The case for working with your hands (2009)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
A year and a half ago I finally made my way back to hands-on hardware development after a few years in data science. It's very satisfying to have a job where there's some physical labor involved and I recognize how lucky I am to be in such a job in a tech company.
[0] https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tr...
I personally find that line deeply disturbing. It is utterly backwards. It starts with the tail's wagging driving the dog and only gets more wrong from there as a view of the world. The whole point of the books was to present a small picture of the world of adults to small children that they could understand and learn. Not as the basis of the world as it is. That is taking the map as the territory writ large.
The author is assuming that things they understand are better without any reference to the world. It references. That could be funny in itself in a "deliberately apply the causation backwards sense". That people so readily believe such utter irrationality because it flatters their egos and would support tearing down what actually works is the frightening part. We have seen it before and only ends in tears.
It is another example of the frankly goddamned stupid idea that any system they cannot understand without any learning is automatically inferior. Reality really doesn't work that way.
I don’t know how many grocers you have left in your village, but where I live they’ve basically gone extinct and those that are left look to be pretty poor and precarious, made irrelevant decades ago by supermarkets.
Eventually I managed to build some really cool stuff, including a scanning microscope (from CNC parts) and a "Bean Machine" which demonstrates the central limit theorem. Now I'm experimenting with rendering 3D surfaces into wood by writing python programs that output g-code so they can be milled (this would take far too long to do by hand unless I was retired).
Fun stuff. I think working with your hands (not typing on a computer, but cutting, carving, shaping, making etc) can be very enjoyable.
Also, nothing quite like the terror of when it all goes horribly wrong and you end up helping clear a mountain of fruit turned into unplanned jam(jelly) and everyone turns and looks at you....
Though essentially just a conveyor belt, these things are simply enormous, as are the chains of operations that bring trains of ore and empty ships to port.
The largest of these is a coal loader that, through which one percent of the nation's GDP is flowing.
When it breaks down the pressure to get it going is intense.
It also gives some insight into why as bushfires rage across the country fuelled by the highest ever recorded temperatures, it's somehow controversial to discuss climate change.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/89683/heat-wave-bre...
It does look simple, but I spent many years in the bulk materials handling industry and there are also rail receival stations, electromagnets to remove contaminants, belt weighing equipment (real time volume calculation), samplers, surge bins (with vibratory hoppers under them), stackers, reclaimers, yard machine anti-collision systems, stockpile impact detection systems and a vast array of PLCs, front end processors, and application-level logic to manage it all.
> When it breaks down the pressure to get it going is intense.
Yeah. When you get calls at 2 am as lightning struck a microwave which stopped a network connect which stopped a database replication which stopped a stockpile calculation which caused a yard machine boom collision you really know how much fun it is.
On the bright side this industry is safety obsessed and quality engineering focused, so cutting corners is neither expected nor tolerated.
> It also gives some insight into why as bushfires rage across the country fuelled by the highest ever recorded temperatures, it's somehow controversial to discuss climate change.
Agreed. Although there are plenty of other factors which can improve bushfire outcomes as illustrated by the national Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre (of which most national fire agencies are members) research: https://www.bnhcrc.com.au/utilisation/overview.
I have seen basically X-Y stages hooked up to a hand router, but I wonder if there are other approaches.
There are also 6040 mills, which are similar but built differently, and shopbots, which are big but capable, plus a bunch of others. To me, the X-carve was the right combination of price, features, and support. I previously had the ShapeOko but it really wasn't capable enough.
Wood is just so much nicer as an end product, though.
Check out the https://buildbotics.com CNC controller and the https://CAMotics.org CNC simulator. Both are Open-Source. These are my projects.
It was made to "emphasize that, in a world where technology and AI can replicate or better anything man can do, human craftsmanship still has a purpose and could become more prized than ever."
The short version I watched streams on Amazon Prime. The full version, "Takumi: a 60,000 hour story of the survival of human craft" is available online hosted with a special video player (with a kind-of weird UI) that allows the user to quickly move about the 60,000 hour (6.8 year) timeline:
AT my first place we did have some master carpenters who made some of the hydrodynamic models - the work they did was breathtakingly fabulous works of art in their own right
At that time my argument was to point of the ways in which humans are better than machines. But I have to say that it is not even necessary to go down that route. If there is some life form that is smarter than humans, or some machine, then it does not detract from the basic departure point that some values or value propositions are absolute. The ability to discover the Pythagorean theorem is absolute in that way. You either discover it, or you don't (or you discover only the special cases). It doesn't matter how many other entities discover the Pythagorean theorem.
Now I don't mean absolute in the sense of the ubermensch or some dumb crap like that, but I do mean that values are values even in isolation. I think the tinkerer's spirit is very much like that. If you are devoted to your pursuit, then it doesn't mean you have to best some notion of the best. It's like that with an appreciation for life too. If you see a beautiful landscape, then that moment in itself is valuable and irreplaceable, whether there are many such or few such—each is valuable in isolation.
I don't the the point of being human was ever to prove ourselves the smartest.
To the universe, we're not special. To ourselves, we can be.
You can't think about other things while you're programming. Of course, you get paid a lot more and it's easier on your body.
Surely that’s a bad thing that a job is so bad you need to wish the day away as quickly as possible rather than enjoying it?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow describes it well. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W94FE6/
Anyway, I think killing shop was short sighted. I never got to experience it as I graduated in the 00s, but having hobbies that involve handiwork, building things teaches you discipline, patience, and a way of thinking different to and complimentary with typical "knowledge" work. I think general mechanical skills are extremely useful for young people to learn.
As far as shop goes, we still had shop class in middle school around 2005. I believe high school also offered some sort of mechanic class, where you could do simple work on cars. Not 100% sure because I didn't take it.
mens et manus - does MIT really practice that or is it just a motto with no action behind it?
Probably not what you had in mind, but plenty of wetlab work gets done on campus every day.
I'm not sure where your curiosity comes from—Crawford is presented in the story as taking a break from his academic career to work on the motorcycle. There's no continuity between the two things except his own personality and involvement.
Also in 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323487
Maybe it is time to remember the great man's ideas during his 150th anniversary and put it into wider practice.
I also think that there is great value engaging in crafting things with your hands if you're a programmer, specifically. At least, there is for me. Even though there is a certain amount of overlap, working with my hands engages a different part of my brain than working with code. Doing that is a bit like a mental vacation for me, and I often have insights into whatever software problem I'm having while doing it, because while my mind is active, the "programming part" is allowed to relax. And the greatest insights often come under those circumstances.
It's never happened, of course. But if AI does ramp up and take over a bunch of programming space, it may drive IT jobs ever lower on the social/pay scale, perhaps even elevating manual labor.
There are some other "maker spaces", but they're more into "education", which seems to mean activities for the middle school rat race to get into college. Kids at desks all doing roughly the same thing, basically.
What kept TechShop going for a while was Etsy. Etsy used to require that you make your own stuff. But computer-controlled laser cutters were allowed for "hand-made" items. TechShop SF had eight of them busily cutting wood and plastic 24/7 at peak. Then Etsy allowed outsourcing manufacturing and that disappeared.
It was fun while it lasted. But the maker movement is over in Silicon Valley. Space is too expensive and the smart people don't have the free time.
You can save money on dimensional lumber if you don’t have a large vehicle and only need shorter pieces by buying the largest pieces at the hardware store and cutting it in the parking lot.