New Year’s Resolutions
It’s the night of January 1st 2024, or at least that’s the day I woke up this morning. By the time this is published it’ll be after midnight. I suppose some introductions are in order; my name is Adrian Kaczmarczyk (I pronounce it “kaz-mar-zik”) and this is my personal blog. I intend to use it to post about technical concepts I think up and find clever or amusing. As of right now most of my ideas (which range from unworkable to half-baked) live on random sheets of paper which I scribble and scrawl all over, and then whenever my desk gets unacceptably messy I have to gather them into a pile and file them away, whereupon they are now completely lost to time. ‘Organization’ is the name of the process by which things become hidden from sight and thus lost forever, but at least the overall result looks tidier in the end. I have been meaning to make a blog to gather my ideas in digital form and keep them from getting lost for a long time, well over a year by now, and now that the New Year has arrived I figured now would be the time to do it.
I am profoundly interested in a category of things I call information machines; any device where information takes on some physical incarnation which then needs to be stored, processed, moved or otherwise transformed by physical processes. Examples of information machines include computers, radios, test equipment, and many other things. Whether the information is analog, digital, both or neither; I love it all the same. To better explore this topic I studied physics in university, and I taught myself electronics to build my own information machines as a hobbyist. I got into amateur radio by way of my electronics hobby, so you may end up encountering me on air one day operating as VA3NB. I have made information machines into my career, and I aspire to make meaningful contributions to the state of the art.
What’s all this about “quicksilver”?
The name for this blog is inspired by a segment from one of my favorite books, Red Plenty by Francis Spufford. In one chapter, we meet the pioneering computer scientist Sergey Alekseyevich Lebedev, who describes the fascination that inspires his work like so:
[Lebedev] cannot find his own work magical, not in any sense of the word that implies mystery. He knows its innards too well. And yet there’s something about the way mute matter mounts up in his machines, and up and up, pattern upon pattern, until it manifests the patterns of thought, which still strikes him with reliable wonder. The earliest computer he built used sound waves echoing through mercury for a memory. The mercury is long gone, except in his imagination: where, with the logic of dreams, he knows his calling is to make thinking pools of quicksilver, with the world reflected in them.
I have found no other passage that describes my own fascination as eloquently.
Having set now the direction and theme of this blog I hope to come back many times, and I hope my readers find my ideas half as clever as I think they are. At least once they’re posted here, they should be harder to lose.