MJD 59,323

Yesterday, I was testing a new bench power supply I just bought. I tested it with a multimeter, then connected it up to a motor, to make it go brrr for fun. It’s the sort of thing I haven’t done since grad school, decades ago.

As I was tinkering, I was idly wondering about whether there was any fodder for blog posts in what I was up to. I don’t mean Maker posts. A lot of people write about Maker stuff, and do it a lot better than I ever could. I mean riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything inspired by tinkering with a new power supply.

Most of my writing to date has been inspired by things like working in an office, consulting, watching TV and of course, reading words written by others. That stuff is good fodder for riffs on Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Though I’m having a lot of fun rediscovering engineering with a middle-aged mind, I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to mine tinkering for insights on Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tinkering In, Words Out, TIWO, is a tougher transformation than SIWO: Symbols In, Words Out. Which is why it’s an interesting challenge.

Possibly it’s just me getting used to once again looking at the world through a long unused lens, but I think there’s more to it. There seems to be some sort of mutual inhibition function between tinkering with ideas with words and tinkering with stuff with atoms. Digital bits, as in programming, are somewhere in between.

While tinkering, you’re thinking a lot of mostly nonverbal thoughts. In this case, I was wondering about what the floating ground terminal was for, noticing how the sound of the motor was changing pitch at different voltages, observing the voltage deadzone between the motor starting/stopping as you turn the voltage up/down, thinking of ways to measure rpm and torque easily, and so on.

Depending on how you think about it, there’s either nothing to say about this sort of mundane tinkering stream of consciousness, far from Archimedean eureka moments, or there’s enough to merit several thousand words of prose. And I don’t mean how-to and instruction manual type stuff.

You could, for instance, write about the edifying, soul-uplifting effects of working with your hands. You could write satire about cliche mid-life crisis activities like tinkering in a home workshop, triggered by too much time spent in the world of symbols. You could wax philosophical about materiality, and sensory-experiential mindsets. You could write some poignant poetry about the smell of multimeters in the morning.

And of course, you could write about the actual activity itself, like the not-in-textbooks metaphysical subtleties lurking beneath apparently well-understood things like voltage and current. That is the sort of thing Brian Skinner has been blogging about on here lately.

But the thing is, whatever you think you might want to say, you have to stop the physical tinkering and start the verbal tinkering. You have to switch context from subsymbolic to symbolic ways of experiencing the world.

Physical activity radiates plenty of cues from which verbalized thought can begin, but to actually follow a verbal train of thought you have to stop the physical stream of activity, and think with symbols again. The context-switching is much more drastic than between two symbolic-domain activities.

I suspect the blue-collar/white-collar divide is about more than pre-modern class boundaries being perpetuated by industrial forms of organization. The prototypical activities involve different sorts of cognition.

Physical tinkering is basically 5-sense environment scanning at a very high bitrate driving tactile action that’s much more complex than producing symbol streams, aka typing. The literal Fingerspitzengefühl — finger-tips feeling — is more complex and less available to ensnare with words. And if you force it, either the words will suffer, or the skill will.

While tinkering, you’re logging a lot of information, and even though most of it is very low-salience, processing it is fundamentally different than working with streams of symbols. Symbol tinkering is very low bitrate, but the acrobatics it can sustain are much more complex. Physical tinkering is a Big Data computation for the human brain, while symbolic tinkering is ordinary computation. Reading and writing of course is mostly symbolic. Writing about social stuff and interactions with other people is also mostly symbolic, though of course there’s a world of non-verbal detail to observe if you want to.

Programming is somewhere in between subsymbolic and symbolic tinkering, and is harder to turn into Life, the Universe, and Everything fodder than either. Maybe that’s why movies and TV shows have struggled the most with portraying lives lived amid code.

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