Computers have no dialects. They don’t slur words. A computer that develops a speech impediment goes from being our most valuable tool to a heavy block of inconvenience that even the trash man won't pick up.

The people who first designed computers, the true pioneers who sat in dingy rooms fiddling with vacuum tubes and parallel circuits, typically weren’t what you’d call social people. Pauses, inflections in tone or volume, body posture—the subtleties of how one human talks to another—weren’t clear enough for them. So, they built machines that they could understand. Machines where there would be no question what was being said.

Computers speak in the pristine, digital language of ones and zeros. Their grammar is simple: each one or zero is a bit; eight bits in a row is a byte. No oddly phrased terms. No truncating “ums” or “likes.” No dangling participles. Just perfect elocution every time, guaranteed.

Compared to computers, we all might as well be Bobcat Goldthwait stammering into a CB radio.

That's because we speak, think, and even act in what the man behind the counter at Radio Shack would call "analog." Our information is waves that crest and trough, stretch out and contract. When we speak and hear, it's sound waves reverberating through the air. When we see, it's groups of electromagnetic waves plummeting into our retinas. When we think, it's really just a chain reaction of chemistry and electricity knitting a wave pattern into the latticework of our neurons.

The problem with analog, as anyone who owned an old cell phone could tell you, is that the message always comes across a little fuzzy. The problem is in the translation. If you relay a digital radio message around the world, from radio tower to radio tower, you’re probably going to end up with something very similar to what you began with. At each station, the message would be taken in, processed, and spit back out; but it would stay the pretty much the same because it’s hard to mix up ones and zeros.

With analog, you don’t have black or white, ones and zeros. You have grayscale. You have decimal points. If you tried to relay an analog message, you’d end up with static. With analog, each time the message gets passed on it’s just another copy, of a copy, of copy, of a copy….

A picture is easy to recreate when it’s just hundreds of thousands of digital pixels on a screen. It’s hard as hell to repaint an artist’s brushstrokes.

In grade school, they teach you that everything is made up of little candy-colored solar systems with a bunch of jawbreakers glued together in the middle. If you're lucky, you'll go to a college where they teach you that physicists think that those pieces of the atom are made of even smaller little circles with names you thought were gibberish from Star Trek. "Quark” and “tachyon" are always popular.

If you become a physics major, you'll learn about quantum mechanics and how watching things happen “makes” the outcome change. If you make it to a master's program in high-energy physics, they'll teach you about string theory and that the outcome changes because those circles were really unimaginably small stretches of space still shaking from the big bang. They are ripples in the fundamental goo of the universe that are too insignificant to see until they collide with other ripples.

That’s the entire universe: waves building upon waves until they’re tsunamis that scientists, once upon a time, mistakenly thought was actual "stuff."

After a PhD and more than two decades of institutionalized learning, some physicists come to a conclusion that goes something like this: waves are just a way of conveying information; all substance in the universe is a product of interacting waves; therefore, the universe is giant, analog database. It’s a vinyl record that’s been melted down and stretched out into eleven dimensions.
Knowledge isn't just power anymore. It’s energy. It’s mass. When you brushed your teeth this morning, that wasn’t toothpaste. It was information. When you light up a cigarette, you fill your lungs with data.

These physicists say that the universe is like the line on your check where you sign your name. If you look really, really close, you’ll see that it’s actually a sentence written in flea letters.

To us, everything looks pretty solid because we’re big enough not to notice that the lines blur. So, we pretend like everything is solid. At the scale we live at, we use Boolean logic to filter "true" from "false" and “this” from “that.” We create computers that communicate for us in one and zeros. We assign labels to past events, and we convince ourselves that what we remember is really what happened.

The “truth” is that the best we can remember is a muffled translation. A message that started at the most fundamental level of the universe, collided with a million other messages, and finally wound up being filtered through our own experience. What we remember is, at best, a blurry copy, of a copy, of a copy….

It’s how two people watching a fistfight can remember the blows just a little differently. It’s why a biography and an autobiography will never be alike.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being definitive. If someone’s shooting at you, it’s ok think of those as “bullets” and not “data sets.”

What you should keep in mind it that every number gets rounded off at some point. Every description leaves some details out. When you’re sitting at your breakfast table reading the morning paper, remember that the black and white of the page is just a little off. When you’re sitting in church, keep in mind that the building around you is more a work of faith than masonry.

You can admire computers because they don’t have the fuzz behind their descriptions, but the fact is that their data sets are only simulations of what the programmer feels. Even if they have their own sensory systems, how computers process input is, at best, a mock up of man’s own mind. The world isn’t written in computer code, the fundamental particles of physics aren’t ones and zeros. We can only describe the universe with slurred speech. We can only hear it in analog.