The implications of computing

Miscellaneous links to computing-related information that has caught my eye.

An answer to the question "Why is programming fun?" from the essay "The Tar Pit," by Fred Brooks.

"...there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures...Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is reall in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."

The SixthSense project.

This shows the kind of imagination about the uses of computing that makes me want to live forever just to see what's coming next.

Progress in electronic voting.

A couple years ago, Carleton was host to Ron Rivest, a Turing Award winner for his work on public key cryptography (he is the R in RSA). One of the talks Ron gave was on the algorithms and protocols associated with electronic voting systems. It appears to me that the Scantegrity system described in the link above is somebody's attempt to implement some of those ideas. If you're interested in this topic, Ron has a very helpful page of voting resources links.