Hobbies: Coding with Arduino IDE

So, I graduated with a humanities degree. But I suppose it wasn't a total loss, because shortly after my short-lived teaching career, I was hired by a big-boy tech company to do support for their SAAS products. I didn't need to know code, I didn't need an engineering degree, and I didn't need to know (exactly) how our computers worked. But the job introduced me to XML and SLQ language. And I started, emphasis on started, to learn a bit how those languages worked. Now, this wasn't me being cool, and hacking behind a dark-screened computer like I was in some Jerry Bruckheimer & Don Simpson movie. It was more like copying and pasting strips of code into my browser -super boring stuff, actually. 

An LED system with a photoresistor sensor. 

Since then, I've been obsessed by computers, and how they work. I really want to get into the "guts" of those things and figure out how they actually work. So, in a way, I was an Arduino natural before I even knew it!  I stepped into the void and purchased the "30 Days Lost in Space" (3) electronics set with a "Hero" board, technical equipment and 30 lessons accessible via a website. This is something a middle school child could do. The lessons are meant for learners, and start at the very basic level. But, importantly, the Hero board uses Arduino IDE as it's language.  

In addition to the programming language, I've also got to order and work with the hardware; resistors, pin-headers, LCD screens, engines, fans, motors etc. Arduino programming really closes the gap between software and hardware, between the coding and the fantastic machines. And, you'd sh*t yourself when you see just how inexpensive this stuff is. The Arduino board retails for about 30 to 40 bucks (USD) (4), and other similar boards are even less expensive! This is stuff that would have been restricted to a lab or a company office only 20 to 30 years ago. Now it's available to all of us!

A rudimentary range-finder.

Arduino IDE introduced me to coding again, like a novice. In short, I was a kid. What do I need to type to make that red light turn blue?, can I make a stop watch?, etc. Not only that, but Arduino has its own board that you can make just about anything with. Need a robot friend? Wanna Spy on your Neighbors? Send a Satellite into space? The Arduino can do it all. It's the brain that makes your hardware wake up. Then, It's ALIVE!

Right now, I'm just working on simple projects more-or-less to learn. Nothing too exciting, but I can't help but think how great the Arduino board and Arduino IDE would be for children. It's an exceptional educational technology that is perfect for training our youth for the 21st century future. It integrates the machines, we all take for granted, with the programming that makes those machines think.

The Cubical Ruins Go Live!

Hello! And welcome to The Cubical Ruins, a blog site. If you're reading this, you're probably a friend or acquaintance of Steve, the proprietor of this domain, but if not welcome anyway. I hope you enjoy reading and browsing. 

The immediate goal of this website is to practice writing and web-development skills, and present the work to an actual audience. The broader, societal, goal is to break free of of Instagram, Facebook, Twittter and the other tech giants, and publish literature, ideas, criticism, hobbyist info and general goings-on, on an independent platform. In short, The Cubical Ruins seeks to resurrect the Blogoshpere of the late 1990's and early 00's, when the Internet was still a fragmented universe of unique weirdos doing their own thing and hosting their own pages. Perhaps social media and Web 2.0 colonized the entire World Wide Web and pushed all of those crudely designed websites out of existence. Or, maybe, those weirdos just got jobs and families. Either way, The Cubical Ruins has decided to join the party late.      

Enjoy The Cubical Ruins: a literary work, hobby blog and photo collection written and created by Stephen M. Skok. 

Contact The Ruins at steve@cubicalruins.com 

Preview: Erik Davis's TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information

I first discovered Erik Davis, and his somewhat "out there" academic work via his podcast Expanding Mind around 2019. From there I started his newest book, and PhD thesis, High Weirdness, and ultimately ordered his earlier work, TechGnosis. As someone interested in understanding and documenting the weirdness of the past four to five years and the hyper-speed jump into artificial intelligence society has taken in the past year, I felt a bit disappointed when I cracked TechGnosis to find it was written and published way back in 1998. I mean, what's he going to talk about, MySpace, Hacky Sacks, Netscape, blogs? Back then, Amazon was just a book retailer for %#$!'s sake...

A Mystery Portal

That said, I should have known Davis would not disappoint. TechGonsis is a timeless and creepily prophetic lesson in technology and how it both obfuscates and conjures up the magical, spiritual realms of our experience. Technology, Davis argues, not only secularizes and rationalizes our world (creating modern solutions to practical problems), but also opens unintended portals into the age-old religious and mystical worlds.  As TechGnosis astutely points out in the first chapter, technology is not a new thing.  It has always been. The most-mind blowing and disruptive technical achievement of man was likely not the Moon landing, artificial intelligence or the splitting of the atom, it was probably language and writing itself. With the written word, pictographs, and later alphabets and numbering systems, humans took a quantum leap toward corralling and taming the natural world around them, and the thousands-year march toward modernity smart phones and space travel began. So, if you're out there looking for a Singularity or Year Zero, consider that the ship may have sailed about 150 to 250 thousand years ago when the first guy made a picture that was supposed to mean "yummy plants nearby", "don't go over there" or "Jeff was here" and other dudes got the message long after Jeff left.

What the hypothetical caveman, Jeff, did was simply attempt to organize his natural world into a more manageable place, and make things easier and simpler. But, it didn't stop there. At a cosomologically rapid pace, letters turned into words, which turned into books, which turned into holy scripture. Numbers, turned into arithmetic, which turned into equations, which turned into algorithms that turned into Google. With the power of documentation, and increasingly mobile and convenient forms of publication, each generation came up with an enhancement that built on the previous generations' novel technologies. One of my favorite historical anecdotes from TechGnosis is the story of the Ptolemys, the descendants of Alexander the Great, who ruled Alexandria of Egypt from roughly 300 BC to 50 AD. They commissioned the Great Library of Alexandria, which is often believed to be one of the first attempts at a comprehensive depository of all knowledge. One of Ptolomys, Davis writes, was so into obtaining and cataloguing data he actually seized any ship sailing into port and forcibly confiscated all scrolls and writings the crew had on them, returning them only after scribes were able to copy them down. So, think about that before you get too upset about Mark Zuckerberg mining your personal information. 

If you've studied philosophy, history or any similar humanities subjects, this is all pretty well-established stuff. Humanity in its ever-expanding technical prowess conquered the natural world with science and machines, and now we have time to invent even more neat stuff because we're not preoccupied with finding food and avoiding snakes. We've even passed the point where we started asking ourselves why, with all this modern knowledge, there is still poverty, gross inequality, war, crime addiction etc? And why, in times like these, does it actually seem to be getting worse, not better? As Davis and multiple well-know philosophers have already pointed out, technology and knowledge never means "progress," only change. We create this handy stuff to make our lives easier and to get farther away from the cold, scary wilderness of nature and the superstitions and myths of the past, but it always comes back. Technology may start as a way to organize and control the world around us, but it always comes back around as a portal from which the weird, mystical ideas of the past re-emerge, and send us looking toward the natural untamed realm for answers. 

Davis provides ample historical evidence for his ideas in the first chapter "Imaging Technologies". Although he includes numerous examples, I was particularly interested in his descriptions from the Ptolemys' Alexandria, the Egyptian metropolis, just prior to it's swallowing by the Roman Empire. It was a port-of-call on the mouth of the Nile connected by land, river and sea to all of the growing regions and city states of Europe, Africa and Asia. It exploded in growth around this time attracting a myriad of immigrants from countless ancient cultures. It was a multi-lingual, pan-religious, cosmopolitan city, where money was made, arts and culture were developed, science was advanced and people with different ideas both mingled and clashed. The cacophony of Alexandria is very similar to major cities in 2023. In spite of the technological explosion that was happening at that time relative to earlier periods -with ever more grandiose buildings, complex machines (2) and countless other advancements ostensibly invented to make living easier and to make resources more abundant- people still turned toward the mystical and spiritual. Newer cults, ecclesiastical traditions and full-blown religions, including Christianity, were seeping out of every cultural crack that Alexandria and its engineers opened on their quest for new knowledge and new gadgets.

Without spoiling too much more of TechGonsis, I'll close by saying that I love Erik Davis' writing style. He makes fun of himself a bit in his forward to the 2015 re-print of his 1998 book by mentioning some of his dated 1990's lingo. But as a child of the 90's myself, I find it all too rad. In spite of it's weighty subject-matter, Davis' writing is accessible to both academic and layperson. In fact, rather than highlighting, Post-it noting and jotting down notes on every other page, I found it more enjoyable to just plow through it like a spooky Stephen King novel or one of those neat historical docu-drama series on Netflix. If you're into the subject matter enough to really nerd out, go ahead and re-read it with more purpose and attention. 

TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information was published by North Atlantic Books in 1998.

Integrations

Last week I reviewed the 1987 film "Robocop" about a futuristic policeman augmented with super-human abilities. When we think of human augmentation we often think of someone like the Robocop, a normal person with physical attachments and implants that allow them to do and see things others can't. In media and gaming the idea is ubiquitous: think The Borg, Iron Man and Master Chief as examples. However, the truth about human augmentation is actually a lot simpler, so simple that we rarely think about just how connected we are at all times, even without eye implants and rocket boots. 

It's mentioned (far to often) that people are addicted to their devices. Sure there's truth to that, but it was a cliche to say so more than a decade ago, now it's just getting annoying. It's like saying we're addicted to food, money or water. This is why I prefer to think of technological augmentation not as a physical attachment, but as a series of integrations.

Some kind of bubble cafe

In technical terms, an integration is any way two or more systems interact with each other. You add a bit of HTML and JavaScript code to your webpage to pull anything from the weather, stock market quotes or sports scores onto your site; now your application is integrated with Accuweather, Bloomberg and ESPN. Your work's payroll system is integrated with its customer relationship management system and it's qualitative reporting systems, so all the information each wing of the organization is seeing is synchronized and updated in real time. This allows everyone access to all the information they need immediately, and drastically reduces the need for clerks, couriers, typists etc. An old colleague of mine said it best: "integration is when the computers talk to each other, so we don't have to."   

We don't have physical brain-plugs, like in the Matrix, or infrared vision, like in Robocop, but our eyes, ears, voice and fingers are the perfect ports from which to send and receive an ever-increasing amount of information. Some readers may remember a time when you had to literally write a check then balance your checkbook by hand after each purchase to know how much money you had at a given point in time. If the calculation was off, or you skipped a few calculations and couldn't find the receipts, the only way to know was to go to your physical bank branch and ask them for the available balance in your account, or wait until a statement was mailed to you. If you had stocks, equities, high-yield savings bonds, etc. you could forget about calculating the value yourself. You could either wait for your monthly or quarterly statements to arrive, or hire a professional to keep an eye on your finances for you. Now, all of our financial information is available to us where ever we go. With the click of an app, you can look across multiple accounts, see interest accrue and stock values go up and down in real time. You can transfer money from one bank to another, sell stocks, and re-pay a friend for dinner from your phone in less than the time it used to take to wait in line at the bank to deposit a check. You are now integrated with your entire financial universe at all times. What used to take one or more days of errands, and interactions with multiple tellers, associates and clerks, is now fully accessible to you at a moment's notice.

It doesn't end there either. My credit card is integrated with my ride share app. My airline app is integrated with my federal known traveler identification, and it's all integrated into my brain via my eyes, ears and finger-tips. I can now wake up, get dressed, make a car come pick me up, book a flight to nearly anywhere in the world, walk through TSA Pre-Check and takeoff -all without ever reaching for my wallet or carrying a single dollar of cash. The only thing I'd need to remember to take is my passport, and the only time I'd truly need to speak with another person is if I make the alarm go off at airport security. Not even Robocop, with his sophisticated mechanical implants could manage that, and it would be significantly harder for him to get through that metal detector. 

Human augmentation is happening, and it's happening faster than ever. We adopt it without a thought, let alone hesitation, because it makes sense, and it makes our lives easier. Best of all, unlike a robo-suit, eye implants or a neural brain-plug, we can turn our devices off and put them down whenever we'd like. Plus, a phone and a set of wireless headphones probably don't hurt as much as a brain-plug. But, put me on the wait list for a set of Iron Man rocket boots.

Movie Review: Robocop (1987) "I'd buy that for a dollar!"

If California was home to a nexus of psychedelia and visionary experiences in the 1960's and 1970's, it was definitely a nexus of visionary blockbusters in the late 1980's and early 90's. Even though most kids of my generation were not old enough to see them in theaters, just about every boy my age not only saw Terminator II, Aliens or Predator on VHS multiple times, but had at least one or two action figures depicting characters (or Xenomorphs) from one of those great films. Which is why I'm surprised -and a bit ashamed- that I'd never seen the the 1987 Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner, until recently. And, boy does it stack up to the greatest sci-fi action movies of that era. 

Scene from Robocop 1987

As the name suggests, Robocop features a part-man part-robot cop who patrols "Old" Detroit in the near future. The crime-ridden and economically depressed city needs a masked, armored hero to save the day and blast the bad guys. Sigh... seems familiar enough, so maybe that's why I avoided this one until now. In a world of dime-a-dozen Marvel supermen, Batmans and vigilante "heroes," I didn't need to see yet another maverick cop blowing shoplifters away with a comically large pistol. No way was a move called "Robocop" going to age well into the current political and social climate. It was certain to be a paranoid orgy of violence, warping suburban America's view of the inner-city into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of lunatic criminals robbing, raping and murdering good, innocent, all-American folk. However, as I watched it became clear that Robocop, played by Peter Weller, was more than just Dirty Harry with robot armor and an even bigger gun. He was a complex, sympathetic figure who provides us with a frighteningly accurate look into humanity's future. 

The film begins in the boardroom of the powerful Omni Consumer Products corporation, a private multi-national industrial concern that supplies large manufactured goods, civil services and, of course, weapons to the government. Think Raytheon meets Halliburton plus Proctor and Gamble, etc. The company has just won a contract to run Detroit's police force and is eager to demonstrate their new 100 percent mechanical policing robot, the ED-209. SPOILER ALERT: the demo does not go well. With only a few months until Omni is set to take over the Detroit police department, they need a solution. Enter Robocop, a part-man, part-machine hybrid with the hardware to take down the criminals, but with the mind of a human to act with discretion.

In classic Paul Verhoeven fashion the first few scenes of the film demonstrate that what we're about to watch is more than a simple action movie. Sure, it's got all the explosions, gun battles and solid kills necessary to keep any adolescent boy (or adolescent-minded adult) interested. However, Verhoeven -who went on to direct Starship Troopers (1997)- shows us early-on that the film has a message that goes deeper than the simple good-guys versus bad-guys motifs. Between the lines, the film is critical of policing, but not anti-cop; it's suspicious of artificial intelligence, but not anti-technology; and above-all it shows how badly things can go when for-profit commercial entities, rather than institutions accountable to the public trust, are put in charge of running a society. 

I suppose any astute grown-up could have predicted in 1987 a lot of what was about to happen over the next 3 plus decades. Computers would have an increasing impact on our daily lives; the privatization of services traditionally provided by the government would have expected results; and robots would begin to replace human workers in every industry. However, given where we're at in 2023: with crime on the rise; policing strategies called into question; flying drones patrolling airspace firing missiles toward the ground on a regular basis; and revolutionary AI software poised to change everything we've come to think we know, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more accurate and entertaining vision of the future than Paul Verhoeven's Robocop.  

Verhoeven, Paul. Robocop, Orion Pictures, Los, Angeles California. 1987.