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Art/Simple Beauty, (circumlunar), 11/08/2018
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Somewhere, someone once said that "simplicity is beauty." It
might have been Goethe or Plato or Emerson or Dorothy
Parker; I'm not exactly sure who to credit. But it has been
said, and it was before my time, and it's true. 99.9%
guaranteed.
I have a friend back in Arizona who is a pathologist by
trade, and a gardener, prepper, ham, and carpenter (among
other things) on the side. He collects and uses antique hand
tools for woodworking, because he loves the simplicity of
their design, and the very connected experience he has when
using them. To me, his tools are beautiful because they are
simple and well-made.
We were visiting his house once when I noticed that he had a
thermometer outside his window, between his house and his
garden. He mentioned off-hand that he used it to tell when
it was getting too cold out. I don't get out much, I guess,
and I hadn't seen this before, but I noticed then that his
thermometer was able to show him a max-high, and a min-low
temperature via a simple mechanism that pushed a dial to an
extreme as the temperature changed. He'd look out the window
in the morning, and he could see if it had been below
freezing during the night.
Contrast that with my solution, in which I had connected a
raspberry pi up to temperature, light, and humidity sensors,
then logged the data in a database, which I could query in
the morning. Sure, I had a lot more data, but we had both
solved a problem, and he had certainly invested less money
and time in his simple and beautiful solution.
Technology is beautiful to me too, don't get me wrong, but
sometimes it all feels like too much, and I want to go out
and get a low-tech thermometer and some hand tools.
I found something like the one my friend has here:
http://www.leevalley.com/us/garden/page.aspx?cat=2,43224&p=60068
