways I survived... I used to do two passes at chapters, one from the front and another from the back, so the rough center of the chapters were my Waterloo.

Anyways the Adams speech makes you realize how gifted he was. He travelled very widely (mentions trips to Madagascar, China & Galapagos in an hour), he was able to see the humor in everything, and he is able to connect history, biology, astronomy, computing and many other sciences. And to top it he was able to use all his skills to weave a fantasy world that was tremendously funny. It is a pity that he died at age 49...

Somehow I started thinking about things I read in the past week. So in the 1980s people made microprocessors by drawing large schematics that defined every gate in these processors. In time people realized that we could utilize computers to design more complex computers, and a new field called Computer Aided Design (CAD) took birth. Moore's law allowed us to quickly increase the complexity of these machines exponentially for the last 3 decades. But an essential feature of the computing world was our ability to use the fruits of our past efforts to build ever more complex devices. In a sense it relates to the statement Newton is said to have made on his deathbed, "If I have seen further, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants." With Moore's law each new generation of humans stands on the shoulders of the last, forming a Totem Pole of sorts to see further. In a way we are all standing on the shoulders of Newton, Einstein, Shockley, Moore, Moresby and others...