A T R A N D O M
Computer Lessons
Whoever heard of the fab giant
ultrasonic
I won’t be fooled by the sheeps in a
mattress
from Pop Songs
It must’ve been just a cardboard can-
nibal the man
Saw bowling Chester from the
record stand
Bob Colwell
In effect, the message in this song
sketches out the basic structure of
today’s communications standards,
t has been two years since we while also demonstrating the very
I
last considered the startling and point being made. It’s a beautiful thing
statistically significant corre- when mutually reinforcing communi-
spondences between pop culture cation occurs on multiple levels at
and our beloved information once. The singer complains that no one
technology, in part because that’s how is listening, but actually even those
long it has taken me to collect enough who are listening aren’t getting the
of these amazing oddities for another message. What message? The message
such column. that they aren’t listening! Delightfully
Pop songs often fractal, it seems to me.
JOAQUIN IN L.A. The Rolling Stones’ classic “(I Can’t
Consider the song “Words” from a have computer Get No) Satisfaction” also draws our
1980s album by the band Missing design secrets attention to the plight of the lonely
Persons called “Walking in L.A.”: access point, but this song also points
buried deeply in out that the number of retries equals
What are words for when no one their lyrics. four:
listens anymore
What are words for when no one I can’t get no satisfaction
listens I can’t get no girl reaction
What are words for when no one ’Cause I try and I try and I try and
listens it’s no use talkin’ at all that Missing Persons were, er, enunci- I try
ation-challenged. And with the same I can’t get no, I can’t get no
Clearly, in 1982 this band somehow confident confusion with which many
anticipated the recent IEEE 802.11 and listeners thought they heard Jimi This excerpt could equally well de-
Bluetooth standards, both of which Hendrix sing “’Scuse me while I kiss scribe our experience upon first power-
provide for a central access point that this guy,” the real lyrics to their song up of Intel’s Pentium Pro processor in
periodically broadcasts a “who’s out titled “Walking in L.A.” were heard as 1995. The first three times we asserted
there” beacon and then listens for “Joaquin in L.A.” Wait, it gets worse. the Reset pin, the chip wouldn’t work,
responses. If there’s no answer, the cen- Some of the rest of the lyrics to this but the fourth time it did. However, I
tral access point gets somewhat song went as follows: discount the possibility that the Rolling
depressed and lonely and polls less Stones were referring to our chip with
often. This is why it is important to Look ahead as we pass, try and this song because surely if they’d
always have at least one responder in focus on it known the chip would do this, they
any wireless network, so that the I won’t be fooled by a cheap cine- would have told us the cause instead
access points don’t go from sadness matic trick of making us figure it out.
and introversion to anger and open It must have been just a cardboard
hostility—you know, the perennial cut out of a man MISINTERPRETATION
state of Windows Millennium, with its Top forty cast off from a record It’s also intriguing how far from
ever-present Blue Screen of Terrible stand rationality the received message can
Sadness and Great Despair. wander before the receiver starts ques-
But here’s the delicious part, redo- But what some people heard was tioning whether the message was cor-
lent of self-referentiality. It turns out this: rectly decoded.
February 2004 7
At Random
I think this constitutes proof that a way they can’t refute so easily. While And racing around to come up
most pop music listeners don’t expect some particularly vacuous drivel is behind you again
to make sense out of most lyrics; there- emanating from our car’s radio, I sim- The sun is the same in a relative way,
fore, when a quasi-random word se- ply shake my head sadly, look at the but you’re older
quence seems to emerge from their kids, and say, “I’m sorry. We had the Shorter of breath and one day closer
speakers, they cheerfully translate it into Beatles.” to death
some other sequence without worrying
that anything might have been lost. Not all rock stars have such prob-
Still, modern speech depends heav- Today’s songs might be lems with their designs. Mick Jagger
ily on our ability to compensate with telling us what the brags about his success, probably just
cognition for what is lost in the audio computers of 2023 to irritate Steve Miller and Pink Floyd:
channel to noise, inattention, hearing will be like. “Time is on my side. Yes, it is. Time is
impairments, and preconceptions— on my side. Yes, it is.” It is also possi-
people hearing what they expect, inde- ble that Jagger is referring to his botox
pendent of what is actually said. injections, but if so, I question his con-
Doesn’t that just drive you nuts some- TIMING IS EVERYTHING clusion, having seen some recent pho-
times? Alert design engineers (and what tos of him.
I would expect that there is a thresh- other kind are there?) will recognize And then there’s Devo, a strangely
old at which our cognition returns the what the Steve Miller hit “Fly Like an quantized quintet from the 1980s con-
result, “This song’s lyrics are ludicrous Eagle” is describing: “Time keeps on sisting of men wearing white shirts and
babble.” Then we act accordingly, slippin’, slippin’, slippin’, into the bow ties with flowerpots on their
either cheerfully singing along or look- future....” That’s right—he was trying heads, moving as if they had stepping
ing up the lyrics on the Internet. But to converge the timing on his latest motors instead of muscles—or maybe
in any case, surely that threshold would mixed-signal SoC chip. Apparently he the video sampling rate was just far too
have been set in such a way as to iden- couldn’t do it, so my guess is he had to slow. They understood pipelining,
tify a potential problem with the re- relax the clock rate. Even then he prob- though. Every pipestage has work to
ceived lyrics of “sheeps in a mattress”? ably had heat problems, which he all be done, changes to be wrought on the
No wonder the Animals sang, “Oh but admits to in another hit song, data flowing through, and a deadline
Lord, please don’t let me be misunder- “Abracadabra,” from the point of to meet (before Pink Floyd’s sun comes
stood.” Reminds me of a patent we view of the fan sink on his chip: up again):
wrote on a mechanism for handling
page misses. The inventors called it the I heat up, I can’t cool down Now whip it
“page miss handler.” When the first You got me spinnin’ Into shape
draft of the patent disclosure came ’Round and ’round Shape it up
back, the title of the patent said, “Page ’Round and ’round and ’round it Get straight
Mishandler.” Spaces are important too. goes Go forward
In the 1960s, my parents teased me, Where it stops nobody knows Move ahead
a hapless de facto representative of my Try to detect it
generation, for the apparently drug- Of course, Miller could also have been It’s not too late
induced weirdness of many of the lyrics singing about his pet gerbil on its little To whip it
of the time. I mounted the best defense treadmill. Enigmatic ambiguity has Whip it good
I could, but with songs like “I Am the spawned many a PhD thesis. Such is art.
Walrus,” the effort was doomed. Too Pink Floyd needs help, too. Normally, OUT-OF-ORDER POP SONGS
bad nobody can understand what Bob the aging effects of silicon don’t have This one’s positively eerie. Somehow,
Dylan sings, because many of his lyrics much of an impact on a clock-by-clock in her 1980s song, “Time After Time,”
actually make sense. At least, I think basis, but with its song “Time,” Pink Cyndi Lauper anticipated the chal-
they do—I could be hearing lyrics Floyd seems to be complaining about lenges of designing an out-of-order
much different than what he intended. a speed path that progressively gets engine like Intel’s P6, where the front
Eventually, I fought back when I worse. Artsy, the way they use the peri- end that fetches, decodes, and renames
found my parents’ old record on which odicity of the sun to represent a single- is decoupled from the back end that
there was a song with the lyrics, “mair- phase clock in a synchronous system: performs all executions:
sie-doats and doesie-doats and little
lambsy-divie,” and we called a truce. And you run and you run to catch Sometimes you picture me
Nowadays, I tease my own children in up with the sun, but it’s sinking I’m walking too far ahead
8 Computer
You’re calling to me, I can’t hear but I can spot a pattern and extrapolate Sometimes that is the problem
What you’ve said from it. If 1980s pop songs predicted Dream
Then you say go slow the course of computer design 20 years Is it your dream
I fall behind ahead, then today’s songs might be Dream
The second hand unwinds telling us what the computers of 2023
will be like. Let’s consider some of
If you’re lost, you can look and you today’s lyrics to get a sneak preview. fter extensive research, I can
will find me
Time after time
If you fall I will catch you I’ll be
The 12 Stones’ song “Crash” pre-
dicts a continuation of the bane of
today’s designs: memory latency and
A only conclude that the rest of
today’s pop songs have buried
their computer design secrets too
waiting snoopy bus protocols. I would have deeply in lyrics that consist mostly of
Time after time hoped that in two decades we would profanity or inanity. Perhaps the pat-
have gotten away from these problems: tern formed by the few normal words
By the time the back end finds a completely surrounded by the curse
branch that has been mispredicted, the My mind is slowly fading words is a coded message. I’ll have to
front end has run off into the weeds. It So far away from me work on that some more. Meanwhile,
could even be fetching and decoding Each time I start crawling all I can say is ... we had the Beatles.
data for all the back end knows. The You’re there watching me And the Walrus was Paul. I
back end then redirects the front end
to the point where the error was made, With high probability (pun intended),
and the front end restarts. But by now, Dave Matthews’ “You Never Know”
the back end may be out of work to do. predicts quantum computing plus opti-
How did Cyndi Lauper see all this cal interconnect:
coming? Bob Colwell was Intel’s chief IA32
Out of the darkness comes light architect through the Pentium II, III,
THE FUTURE Like a flash and 4 microprocessors. He is now an
I’m an engineer. I may not understand You think you can you think you independent consultant. Contact him
all of the reasons why something works, can at bob.colwell@comcast.net.
2004:
January July
looking outlook issue next-generation search
February August
ahead ad hoc networking sensor networks
March September
to hardware speculation robotics
April October
future computers and the aging software architectures
technologies May November
adaptive software and information assurance
hardware December
June next-generation personal
internet security computing
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