On the day after a Remicade infusion, I am usually very quiet. I wouldn’t call it “tired.” Being tired is unpleasant, and I feel fine. But I also feel disembodied and inert. So it makes sense to go to the movies this afternoon — Friends With Kids is showing right around the corner — and try to be more productive tomorrow.

***

I’m reading Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson’s history of the digital universe, and wondering how much I’m going to get out of it, given my inability to grasp the basics of electronics. I have read no end of descriptions of vacuum tubes and capacitors and relays, but the question always remains, what do these things do? There’s a slippage, and suddenly I’m on the other side of a gulf from whomever it is who’s trying to explain these things to me. My ignorance has a deep tap root.

I had never really thought of the hydrogen bomb as complicated, although of course it is. I simply thought that it was big. The challenge, I gather, was to assemble the parts of the bomb in a way that maximized the impact, within the device itself, of shock waves generated by preliminary explosions. Bombs within bombs. And the engineering behind this assembly required masses of trajectory calculations — reiterative calculations in which the outputs became the inputs. (I hope that I’ve got that right.) The calculations were beyond the capabilities of even the largest staff of human computers (people with adding machines). So the ENIAC machine was put together at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, in Philadelphia, which was home to a lot of electronic innovation at the time. The ENIAC was a very powerful calculator, but it was not what we would call a computer. I’m not sure why.   

Two years ago, I read James Gleick’s engrossing tome, The Information, without learning very much of anything. I took away the imp of a paradox: information is that which we don’t know yet (your name, for example, is not information to you). But the meaning of Claude Shannon’s theories slipped right by me, and I never understood Maxwell’s demons, even when I held the book upside down and shook it. I’m afraid that I simply lack the basic knowledge of mechanics, if that’s the word, that would permit me to be meaningfully addressed by a writer on these subjects.

I’ve just taken a minute to glance over the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for “relays.” I read it as if with two brains. One brain saw how relays work. The other brain couldn’t figure out what relays do. Or maybe… It wouldn’t hurt to have someone to talk this over with.

I knew a few engineers, once, fellow students at the college radio station, and whenever they talked “engineering,” I stopped paying attention. I had serious cultural problems with engineering students, with their dress, their manners, their sense of humor. I had never met people like them before; I’d lived in a world where everyone was expected to behave like polite ladies and gentlemen, and engineers seemed to have an entirely different approach to the task of being decent human beings. In those days, I took electricity entirely for granted, and never imagined that I’d one day regret not having been sat down and and shown what it can do. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 12:08 pm.