Normal people have very weird ideas about how computers work under the covers.

Omaha and I visit a cafe near our home nearly every day. Today, I got into a weird conversation with someone there about computers and, of all things, lists. I said a list was one dimensional, and she got angry at me. "A list is two dimensional. It goes down the paper and across the paper." I objected that that's not how it works inside a computer; it's just a single line, from beginning to end, of numbers. A list is just a line of numbers, in pairs: the address where to find each item on the list, and how much to read in until you've seen the whole item. The items themselves are somewhere else along the line. There's no multi-dimensionality at all to memory (or hard drive) accessing; it's just one dimension.

"But that's still two dimensional, right?" she insisted. "You have an address for each item, like, going down the page, but each item goes across it." I said that was an artifact of human interpretation; computer addressing was a single number, one for each place in RAM or on a disk.

She refused to believe that.