Untitled

Got back from the company meeting today. Yes that company. Yes I work for the man. Yes, I know I'm a complete sell out. That said...

It's definitely a fascinating experience working there. There are a ton of very smart people, which I always find remarkable, mostly because I consider the vast majority of people not very smart. That's not to say they're not very interesting and great people, I just don't think that they're smart. Just like I would say that I'm probably not the best looking guy in the world. I think that people just need to face who they are. Back to the original point, I've always been fascinated by any collection of smart people in one place, just because it’s such a rarity. It’s like that Chris Rock bit… when’s the last time you saw two Indians together. It’s like seeing a snow flake. That’s not to say the place is perfect, or there aren’t any number of people who work there who could use a good boot to the noggin’, but as the general populace goes, I’d say it’s above average.

The meeting really made me realize the banality of running a company. Here you have one of the smartest and most passionate companies in the world and you still have to gather everyone together in a room (or in this case a stadium) and rah-rah everyone into doing the work that they’re getting paid to do anyway. It was undoubtedly inspirational, and it was a nice insight into what the executives are thinking, but all in all, still a little bit weird. I do love the product demos though... :)

Human bandwidth

Since this is my first blog, I'd like to use this space to really bemoan the fact that now that blogging has become so popular, the singal to noise ratio is really in the toilet. Actually, that's not even the problem. The problem is that there are tons of people out there and I'm sure they all think that they have something important to say, and it's quite likely that they do. But no human could possibly read or enjoy all the things that all the people out there in the world have to say. It's just not possible.

I had a great picture up on my wall for a while from Jim Gray's Turing award speech...

Human input data          /hr        /lifetime
READ (text)               100 KB      25 GB
Hear (speech @ 10 KBps)   40 MB       10 TB
See (TV @ .5 MB/s)        2 GB         8 PB
It's so fascinating to think that we're physically bounded by the our input bandwidth. Regardless of comprehension. You actually can't beat it, without some kind of neural input. Suffice it to say, that the total bandwidth, comprehension included, of people reading blogs is just way way below that. That's a nice bound for how many people I think are going to read this :)

Updated [11/10/2004]: Oh just trying to correct a spelling error that's more than ONE YEAR OLD.