Coincidence of Thoughts

Every now and then, I get into weird thinking... thinking about some innovative idea, get imaginative and self motivated by the spark of idea, that I start to plan on its implementation. Then after a while, I give up - either forget about it all and get back to the real world or just laze around postponing the implementation part, till I lose interest and motivation to drive the very idea that came to me earlier. And then, on one fine day I wake up to find somebody else implementing exactly what I had thought about! I'm sure many of us have been through this cycle. A lot of us are great thinkers, while at the same time we are lazy to implement our own ideas. This leaves a significant few who make a mark in the history books by striving hard to get their(?) idea on implementation and set it ready for the world to experience.

Here's one such incident that occurred to me lately:

Some two years ago, I was deeply pondering upon the idea of creating a complete operating environment using the Ruby programming language. I wanted to replace the entire stack of common utilities and configuration files that existed on Linux with those written completely on Ruby, with standardized XML based configuration files. I started off with some basic design, and then setting up goals for the project, wrote a tiny shell to start with, and some basic ruby scripts to replace init and its relevant /etc/inittab and the rc scripts.

Once, I got myself clear with the initial framework and design, I motivated a couple of my good old students regarding this project more than a year back, and together we managed to build up small ruby scripts to replace the existing Linux shell utilities (basename, dirname, ls, cat, rm, mkdir, rmdir, so on...). Two of my students infact built a functional FTP server and a HTTP server on Ruby. One other student of mine went through the adventure of creating a complete 'fdisk' utility purely based on Ruby (of course, he couldn't get much success at that time).

Then, slowly we lost track - my students got busy with their job and further studies... while I got busy with my job too. But every now and then, I've been thinking about this pet project of mine, trying to come up with something more innovative. Infact, I described this project as the Ruby based Operating sub-system [the name I wish not to disclose for now ;-)]. Something that works as a layer on top of an existing operating system kernel (like Linux, or *BSD, or even Mach kernels) providing a flexible, extensible and consistent operating environment for the user.

A couple of minutes back, I was on rubyforge, looking out for some good system projects on Ruby (I was particularly looking out for a persistent object data store implemented on Ruby), and to my shock I found an interesting project called R:O:S - The Ruby Operating System (http://ros.rubyforge.org). Upon reading their wiki and peeking into their mailing list archives, I realized that someone at the other corner of world had been thinking exactly what I've been thinking (well, almost) ;-). I'm sure that this weird thought of implementing a Ruby based operating environment would have struck both of us almost at the same time, except that he's made an effort to document this thoughts and collate his idea at that time - which is exactly where I lagged behind.

There have been a few incidents like this before [another idea that came to me was implemented by someone under the project name GoboLinux ;-)]

All in all, I see a pattern in human thought. I believe that thoughts and idea aren't bound to the mind of one person. Infact, they would not be generated in our mind at all. But it could be that thoughts and idea are like waves carrying patterns of information that propagates around us all. Our minds act as signal receptors trying to translate these patterns to our perception. Not all of us would tune to a particular signal, but perhaps some of us coincidentally do. Therefore it is more likely that when this signal of thought propagates around us all the time, some of us perceive the information that it carries, while a significant few of us, step forward and translate this information that we perceived to a "real world" implementation for the world to experience.

All our scientific and cultural advancements could have happened this way. Its like saying that we would still have had filament lamps irrespective of the very existence of Thomas Alva Edison. If Edison had failed to invent the filament lamp, perhaps someone else would've succeeded. This makes me think that we are merely carriers of information which is being generated somewhere beyond our realm.

This plane of thought makes me wonder if we are being controlled by some external entity watching over us all the time - transmitting signals that are interpreted by our mind - in order to keep us sustained, evolve, innovate and progress with time.

Perhaps, I just transitioned from one point of thought in my mind to the other! :-). I wont be surprised if somebody else somewhere thought exactly what I'm thinking right now and exclaimed "Hey, I thought the same darn thing... this guy has documented this!" just the way I felt a couple of minutes ago.