From: banerjeeadda1234@gmail.com   
      
   I discovered Asimov in 1982. I had read Asimov before, as his works would   
   appear in "Science Today". The Foundation series was a revelation to me. Later   
   on, I would read his books on robotics, in the 90s. But the Foundation series   
   was the most    
   enthralling, what with the legendary Hari Seldon the great mathematician and   
   his prediction of the future with complex maths.   
      
   In the mid 90s, while working for Telstra Research Labs, in the early 90s, I   
   developed queuing theory to meet certain telecom needs, such as in signalling   
   networks, with noted success. Much less busy tones, and that was made global   
   with my international    
   standardisation contribution which showed the nature of signalling traffic to   
   be of Gaussian distribution, thus allowing easy dimensioning.   
      
    On that strength, I was given the job to solve a major problem then, the huge   
   waiting queues at the Department of Social Service, now called Centrelink. To   
   cut a long story short, I applied the basic methods of Hari Seldon - I made a   
   huge digital    
   simulation program with some 64000 variables and found out the best possible   
   solution for optimising the parameters with pure brute force number crunching.    
      
   It was a showpiece program, at that time, being something of a first, in the   
   mid 90s, for it was a complex application program which a single person could   
   develop. I often demonstrated its functioning in the TRL foyer, to various   
   invitees. There are tons    
   of such apps now, of course, but in those days it was a novelty.    
      
   The app I made was a huge success, for it could distribute resources such that   
   waiting times would reduce drastically, by pointing out what numbers to put   
   into the controlling program and how to stop delays by putting in the manpower   
   into action BEFORE    
   the rush happened. Never after the rush happened.    
      
   My feeling was one of elation. This number crunching approach, after detailed   
   and painstaking simulation, could apply to very many areas where there are   
   shortages. Globally applied, inequalities could be resolved peacefully and   
   efficiently.   
      
   Alas, that was not to be. Our labs were shut down. Too many people profited   
   from controlled chaos, which made them important and indispensable.   
   Still, there are ruins to the whole thing, such as this old copy of the great   
   books of this most wonderful science and scifi writer, Dr Isaac Asimov, to   
   whom I owe a great deal in my professional career.   
      
   Cheers,   
   Arindam Banerjee   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)