Arduino

As Clay Shirky wrote his new book on distributed information systems, he joked about calling it LOLcats as Soulcraft. That was a play on Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which argues for the intellectual value of manual labor. Shirky’s point seemed to be that captioning cat photos with pidgin English — or, just as likely, editing Wikipedia — is enjoyed as a collective act of creation akin to an Amish barn raising. Yes! Then again, he was being facetious.

I spent the past week in Phoenix, Palo Alto, and San Francisco.

Phoenix

is the fifth-largest city in the United States, situated in an uninhabitable portion of the country with no natural water supply. Its existence feels stubborn, arbitrary, and ingenious: urban design as a pure and unchecked market force (see also: Abu Dhabi). The rash of empty real estate speaks, crucially, to the city’s character.

Bringing me to Phoenix was an unusual conference of thinkers and practitioners in online journalism. We spent forty, over-saturated hours grappling with concepts like friction, attention, context, measurement, curiosity, and reading. It was wonderful, and afterward, I went for a hike outside the city with more inspiration than I had synapses to inspire.

In the Phoenix airport, a woman leaning against a GoDaddy promotional display read aloud a magazine story about Saddam Hussein’s capture from her Samsung Galaxy Tab. I remembered — how do we forget these things? — that there’s video of Hussein’s hanging on the internet.

Palo Alto

is named after a tall, double-trunked tree on the banks of the San Francisquito Creek; one of the trunks was felled by a storm in 1886, but the other is still there, and you can go look at it, though I did not. Instead, on my first night in Palo Alto, I caught up with an old friend over beers, deviled eggs, and fish and chips. He’s an engineer who once studied jet engines and now, as a doctoral candidate at Stanford, “fucks around with stuff for the enjoyment of myself and others.”

His research group is called Imaginary Labs.

At the table next to us, a group passed around a wheel with lights between the spokes that illuminated as it spun on a short axle. Over at the bar, the object of fascination looked like a Quidditch snitch, but I couldn’t discern its function. “Turn it waaaaaaay up,” someone said.

My friend — his name is Greg — shares a house with two other mechanical engineers, who are good people, and a “nerdy computer scientist,” who never materialized while I was there. (This was the first time in years that I’d heard “nerd” or “geek” used in a genuinely derisive context.) The place is filled with gadgetry, from the platform bed Greg constructed during a carpentry kick to the garden called Superbia to the fish-tank sound system for manifesting audio from the charged pulses of an electric eel.

Whoooooooooooommmmmmmp!

Sometime later that night our conversation turned to the dichotomy between ideas and materials, which isn’t a dichotomy at all but often gets framed that way. Crawford, among others, worries about “a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy.” W00t?

My job is fun and satisfying, but the products I help create are intangible, constructed with notions and not nails. Which is not to idealize one or the other; I’m lucky to work on the Web. It’s just that sometimes I envy our mobile team because they can hold their craft and crack it open and think about the space between seven inches and ten.

Even within my seemingly limitless medium, I’m bounded by an inability to create what I conceptualize. I know HTML and CSS and can understand your PHP, but I can’t spin a database into an app or make an API call. Well, I did once, and it was totally my hello world.

In time, I’ve been inspired by co-workers who code, friends who learned to code, meetups like Hacks/Hackers, and posts like “Why Attend a Hackathon,” by Chrys Wu. (Hello, New York!) So while I’m not big on new year’s resolutions, I told Greg, in January I plan to take my first course in computer programming since I was in elementary school. I want to learn a data-visualization language called Processing.

“Have you ever seen an Arduino?” is how Greg responded to all that.

I had not, and the hunt was on to find one. A workbench in the living room was stocked with LEDs and hinges and books by Edward Tufte — but no Arduino. “There must be dozens in this house!” Finally, one was located in the frame of a Wink, an orb Greg created that “allows two people to share a moment of synchronicity across great distances.”

An Arduino, I learned, is a simple microcontroller with inputs and outputs, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a tiny computer and, loaded with code, can control traffic lights, musical instruments, or fairly complex robots. Greg had hooked up two Arduinos to encased lights that communicate with each other over the Web. This was the Internet of Things I’d been hearing about. Back in New York, my Internet of Things consisted of devices capable of adjusting themselves for Daylight Saving Time. With the Wink,

you just pick it up to communicate. The coupled device emits a light pattern, and the recipient picks up his Wink to respond. It is a state machine for presence; immediate yet implicit, meaningful yet ambient.

The Arduino’s software is based on Processing, Greg explained, which was the whole point of introducing me in the first place. This language I want to learn could not only visualize a large dataset but empower my relationship with the physical world. On a nightstand, I spied a copy of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and I purchased it on Google Books.

Walking home through downtown Palo Alto, I passed the offices of First Virtual Group, “a diversified holding company…with global interests in real estate, agribusiness, philanthropy, and global financial asset management. We consist of over 50 individual corporations.”

San Francisco

was ostensibly where I spent my vacation, insomuch as it’s easiest to say, “I’m vacationing in San Francisco.” One day, I walked around the Mission. Mostly, I hung out in South of Market, which somewhat sheepishly calls itself SoMa. (My friends in New York just moved to SoHa.) The wide streets reminded me of Seattle and everything felt

own, it ended up in a converted warehouse in SoMa. (That interlude was Robin Sloan’s brilliant novel set amid a realistically quasi-apocalyptic San Francisco in HD.) Formerly industrial neighborhoods seem to attract internet startups as abandoned beaver dams nourish wetlands.

Beaver dams can be disruptive… beaver dams along a stream may contribute to denitrification… Each time the stream life cycle repeats itself another layer of rich organic soil is added to the bottom of the valley.

I surfed around SoMa, firing up Twitter Inc., searching Google Inc., checking the Wikimedia Foundation, blogging about it with Six Apart Ltd., embedding myself at Scribd Inc. Their lofts encourage the sense of navigating a network not a neighborhood. Even the coffee houses appeared to brew according to an algorithm.

Last.fm Ltd. thinks I’m a 23-year-old female. Intuit Inc. says I spent too much on uncategorized last month. The blog post I meant to write on vacation would have ruminated on a new study of American browsing behavior: “Comparing the homogeneity of websites to zip codes, we find that websites tend to be more racially diverse.” W00t?

Another evening in Palo Alto, a patent lawyer hanging around Greg’s house picked her head up from a pile of documents and asked, “Is a circuit a physical object?” You know a conversation will be fruitful when it begins with disambiguation, and, oh man, did I learn about circuits.