A chance airport encounter with a magazine called Computer Power User (CPU for short, wink wink) has led to a more serious involvement–i.e., I’ve subscribed. One nice thing about subscribing is that I have access to all the content over the web as well as in print, which makes it easy to get to the vast quantities of useful news, offbeat opinions, and links to utilities, firmware updates, and other great downloads. This is the way all magazines should operate. I don’t always have the print issue with me when I want to get back to the content I remember reading. In fact, that’s the principal use I make of the web feature. I rarely read the content there first; instead, I go back to it to retrieve stuff I’ve already read.

In the “offbeat opinion” department, the magazine features several quirky columnists from the last three decades of computing history, and the writing is unusually literate and thoughtful. In the October 2004 issue, for example, there’s a fun column on “organic computing” by Alex St. John, identified by the magazine as “one of the founding creators of Microsoft’s DirectX technology.” The subject is not making computers from carbon, but rather the human brain and body considered in terms of computers. The last paragraph is a zinger:

To summarize, you are made of proteins; proteins are little programs that are the computational byproducts of RNA transcription. RNA functions like a system bus, and DNA is RAM that stores everything about YOU as 6-bit sequences of nucleotides. Most organic life is made out of 21 amino acids because 21 is the number of building blocks that can be efficiently encoded in organic RAM with error correction. You are a giant, walking, talking Lego construction assembled by proteins from trillions of little amino acid building blocks and sea water whose sole purpose is to compute new copies of yourself before the inevitable accumulation of calculation errors causes you to crash permanently.

Fascinating metaphorical flight there, though I suspect that “copy file” isn’t quite as rewarding or fun for the silicon machines as it is for us. So there!