Where do you keep your cache?

Ramu the Bamu left a mess behind when he passed in 2017 As his brother it fell to me to sort through the prodigious debris of his life mostly books magazines and sundry files and papers Ramu beloved to all who knew him was accepted for what he was the absentminded kindly lord of his pigpen He lived in a room defined by its chaos where he and only he could accurately and swiftly find whatever he wantedCovering an entire wall in another room were his nearly 3000 books and magazines from a lifetime of squirrelling Punch Geo National Geographic LIFE Playboy Penthouse New Yorker Esquire in the magazine half and weathered and brown collections of books from the Jurassic Era in the other halfIf you wanted say for Playboyrsquos interview with Truman Capote Ramu the Bamu could fish it out instantlyI have far fewer books My cuisine shelf has 125 books on food and cooking In the guest room are 61 books mainly related to diet health cholesterol photography and idiosyncratically tips on how a gentleman should dress Alone on a single shelf are 19 battered Tarzan books Behind my work desk is a rack with 191 books reflecting the befuddled polymath who owns themBut earlier today the polymath could not find a specific bookmdashHatterrsquos Castle by A J Croninmdashin this meagre collection of 306 books even after turning the shelves upside down and inside out It took hoursIt takes your wife ages to find the soont powder in a swarm of 50 or so spice bottles You search for a particular tie among your dozens you just saw it last week where could it have goneMade me wonder about Google search I ask a questionmdashsay Why isnrsquot the sky greenmdashand even before my fingers can rise from the Return key Google is already displaying the top 10 of about 1510000000 results compiled in apparently 034 secondsAlmost as good Irsquod say as Ramu the BamuCould we speed up how quickly we find our spices books ties and files by studying how Google does itIn 1975 Intelrsquos Mr Gordon Moore correctly predicted that computing power would double every two years It did but the universe of stored knowledge has also been exploding The more information a storage device has the longer it takes to search through it A better solution was neededSo they invented a cache a special superfast memory module for keeping information you accessed recently or frequently A bit like keeping a few muchneeded textbooks handy as you studyBy the way your mother and her mother before her knew all about caches so probably does whoever cooks in your home Indiarsquos most ubiquitous cache is the masala dabba the circular lidded steel container with six canisters for storing powdered dhania jeera and mirchi as well as whole jeera mustard and peppermdashthe most commonly accessed spices of the Indian kitchenThis masala dabba has another feature it is right next to the cooking areaGoogle and other websites understand the importance of proximity When data flashes by at the speed of light reducing the distance between the server and you revs up the delivery If yoursquore in Mumbai your search results are not coming from the Googleplex in Mountain View California but probably from a content delivery network in Marol or NallasoparaLetrsquos say yoursquore a quick study and this column has inspired you to create a small lsquocachersquo closet for clothes you wear regularly and a larger one for less frequently used attire like business suitsWhat will you do when your closet gets fullA computer would evict some data to create space But how does it decide which items to evict from an overloaded cache In computers the first to go would be the Least Recently Used LRU itemsSounds geeky but humans have been using LRU in their daily lives long before computers For example I have made several hundred friends over my life but I divide them now into those with whom I have regular contact and the ones who are in my address book but not my life They are my LRU friends who only send me cat videos and Janmashtami greetings now and then and donrsquot even expect a replyLRU is powerful Facebook has used it to subvert minds and democracies Their algorithm assumes you want more of whatever you watched recently If it was a climate change conspiracy video your feed would fill up with more climateparanoid videos Pretty soon yoursquod be a raging conspiracy theorist who trusts nothing and no oneToday I rearranged my books banishing the LRUs I began parking frequently accessed books on a shelf away from the LRUs Recentlyread books go to the left side of that shelf Itrsquos a new life and itrsquos weightlessTry it itrsquos easy1 Separate the LRUs from your collections so that your most recently accessed books clothes spices whatever are within easy reach and the rest are elsewhere2 After using any of them place them back on the very left of the storage spaceSeek now and ye shall definitely findYou can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopigmailcomSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper