Mukund’s adventures

At least some of us would not waste time fighting stupid wars among ourselves over bits of land, if we regularly took time out of our important lives and looked outside the Earth, even at the rest of the Solar system. We would see how insignificant Earth is compared to the other Solar planets and the sun. There are an incoherent number of such planet systems in the Universe, and all the land and resources of Earth do not stand out even as a speck.

Let’s take time out today and see a picture of Earth and Jupiter to scale, placed next to each other (courtesy of NASA):

See how puny and insignificant Earth is in size? Now if our sun were added to this image and shown as large as Jupiter, Jupiter would look as small as the Earth, and it’d be very difficult to see Earth at all. Sure, Jupiter is full of gas and no other Solar planet can really host organic lifeforms like Earth can, and hence all of Earth is precious to us. We fight because we compete for resources. We divide ourselves among species, among countries, among neighbours, among religions, among Linux distributions, etc. If we do it so much, surely there must be something good to it.

We fight and waste time and resources. But time and resources are here to waste. Life doesn’t care that we fight, because it always wins. Because we lead such self-important lives in vain, we do not realise how unimportant instances of life—we—are. We enjoy fame and fortune and being controversial. Most of us lead gloriously uninformed lives which is not a bad thing as we’ll see soon. We eventually perish (as instances), and newer lifeforms (our offspring) take our place. Genes of those who survive and have children, are passed on and hence those genes succeed in living for one more generation. A big difference between us and these newer lifeforms which inherit the Earth is that they also know more than us (knowledge learned on the Earth, which doesn’t pass on in genetic material).

If you consider the Universe, us and life as three different entities:

• The Universe is a playground of energy/matter/space/time
• Life is a revisioned set of instructions for successfully assembling matter into stable automata which execute for different periods of time; the instructions keep mutating all the time due to environmental effects, and also change by intermixing of genes due to natural selection (hopefully)
• We are instances of those instructions—processes created to test these newer instructions to see they successfully work and survive by getting passed on, or perish

Every person on the Earth, at some point in their lives, tries to live a successful life to the best of their satisfaction. The level of being successful varies.. a scientist may have different goals in being successful than a football player. The scientist may think the football player’s goals as stupid, whereas the football player may imagine the scientist’s goals as nerdy. Yet we do what we can do best, no matter how mere it is. Even if we don’t do a damn thing, perhaps that would be okay too except competing for resources with the rest of the population would be difficult, and our chances of survival would be lower. The #1 thing we always try to do is have babies. Even when nobody tells us how to, we still know. People define living things as being made up of cells, but if I had my way, it would be the ability to replicate autonomously.

We are at a point now, where simply our genetic material and the environment don’t dictate whether our genes succeed or not. The working knowledge we have of the Universe changes the game of life slightly. The knowledge is also revisioned, and changes according to our observations. Similar to how we depend on other species of life to provide us with food, we now have people we can go to if we can’t seem to create babies. Soon maybe we’ll even beat life and increase our life spans. On the other hand, we also have made weapons to artificially kill life without use for food: for pleasure, or to make our lives more convenient. It may seem like a natural evolution of our capabilities, but it’s not the way of life. Well, even a volcanic explosion or a quake or an asteroid hitting the Earth is not a way of life, but these are outside our control.

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I hope you got baffled by the bullcrap. In the modern world today, communication and transport facilities have brought all of mankind a lot closer. We intermix readily, we eat different kinds of food, work together, use gadgets and clothes and other produce from different countries, entertain ourselves and often try to copy others’ ways of life. It decorates our walls and shapes our demeanour. It’s simply unacceptable to kill mass numbers with technology. Even a fistfight is much more reasonable than annihilating people we are otherwise fond of in numbers.

I used to think that internet-addiction was something which some people in some random country did to themselves and got news coverage from time to time. My ADSL splitter died recently and it put my dependence on the internet into perspective. I was without net access for a whole day! It took many hours to even find out what the problem was and I was
definitely upset that it was taking too long.

In parallel, I also realised how much time I was spending on the computer. A few days ago, I forced myself to read through half a novel in two days, but I couldn’t keep my concentration on it for too long and left it there. Mind you, I’m not bored of reading. The novel is interesting and so are the textbooks. And it’s not the first time I’m reading books—I was a bookworm till the time I got internet access about 8–9 years ago.

I have a few books which I borrow from my bookshelf and put in the bathroom for reading and it dawned that I was learning a lot more useful stuff from those accumulated few minutes in the bathroom than the non-programming time I was spending in front of the computer. Obviously I can’t rush back to the computer, and thankfully I don’t have a handheld.

My main usage of the computer/internet can be grouped into:

• Programming and related project management activities, reading API docs and other references
• Reading and replying to personal emails and mailing lists; posting on my blog
• Chatting (also known fondly as loitering) on IRC and Jabber
• Reading the news such as the BBC, Slashdot, popular science articles, cartoons
• Reading blogs of people and aggregators such as Planet GNOME
• Reading technical journals such as on Arxiv, PLoS, ACM, IEEE computer society, etc.
• Ordering stuff on the net through online stores

There’re some things which I can avoid doing and spend that time on more useful items. There are some things which I can’t avoid because of my profession as a programmer. I cannot disconnect my internet connection, or even stop using email or the web.

If you think about it a bit, you can see that you can get a lot more done when you’re not trying to stay on top of things. I don’t need to know what’s happening in the news immediately. I don’t need to read my email every hour (I already don’t reply to people immediately). I do not need to chat at all.

As an experiment and to cut my addiction, I’ve decided to try and operate in delayed batch mode. The sky won’t fall on my head if I don’t use the network today:

• I can check email every 2–4 days, and reply to the accumulated emails at a time. This includes mailing list emails. It’s very unlikely that someone else won’t reply on mailing lists.
• With a web-based RSS reader I can read the news as a batch of stories every few days and keep up with it.
• I am not going to chat anymore.

So what am I going to do with all the saved time? I am going to spend it programming, and reading the numerous textbooks and novels which are gathering dust on my bookshelf.

There’s one more thing I want to write about. What kind of a computer do you use? Do you have a reasonably powerful gigahertz CPU, lots of RAM, a great widescreen display panel, optical mouse and a nice keyboard? Do you sit on a comfortable chair and have a decent large desk? No? Think about it. If you were optimizing your program for speed, you would first profile where your program spends the most amount of time and put your efforts into improving the program there. Typical free software developers spend a lot of time in front of the computer, as we work on our projects at home after office hours. The computer display is what you stare at for many hours. The mouse and keyboard are what your hands use. And you don’t want to be bogged down waiting on the computer either. It doesn’t cost too much to upgrade a bronze age computer lab to a decent configuration. Consider it in units of the cost of pizzas, beer, chips and crisps (maybe I’m being too sterotypical here ).