2009.25: What have you built lately?
I've always been envious of people who knew how to build houses, a skill that will never go out of fashion. Likewise, those who can repair cars or fix plumbing. When I was a kid, we built things like computers that could count to 111 in binary, which is pretty useless, although it did nurture my love of geeky technology all these years.
My most ambitious project was a vidicon TV camera,constructed from plans in a magazine. I went to the store and bought an aluminum chassis, tube and sockets, resistors, capacitors, coils, wire, solder and lots of screws, nuts and washers. The article was published in three parts so it took at least three months to build the camera, but it actually worked, giving a fuzzy, flickering black and white image. Of course this was yet another way to lure girls over to my mom's house where I lived in the basement.
My friends and I pointed the camera at the girls and and messed around with posing and pretending we were the Tonight Show. That show was hosted by Steve Allen, a guy who was a songwriter and musician as well as being very funny with improvisation. Anyway, all this was a lot of fun but it rarely got us anywhere with the girls. It took being in a band to jump that hurdle, and every one of us was in a band, eventually. Funny how my pals were ostracized something like the guys in "Weird Science" and every one of us went on to play some role for famous artists as important as Prince. We also all went to California to accomplish this, and I'll bet we got more than the atheletes who laughed at us in dodgeball games. Ah, sweet revenge. By the way, what does dodgeball in gym class say about the human race?
I followed electronic technology all these years and continued building projects first with transistors, such as an FM transmitter to be a pretend disc jockey in a 300 meter area, and then integrated circuits. From the day I build that TV camera (there was no VCR technology yet) to today where a Flip Video Mino can record an hour of HD in color, only about 44 years have passed. Not very much time compared to the progress of the first 1900 years on our calendar.
Humanity has made a hockey stick-like curve towards finer and better technologies in every field, particularly computing and video, but also in medicine and biology, yet we have not been able to do anything at all about our violent and warlike nature. I recall a sci-fi story I read years ago where the various nations, seeing what a waste war was, found a "better" way to deal with it: they just ran a permanent war of computer simulated strikes and killed the number of people on each side predicted as the outcome!
We live in an age where mankind has more reach than ever before. Our workplace tools have become toys and entertainment centers. We can broadcast live video from our cellphones, we can buy and sell anything on the Internet. My discovery of the Kiva.org web site was a revelation. It made me see how easy it is to pay forward some of this great potential by investing in human dignity. I have had hundreds of thousands of hours of pleasure via the Internet and now I'm able to make a difference in people's lives from half way across the planet by sending a $25 payment through the Kiva site to a group of hard-working business owners in the third world.
I think the things most valuable that we can build are mutual respect, empathy and human dignity.
