THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WHAT COMPUTERS DON'T DO | 2007-01-08

A friend of mine once said, "The one thing nobody ever does during Rush Hour is rush."

It has occurred to me that the one thing nobody does with a computer today is compute. I found out not that long ago that there is a calculator built into about every computer, on which, if you want to, you can compute, i.e., add, subtract, multiply and divide.

Watching documentaries on whales, it occurred to me that those calculators are like the leg bones in a blue whale. This is the biggest animal that has ever lived on earth -- probably. It is as long as a football field. Buried down deep in the back of each blue whale is a set of legbones, about animal size, and so absurdly tiny in this titantic body. But it is a last tiny reminder of the fact that this was once a walking, furry land animal.

So our computer actually has a computer in it, which we use about as much as the blue whale walks around.

COMMENTS (6)

#1 Pain | 2007-01-08 15:51

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Actually your computer does computations all the time. Arithmetic is used in everything from word processing to rendering graphics on your screen.

For example this line is using computations:

#2 Dennis | 2007-01-08 20:14

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Computer are always doing computation, even if it is when you are simply ripping a CD, but the point is that people dont use a computer to do their own computations. I work in a cubicle where we do computations all the time, double checking other peoples calculations. Each of us sits in front of a $4000 computer, and uses a $5 desk calculator. We use the computer for e-mail, tracking documents and looking up phone numbers, but when it comes to calculations, the computer sits idle.

#3 Alan | 2007-01-09 02:06

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The British during WW2 built the worlds first computer, it was the size of a house, chalk full of vacume tubes and relied on punch cards as it's brains for the computing purpose. By todays standards it was a clunker, with a fraction of the computing compacity of todays wonder machines. Todays machines have eliminated the need understanding program language, theses machines have the brains installed inside them at the time of purchase, its a miracle of evolution so to speak. Like the Whale with the useless legs, here we sit before a giant and we rarely notice the legs, Computer, the transformation of data into logic.

#4 Pain | 2007-01-09 23:35

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I pulled these gems from Apartness' signature on SF:

"If races are meant to be apart, then why are there multiple races, and not just one huge race of the same people? I have always wondered what the answer to that question is." -gsm2006

"No one is different, the only way people are different is by their cultures and so what... different is good, it isn't the same old stuff." -itsforme

#5 Peter | 2007-01-10 15:04

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Pain, These are the internet names of beavis and butthead. Only possible explanation I can think of. Shari

#6 Bob | 2007-01-10 18:05

Actually, I understand that computers use the o,1 language rather the doudecimal

1-10 system, but that is not mathematics. The 0,1 is telling the computer what to put

on your screen, not doing computations. It is a language, not a computation. Those

charts don't require any mathematics the producer can't do on his hand calculator.