Saturday, June 30, 2012

Dividing By Zero

I was attempting to consolidate my blogs on Blogger.com last week and in the process I deleted myself from them which in any normal, rational, logical world would be seemingly impossible.  Since, after all, I started the blogs in the first place. 

And yet I found myself in an insane version of Descartes theorem 'Cogito Ergo Sum'. In reverse and in binary.  

How can one delete their own thoughts? And yet I almost did.  And the scary thing is four years of this our story were almost tragically lost.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for technology and it sometimes serves a purpose.  But does it truly serve our purpose?

I could write an entire book about how many times I tried to use Twitter to keep everyone involved   and informed on our walk from Austin to Boston but it failed almost everytime.  Granted it was a relatively new technology in 2009 but, for example, when we were trying to build excitement for crossing the Purple People Bridge into Cincinnati, I'd been uploading photos leading up to it that didn't even get posted until hours after the event and in reverse order. 

This isn't just a Twitter rant - it's regrettable that all new technology companies think they can come up with the next novel idea, give it away for free, and take it viral.  And when and if it does they offer no support to the users as once they've duped you into using it their money comes from advertisers even though the ad dollars are based on you.  

It's a failed model and to prove it to yourself - take out your iPhone, open up the calculator app and divide any number by zero.  

1 comment:

dawnzer said...

What does it show on an iPhone? On my Android, it shows infinity, which is the standard set by IEEE. From Wikipedia: "In computer programming, an attempt to divide a floating point number by zero will lead to +-infinity by the IEEE 754 floating point standard, however, depending on the programming language and the type of number (e.g. integer) being divided by zero, it may: generate an exception, generate an error message, crash the program being executed, generate either positive or negative infinity, or could result in a special not-a-number value."