I am really really good at distracting myself from work, so lately I have been reading about computers. Specifically, really basic computer stuff, like how RAM works,
how a CPU works, etc. Read some wikipedia articles and found a logic circuit simulator online so I could make a binary adder. I read about how they work and then fiddled around with it (ok, actually, drew it during a boring lecture) and it worked. It was a really good experience in realizing how smart humans are... there is no way I ever would have made that logical leap. Not in a million years. Sure, I can think through OR and AND and XOR and figure it out, but the initial idea? Mind-blowing. For some reason I never understood how Binary works, I thought it was some kind of secret code. Now I can count to 1023 on my fingers! How's that for a party trick. (4 is flipping someone off! pretty Radical!)
I am thinking about this stuff a lot because of my GIS (computer-aided mapping) class. It's a frustrating program where you have to use weird tricks to do things that seem like they should be easy. The trick is that it
looks like you're fiddling around with shapes, but really what you're doing is telling a computer how to draw a database or many databases. Definitely parts of it are really making me think of a computer as a complicated machine that is good at manipulating numbers, instead of as a magical box that lets you run "programs," whatever those are. For this class a lot of the readings are about people in the 60s and 70s figuring all this stuff out on mainframes, and it's really cool. Having pretty much grown up with computers, it's weird thinking about how it all works. I feel like there is a huge mental gap for me between the stuff I'm reading about (connecting wires and transistors and switches so that little lights turn on and tell you what two numbers added together are, using magnetic tape to store information, etc) and Facebook or a video game or making a map that tells me where the major watersheds are in New Jersey. Trying to think about how I'm typing this right now and sending it to all of you on a machine descended from that simple little 4-bit adding machine is pretty insane.
(Buying wires and toggle switches and little lightbulbs and making an adding machine in a little box is such a beautiful nerdy project. One day I won't have homework.)