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Wanderings

The sublime and the ridiculous
are often so nearly related that
it is difficult to class them separately

We are bounded by locality

I am currently pursuing my research at Northeastern University. One of the routines of that is to walk to the lab from home, which I must say is beautiful. During those walks I generally think about the tasks I need to carry out in a day's work. Generally they are quite predictable and boring. But sometimes from the myriad of confused thoughts emerges some good ones.
This blog struck me when I was thinking about the research problem I was faced with. I was trying to study the data access patterns in cache (don't go to sleep, it gets better), which people who are doing computer architecture call, locality. And it struck me that we as people also have the same characteristics. If you take us as a system whose inputs are through our senses, brain can interpret only the information which is provided by these inputs. So in a way we are bounded by these senses which provide us information throughout our lifetime.
Now, its not that simple. If it were true than by now we would have already seen machines replacing us. The key element here is the brain processing the information provided to it, and how it does it. Brain is capable of IMAGINING. It is capable of analyzing the information provided to it in completely different ways which leads to different ideas. Sometimes, these ideas are so great and beautiful that they change the world functions.
That's why I believe we should spend time doing different things and doing them differently.