# Notes and highlights for But How Do It Know? - The Basic Principles of Computers for Everyone Scott, J Clark --- ## Introduction ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 5 · Location 82 " It keeps hot food hot , and cold food cold . . . . " Joe ### Note - Page 5 · Location 82 Complexity reduction thru insulation ## Just a Little Bit ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 14 · Location 200 A bit is some kind of a physical object that has a size and a location in space , and it has some quality about itself , that at any given time can be in one of two possible states , and may be made to change back and forth between those two states . ## What the…? ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 19 · Location 288 A computer gate generates a third bit from two other bits , it doesn’t open and close or stop or let anything through . ## Remember When ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 31 · Location 489 but in the end they would find that when ‘ s ’ was on , the light went on and off with ‘ i , ’ and when ‘ s ’ was off , the light would stay the way it was just before ‘ s ’ got turned off . ### Note - Page 32 · Location 490 Memory of nand gated ## Back to the Byte ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 47 · Location 700 This combination of a Byte and an Enabler , has a name , it is called a Register , thus the ‘ R ’ in the drawing . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 47 · Location 704 Register simply means a place to record some kind of information , like a hotel register where all the guests sign in ## The Magic Bus ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 50 · Location 740 So this is a bus . It is a bundle of eight wires that typically goes to many places . ## More Gate Combinations ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 55 · Location 832 We have seen how NAND gates make NOT gates and AND gates , and then NOT gates and AND gates make a Decoder . ## The Display Screen ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 166 · Location 2188 In a computer , a single dot on the screen is called a ‘ picture element , ’ or ‘ pixel ’ for short . ## Another Code ### Highlight (blue) - Page 173 · Location 2280 This just goes to show you why computers need to be so fast . The individual things that they do are so small , that it takes a huge number of steps to get anything done at all . ## That’s All Folks ### Highlight (blue) - Page 182 · Location 2401 Everything you see a computer do is a long concatenation of these very simple operations , the ADDing , NOTting , Shifting , ANDing , ORing , XORing of bytes , Storing , Loading , Jumping and I / O operations , via the execution of the instruction code from RAM . This is what makes a computer a computer . This is the sum total of the smarts in a computer . ## Hardware and Software ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 185 · Location 2446 If you have a lawnmower , and want a second lawnmower , there is no machine that will copy the lawnmower . ### Note - Page 185 · Location 2447 What if you had a hud that kept track of decomposition steps or like jarvis? ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 186 · Location 2457 So it is part of the ‘ ware , ’ but it isn’t hardware . The only thing left to call it is ‘ software . ’ ### Note - Page 186 · Location 2458 Flexware of shrinking nanotech with heat (creativity movie on netflix) ## The Operating System ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 188 · Location 2475 It would appear that all ten programs were running simultaneously because each one gets to do something , faster than the eye can see . ### Note - Page 188 · Location 2477 No such thing as multitasking ## Firmware ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 205 · Location 2707 So there is RAM , ROM , PROM , EPROM , EEPROM and Flash . These are all types of computer memory . ## Digital vs. Analog ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 209 · Location 2777 Most old technologies were analog , like the telephone , phonograph , radio , television , tape recorders and videocassettes . Oddly enough though , one of the oldest devices , the telegraph , was digital . ## Philosophy ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 218 · Location 2901 The question is , whether man is composed solely of the structural body that we can see and dissect , or whether there is an integral spiritual component to every human being which accounts for the qualities of consciousness , love , honor , happiness , pain , etc . ### Highlight (blue) - Page 220 · Location 2940 Everything else it ‘ does ’ amounts to nothing more than the simple warehousing of bytes . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 221 · Location 2949 DNA is interesting in that it is a long string of only four types of things . It’s digital ! ### Highlight (pink) - Page 222 · Location 2961 But if the human computer got stuck in a loop , there would be an instant loss of consciousness and the body would just fall completely limp with no struggle . I have never seen that , but if the brain operated just like a computer , you would expect to see it on a fairly regular basis . ### Note - Page 222 · Location 2963 Actually possible with kriya o e? Epilepsy too ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 227 · Location 3048 A pair of scissors is a device that performs a function when made to do so . You put a finger and thumb in the holes and squeeze . The blades at the other end of the scissors move together and cut some paper or cloth or whatever it is that you have placed in their way . Do the scissors “ know ” how to cut shapes out of paper or how to make a dress out of cloth ? Of course not , they just do what they’re told . Similarly , NAND gates don’t “ know ” what they are doing , they just react to the electricity or lack of it placed on their inputs . If one gate doesn’t know anything , then it doesn’t matter how many of them you connect together , if one of them knows absolutely zero , a million of them will also know zero . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 227 · Location 3057 Now that we know what is in a computer , and how it works , I think it is fairly obvious that the answer to the question “ But How do it Know ? ” is simply “ It doesn’t know anything ! ” ### Note - Page 227 · Location 3059 Stupid filing system