5 August 2019
I hummed-and-hawed about this one, because I'm not, and never was, the geeky Hi-Tech type. But I'd say Technology had an important influence nonetheless, although maybe not in the way you'd expect, as for me it’s a bit tied up with Religion, which I think is a subject I’ll probably get to in this series as well, as none of us escape the cultural minefield of Dogma and Faith as we grow up.
But, for now, Technology.
I was about 11, around the time I had to manufacture my own bike out of roadside rubbish or walk for the rest of my life. But strictly speaking The Bike doesn't count, it was just rudimentary mechanics, not Technology. Technology is where there's a ghost in the machine, and sooner or later a kid has to confront it.
I know this “Ghost In The Machine” term was coined by an Oxford philosopher back in the late 1940s (and used later by Koestler in his book) to denote the difference between "mind" and "matter" in we humans, but I like to use it as the magic stuff that you can't see happening but it works anyway. The magic stuff that the scientists swear is there but it can never be properly explained to non-scientists and it defies all logic anyway. Like memory chips and jetliners.
No-one - including Mr Google - has ever adequately explained to me how you can get 1,000-plus hi-resolution colour photographs on a little bit of plastic-y stuff the size of a fat postage stamp. I can see the end result okay, and am really grateful for it, but I don't actually believe it can happen. All talk of compression algorithms just sounds deeply suspicious.
The same goes for jetliners and gravity. For thirty-odd years I've flown in those things, for hundreds of hours over half the world, and I still don't actually believe they are capable of flying. I can get my head around that wood-and-wire gadget the Wright Bros cooked up but not an Airbus. I mean, geez!, they weigh tonnes and tonnes! And they're held up only by very thin air and millions of years old fossil fuel. So they say.
There has to be something going on with things like memory chips and jetliners that they're not telling us about.
My uncertain love affair with the ghost in the machine started with radio. Stone age radio. When I was 8 and living up in the ranges, my uncle gave me a box of crystal radio bits. Swore it would work if I put it together right. Which I did. But it didn't. Something to do with being encircled by large hills and wave frequencies and the horsepower of the transmitters. So he said. Probably needed a super long aerial to suck the thingo waves out of the ether. So he said.
So I cut an extremely long mast from a sacrificial gumtree sapling, mounted it on the pigsty way way over the other side of the creek, joined up many lengths of correctly coated copper wire, fitted regulation insulators at each end, and strung up the world's longest aerial, all without the aid of helicopters. Which gave me a far better quality of silence. It also gave me no basic faith in Technology. And uncles.
Then, about 1950, we moved to the city, I twitched up no more than a token aerial to the side of our backyard loo, short length of wire, and five stations jumped in loud and clear. I was hooked. Fell asleep every night plugged in, and developed a serious case of Headphone Ears (oddly misshapen and constantly smelling of Bakelite). My faith in uncles restored.
Then another uncle lent me his custom-built, open-chassis, multi-band receiver, which was about the size of a washing machine and only marginally lighter, had racks and racks of valves that lit up like the CBD at night - the ghost at work. It brought in Venezuela and Japan and ships at sea and all sorts of mysterious sounds that were either migratory whales humping or the spies of the world talking to each other in code.
When I had to hand it back, I was given a book called "Radio For Boys", that showed me how to make my own, from a simple battery one-valver up to an "AC Mains Superhet", complete with wiring diagrams and a parts lists. Which defeated me from the start.
With my crystal radio, I could (sort of) SEE how it worked, and it ran on the energy of the universe (so I was told), but all these "Mullard EBC33" valves and "100pF 350 vw" condensers and resistors full of "ohms" were blatant Technology and therefore not capable of being understood. By me. Or even attempted.
This is why in time I abandoned advanced radio and moved on to engines. Engines were the sort of Technology that one could trust! Pistons flying up-and-down up-and-down and crankshafts doing a goodly rate of revs and con-rods joining them together. Camshafts pushing valves about, oil pumping, water pumping, distributor zapping out sparks, and not a ghost in sight. Nothing that needed some specially educated boffin to explain it.
As it happened, I went on loving engines for quite a while, but turned my back on them during my Mid Life Whatsit, and haven't worked on one since and am fortunate enough to not need to. But I believed I still could if I really did have to. But I made the mistake of actually looking under the bonnet of our new Ford a while back, out of idle curiosity. I had NO idea what all these new bits were or how they went together. And I was crushed to be told by my dealer that you can't diagnose or tune a car any more without a laptop! Ahhh, the ghost had returned.
Okay, upshot is, while I know from experience that science and physics do actually manage to somehow keep jetliners in the air and really can squeeze endless bumph onto a memory chip, my brush with Technology when I was still green and vulnerable left me with the basic notion that any time I can't see the cogs and the connecting rods for myself then I should be deeply suspicious - well, remain unconvinced - of what is actually making it work. Until personal experience or logic does its thing.
Cheers.....
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>