Our neighbor left the box with my mother. He was an Air Force Captain taken with building things of one kind or another. During my Junior year in high school it was building electronic kits. Back in the day that meant anything from Heathkit. The company produced well-designed stereo components, oscilloscopes, an analog computer (long story, but my high school had one), test equipment, and amateur radio gear. If you knew how to solder they were almost idiot-proof and you could repair them yourself when they broke. A few of his old projects somehow made it to me.
It was a Heathkit AA-40 - a 40 watt per channel class A tube amplifier. Unlike many of his gifts it still worked. The problem was I didn't have a turntable or speakers. We had a family stereo, but touching it would have been socially dangerous. I found an old turntable and a single very not very good speaker. Anything moderately good was out of the question. Sometimes it's useful if you can't afford something.
I had read that the mass of the driven element, a speaker cone, was important. Low mass meant high acceleration for a given force. It made sense. There were exotic electrostatic speakers with even lower masses than a cone. Supposedly they sounded great, but had some technical issues. It started me wondering if I could go to an even lower driven mass.
A feature or flaw about me is I'm usually more interested in how something works than what it does or what it might do for me. I thought ham radio would be exciting. It turns out it was mostly people telling you how good your signal was, the weather and a few other boring things. On the other hand how radio waves propagated through the atmosphere was fascinating and still is. Faced with needing a speaker I was drawn to the basics. It was just turning an electrical signal into a mechanical motion which would create a string of pressure differences in the air. Speaker coils, magnets and paper cones. On the other hand if I could make a plasma dance...
I used a blow torch with a wick made out of asbestos (I know) that brought a salt solution into the flame. Of course there was a background noise and it was a serious fire hazard, but you can't have everything at once. The amplifier's output went into a high voltage transformer from a junked TV and into two electrodes in the flame. It worked! The flame moved in time to the music which was sort of identifiable as music. It sounded terrible with the hiss and wasn't exactly safe for indoor use. But I've never been an audiophile, so it was an achievement in my book.
The same with a lot of technology. It's deeply fascinating, but how chips are made and how semiconductors work seems more interesting than how I use them. And how people use technology is more interesting than how I use it. (Sociology is way beyond me.) There's a lot I'm interested in, but when it comes to personal adoption I tend to be in the middle and sometimes the trailing edge. I'll buy something new, like the first iPod or iPhone, and replace it every year until it does what seems useful. Then I keep it until it fails or, like my old MacBook Pro, has a maddening keyboard.
I'm mostly in Apple's ecosystem so smartphone means iPhone to me. As time goes on I've made an effort to rely on it less and less. It packs enough very useful features that I wouldn't go back to a pre-computer wireless phone, but my four year old phone is currently in a wait until it fails mode.
That said I follow Apple developer's conferences and product announcements. The current iPhone 13 has a remarkable set of photographic and video capabilities. Computational photography gets better every year and is now at stun level. Apple is using the processor, graphics processor and machine learning hardware at the same time in some of the modes. It's astounding. If you're a serious photographer like Om or Bryan, you probably need one and have already ordered. The device seems mature at this point. They didn't make a big deal of it being faster, but rather concentrated on battery life. Pro tip - mature portable electronics that check all of the feature boxes focus on battery life. In the end user experience wins.
I'm not a photographer so a new iPhone would be overkill. Maybe in a year what I have now will be unusable and I'll have something new. How these things work and how they're built is the exciting part. I would not have predicted some of the video features on the new phone.
Horace Dediu has one of his always insightful pieces on the importance of the new iPhone. In my case I'm probably a trailing edge user at this point - different from the much larger group Apple is addressing as they reinvent what the iPhone is useful for. He's worth following if you have an interest in on person computational power and the micromobility revolution.
On the other hand Om may have nailed the really important product launch this season. Then again, he offers an excellent iPhone 13 Pro review.
breadth and depth
His parents were Danish, hers Swedish. By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities. Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year. He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week. He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it. We'd sit in his yard and listen. Some were short, some took a half hour. They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places. They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections. Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.
My sister is a visual storyteller. It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder. She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize. I suspect my Dad was a big influence. He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions. He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple. Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad.
A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range). He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:
Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:
“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”
Raducanu added this:
“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”
Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing. Epstein goes into depth in both of his books. Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs. These people have built the tools they need to think creatively. They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.
I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again. I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12. I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life. Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices. The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular). One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.
I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects. Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work. They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth. There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia. Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.
Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects. Many of you have your own diverse lists. My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports. Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you! It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later. You find yourself becoming more creative with age. Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres. Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or... the list goes on and on...
Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.
Posted at 10:20 AM in art, book recommendation, building insight, critical thinking, education, general comments, story time | Permalink | Comments (0)
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