Ones and Zeros

In a hospital waiting room I saw two signs.  One announcing the availability of free WiFi.  The second telling people to turn off their cell phones for safety.  WiFi frequencies are around 2.4GHz, cell phone frequencies are 850 MHz, 1.9 GHz, and 1.7 GHz, and 2.1 GHz.  In other words, not that different.  Power levels are similar too.

So, what gives?  My theory is that cell phones are banned not because of equipment interference, but becuase they don’t want people bugged by one side of 15 minute-long conversation about someone else’s inane office politics.  Kinda like the one I had to listen to.

Or, it could be just technical ignorance.  Anyone know one way or the other?

I got this idea Friday.  I would do a Cylon pumpkin with the red LED eye-scanner moving back and forth.  A quick google search and I found that others had done the same thing.  I even found code for the Arduino board to do this.  (Ok, I’ll tweak the time constants, I thought his was scanning too fast.  It looked like an anxious cylon to me.)

My wife had bought some great pumpkins so all I needed was ten bright red LEDs.  I have ten LEDs already, but of miscellaneous colors and brightnesses.  Off to Radio Shack, or “Shack” as they oddly call themselves now after a basket-ball player.

Of course, Radio Shack doesn’t have them.  And what they do have is poorly organized, the bin labels don’t match the contents. The sales guy took pity on me and called their other stores.  No one had them.  Some don’t even carry parts anymore.  There are no other stores that might carry stuff like this either.

Radio Shack is moving to selling just cell phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics.  There are a number of other stores that do that better, Best Buy for example.  And there are numerous online sources as well.  Yet, the burgoning “maker” movement of hacking, tinkering, customizing, and creating your own electronics has only online sources for parts and materials in most areas.  Radio Shack is missing a potential market by their rush to what everyone else is doing.

In Silicon Valley, Austin, and other reasonably techy areas, there is Fry’s Electronics.  But here in the Wash, DC area, there’s nothing.  It’s a desert wasteland of unavailability.  This is the way things are in most of the U.S.

Industry and government figures wring their hands sometimes over the lack of engineers and scientists that the US creates.  We import both from India, China, Europe, and Africa.  Fortunately enough want to stay to keep us all in GPS toys and more important things, although that seems to be changing.

The thing is that taking things apart, experimenting, playing with parts, and maybe building something new and tinkering in general is important.  Tinkering leads to design, design leads to engineering, and engineering can lead to scientific inquiry.  But tinkering begins with parts.  No parts, nothing to tinker with.

A lack of easily available parts is directly affecting the next generation’s engineering and scientific abilities.

In the late 1980s Hewlett-Packard would support products for five to seven years and expect to come out with new products in that line every 2-3 years. Today, consumer product lifecycles are nine months to a year for more mature products. And they’re continuing to shorten; six month announcements are common now.

A few years ago at work I was helping the US DoD purchase some then-new handheld computers for a research project. (The computers were lousy. You can’t fit a desktop version of Windows on a screen the size of a small index card!) The product cycle was nine months for the computers. To purchase them the government needed the exact model number to purchase, and about a year for the acquisition cycle they were using.

By the time they’d determined that they could buy the devices, those computers were already obsolete and unavailable. Pace of change had caught up with reaction time.

We see this in people we know too. I email with several people that check their email once a week or so. I’ve learned to expect very slow replies from them. For someone living in a well-controlled environment, perhaps retired, this is workable. For the rest of us, we need to keep up.

How do you keep up with change? I’ve got my strategies and I’ll write about them later. But I’d like to hear yours.

In the vein if my last post about older ways of thinking, there are three ways of giving directions.

First, to not give specific directions but only general ones.  Assume that anyone finding your house or place of business is familiar enough with the area to know the building or major roads that you don’t have to be precise.

When we lived in New Hampshire this was common.  I once got the directions, “Go south on highway 1, pass the first Dunkin’ Doughnuts, then turn left a half mile before the old Channel Hardware store.”  For some reason most of the directions I got in New Hampshire and Massachusetts included Dunkin’ Doughnuts.  Those stores were common enough to be landmarks.  But my favorite part was to “turn a half mile before” that old store.  That store went out of business before we moved to the area and the sign was long gone. Basically you had to already know where you were going to get there!

Second, to give specific directions including turns, streets you’ll see before your turns, and streets you’ll see if you miss your turns.  In short, good directions.   Good directions that are great if you don’t have a map or a GPS with a moving map.  And are a waste of time with those devices.

I have Google Earth (version 5.1, the latest) installed on my computers.  I have a GPS with a moving map in one car, and we have iPhones with GPS and moving maps with us in any case.  Ten minutes of discussion on directions is wasting everyone’s time.  And if it’s from your memory, it may not be right either.

What I want is a third way to give directions: Note the destination address, any issues not clear on maps (funny turn lanes, oddball corners, etc) and note parking information at the destination.  I want the stuff that’s not clear on the GPS moving map.  The whole turn-by-turn directions are not that useful.