I am starting a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and
readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing,
basket weaving, rugby – whatever. Please send me an email and I can help you
craft a post on your hobby and get appropriate links, photos etc. It can be as
few as hundred written words, so go ahead and get your hobby the exposure it deserves.
I am proud that the first column is by fellow Enterprise Irregular, Mr. Renaissance Man, Bob Warfield. He is clearly a man of many talents, as he holds nine patents, on topics as diverse as genetic algorithms and user interface design.
Just wait till you read below about the range of his hobbies!
“Astronomy has been a hobby that I've played with off and on for years. While people have been stargazing since the Ancients, but it's been fairly recently that individuals could purchase computer controlled telescopes that point to whatever object in the sky you call out on your laptop, and sensitive CCD cameras that allow them to take pictures rivaling the photographic images of professional grade observatories. Mind you, I'm not talking about lashing your Canon DSLR to your telescope, I'm talking about dedicated research grade astronomical imaging systems. Image stabilized binoculars are also a boon to stargazers because you can see much more clearly the dim objects in the heavens when they're not madly jumping around.
When I was growing up, ham radio was the high tech hobby. Talented "hams" built their own radio equipment and often made it more sensitive or more powerful than the commercially available units. Today, we have PC overclocking and case modding. It's the same sort of thing. There are folks crafting water cooled and even refrigerated PC's that run at higher clock speeds. They build wild custom cases to put their PC's in.
Heck even the model railroad gang have a curious mix of the very old and the very new when they take a finely detailed steam locomotive and put computer control into it. This is not your father's Lionel train set!
While we're on modeling, Radio Control has sure changed too. I used to fly those darned things (actually, I used to crash them a lot), and I remember coveting a helicopter. A friend who was an amazingly skilled R/C pilot got a helicopter and he could barely keep it in the air. We asked around and were told a common "training" exercise for R/C helicopter pilots was to balance a ball bearing on an inverted metal bowl and have enough control to make the bearing go where you wanted on the bowl's surface. Can you say, "dynamically unstable?" Wow! I knew I would never be able to fly a model helicopter when I heard that, but I was wrong.
This Xmas we got our kids R/C helicopters. They are electric and meant to be flown indoors. They have built-in stabilizing gyros connected to a microprocessor. This is like the fly-by-wire that aircraft like the F-16 pioneered. Military grade technology to be sure, and it makes these little dragonflies easy for anyone to fly with zero experience or talent. These particular helicopters cost us a grand total of $29 each at the mall. Technology really changes everything.
Hot rodding? Don't get me started! I have loved cars for a long time and my 15 year old son has the fever bad. Old School lives on with carburetors and even what are called "rat rods" which are a throwback to the original kids taking nearly worthless cars and putting mostly elbow grease in with very little cash to "soup" them up. But high tech has enabled all kinds of crazy new car stuff. Fuel injection would be the most obvious thing. The availability of home plasma cutters and Tig welders makes it possible for people to do in their homes to cars and bikes what the Orange County Chopper gang do on TV. The results are often amazing. And anyone who has seen movies like Tokyo Drift or Redline knows that there is an import tuner car craze that thrives on all sorts of high tech goodies including chips, boost controllers, turbos, fuel injection modifications, and even Formula One style data logging to help tune suspensions.
Technology touches all areas, even the seemingly low tech. My mother was certainly fond of her computer controlled sewing machine which was truly a marvel. It could do all sorts of custom embroidery and decorative stitching that would've taken mom hours and hours to do by hand.
But there are also entirely new hobbies that are only possible because of high tech. And there are some social trends associated that are kind of fun and interesting too.
Here I'm referring to the ability for people in their workshops to build computer controlled CNC machine tools of various kinds that have ridiculous precision and speed. And the social trend is around the whole Maker movement that we hear about from people like Tim O'Reilly.
There is a huge board dedicated to this (actually, there are many, but this is the biggest) called CNCZone which has thousands of members building these machines and using them for all sorts of purposes.
Technology touches everything, but it's wonderful when it makes things even more fun and approachable, or when it opens whole new avenues.”
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