motherboards

On a whim, in a stupor induced by headcold, finding myself thinking clearly but simply, even more distracted than usual, I got interested in electronics.

It started with the annual winter yen to build a Theremin. Followed closely by the thought: how hard could it be?

Theremins are the electronic instruments from 1950s horror movies, an electronic, hands-free instrument that produces sound based on the performers hands interacting with electrical fields surrounding antennas.

Read about its basic operating principles per wikipedia.

It's one thing to know about Theremins, it's another to know how they work. I want to build one; I want to know how they work.

Which requires a serious dredging up of lost knowledge regarding electronics.

Actually, I never knew much about electronics, though I did well on the EM section of the Physics AP exam.

It's been that long.

Granted we built a robot, but I never got a good understanding of circuits beyond basic principles and simple schematics. A Theremin, it turns out, is pretty advanced.

So I decided to start small. A visit to American Science and Surplus (a wonderland of strangeness) resulted in me being the proud owner of a "My First Strobe Kit", a DIY electronic circuit that requires soldering ("sottering") and whatnot.

The more I think about electronic circuits, the more I don't understand them. How does information flow through them? I'm learning, of course, about resistors, potentiometers, capacitors, and whatever else. Lots to keep track of.

So I started with a problem, how to build a Theremin, which turned out to be too complicated, so I broke it down, and broke it down, and broke it down. Electricity is still pretty complicated, but with this Strobe kit I can at least start learning by doing.

[As if I needed another hobby.]

But maybe this is just a rhythm of thought, a wavelength, that I've been fostering, against all odds: trying to figure out how things work. It begins with identifying the problem and ends with breaking it down into the simplest components. Whether or not I put the parts back together remains to be seen.

Deconstruct first; reconstruct second.

Through this process, I've realized that I don't actually believe in anything. Or the opposite. I believe in too many things, contradictory things, that render them un-possible.

["Me fail English? That's unpossible!"]

For instance, it doesn't happen too often, but there was at least one time on the bike tour that someone asked me about my religious beliefs. I don't know how, but I realized that I both believe in God and in the death of God. I both believe in reincarnation and don't. I both believe in good and evil and don't.

It's like, when I get down to the electronic circuit of my mind, there's all these switches that allow both 1's and 0's.

Which coincides with this book that I'm reading: Erring by Mark C Taylor.

"There is a large, and I believe growing, number of people who find themselves in the middle of such extremes. Suspended between the loss of old certainties and the discovery of new beliefs, these marginal people constantly live on the border that both joins and separates belief and unbelief. They look but do not find, search but do not discover."

So I'm not so unusual. There's always consolation in that.