8-Bit Glasses

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I wanted to be a paleontologist so bad I learned how to spell it. To my parents the most important part of this burning passion for prehistoric life was how unbelievably adorable it is to see a 6 year old child say Pachycephalosaurus. To me, almost two decades later, what matters to me is why I wanted to be a dinosaur scientist in the first place. When the last three kids said they wanted to be, in turn, an F1 driver, a policeman and a nurse, answering my teacher’s vocational queries with possibly the largest word anyone in my class had ever heard was a bold declaration. I said “Paleontologist,” but I might as well have said, “I’m going to be your class nerd and if any of you want to throw stuff at me I’ll be over here in the corner reading quietly.”

Now I don’t want to wade into the nature vs nurture argument, but seeing Jurassic Park as a young child* was a pivotal developmental moment in my life. It gave birth to the first of many obsessions in my life. I loved dinosaurs and so I had to know everything about them. Some nerds are made, not born.

I never ended up going down the paleontology career path, or a good number of the other paths I intended to go down as I grew up and tried to figure out what I wanted to be, but I think about it a lot. How many actual paleontologists did Jurassic Park create? What about geneticists? There has to be someone out there with a genetics degree who only has it because they really want a live dinosaur. How many people went on to study forensic science because of CSI:Miami? What percentage of Whitehouse staff are there because of the the west wing? As someone with a deep love of numbers and an unhealthy interest in stories and storytelling, I desperately want to know the actual numerical answers to these questions.

I started off wanting to write a blog post about how artists are more than just creators when they interact with their audiences and get to hear about how their art has impacted on the lives of their audience**, but now I just want to go do some statistics. Either way, that’s one story about how a story*** had an impact on me.

I’ve got a hundred more.

*Whilst writing this I’ve had a few words with my parents. When Jurassic Park came out Michael Medved was screaming and shouting about parents taking their kids to see it. In fact he said that any parent that takes a young child to see Jurassic Park is “guilty of unconscionable child abuse.” Spielberg wouldn’t let his son Max see it in the cinema and he was 8 at the time! I’m sure I was very persistent about going to see it but I don’t remember it being much of a fight. I assume I had to promise not to have nightmares. When I consider the number of times I’ve said “don’t tell mum I let you watch this” to my little brother I have to assume that my upbringing was some kind of experiment.

**and I kind of just did. Meta.

***http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXLDv-fUINM

As part of my ongoing mission to share more of the stuff I make, here’s a horribly rough demo of a song that I usually wouldn’t share with you.

Image by pinguino

So I’m on the last train back home from an impromptu evening out in town with some friends. That wasn’t intended to be one of those “Now picture the scene” openings, I’m  writing this on the train right now. I’ve got into the habit of writing whenever I find myself with some time to kill. It’s descriptive writing practice, I just write about what I can see. Interesting scenery. Drunk guy. Woman who’s lost her ticket. Tonight’s a different story since 50% of the population have decided that this is halloween weekend. I would have said it’s the weekend after but I’ve not got any real reason to believe that. I’ve got two other people joining me on the journey today, subway girl and halloween girl. For those of you not familiar with the “subway girl” concept, she’s that girl (not always the same girl) you fall in love with on public transport. Well, you fall in love with who you think she is. It’s a flawed system. This evening the book I’m no doubt mis-judging comes covered in curly red hair and a smile… that is apparently intended to say goodbye. She’s getting off here.

God it’s cold. I’m wearing three layers and I’ve been shivering for the past three stops. So now there’s just myself and halloween girl. Her costume is pretty good, but I can’t decide if she’s supposed to be a corpse, a ghost or a vampire. All of the above. Oh, and apparently she’s french.

Peur…Perdu…ehh-poo-vant-ableh. This appears to be quite an intense conversation I’ve gotten myself into but I’m afraid high school french only really prepares you to brief french identity thieves. My dog’s name, first street I lived on or mother’s maiden name I can do but nobody told me what “sup-leess” means. Thankfully I managed to unleash the swiss army knife of french phrases, “Je ne parle pas beaucoup de francais.”

Her costume, as I’ve already said, is pretty good. Her make-up (a few good glares from a costume department and you quickly learn not to use the word face-paint) can only be described a s sinister. Pale, but with…something around the eyes.

Aaand the lights are out. Scotrail are a joke. It’s like they never expect it to be cold. Nobody ever listens to Ned Stark.

They’re back on again.

Ok so I’m not sure if she’s in character or if the make up just makes her super creepy when she smiles but… oh… apparently we’re going to have another conversation. Ame…Engloutir…I still don’t know what you’re saying.

I’ve been trying to think of how you would describe her clothing. Old. Ragged. I want to say victorian but I know that’s just the amature compulsion to describe any and all period clothing as victorian.

Still smiling at me. Still creepy.

Ok, that’s the second time the lights have cut out. We’ve not come to a complete stop but I can’t hear the engine going. I have no clue where we are. You’d think they’d make an announcement. I was planning to just sit tight but I think she’s getting up to find a conductor. Or not. She’s doing something. It’s too dark. Gonna stop typing on my phone so I can try using it as a torch. Back in a sec.

I have this habit (others would call it a problem) where I find myself fixated on a certain things, reading books, wikipedia articles and anything else I can find on whatever this thing may be. It could be an event in history, a style of arcitecture, a scientific theory or a music composer. The only thing these things have in common is that I find them interesting and I occasionally brain dump them into conversations. I thought rather than just having this random database of topics fighting to escape my brain and into conversation it might be better to try and document them, so here’s the first one.

Nikola Tesla, or why you should hate Thomas Edison

Born on the 10th of July, 1893 Nikola Tesla was born to a candle-lit world yet to harness the true potential of electricity. He wanted to be a poet, but one day he got a static shock from his cat and was inspired to study and better understand the effects of electricity. He grew up and went to study electrical engineeering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz but bailed on it before he finished, running off to work as an assistant engineer for a year where he had the first of many nervous breakdowns. Eventually he went to university, but dropped out of that too.

He went to work for the National Telephone Company in Budapest and became the chief electrician after a year working there. A year later he moved to Paris to work for Thomas Edison, the man who didn’t invent the lightbulb but did build upon the work of 22 other men so that he could market the lightbulb. Thomas Edison, the man who marketed the lightbulb, offered Tesla $50000 (The equivalent of a million dollars today) to fix his electric motors which, without being too technical, didn’t work. Tesla fixed all the issues with them and asked for the money he’d be promised, to which Edison informed poor Nikola he had only been joking about the money. One of many reasons to hate Thomas Edison

So Tesla went off to develop an alternating current electrical system, which irritated Edison who was trying to sell his direct current system, which he felt was better because it needed thicker wires, couldn’t transmit energy all that far and needed a power plant every square mile. Edison came up with an excellent idea to discredit Tesla’s much better AC system by using it to publicly electrocute live cats and dogs that he paid schoolkids 25 cents to steal from around the local neighbourhood. If you don’t hate Thomas Edison by this point I don’t think we can be friends.

You might be thinking hey, maybe the science/engineering business was just like that then, and maybe there’s some truth in that, but the point is Tesla wasn’t like that. When Guglielmo Marconi sent the world’s first transatlantic radio signal, becoming world famous for work based on stuff Tesla had already done, do you know what Tesla said?

“Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.”

Good guy.

Tesla was a genius. He did things in his lab that scientists are still finding impossible to replicate. He pitched the idea of radar 18 years before it was invented (fun fact: it was turned down by the head of research and development for the US Navy, Thomas Edison). He built the worlds first hydroelectric dam. He invented radio astronomy.He figured out the resonant frequency of the earth 50 years before anyone else did. He spoke eight different languages, memorized entire books and could visualise his inventions in his head and build them without ever writing anything down.

He was a revolutionary and a genius, one of the greatest minds that ever lived.

And he invented tesla coils, which are awesome.