This is a glimpse into the invisible imperceptible core of, and a kind of background to, our computing experience.
"The data hidden in our perceptual "blind spot" contains worlds waiting to be explored, if we choose to shift our focus there. Today's digital technology enables artists to explore new territories for content by capturing and examining the area beyond the boundary of "normal" functions and
uses of software."
Kim Cascone, The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music
Where is tranquillity in 199 389 events in a second? First off, reading the trace we notice that some of the activity is caused by the tracing script starting and stopping, some of it is caused by the `sleep` program that we use to count to 1 second before stopping, and a lot of it is caused by the `<idle>` process, sometimes called `swapper` or process 0. This is a process whose job is to do nothing at all in an infinite loop and runs with the lowest possible priority only if nothing else needs running.
Secondly, since there are 1 000 000 microseconds in a second, only 199 389 events and many events occur within the same microsecond, a majority of these microseconds have no function call happening within them.
During the trace, the laptop made no sound, the screen showed nothing but the most bare-bones user interface and there was no human initiated tasks going on in the background. Thus, the trace reflects the activity in the computer when it does not actively perform any work and is undisturbed by any human.
Tracing the activity of the kernel for one second, we were left with a sequence containing 199 389 software events timestamped with microsecond accuracy. This accuracy was not sufficient to distinguish the individual starting point of every function call since many microseconds contain several function calls within them. This already is a demonstration of the incredible speed of the events we are measuring, and how far it is from a human perception of time.
While reading through all of this data could certainly be a meditative experience, discovering it as tranquil seems easier experienced through listening.