Five Questions

One of the games that bloggers play is to challenge another blogger to answer questions about themselves. My friend twistedcat offered to ask questions of her friends, for which I volunteered. She deftly tailors the questions to the querent. Here are her questions and my answers.

1. you can spend one hour in conversation with any author, from any time period. who do you choose and what do you talk about?
A. I love books on how things work. Books that explain how computers work, how radios work, things like that. For my author, I would choose the author who, several years from now, will write the book on how to build a teleportation device. :) Or, failing that, Robert Heinlein would do nicely. Or Louis L'Amour. John D. McDonald. Homer (with Greek translater).

2. do you listen to music when you program, and if so, what is your preference?
A. I sometimes listen to music while programming. I have eclectic tastes in music, as evidenced by my list of favorite singles, but typically I listen to the music I used to hear on KROQ in the 80's. Tears for Fears. Thomas Dolby. The English Beat, etc.

3. do you think in words, pictures, or shapes (or perhaps something else entirely)?
A. I think in clusters, chains and links. Clusters of facts, including sounds, images and smells. When I think of you, it brings up a collection of memories including lunch at the sushi place, how the room looked, the taste and aroma of the teriyaki, how you looked, what we chatted about, how it felt hugging you. Chains of cause and effect. If this, then that, and if that, then what next. Links from one cluster to another, like web page hyperlinks. When I think of our lunch over sushi, I can link to the lunch before that, when we ate at Fresh Choice and a whole 'nother cluster of facts.

4. sugar, corn or wheat: if you had to give up one, for the rest of your life, which would it be?
A. I love all three, but I'd have to choose corn. I get the shakes when my blood sugar drops. I love wheat in all its forms: bread, tortillas, cereal, pastries, crackers, crepes, etc. As much as I love corn in its various forms, I eat it less than the other two. I have friends with wheat intolerance (as you know), and I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.

5. >bap!< you're in an alternate reality. you have been tapped to do the design for a computer program that will run the country (time is not an object, and you're just doing high-end systems design; you have brilliant humans to implement your programming ideas). where do you start? what are the priorities?
A. Whoa! What a rush! Okay, let's see...
Don't like centralization. Distributed processing is the way to go. Establish a network of computers so cities and states don't need the federal computer to operate. Makes it more tolerant of failures and catastrophes. Establish a secure voting system, so that teams of experts, and the populace at large, can be polled to determine the options and preferences for dealing with various situations. Every time it polls, it evaluates how effective each respondant's answer was, and in what category the problem domain was. Then the next time it polls, it gives more weight to the people who give the better answers in that domain. Eventually, after it's identified the 25,000 people who make the best decisions, it identifies them publicly and destroys itself, because the country shouldn't be run by a computer. :)


Blog Tag: Opinion