Upgrade, anyone?

Steve Pavlina, is a personal development writer whose site covers all manner of topics from self employment, to modifying your sleep patterns. Recently he has been looking at human intelligence and how the mind works. What I found more interesting than the strengths on the human mind was his list of its weaknesses. The techies should appreciate this.

  1. Faulty hard drive - We all have those times when we forget or confuse critical details or add information that wasn’t present to our memories of people, things, places, or events. 
  2. Low RAM - There just so much information that we can work with at one time. What is it they say, seven items maximum in short term memory? 
  3. Slow CPU - Other than those amazing human calculator people who can work with 15 digit numbers in seconds, most of us do think pretty slowly.
  4. Infinite loops - Those of us who have tried to change bad habits (ours or anyone else’s), recognize this one. You just keep doing it over and over and over without being able to stop. 
  5. Lack of error correction - That concept of learning from our mistakes sounds good in theory but so many people have a problem with this one.  
  6. Limited sensory input - Of course, technology is making up the gap in this one - night vision goggles, X-rays, etc. Luckily we have this “wonderful” mind. 
  7. Poor networking capabilities - Oh boy, remember sitting listening to a lecturer trying to explain something to you in the simplest way he knows how, and still you took forever to get it, you still had some of it wrong and inevitably you were bored out of your skull. 
  8. High maintenance costs - Whoo boy! 8 hours to refresh and recharge at night, all those lost memories and information and not to mention the risk of it crashing from strain or some illness. 
  9. Legacy code - There’s something about that whole “flight or fight” response that is so primitive. Sure it may have its occasional uses (if faced with a gun for example) but in today’s world, the “dangers” are typically a lot more complex. 
  10. Unreliable hardware - Inevitably, something’s going to go wrong and the whole system is gonna fail. So you should be trying to get your important processing out of the way and make good use of your up-time.
Right now I am feeling kinda calm emoticon calm and tired (yawn) emoticon tired (yawn)...
Musings on People that flowed from my brain at 8:09 am Thursday, Jun. 28, 2007

1 Comment »

Comment by owen

July 1, 2007 @ 3:29 pm

my attention span has totally died in the past 3 months and I don’t know why

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

:mrgreen: :neutral: :twisted: :arrow: :shock: :smile: :???: :cool: :evil: :grin: :idea: :oops: :razz: :roll: :wink: :cry: :eek: :lol: :mad: :sad: :!: :?: