notebook

I began keep­ing note­books at age 7 or 8.  My par­ents must have sent this one in a box a while ago.

00 - notebook

The entries in it date from late 1985 to ear­ly 1986, so I would have been 10 at the time: a lit­tle pudgy, with an over­bite, a bowl cut, and a very seri­ous expres­sion.  It’s fun­ny how clear­ly I remem­ber this object.

02 - notebook open cropped

04 - notebook edge

03 - hecho en mexico croppedI asked my par­ents if we could buy it because I liked its pseu­do-Edwar­dian design— and I liked the idea of a ref­er­ence note­book of this size, with one side a direc­to­ry of con­tacts and the oth­er a pad of blank paper where I could keep track of the things that real­ly mat­tered to me.  Like resis­tor codes, col­ormaps, note fre­quen­cies, pro­gram­ming key­words and ASCII tables:

05 - computer cropped

In truth this was a the­o­ret­i­cal exer­cise, because I knew all of this stuff like the back of my hand.  It was such a sig­nif­i­cant part of my lit­tle pri­vate uni­verse, as famil­iar as the lay­out of our apart­ment and the graf­fi­ti scratched into my school desk.

06 - electromagnet cropped 2So in the next pages, ref­er­ence tables quick­ly give way to notes and inven­tions, real­ized to dif­fer­ent degrees.  I was obsessed with elec­tro­mag­net­ism, which is unsur­pris­ing in ret­ro­spect.  Many of my obses­sions were about the trans­duc­tion of things unseen— usu­al­ly cur­rent in wires— into the tan­gi­ble, and vice ver­sa.  Any­thing that might medi­ate or inter­con­vert between elec­tric­i­ty and some­thing that could be seen, felt or heard was inter­est­ing.

07 - magnetometer cropped

level meter squareThis was an appli­ca­tion to some­thing like an elec­trom­e­ter or mag­ne­tome­ter— I imag­ined that the com­pass would swing toward north if mag­ne­tized, or the charged nee­dle align with an ambi­ent elec­tric field, and the induc­tors would gen­er­ate cur­rents that would allow the vec­tor to be read out.  It was inspired by the coils in speak­ers, and a volt­meter I took apart.

08 - quad nand croppedI had a 200-in‑1 elec­tron­ics kit, and was espe­cial­ly enchant­ed with the cou­ple of prim­i­tive chips on there— includ­ing such won­ders as a quad NAND gate.  The kit had a book full of cir­cuit designs, which I dis­dained to build as writ­ten (though in frus­tra­tion, when my own designs didn’t work, I would some­times try to appro­pri­ate them by redraw­ing the cir­cuits with­out look­ing at the orig­i­nal).

09 - mystery circuit cropped09a - crystal set radio cropped square

The crys­tal set radio was a main­stay, though the only way I ever got this to work was by string­ing up a giant anten­na, and could only ever pick up one sta­tion.

09b - initial design for alarm cropped

This was a sim­ple but impor­tant cir­cuit: an alarm designed to go off if my par­ents were in the hall.  I taped the pho­to­tran­sis­tor just above cat height.  For many years I insist­ed on total pri­va­cy while “work­ing”, and hat­ed to be inter­fered with.  Part of the rea­son was that there was gen­er­al­ly some­thing tak­en apart in the room that should not have been, per­haps even some­thing not strict­ly mine.  But I also just real­ly liked to be left alone.

10a - rubber tubing and doped silicon cropped

Mex­i­co City’s water was undrink­able.  I want­ed to puri­fy it with a still, or maybe by elec­trolyz­ing it and recom­bin­ing the hydro­gen and oxy­gen.

10b - snorkel water distillation cropped

As some of these designs were solar, this led to think­ing about solar pow­er gen­er­a­tion.  I imag­ined beau­ti­ful glass balls on top of build­ings with spin­ning rotors inside, elim­i­nat­ing the need for a pow­er grid.

11 - pgab solar generator using beta rays cropped

11a - pgab explanation cropped

But in my heart I wor­ried about the effi­cien­cy of gen­er­at­ing pow­er by knock­ing elec­trons off of the doped sele­ni­um.

13 - solar generator with piston cropped

This was a more direct approach, based on some­thing like a Stir­ling engine.  Slow­ly rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing pis­tons would dri­ve a gen­er­a­tor.

14 - perpetual motion with earth magnetic field cropped

14z - perpetual motion reductio ad absurdum croppedAt this point I won­dered why the same couldn’t be done with the Earth’s mag­net­ic field.  I was very excit­ed by some of these ideas and began talk­ing about them with adults.  At this point the term “per­pet­u­al motion machine” entered my vocab­u­lary.  I strug­gled with the dif­fer­ence between force and ener­gy, and remem­ber final­ly get­ting it— or think­ing I had— with a con­cep­tu­al dia­gram involv­ing some­thing like a pis­ton in the han­dle of some­thing like a gal­lon milk jug.  Though admit­ted­ly I’m find­ing the log­ic a lit­tle unclear now.

15 - shipstone croppedI was frus­trat­ed with bat­ter­ies.  There were no recharge­ables around at the time.  After a few acci­dents, I was leery of draw­ing pow­er from wall sock­ets, and there were always draw­er­fuls of spent bat­ter­ies lying around.  It was waste­ful; and worse, bat­ter­ies seemed to me so clear­ly just toys, not a real part of the ener­gy infra­struc­ture.  I was read­ing a lot of Hein­lein at the time, and the idea of a super-effi­cient bat­tery that could pow­er a whole house— the Ship­stone— was impos­si­bly appeal­ing.  I des­per­ate­ly want­ed to be Daniel Ship­stone and invent this thing.  Maybe with some kind of semi­con­duc­tor dop­ing?

Those kinds of flights of fan­ta­sy veered into super-pow­er­ful lasers, or anti­grav­i­ty machines.

15a - new ruby laser design cropped

16 - antigrav cropped

Wish­ful think­ing, in oth­er words.  This made me angry with myself, because it was clear­ly not “work­ing”, not com­ing up with real stuff.  Which is what I always insist­ed I was doing, locked up in my room.  Ship­stones and anti­grav­i­ty machines that couldn’t oper­ate on any prin­ci­ple I knew of were just play, and I was act­ing like a child.  The look of tol­er­ant amuse­ment in the librarian’s eyes when I explained a fan­ci­ful inven­tion drove me into a qui­et rage.  I didn’t want to think of myself as a child, and loathed child­ish­ness, and pret­ty much loathed most oth­er chil­dren.

In ret­ro­spect it seems clear that a lot of this was due to oth­er children’s dis­com­fort with me, and my inabil­i­ty to fit in social­ly.  I was so odd, so alien, so easy to make fun of— and I was des­per­ate to be the one who did the reject­ing first, rather than risk being the one who was reject­ed.  This gave me a kind of aloof­ness, hence immu­ni­ty to the hurt of iso­la­tion... but of course it was also a vicious cycle, since this atti­tude hard­ly helped endear me to my class­mates.  Maybe that’s why the whole phone direc­to­ry side of this note­book stayed pret­ty much emp­ty—

97 - not many friends cropped

Well, not total­ly emp­ty.  There was Luis, who may or may not have been a high school kid in my mom’s art class whom I got on with, and the oth­er ‘L’, a pur­vey­or of elec­tron­ic com­po­nents.

98 - larry g electronics

There are only one or two oth­er entries in the address­book.  I wrote this “human stuff” in cur­sive, because its inher­ent slop­pi­ness seemed more fit­ting; block let­ter­ing was reserved for real things.

So, bet­ter to be alone, and to be an adult-child.  With grim plea­sure, I’d get back to “work”.  On real things.

17 - conventional half adder cropped

Com­put­ers were more real.  I’d had one in my room since 1981.  Though I still thought there had to be bet­ter ways of imple­ment­ing their build­ing blocks, things like mul­ti­vi­bra­tors and coun­ters.  I imag­ined doing it with tun­nel diodes and spe­cial­ized sil­i­con instead of gates.  Real­ly this was some­thing like a design for base-10 tran­sis­tors.

17a - attempt to simplify a multivibrator cropped

18 - hundred counter cropped

Vehi­cle design was anoth­er pas­sion.  I thought that a “con­vert­ible” meant a car/boat (a James Bond inspired mis­con­cep­tion), and remem­ber being very dis­ap­point­ed by how lit­tle was real­ly meant by the word.  The “tur­bo” in this car could either recov­er ener­gy from the exhaust or be used to pro­pel it like a squid.

19a - car with turbo cropped19b - hollow airplane design cropped19c - hovercraft cropped

I thought planes might be more effi­cient and make less noise if they were shaped like hol­low tubes, with more slow­ly rotat­ing fan blades inside.  The pas­sen­gers could sit in the wings.  And what kind of engine could a hov­er­craft have?

But this was again veer­ing toward the uncon­vinc­ing.  I want­ed to solve a real prob­lem in a real way, like the unac­cept­able design of the cath­ode ray tube.

20a - oscilloscope cropped20b - flat panel crt cropped

It was essen­tial to flat­ten and minia­tur­ize it.  Why could the elec­tron gun and plates not be arranged on a steep angle?  The point being, of course, wear­able com­put­ing.

21 - face wearable computing cropped

22 - watch wearable computing cropped

Toward the end of this note­book, I’m focus­ing on pure physics, try­ing to find good ways to tab­u­late the fun­da­men­tal par­ti­cles.

70 - particle notes

71 - particle table 1 cropped

72 - particle table 2 cropped 2

One might sup­pose this was because I real­ized that a train­ing in physics would be impor­tant in order to become a real inven­tor.  But actu­al­ly, some­thing more prob­lem­at­ic was going on.  I felt that there was a hier­ar­chy of seri­ous­ness­es among my inter­ests, and that physics was the most seri­ous thing.  Physics was about the fun­da­men­tal nature of every­thing, not just some tran­sient engi­neer­ing prob­lem or— worse— some­thing mere­ly human.  I imag­ined that things like the elec­tric motor, while not real­ly physics and there­fore far from fun­da­men­tal, were like­ly to at least be fair­ly uni­ver­sal devel­op­ments among the uncount­ably many advanced civ­i­liza­tions in the uni­verse.  There­fore not so bad to work on, right?— because if I were an alien I just might be doing the same thing.  This kind of work was sort of species-invari­ant.  More like physics.  Not that I was able to put it to myself quite that explic­it­ly.

But through­out these years and many that fol­lowed, I was devel­op­ing a secret love of pro­gram­ming.  Many oth­er nerds grow­ing up around the same time will know exact­ly what I mean when I write that noth­ing else could keep me so relent­less­ly, con­tin­u­ous­ly and joy­ful­ly engaged in a prob­lem.  It let me expe­ri­ence flow, for hours and hours, and it was utter­ly addic­tive.  Invent­ing on paper could pro­duce a state of rever­ie and even ela­tion for a while, but mak­ing phys­i­cal things was always hard, always ran up against con­straints.  I’d run aground and need to call Lar­ry and see if he had a miss­ing part in stock.  It was stop and go, every­thing always unfin­ished, the idea always real­ized crude­ly if at all.  Maybe one day 3D print­ing, pro­gram­ma­ble biol­o­gy or nanoassem­bly will real­ly bring “mak­ing” into the same space as pro­gram­ming, but this still seems far off.

In any case, my love affair with the com­put­er, while it could hard­ly stay a secret, was some­thing I felt vague­ly embar­rassed about— because it was so far removed from the fun­da­men­tals of the uni­verse.  Because it was engi­neer­ing, and worse, engi­neer­ing with things that had them­selves been engi­neered by oth­er peo­ple.  Sec­ond- or third-order.  So not fun­da­men­tal.

80 - bugsheet cropped

That’s why the very last page of this note­book, writ­ten slop­pi­ly, is a “bugsheet”— my way of track­ing work items and bugs in the pro­grams I was work­ing on at the time.  These were of course ephemer­al for me.  I thought the inven­tions were impor­tant to pre­serve, but these work items were more often than not scrib­bled on scratch paper.  There are lots of pages torn out of this note­book, and I have a feel­ing that many of them were sim­i­lar to this one.  Look­ing at the bugs, I vague­ly remem­ber work­ing on a win­dow­ing sys­tem at the time.  (I guess this would have been around when Microsoft released Win­dows 1.0, though I didn’t encounter Win­dows until much lat­er.)

For rea­sons I’m not entire­ly sure of, I wrote at the top of this page “1986 – 1987 – 1988 – 1989 ~ ”.  This might have been a pre­dic­tion about how long it would take me to build this ridicu­lous­ly ambi­tious project, or— maybe I’m read­ing too much in now— a resigned sense that this part of my life was going to stretch out, and on and on, beyond the unimag­in­able future on the far side of puber­ty.

I’m sor­ry to say that my hier­ar­chy of val­ues was rein­forced— matched per­fect­ly, in fact— by many of the physi­cists I met lat­er on, and by the cul­ture of physics in gen­er­al.  I still love and respect the field, but with reser­va­tions.  I don’t know of any oth­er pro­fes­sion that embod­ies such casu­al, unar­tic­u­lat­ed chau­vin­ism for such a broad range of human activ­i­ty; every­thing else is too spe­cif­ic, too con­tin­gent, too easy, too man­made, too lack­ing in rig­or.  And then even with­in physics the hier­ar­chy repeats in a self-sim­i­lar man­ner, with this or that field above the oth­er.  Bio­physics?  Too squishy.  Sol­id state?  Too engineering‑y.  Astron­o­my?  Stamp col­lect­ing.

I’m glad I got out when I did, before things went real­ly wrong in my life.  I’ve recov­ered— most­ly.

I’ve been extra­or­di­nar­i­ly lucky.  First, I was lucky because my par­ents were so deeply sup­port­ive of me when I was young.  They nev­er laughed in the face of my utter, absurd and rather brit­tle seri­ous­ness.  They encour­aged me in every way with­out ever being patron­iz­ing, they drove me to far­away elec­tron­ics sup­pli­ers in search of exot­ic com­po­nents in the ser­vice of ill-spec­i­fied projects.  They smug­gled com­put­ers across the bor­der from the US.  They pre­tend­ed not to notice when remote con­trols went miss­ing, and they gave me the space and time to devel­op in my own odd, lumpy way.  They trust­ed me.

And in time, It Got Bet­ter: part­ly because the pas­sions I’ve always had most authen­ti­cal­ly are con­struc­tive and hap­pen to be in high demand.  I can now admit that what I called “work” as a ten year old real­ly was play; and that I still spend much of my life engaged in this kind of imag­i­na­tive play; and that— in a delight­ful twist— I’m now paid to do it.  I work with many peo­ple who had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences as kids, and who have sim­i­lar­ly found them­selves wel­come and val­ued in soci­ety as adults.  We get to play togeth­er, and real­ize real­ly big projects we could nev­er do alone.

99 - egg and sperm cropped

This sketch is the only one in the note­book of any­thing even remote­ly human or bio­log­i­cal.  I remem­ber a sense of hope­less­ness at the sheer numer­i­cal impos­si­bil­i­ty of a sper­ma­to­zoon ever find­ing and fer­til­iz­ing the egg.  I want­ed there to be more than one win­ner.

The cur­dled feel­ings that used to lie in wait when I stepped away from the com­put­er or the work­bench, the intense sense of alien­ation and alone-ness I would try to pre­emp­tive­ly embrace when I was 10, are most­ly gone.  It’s tak­en quite a few years.  What a joy and relief it is to have close friends, to love and be loved, to be able to con­nect, and to feel, if not exact­ly nor­mal, at least nor­mal enough.  Human.

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