The Left Field

Multi-tasking the project plan

I had one of those weird moments recently where I made an analogy between two things that I have never before analogized. Namely, multi-tasking operating systems and project planning. I will get back to that in a moment but first, I have a possible reason why weird analogies are popping in my head that I would like to spend a minute on.

The reason is Douglas Hofstadter. I have been a fan of Mr. Hofstadter's writings ever since I read Godel Escher Bach in college. It was required reading in the geek circles I moved in, in those days and it had quite an impact on me. I also greatly enjoyed Metamagical themas, Fluid concepts and creative analogies. I absolutely loved Le Ton beau de Marot which is a rare kind of book. Deeply personal on one hand and totally fascinating to a typesetting and language geek like me on the other. I cannot think of any book to compare it too. I have no idea where I would put it on a book store shelf to properly classify it.

I have recently started to read I am a strange loop and it is dovetailing perfectly with other current reading material around the Buddhistic conceptualization of that tricky little word "I". The book is from 2007 and contains fascinating reflections to earlier writings and is just full of fantastic stuff. Highly recommended.

Anyway, analogies are a big part of Hofstadter's thinking around the mind and how thinking actually works. I think with analogies all the time. Many of them are nuts, but somehow even the crazy ones help me somehow. I don't know where this one lies on the crazy useful spectrum but here goes...

Modern computers do many things at the same time. It is called multi-tasking. Humans multi-task a lot too and some people are better at it than others. I read somewhere that women are better at it than men. I don't know if that is true or not. Some of the multi-tasking that goes in computing is behind the scenes and users of computer systems - be they end-users or developers - do not need to be conscious that it is going on.

For example, as I write this my machine is doing all sorts of multi-tasking behind the scenes while I just concentrate on words. The internet is chattering in the background, an army of non-maskable interrupt handlers keep grabbing CPU time to stop various buffers from over-flowing, and so on.

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