Forrest Mims and RadioShack (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Forrest Mims and RadioShack (2017)

hackaday.com

83 pointskeiferski22 comments

I read one of his columns about Flip flops in the third grade, so I grabbed all the switches, lights, wires and batteries in my third grade class room, I got two relays, and I was off to the races. I showed my teacher that was how a computer memory worked... and she said "That is not what they are for." Not disappointed, two years later I got the RS Electronics project kit, and raced through all the projects, and worked through the Books, with a few extra parts. Some how, my dad (MsEE) always had a few extra parts I needed. I soon had a bad attitude about being able to fix anything electronic. On to Programming. Three decades later someone walked into the computer group fix-it clinic, and asked to plug in a 'Micro-Tops' ok... what is it? It was made by Forest Mimms III? omg... I have known that name since I was a child. I hooked him up, gave him my copies of my books, and had them autographed. He may be a climate change denier, but he allowed principal measurements of the ozone hole, and provided irrefutable proof of Dr Drew Schdell, of NASA Goddard, theories on the ozone hole. Kind of a bummer when you do that. Oh, and just by the way...https://archive.org/search?query=Forrest+M+Mims

In 2016, Star Simpson turned some of Forrest Mims' circuits into beautiful PCBs that integrated his hand-drawn schematics and descriptions. [1]

During this period, she gave talks about the value of aesthetics in PCB design that I loved. I think her ideas about aesthetics apply way beyond electrical engineering. [2]

----

1 - https://www.crowdsupply.com/star-simpson/circuit-classics

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eost2IbQ6mg

Maybe it is generational but Don Lancaster Cookbooks was far more influential on me. His books were far more useful and instructive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Lancaster

RTL Cookbook, TTL Cookbook, CMOS Cookbook, Active Filter Cookbook, TV Typewriter Cookbook, Cheap Video Cookbook, Son of Cheap Video, Apple books, Assembly Cookbook for Apple II/IIe, Enhancing Your Apple II - Volume 1, Enhancing Your Apple II and IIe - Volume 2, Applewriter Cookbook, Programming books, The Hexadecimal Chronicles, Don Lancaster's Micro Cookbook

This article is brimming with nostalgia for me. I vividly remember sitting at a workbench my father had fashioned from an old door, recreating circuits from Mini-Notebooks.

Same. I have a stack of these somewhere at home. Grew up getting them at RadioShack, sometimes stopping to ask the salesperson questions about BASIC coding and they’d start jotting notes down.

His "Getting Started in Electronics" ("https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/") and magazine articles were a big influence on me.

I didn't know he was self-taught in electronics.

I wonder, had he gotten an EE in college, what he would've ended up doing, and would it have had as much positive impact as he ended up having.

Never meet your heroes. Forrest Mims is a creationist and climate change denier. It's kind of like discovering that David H. Ahl of BASIC Computer Games fame was responsible for the very racist depiction of "Ninja-Endo" in Atarian Magazine comics in the late 80s.

Weirdest thing to me, how you can both be so accomplished in many different scientific subjects and at the same time hold on to such ridiculous beliefs.

I knew a rocket scientist who was both a creationist and devoutly Mormon. Its not as uncommon as you'd think.

I've seen people make this point before, usually with the sentiment that even geniuses can be quirky and wrong.

Even if it might be right some times, it seems to drip with hubris. My first thought when someone infinitely more intelligent and accomplished than I am holds a surprising viewpoint isn't "huh, why aren't they as smart as me on this?". It's more "what am I missing here?"

The conclusion I've come to is that faith and logic occupy different portions and use different pathways in the brain. They're one of the things where the cognitive dissonance isn't as hard to hold having dissonance over other ideas - simply because they occupy different spaces in the head.

Yep, I've seen that rationale. Where that loses me is that it involves me applying some simple logic that there's no reason to believe that someone more intelligent than myself couldn't also apply themselves.

> My first thought when someone infinitely more intelligent and accomplished than I am holds a surprising viewpoint isn't "huh, why aren't they as smart as me on this?". It's more "what am I missing here?"

Why? Intelligence/accomplishment in one (or even multiple) field(s) doesn't mean they're infallible. Especially in a society where the most accomplished are often simply the most ruthless, this is a confusing default mode of thought to me.

Sure, it doesn't mean they're infallible. But it very well could mean they are just brighter than I am, potentially by a long shot.

> Especially in a society where the most accomplished are often simply the most ruthless

This is a popular take at the moment, and probably somewhat true, but there really are people out there who are just better at things than I am. For whatever reason, they have demonstrated much greater capabilities than I have. And I feel like I should avoid writing off their opinions simply because they don't line up with what I think is popular consensus.

Of course I shouldn't buy into some point of view just because someone influential thinks it. But I can hold space in my head for keeping track of what the various schools of thought are around a topic, and not picking a winner until I have to.

http://www.forrestmims.org/scientificamerican.html

The letter from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences might suggest a different perspective. Not sure how racism is connected...

Creationist and Strongly pro-life seem to fit with what I can find of what he's said.

I can get how people become pro-life in a certain way - if you believe life begins at conception, all abortion is murder, period. If you're like me, and believe it begins at viability, it's much grayer.

I have no great opinion on intelligent design. I dont believe in it, but I also dont care much.

Climate change denial he seems to be silent on - I can find some backscatter comments on a blog - but they're not from him - they're basically asserting that's he's a climate change denier. If you have a citation I'd be interested in reading.

From what I can remember when he was on the Amp Hour podcast, what he is asserting is that some of the current atmo temo data is wrong, or biased in some way that makes it seem worse than it is. No outright denial though.

Based on the subject of his study over the last 30 years, I can see how he might have some feelings about the data.

It’s super common for people to be excellent at certain things that require reason but also hold views that are significantly less rational in other domains.

I know incredibly smart people (engineers and other fields) who are e.g. creationists, believe we did not land on the Moon, antivaxxers, believers in alien/UFO conspiracies, and believers in what I consider very crank and awful politics of both “left” authoritarian Marxist/“tankie” and “right” fascist or NRx varieties, etc. (The latter includes one person who horseshoed from Communism to Bannonite fascism.)

Then there are loads of famous names with the same domain specific rationality I could list. Shockley, Pauling, Musk, Jack Parsons, Henry Ford, …

People are often inconsistent in their rationality or make exceptions for things they (whether they realize it or not) believe for emotional reasons. People get triggered, get into beliefs for social belonging reasons, or even get recruited into cults. Being great at something doesn’t make one immune to being “got.”

Consistent application of reason may be the rare thing. It’s hard and requires examining emotions as well as thoughts. Also requires the ability to say “I don’t know” rather than be a know it all or hallucinate as we say in AI now. Nobody is an expert in every field, but the ego sure wants to be.

People want these comic book superheroes that are always rational, always compassionate, and never fall down crazy rabbit holes or get emotionally triggered into adopting ridiculous viewpoints. Hence the saying "never meet your heroes."

> I know incredibly smart people (engineers and other fields) who are

It's the stereotypical professor super smart in one specific area but everything else is a mess. Doctors can be like that too just ask an hospital IT person what doctors are like.

I wish modern education inspired more polymaths aka "Renaissance man". People are forced to focus so tightly one one thing it becomes ridiculous. It's difficult but I think if we are raised that way and raise children that way it may become more normal.

For myself I was into art as a child; drawing, painting, sculpture, crafts, photography. I also loved music and instruments. I found languages interesting my early to mid teens I invented my own writing system. Plus I have always made experiments as a child building things, or combing chemical compounds. But school pretty much forces you to pick one subject and that's that.

I never thought of it like that – a broad education is a good way to learn to respect how and why people in other fields think they way they are. The secret is trying to figure out how to make society pay into that... but we seem to have a hard time as a society making education more than a investment in future income.

> Each volume took about three weeks to produce, including designing each circuit and building it four times to make sure it worked.

Just 3 weeks?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com