While scanning the latest news, uprisings, shenanigans just now, the mind went back 30 some years ago to my first computer: a Compaq. Wow, how that inspired me back then to see a sentence I typed appear on the screen and to also be able to play Pac-Man. Fast forward to now, and I don’t get excited at seeing a sentence, a picture, a video or playing solitaire; it’s just business as usual, and why is that blue circle going round and round. Do I need an update?
Growing up as a kid in the 40’s and 50’s we had one telephone, a wire connecting it to the wall and then outside to the telephone post through the back yards of the neighborhoods. You could talk through that one wire to someone in another town far away.
In 1960, I learned the Morse-Code, a simple system of combining dots and dashes into words leaving a tiny bit longer pause between each word, sending the di-dah combinations electronically over the airwaves to the ears of another. Hmm? Now, technocrats have learned how to combine one’s and zer0’s into a series of 8 units, a break and then more of those two digits as the binary code for electronic computing. These typed notes are being converted into those digits sending the signals over the air, then converted back into words on the screens of millions of hand-held smart phones.
The strings of a piano each of differing lengths producing different sounds of low to higher pitch going through the air making music to my ears. Put seven pianos together in the same room, each doing their own thing; wouldn’t that become just noise bouncing echoes off the walls?
I hear your voice. It went from your lips thru the air reaching my ears and into my brain muscle interpreting what you said. Sound vibrations. I’ve been in restaurants where the sounds of everyone chatting bounce off the ceiling and walls adding to the festive atmosphere. Now that I’m partially deaf, those sound vibrations, the echoes all mingling together getting messed up because the ear is not working correctly: those tiny hair fibers are either missing or are not vibrating as they ought, or something like that I’ve been told. That blue circle going round and round.
Yes, my ears need an update. I’ve had 3 of those man made electronic updates and neither has been able to reproduce the original ability of hearing and discerning sounds coming through the air.
Consider that there could be millions around the world doing the same as I’m doing pressing the ‘send’ button at the same time, and yet those signals do not collide into confusion; no echoes as it goes through the air. All that talking through a wire not bumping into other speech patterns. Through the air and wires without confusion, without echoes. How is that possible? Better ask a scientist about that.
Shout out at the walls of a great canyon and you’ll hear an echo.
How is all this possible? Frequency multiplexing is what it’s been named. Waves through the air. What happens to those vibrations when winds whip up a flurry, tornadoes swirling the air, rain drops and snow-flakes dropping? Does that not interfere with those frequency waves?
How marvelous this is. All part of that first ray of light penetrating the darkness at 186,000 miles per second.
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge” (Psalm 19:1–2)
One Day at a Time 