Atom Recycling

In On Intelligence I read that approximately 98% of your body's atoms are replaced approximately every 3 years. I also heard the same thing on NPR (National Public Radio) a few weeks ago. If you stop to think about this for a moment, it's pretty amazing and a little scary at the same time. Over the course of those three years (while your atoms are being replaced), you're general sense of self and your appearance remain fairly consistent, which is quite remarkable.

On Intelligence

I've just started re-reading On Intelligence, the book by Jeff Hawkins. I read it for the first time approximately four months ago. His ideas on how the human brain works are profound.

In the first chapter, Hawkins dispels Artificial Intelligence and the reasons why he believes it has failed. Basically, the human brain works differently than computers. As a result, computers are not intelligent by their very nature. Instead, we must first understand how the human brain works; particularly the neocortex. The first chapter also lays out that "... understanding cannot be measured by external behavior... it is instead an internal metric of how the brain remembers things and uses its memories to make predictions."

Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures

I just finished reading the book Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures. There were a few decent pieces of information, but overall I was not very impressed. Some of the content was OK, but the grammatical errors and different writing styles made it a very disappointing read. There were four different authors which contributed to the flow problems, and it was obvious that some of the chapters were more poorly written than others. In addition, it didn't seem like anyone even proofed the book. I can understand a few errors, but I found myself re-reading sentence after sentence trying to understand what words were missing, misspelled or out-of-place.

The chapter on transactions was pretty decent. I liked the information on compensating transactions, which I had heard called three phase commit previously. The chapter on UDDI was pretty decent as well. I was disappointed in the last chapter on Event-Driven Architecture. It just seemed to be a hodge-podge catch all of the author's thoughts without much meat.