In these days at home I enjoy my screen saver as a window into what life once was like, and God willing will be again. At any given moment there will be three, two or a single picture on the screen. Included are photos of weddings, and dances, babies, and musicals, the first day of high school, and graduations. My kids have contributed the international shots, from Iceland, and Switzerland, Paris and Madrid. Sometimes there will be one of my granddaughter poised beside another of her mother as a small girl hugging her grandfather for the last time. Such juxtaposition does a number on my sense of time. 

 

If you are curious about the era in which any given photo is from, a rule of thumb is that the clear ones are either by my kids or a qualified friend, while the out of focus ones were taken by me. 

 

The algorithm that squeezes the photos to fit together has little warning. Something in the program helps the program to zero in on the best parts which for me is faces. Yet even with that intention, there are a bunch that show up skewed. It could be that the subject has been truncated at the neck, or when two people are in the picture the computer compromised by showing the empty space between them. Just now there was a picture of a dumpster. It is a serviceable dumpster, but I cannot recall who the people were that were edited out. On occasion there will be the bottom half of one person under the top half of someone else, just like those funny books I played with as a child. 

 

I can get annoyed at the close up of a torso, or simply look at one of the others in the display. Or I can wait three seconds for the next array of people I love. 

 

It all seems like a metaphor for my internal conveyor belt of thoughts. Do I zoom in on the clothes someone left on the floor, or the dishes by the computer? Or  do I focus on the joke Ben just told me. 

 

"Why didn't the moon want any dessert? Because it was full."

 

It turns out that the algorithms in our brains are programmable too.