Standing on One's Own
Effecting a vision is hard in meatspace. Think about October Sky. A crew of plucky kids with a dream. A dream that could not be a reality without some serious resource commitment and craftsmanship. I recall a machinist character who snuck around to steal tool time from a company to fabricate a metal part of the rocket’s body.
The human and material capital required to produce something quite simple, let alone some reasonably complex system like a battleship, is profoundly humbling. Just the tooling required to build a small table can bear a retail cost multiples higher than the cost of a mass-produced equivalent, including materials.
The “tooling” required for a lot of intellectual and technical development is often free, or at least quite cheap. I was thinking last night about Efendi, my own creation that runs my blog, and Clarity, which does the job of Picasa or Flickr, but just the way I want it to work, and on my own (rented) iron and on my terms. Cluster 2 runs on Python and was my creation. Cluster 1 limped its way through on PHP and was the work of one slow afternoon.
I wandered away for a moment’s nostalgia, but my point is directed toward the idea of feeling a sense of delight and pride at watching one’s creations doing good work. Standing on the shoulders of giants, of course, I effectively breathed life into these things, installed them on a platform of my provision, and they now provide a service to me and people I know. It’s a good feeling, even though they are trivial things.
I get a similar pleasure when I install a light fixture, or hang a bookshelf, or wire a network, or hook up a ceiling fan, but it’s just so darn expensive to do anything like that, let alone to build something up nearly from scratch. It’s a fascinating turn of events that innovation in computer science is so comparatively cheap.
It was an interesting feeling last night to hold Claire up by the armpits just above my lap. She pumped her legs outward as is her wont, but this time - for the first time - she straightened them out and pushed against my legs. The force borne by my hands reduced as she lifted herself up a little bit taller. She did that on legs that, not three months ago, were somewhat alarmingly thin and relatively underdeveloped at the time of her birth.
That action was the product of cumulative days of seemingly random experimental muscle movements. She did it burning high-density calories off of food created by her mother’s own body. And there we were again, seeing one’s own creation do a little something on its own.