The
analog universe
By
Stu Hutson
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...
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