Today I was reminded of how computers can just sit there and seem to do absolutely nothing, but still can be entirely doing something. When a computer crashes or becomes unresponsive, it’s not that it’s died or anything. It’s usually because it is stuck in what is called an “infinite loop.”

The concept of doing something forever seems foreign to mortals like you and me. Yet the computer really isn’t human and can do things that we could never imagine doing. The photo above will flip back and forth, back and forth, forever. If allowed to do so. The computer is working fairly hard to make that action happen, and yet it doesn’t tire at all. It can do that action a thousand times. A million times. A billion times.

The computer never gets bored of a repetitive task like you and me. I ask you to stare at this image and determine when you get bored. And then as you stare at the image, you discover so many things. The swaying of the trees, the pivoting of the man’s knee, the reflections in the windows differ, and a myriad of things begin to stand out as subtle differences between two points of time that are so narrowly separated you wouldn’t expect so many changes to be visible. Perhaps I won’t get bored and will outlast the computer this time. We shall see.