Wednesday, December 21, 2011

To the Power of...


When I was much younger sometime I would wait for sleep by playing a game of doubling. One, two, four, eight, and so on...  I would challenge myself to how many “doublings” I could do. When I got to 1024 (2 to the exponential power of 10) I thought I was doing a pretty good job. However, it didn't take long after that for me to give up the never ending task and to choose sleep instead.

In 1965, Gordon Moore from Intel predicted with amazing foresight that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip would double every 2 years, enabling its complexities to grow exponentially. Since 1965, it had double 23 times.  In 46 years the number of transistors had grown 8,388,608 times its original size. Imagine how complex it would get if given 200 years...or 2,000 years... or 20 billion years.

In the beginning there was only darkness; then came light. Then came heaven and earth, land and ocean, mountains and valleys, etc. The story of Eden started with one man, Adam... then came Eve. Soon later came Cain and Abel and their off-springs. The story of every human being begins with a zygote, then it divides itself into two, then four, and so on...until trillions of cells later you see a miracle every time you look into the mirror.

To experience a miracle we need not look far. We just need to look with the right perspective.

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