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December 25, 2022 - January 19, 2023
The Metropolis Algorithm is like Hill Climbing, trying out different small-scale tweaks on a solution, but with one important difference: at any given point, it will potentially accept bad tweaks as well as good ones.
The first telephone call in history, made by Alexander Graham Bell to his assistant on March 10, 1876, began with a bit of a paradox. “Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you”—a simultaneous testament to its ability and inability to overcome physical distance.
In circuit switching, the system either approves a channel request, or denies it outright if the request cannot be accommodated.
Packet switching is radically different. The phone system gets full; the mail system gets slow. There’s nothing in the network to explicitly tell a sender how many other senders there are, or how congested the network is at any given moment,
“the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
A buffer is essentially a queue whose function is to smooth out bursts.
The most prevalent critique of modern communications is that we are “always connected.” But the problem isn’t that we’re always connected; we’re not. The problem is that we’re always buffered. The difference is enormous.
The feeling that one needs to look at everything on the Internet, or read all possible books, or see all possible shows, is bufferbloat.
It used to be that people knocked on your door, got no response, and went away. Now they’re effectively waiting in line when you come home.
At the time there was no really good way to leave messages for people. The telephone worked up to a point, but someone had to be there to receive the call. And if it wasn’t the person you wanted to get, it was an administrative assistant or an answering service or something of that sort. That was the mechanism you had to go through to leave a message, so everyone latched onto the idea that you could leave messages on the computer.
The much-lamented “lack of idleness” one reads about is, perversely, the primary feature of buffers: to bring average throughput up to peak throughput. Preventing idleness is what they do. You check email from the road, from vacation, on the toilet, in the middle of the night. You are never, ever bored. This is the mixed blessing of buffers, operating as advertised.
I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.… I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. —STEVE JOBS
the object of study in mathematics is truth; the object of study in computer science is complexity.
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. —BLAISE PASCAL
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. —MARK TWAIN
