New Age Math

The reason I named this Blog "Life is a Queue" is because I used a Mathematical discipline called Network Queueing Analysis in my computer performance analysis work at NASA. I am an Expert in that field.

Simply put Queueing Analysis is all about Time. It is used to predict the response time of tasks in computer and communications systems, the queues of passengers at the airport, the queueing at shopping malls, supermarkets, banks.

Also Life is about Time. We spend our whole life using Time. We use time to Sleep. We use time to Brush our Teeth. We use time to Travel and time to Shop. I am using time to write this essay. All of life is a Queue. Right now I am waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.

As we use up time, it is added to our Age. Good times are added to our age, bad times are added to our age, wasted time is added too. Every tick on the clock is added to our age.

There is fascination about "Time Travel" both Forward and Backward. What if there was a Machine that would allow you to move about freely in the Fourth Dimension. We can move from place 1 (home) to place 2 (work) and back to place 1 (home) no problem, but we can't move in time any way other than t1, t2, t3...... . There is no going Backwards.... and No Jumping Ahead.

The Physicists and Astromomers go absolutely mind bending when they muse about time see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/time/ .

Carl Sagan: The grandfather paradox is a very simple, science-fiction-based, apparent inconsistency at the very heart of the idea of time travel into the past. Stated simply: you travel into the past and murder your own grandfather before he sires your mother or your father. Where does that then leave you? Do you instantly pop out of existence because you were never made?

Or are you in a new causality scheme in which, since you are there you are there, and the events in the future leading to your adult life are now very different?

The heart of the paradox is the apparent existence of you, the murderer of your own grandfather, when the very act of you murdering your own grandfather eliminates the possibility of you ever coming into existence.

Stephen Hawking's chronology protection conjecture: the laws of physics do not allow time machines.

Going Backwards in time means getting Younger... All of us would like to handle that trick. It cheats Death!

Going Forward in time means getting Older. Fortune tellers con folks by claiming they can see ahead to the future. With a time machine there are tremendous financial gains to be had on the Futures Market if one could jump forward a few days and then come back to Now and Invest with certainty about prices.

There are popular songs about time... "Don't stop thinking about Tomorrow... It'll be here sooner than you know... Yesterday's Gone.... Yesterday's Gone..."

We make promises "till the end of Time..." We buy things with "lifetime warranties".

Time is very precious to us. We try to save time. (As if we could some how put it in a bottle)

There is an Important Law in Network Queueing Analysis that I call the Law of the Supermarket. No one had ever given the law a catchy name so I chose the name to capture the imagination. In its simplest form the Wait at the Supermarket Checkout server is

W = S + SxQ

W is the amount of time spent (wait) at the server. It is equal to
S the amount of time it takes to serve a single customer
Q is the number of customers ahead of you when you arrive.

Everyone I have ever met understands and practices this law. We look at the Line ahead and estimate the time it will take to get through the server. Note: the wait time is how much older we will be when we leave the line.

Age@start + Wait = Age@end

Suppose the service time is a negative number... then the Wait would be negative... If the wait is negative, you come out of the server Younger than you arrived.

This server is a "Fountain of Youth"... the longer you are there the Younger you get. Ponce de Leon was looking for it in Florida back in 1513.

Back in 1980 I discovered that using negative service time in Network Queueing models allowed approximate response time predictions for tasks that had parallel servers. It is a Useful construct and it did not break my computer!

Today we go to Health Spa's and Plastic surgeons they promise to "take years off your appearance." But they are not Time Machines.

In time for my last Birthday I discoverd a new mathematical series. Here is a sample from the series: ....... 36, 46, 56, 66, 67, 68, 69, 7, 17, 27, 37 .....

Can you complete this series?

Take the numbers from 1 to 99 and reverse digit pairs, if you get a smaller number it is in the series.

I call this the NEW AGE MATH series. When someone asks you age, use the NEW AGE MATH series to answer the question. Simply reverse the digits of your age and get the NEW AGE MATH Answer. Once you get past 60 it cuts decades off your age.

By the way I just turned 27. And last year was a Blast!