What did you learn today? Did you intentionally (or accidentally) step out and look at something new today, and learn something in the process? I try to do that all the time, and I suspect I have been doing that my whole life. I have no intention of stopping!
Yesterday, I went up to an amateur radio "hamfest" in Belton, Texas. I have been a "Ham" for over 25 years, but I decided I needed to upgrade my license so I can really play with radio. I am much more interested in computers, but the whole radio thing is pretty fascinating, and I enjoy exploring how it all works. The license I got way back when lets me operate radios in very high frequencies only. No short-wave world-wide stuff. I took the test at the hamfest, (got 100 on it) and am now able to "work the world" on short-wave frequencies. Or I will be as soon as I install a decent antenna for my radios. That is coming soon!
The funny thing about this is that the license I got yesterday is called a "General class" license. I spent 20 years in the Air Force and never made General. Now I are one (yuk!)
So, what does all of this have to do with learning new things? In studying for that test, I now know a lot more about radio than I did before. That is pretty cool. For some reason, I feel pretty good when I master something new, and it really does not seem to matter what the subject matter is. Usually, it is something technical, but not always.
A hobby is supposed to help you take your mind off of your day-to-day work. But, I tend to combine my work and my hobbies, so I am now exploring using computers in radio. What took me there is a tale that is interesting, at least to me. So, I decided to tell the tale.
Why Study Radio Now?
What pushed me into doing this upgrade now? I have wanted to do this for over 20 years, but never pushed that desire up my priority list. That changed recently during a Google search session, and suddenly, radio advanced on my priority list to the top. It actually only took me two weeks to master the material needed to pass that test. I am pleased I managed to do that. Now, I have one more upgrade to do, and I ordered a study guide to do just that. I am now going for the highest level license an Amateur Radio person can get. (It is called Extra Class).
Back to that search!
It was not just one search that pushed me to this upgrade. I had a bunch of events stored up in my mind that got triggered during the search. The combination of materials I was seeing on the web and those memories did the trick! I think that is how curiosity leads to progress!
I suspect that something will be interesting to you only if it triggers something in your head that makes you want to know more about that thing. That is what curiosity is all about. A need to know more. I am definitely a curious person (stop laughing!)
Where does that need come from? Why do you decide to explore some things and ignore others? Let's look at how this happened for me.
The Internet Session
Do you spend much time on the Internet? (Who doesn't, these days?) The Internet is really a dangerous place for folks like me. I start off searching for information on some topic. During that search, something pops up that looks interesting, and off I go. I wander down unexpected paths encountering all kinds of new things to think about. Some of those things may be related to the topic I started my search with, but often, the material is totally new.
Now, some folks would simply stop this silliness and go back to what they were searching for. I will get back to that. However, the new things I am seeing trigger some kind of need to add new material to the unending list of things I need to understand.
Bad Weather
The other day, I started searching for a weather radar app for my laptop. The weather was forecast to get nasty, and I wanted a way to get a quick look at the radar images for the area.
As soon as I started my search, I ran into some links to neat images from space, specifically, from the Hubble Space Telescope. Boom, I am remembering standing at the Astronaut Hall of Fame induction where my friend Guion Bluford was one of those inductees. So was Kathy Thornton, who spend a lot of time in space working on that Hubble telescope. I chatted with her for a while about that mission, which I watched on NASA TV. My mind was definitely off of weather, and on to space!
Soon, I am looking at more images from space, and all of a sudden, I am looking at images from Radio Telescopes. My mind now jumped back to my visits to the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico (which you may have seem in the Jody Foster movie, Contact" years ago. This telescope captures radio waves from space using huge antennas arranged along railroad tacks that spread out from the main building about 10 miles in several directions. The images are pretty cool, considering they are just a bunch of numbers a big computer processes into images that help us understand what might be generating those signals.
Hmmm, I wonder what new things they are doing here in radio astronomy!
A quick search turns up a huge new system of fairly simple antennas arranges in grid covering a very big chunk of desert in Australia. This system does not use those monster dish antennas like those I visited at the VLA. Instead, these antennas are just a bunch of fairly simple metal strips arranged in a small mesh-like grid and stuck on the ground. A large number of them are arranged to cover the desert, and all of them feed data to a central computer system. They all point straight up and see whatever is above them. As the Earth turns (wasn't that a soap opera?), the antennas see new chunks of sky. Cool.
But what warped my mind was reading that they can control exactly where in the sky the antennas see signals by using electronics to adjust the antenna and control what it sees. The antenna does not move, it is just told to pay attention to signals coming in from some specific direction. I really need to figure out how they do that! More new stuff to learn.
All of this lead me to need to explore radio more deeply, and study how antennas work. All of a sudden my knowledge of radio needed attention.
So, advancing my credentials in radio seemed like a good move! And I am moving.
Computers are a big part of all of this, as is radio. And, it is connected to space. What more could you want if you are an Aerospace Engineer/Computer freak like me?
Radios and Computers
Radio astronomy is pretty neat stuff these days. But there are other advances in radio that are just as interesting to me.
Old fashioned radios had a ton of strange parts called tubes, resistors, and condensers. I pulled the back panel off of a lot of old radios when I was a kid, and I looked over all those parts. I had no idea what they were all about, but I searched through books in the library (remember those places) and stared figuring out what each one did. I never quite put everything together, though. Studying for my test, things stared falling into place, and I now have a much better understanding of how radios work, and a ton more things to explore. I l need to do more learning!
Simplifying Radio
The cool new thing folks are doing is getting rid of a lot of those parts, and replacing it all with software. Right up my alley!
When electricity moves back and forth through a wire, an electromagnetic wave moves away from the wire and travels through space at the speed of light. We call those waves "radio waves". They move through space until they hit another chunk of wire called an antenna. When they strike the antenna, the waves make electricity move through that second antenna wire. The amount of electricity is tiny, but it is there, and we can process it.
Note
The man who discovered this phenomena was astounded by it all, and he changed the world with his work. (Read up on Heinrich Hertz, whose experiments proved the existence of these electromagnetic waves. Today we say things wiggle at "60 Hertz". That term is in his honor!)
Modern radio stations run thousands of watts of power into huge antennas to send that stuff some call music out through space to your car radio (which is where most modern radios seem to live). The antenna on your car only sees a tiny fraction of all of that power, and the electronic parts in the radio need to amplify that signal, and isolate one signal out of a sea of signals the antenna actually sees! If we could see electromagnetic waves like these, the air would be a mess! There are waves coming from everywhere, yet our electronics can pull out one signal from all of them and we hear that "music"
What we are doing now is using computers to process the signals, and do that isolation. That is pretty cool, and eliminates a ton of parts, replacing them with a computer program that does the same work.
That is, if some curious someone understands what the signals look like, and knows enough about programming to process those signals.
I want to be one of those folks, so that is where my new hobby is going!
ADD
No, I am not talking about math. Attention Deficit Disorder is the term used to describe people who cannot keep their minds on the central topic they are supposed to be working on. The term is used often to describe kids who cannot pay "proper" attention in class, or get their homework done. Know what? I was probably one of those kids when I was very young.
Perhaps we are too quick to label things these days. Is developing an insatiable curiosity a bad thing? I recently read a book by one of this countries best physicists, Richard Feynman (who worked on the Manhattan project, and was chosen to be on the team analyzing the Challenger accident), In his book, Richard tell many stories about being curious when he was a kid. Many of the things Richard explored, I explored as a kid. That was fun to discover! We were asking the same questions when we were very young!)
I suspect far too many of today's parents would rather squash that curiosity and teach their kids to "focus" more. Sorry, I think that is wrong. If we kill off curiosity, our species will die off because no one will think up new things to explore, and development of cool new technologies will cease.
Instead, we should find ways to focus on being more unfocused. (At least part of the time!) We need to be expanding the scope of our thinking. We really need to apply our brain power in areas that are not just about the job we happen to do! We should teach our kids to explore, to search for new ways to do things, and to find new things to explore. This is the exact opposite of what "treating" ADD tries to do. Yes, you can overdo all of this. You do have to get your work done, and finish at least some of the projects on your list! I have taught myself to eventually get back to my original search. (I think we call that maturity!) But, in my case, my list of things to explore gets a lot longer.
And I am glad about that!
MY Future
My list is long enough that I am sure I will never get to all of those topics. I am fine with that. As long as I have my list, I am never going to be bored.
I stared off on my curious career as a kid exploring museums and libraries. There were no computers available (but I did study the ones folks had invented back in the 1950s). My list started back then, and grew at a fair rate, enough so that I had a lot to explore and learn. What was on the top of my list back then was finding out how airplanes flew!
Today, I use that Internet thing. All I need to do is start another Google search, and watch the fun unfold! My list grows at an alarming rate as a result. Those topics at the top get the most attention. Topics move around all the time, and that is never a problem either. I think about the topics from time to time, especially as something triggers a memory. I never worry about having a very long list of things to do!
As curious as it might seem, being curious can result to a very fun life! You never run out of new things to learn. Every day should produce a new result, or you missed a golden opportunity.
I try not to do that!
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