Integrity Grows From A Humbling Realization

My friend Sri Sridharan (http://www.infinisri.com) just passed away last week. While in last several years Sri had devoted himself to "seva" and working on projects that make difference to those who are ignored, I will always remember him as my Guru in "architecture thinking". More than a decade ago, when I worked for him he introduced me to the concept of "Power of Ten". (An animated version is online: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/). He emphasized that as we change the scale of things (i.e., by a factor of 10), the reality we perceive changes. And our old models, ways of understanding and dealing with things have to change to make sense of this new world we see. In AI lingo he would say, as the scale changes the representation language itself has to change. Models do not easily scale across the power of ten.