#computer processing

In the early part of the 20th century, the Harvard University Observatory employed a small army of women — they were known at the time as girl computers — to identify images of stars on photographic plates and then to record the intensity and location of each identified star. The job done by these girl computers has long since been taken over by the digital sort. We all know that digital computers are much better than we are at doing arithmetic, but over the past few decades computers have been taking over jobs, like playing chess or recognizing speech or carrying out symbolic mathematical manipulations, that we used to think of as the province of the human brain. How close are computers, like HAL in the movie 2001, to matching those things that now only our brains can do? Our goal here is to compare the capabilities and speeds of the brain with those of modern-day computers.Hardware Our starting point will be to compare the brain's hardware with that of computers.

Brain                               Microprocessor Synaptic density10 9/μl0.3 × 10 9/μlTransistor density Wire/synapse3-4 μm30 μmWire/transistor Synapses/neocortex10 1410 9Transistors/chip Wire/neocortex3–4 × 10 5 km30 kmWire/microprocessor

The computer, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th Century and a powerful tool in the 21st Century.

Yesterday I talked about how computers suffer from bad programming.  Here’s what was really bogging down my Linux Mint system last night that I seem to notice have the same problem on Windows.  Mac users, don’t assume you’re immune to the problem, because this is probably you too.

1. Your web browser.  It doesn’t matter what browser you use. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or heaven forbid Internet Explorer or Edge.  I spoke about this problem yesterday.  More than likely, the problem stems from having too many tabs open.  Personally, I try to copy as many URLs to a text file so that I can revisit them later.  And after many years of torture, I’ve finally found all the apps I need to resolve this issue.  The two Chrome extensions I suggest for tab management are Tab Glutton and Copy All URLs. Tab Glutton lets you see a list of tabs.  You can type in a string to filter and find the open tab you are looking for and close many tabs that you left open that you are not using any more no matter how many browser windows you have open.  Copy All URLs copies the URLs from every tab so you can put them into a temporary text file.  You can also use it to open many URLs using a paste feature.  For some reason, if you close all the browser processes, all the memory is freed up once again. Browsers have a notorious rap of just holding on to memory even after tabs are closed.  You’ll also want to not let Chrome run in the background.  Copy All URLs is great for letting you flush out all the physical memory (and virtual memory) that Chrome needlessly gobbles up.

2. Music Streaming Services.  I love Spottify. I miss Last.FM. I grew up on LaunchCast.  While those last two had benevolent intentions an can find new music from just about everywhere, Spottify, Pandora, Tidal, iMusic, and Google Play suffer from a stale rotation, poorly creative playlist (why Brittany Spears was part of a Back To the Future Playlist Spottify was promoting in October was a sign NOBODY had ever bothered to listen to Huey Lewis and the News, ZZ Top, or Sammy Hagar) they also suffer the same problem that web browsers have: Memory Gluttony.  Many proceses open still munching away at the RAM and unless you are absolutely sure you’ve closed those processes, they’ll still eat like tapeworms. 

3. File Sharing Synchronization.  Dropbox squatted about 4 GB of memory on my Linux desktop compare than to the 81 MB on my Windows Machine.  Never mind it was permitted a place to store the physical files for synchronization on my harddrive.  Dropbox seems to be the worst offender.  Other services like Google Drive (the most at 55 MB but the smaller ones are less than a megabyte) and Microsoft OneDrive (a svelte 1.4 MB) have been quite polite.  Chrome can be included in this list too unless you remember to turn off letting it run in the background.

Again, installing other software to fix these problems such as “Antivirus” or “PC Cleaners” DO NOTHING, waste your time, and are total scams.  You already have the software, and the hardware reduce memory.  Anything out of control is less the fault of the user and more of the fault of the programmer who made the software.

Perhaps I should write a few scripts to fix some of these problems.  It’s more of a processing problem where more processes are created where instead of spreading out the use of memory, they use about the same amount of memory that a single process uses in EACH instance.

For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winningWatson system and Google Translate are high profile, successful applications of language technologies, but the humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of the continuing difficulty of the problem.

Our ability to easily distinguish between multiple word meanings is rooted in a lifetime of experience. Using the context in which a word is used, an intrinsic understanding of syntax and logic, and a sense of the speaker's intention, we intuit what another person is telling us.

"In the past, people have tried to hand-code all of this knowledge," explained Katrin Erk, a professor of linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin focusing on lexical semantics. "I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been successful. There are just too many little things that humans know."