Little things, you know, the things that stop complex things dead in their tracks seem to proliferate like ants around a picnic when one needs to get something done. Rush hour, the bane of commuting, can be stopped by the following "little things" (partial list of course): stalled car/car with flat tire/car out of gas etc., etc, etc.; debris; fender bender and last but not least, rubbernecking. In programming, one character put in the wrong place can cause a program to lock up or a network to crash as seen by the Blackberry fiasco when millions of BB addicts were frozen out when RIM "upgraded" their system with a minor patch, something akin to the occasional patch Microsoft sends out that does the same thing to millions of Windows users all over the world. (This has gotten a lot better, thank God.)When little things are combined with randomness, interesting things happen. For example, Helen Hopper locating the moth that crashed one of the first computers in the world happened when one unfortunate insect landed on the wrong place at the wrong time and got fried. Penicillin, discovered by Alexander Fleming, was found when Fleming "noticed a halo of inhibition of bacterial growth around a contaminant blue-green mold on a Staphylococcus plate culture."
Newton's Apple started a revolution in science when Newton saw how gravity could extend beyond the earth to control the paths of planets and stars and...
Einstein "discovered" relativity while riding on a trolley car tying to imagine what it would be like to ride on a beam of light."And so it goes..." Kurt Vonnegut
No comments:
Post a Comment