anyone seeing “two options as truly equally compelling cannot be fully rational.”

Ignoring the precise anecdotal details, we can sum up all the Aristotle and Buridan’s ass variants as useful models in the much debated area of ethics involving free will (of which more later if I so decide): how do we select between multiple-choice actions? Do we perform some determining moral arithmetic, balancing self-satisfaction with that inner voice of conscience and altruism?

Does this ethical odyssey butter any CS parsnips, I hear you cry? I know of only one Buridan CS victim: poor indecisive Mickey Thumps, whose atrophied corpse was found clutching a White Paper on the pros and cons of upgrading from Windows XP to Vista. In less fatal, everyday coding situations, one does find oneself Buridanically frozen at the keyboard, fingers poised over equally plausible keystrokes. This inaction, though, is far less excusable and rational under current software development facilities. We EOFs (extremely old farts) tend to see you under-65s as complacent arrivistes blessed with backspace, del, undo, and redo keys, and all manner of new-fangled, mollycoddling editing, interactive, and debugging crutches. In Brit soldier slang, programming has become “dead cushy.” And paid by the line, to boot! Why hesitate? Peck AnyKey and see! Click Any Where and stare.² All is instantly revocable. Think Heuristic. Think Iteration. Think Agile. Think BoAD (Build [optional Augment] Destroy). Think SAP (Simulated Annealing Programming). Well, perhaps next year, sap.

Have I made the point? (More or less. But watch your deadlines. —Ed.) You kids are less likely to suffer the prevaricating angsts of us brave ENIAC and EDSAC pioneers. Stripped to the waist (even the men) amid the sweltering glow of a thousand thermionic valves, we flipped the switches and fed the punched tapes. Pre-prep and pre-check ruled. There was no going back. Once the run started, all our committed settings were at the implacable mercy of a lengthy execution. No easy diagnostic dumps explained the unexpected halts (even Turing was baffled!). Then came the checking of our results (if any) on an abacus: on a lucky day, two split peas on a rusty wire. (Is this true?—Ed.) The kids of today just don’t believe us. We had every right to pause and ponder before hitting GO. Nor could we pretend to be busy by fiddling with a mouse (whence the term “mousing around”). Pause for a timely, diverting link to dear Dr. Douglas Engelbart’s magic rodent, Mus graphicus, just celebrating its 40th birthday as reported in the SRI January 2009 Bulletin:

Personal computing made its world debut on December 9, 1968, when Dr. Engelbart and his team at SRI gave

the first public demonstration of the mouse and other fundamentals of modern, interactive computing. On December 9, 2008, SRI presented a 40^th-anniversary event in Memorial Auditorium at Stanford University to celebrate what has been called the “mother of all demos.” A crowd of about 1,000 gave Engelbart a standing ovation, recognizing the magnitude of his contributions. Logitech also announced on December 9 it had shipped its billionth mouse.

In spite of which (or possibly because of its infantile popularity, the victory of Disney over Descartes), we oldies remained mouse-cynical and GUI-resistant. Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defined the mouse as “an animal which strews its path with fainting women.” Back in

One does find oneself
Buridanically frozen at
the keyboard, fingers
poised over equally
plausible keystrokes.

the early GUI days of insufficient processor power, I was not over-cynical in defining the computer mouse as “a device that strews its path with fainting applications” (Stan Kelly-Bootle, The Devil’s DP Dictionary, McGraw-Hill, 1981).

One must note that, especially on laptops, the trend is away from mice in favor of track pads built into the keyboard. These now have some remarkable tactile sensitivi-ties allowing taps and multifinger “strokes, spreads, and swipes” to replace cumbersome mouse scrolls and button clicks. We are seeing a convergence with older touch-screen technologies, as in the iPod, whereby the screen is the touch pad. Is there a limit to the number and type of “gestures” that can be recognized by such devices? (Let’s ignore the gyroscopic and accelerometric sensors