One of the many greatly entertaining Far Side cartoons I read during my youth was one of a pudgy blond kid who asked to be excused from class because his brain was full. It is a common lament among people in the process of education, especially those who are young, that their brains are full and that they cannot seem to learn anything more. This is immensely amusing for older people, for as children struggle with this in such elementary matters as learning how to read or multiply, adults smile and ponder on what they have learned over the course of a lifetime, and know that the brains of the little ones can fill a lot more, with the right discipline. It is ironic, I suppose, that the more knowledge a brain possesses, the more information it can hold, because the more possible connections can be made between the knowledge that exists, allowing it to be retained and recalled more easily.

This is especially ironic when one compares it to the problem of computer memory. From Friday morning until this morning at work, my own ability to function as lord of the data [1] has been greatly limited by the fact that my computer was out of memory. In fact, at the time that someone from IT finally came to my desk as a response to my ticket, my computer was down to 50 MB free out of a memory of 110 GB, which is an impressive amount of memory to fill, I must admit. After hearing some complaints about the monstrously large files I work with, we (the IT fellow and myself) dug into the hard drive a bit and tried to figure out exactly what was filling the memory to such a great extent. What we found was that 12GB could be easily freed by removing the hibernation feature of my desktop, something I use a fair amount on my laptop at home, but not something that is particularly useful at work. So it was junked.

After that we continued to dig, and we found that more than 10GB was taken up by my Outlook, because I obsessively keep every single e-mail that I send and receive at work, a data trail that is of interest, but also one that is not easy to dig through without a large amount of patience. I’m generally a fairly patient soul with a great need to document my existence, so I deal with the voluminous e-mails, in the level of thousands or tens of thousands, that I have sent and received over the course of my employment so far. We kept these, but noted their size and existence, and moved on to two large and mysterious collections of internet files. By cleaning up these temp files made up of all the reports I had pulled so far, an additional 10GB or so was cleaned up very easily just by getting rid of the internet cache. So, now I have my computer back functioning fully with about a fifth of its memory free with minimal action taken on my part, about five or ten minutes worth of simple disk cleanup. Clearly, when it comes to computers, memory almost full is a far greater problem than for human beings, largely because computers cannot themselves make the same connections as efficiently as people can, even if their computational skills are far greater than our own, to the point where it is foolish for anything other than a computer or a large group of computers to run algorithms, leaving the heuristic and interpretive aspects to humanity.

In the mid-2000’s, Paul McCartney was in the midst of a productive period of creating music that was moderately popular. Among these albums was an intriguing one called “Memory Almost Full.” Three of the songs from that album, “Ever Present Past,” “Dance Tonight,” and “Nod Your Head” were released as singles and they were minor hits in the United States, Great Britain, and around the world. The album is full of melancholy reminisces about the past, and wondering about the course that life would take. This is not a particularly surprising course for an artist to take when he has been recording for more than 40 years. Eventually we all go back to memory and try to piece together how we have gotten where we are. What is more ironic and striking that long after reaching a point in his career where he would be expected to cease being a popular musician, his last three singles have all hit the top 40, one of them reaching the top 10. Of course, all of them are collaborations with Kanye West [2], where Kanye sings or raps over McCartney’s acoustic guitars, but it is still impressive that even after all these years, McCartney’s popular and critical success, and his ability to create artistic pop music, is still not over yet. If only all creative people could stay vital and relevant so long. It is something worth striving for, after all, for we are men and not machines. So long as we live, there is always hope for the future, as we strengthen old connections and build new ones.

[1] See, for example:

Lhttps://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014/10/24/lord-of-the-data/

Beast Mode

Maintenance Men

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015/01/27/four-five-seconds-from-wildin/