Electrical Circuit Quotes

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

We still don’t have a clue about what’s going on in the human brain. We have theories; we just don’t know for sure. We can’t build an electrical circuit, digital or analogue or other, that mimics the biological system. We can’t emulate the behavior. One day in the future, we think we can.

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

This week in live current events: your eyes. All power can be dangerous: Direct or alternating, you, socket to me. Plugged in and the grid is humming, this electricity, molecule-deep desire: particular friction, a charge strong enough to stop a heart or start it again; volt, re-volt-- I shudder, I stutter, I start to life. I've got my ion you, copper-top, so watch how you conduct yourself. Here's today's newsflash: a battery of rolling blackouts in California, sudden, like lightning kisses: sudden, whitehot darkness and you're here, fumbling for that small switch with an urgent surge strong enough to kill lesser machines. Static makes hair raise, makes things cling, makes things rise like a gathering storm charging outside our darkened house and here I am: tempest, pouring out mouthfulls of tsunami on the ground, I've got that rain-soaked kite, that drenched key. You know what it's for, circuit-breaker, you know how to kiss until it's hertz.

She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, "We've got to try, anyway.

The revolution is built on three simple facts. (1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

We wind a simple ring of iron with coils; we establish the connections to the generator, and with wonder and delight we note the effects of strange forces which we bring into play, which allow us to transform, to transmit and direct energy at will. We arrange the circuits properly, and we see the mass of iron and wires behave as though it were endowed with life,

It was like a blackout in reverse. Since around nine o’clock, no lamps could be switched off, no electrical appliances powered down. If you tried to pull out the plug there was an alarming crackling sound and sparks flew between the outlet and the plug, preventing the circuit from being broken.

The toxicity of an electrical wiring error is a function of the dirty electricity and the electrical items plugged into the faulty electrical circuit.

A branch of electrical theory called network theory deals with the electrical properties of electrical circuits, or networks, made by interconnecting three sorts of idealized electrical structures:

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.

Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement—waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house.

Using Hollerith’s tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight. It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information, and the company that Hollerith founded became in 1924, after a series of mergers and acquisitions, the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM.

His thinning hair was standing on end, as if the frustration of dealing with his wife’s pigheadedness had overloaded his circuits, sending a jolt of electric current through him.

The alleged sheep contained an oat-tropic circuit; at the sight of such cereals it would scramble up convincingly and amble over.

In solar photovoltaics, it is much better to over-size the electrical components of the DC circuit than to under-size it.

A modern CPU is just a circuit of millions of microscopic wires and logic gates that manipulate electric currents of information.

It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity tat bloom to life speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, 'The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.' And yet, he continues, 'We know so little about it that even a child's questions should be seriously entertained.

There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.

We send electric currents down orderly runs of circuits and switches, but the shape that electricity wants to take is of a living thing, a fern, a bare branch. The strike point in the center, the power seeking outward.

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task. We know that they followed that instruction, because the timing of the visual target had no effect on the main task. If the critical letter was presented at a time of high demand, the subjects simply did not see it. When the transformation task was less demanding, detection performance was better.

The difference between the Platonic theory and the morphic-resonance hypothesis can be illustrated by analogy with a television set. The pictures on the screen depend on the material components of the set and the energy that powers it, and also on the invisible transmissions it receives through the electromagnetic field. A sceptic who rejected the idea of invisible influences might try to explain everything about the pictures and sounds in terms of the components of the set – the wires, transistors, and so on – and the electrical interactions between them. Through careful research he would find that damaging or removing some of these components affected the pictures or sounds the set produced, and did so in a repeatable, predictable way. This discovery would reinforce his materialist belief. He would be unable to explain exactly how the set produced the pictures and sounds, but he would hope that a more detailed analysis of the components and more complex mathematical models of their interactions would eventually provide the answer. Some mutations in the components – for example, by a defect in some of the transistors – affect the pictures by changing their colours or distorting their shapes; while mutations of components in the tuning circuit cause the set to jump from one channel to another, leading to a completely different set of sounds and pictures. But this does not prove that the evening news report is produced by interactions among the TV set’s components. Likewise, genetic mutations may affect an animal’s form and behaviour, but this does not prove that form and behaviour are programmed in the genes. They are inherited by morphic resonance, an invisible influence on the organism coming from outside it, just as TV sets are resonantly tuned to transmissions that originate elsewhere.

For simplicity’s sake, they assumed that the brain as a whole could be modeled as a vast, interconnected electrical circuit, with neurons serving as both the wires and the switches. That is, each neuron would receive electrical input from dozens or hundreds of other neurons. And if the total stimulation passed a certain threshold, that neuron would then “fire” and send an output pulse to dozens or hundreds more. The result—today it would be known as a “neural network” model—was admittedly a gross oversimplification of reality.

I am inundated with feeling. I feel like a pinball machine on tilt. All the buzzers are ringing, lights are flashing, and I am about to fry my circuits. Nothing is coming in,and nothing is going out. I feel electrified. The wires ignited, sparked, and fizzled. I want it all to slow down. I go right to the water to douse my flame. I immerse myself in the hot water. I want to wash the smells off my body. I can smell Isabella's hair, her breath, and her child vaginal scent. My hair smells of smoke,and I want to wash Francis off me.

System 2 and the electrical circuits in your home both have limited capacity, but they respond differently to threatened overload. A breaker trips when the demand for current is excessive, causing all devices on that circuit to lose power at once. In contrast, the response to mental overload is selective and precise: System 2 protects the most important activity, so it receives the attention it needs; “spare capacity” is allocated second by second to other tasks. In our version of the gorilla experiment, we instructed the participants to assign priority to the digit task.

These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits. It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

Those important brain circuits, the ones that enabled most of us to avoid saying the wrong thing, were simply not there in Martha's case; or fired in the wrong order; or were short-circuiting. In other words, Martha Drummond was an electrical problem. And understanding people as electrical problems undoubtedly helped one to tolerate them.

They tested every electrical system. They rebuilt instruments, checked circuits, wiggled wires, dusted plugs. They climbed into the dish and placed duct tape over every seam and rivet. They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean5 of what they referred to in a later paper as ‘white dielectric material’, or what is known more commonly as bird shit.

(1) Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. (2) Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. (3) The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our movements and thoughts become.

... the intercessor is not so much like a lamp in the electric circuit as a radio which is both a receiver and transmitter. The receiving aspect is often quite overlooked in the ministry of intercession. Communion with God should surely be a two-way traffic. We speak of prayer as our ‘coming to the mercy seat’, but when God first spoke about this to Moses He said nothing about it as a place where Moses would speak with Him, but rather as a place where He would speak with Moses (Exod. 2 5 : 22). In other words, the mercy seat was to be first a place of revelation, and then a place of intercession. This revelation may indeed be given to the intercessor as he prays, but it will often be necessary to tune in and hear what eaven is saying that he may know how to pray. To learn how to talk to God we must first learn how to listen to God.

Shortly after World War II, decades of investigation into the internal workings of the solids yielded a new piece of electronic hardware called a transistor (for its actual invention, three scientists at Bell Laboratories won the Nobel Prize). Transistors, a family of devices, alter and control the flow of electricity in circuits; one standard rough analogy compares their action to that of faucets controlling the flow of water in pipes.

If you weren’t an android,” Rick interrupted, “if I could legally marry you, I would.” Rachael said, “Or we could live in sin, except that I’m not alive.” “Legally you’re not. But really you are. Biologically. You’re not made out of transistorized circuits like a false animal; you’re an organic entity.” And in two years, he thought, you’ll wear out and die. Because we never solved the problem of cell replacement, as you pointed out. So I guess it doesn’t matter anyhow. This is my end, he said to himself. As a bounty hunter. After the Batys there won’t be any more. Not after this, tonight. “You look so sad,” Rachael said. Putting his hand out, he touched her cheek. “You’re not going to be able to hunt androids any longer,” she said calmly. “So don’t look sad. Please.” He stared at her. “No bounty hunter ever has gone on,” Rachael said. “After being with me. Except one. A very cynical man. Phil Resch. And he’s nutty; he works out in left field on his own.” “I see,” Rick said. He felt numb. Completely. Throughout his entire body. “But this trip we’re taking,” Rachael said, “won’t be wasted, because you’re going to meet a wonderful, spiritual man.

It’s hard to blame Representative Petri for missing the point. The value of studying fireflies is endlessly surprising. For example, before 1994, Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them. Once the cause was identified, it became clear how to relieve the congestion. Electrical engineers devised a decentralized architecture for clocking computer circuits more efficiently, by mimicking the fireflies’ strategy for achieving synchrony at low cost and high reliability.

You can think of it this way: Thought is electrical activity—a bunch of neurons firing up and connecting to each other—but all this mental circuitry has to function in a liquid environment that swarms with hormones and other small molecules whose levels can register in the mind as emotions. When the liquid starts turning into tar—or worse, going into whirlpool mode and threatening total disintegration—the only way out is to strengthen the neuronal scaffolding and try to keep the circuits dry. From “think in complete sentences” the rule evolved into “think.” So I would get to the answers by thinking—not by dreaming or imagining and of course not by praying or pleading to imaginary others.

Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!

Given their relationship with the locals and their general enthusiasm level, Doherty and Byrne had been assigned to go through a bazillion hours of closed-circuit TV footage, looking for regular unexplained visitors to Glenskehy, but the cameras hadn’t been positioned with this in mind and the best they could come up with was that they were fairly sure no one had driven into or out of Glenskehy by a direct route between ten and two on the night of the murder. This made Sam start talking about the housemates again, which made Frank point out the multiple ways someone could have got to Glenskehy without being picked up on CCTV, which made Byrne get snippy about suits who swanned down from Dublin and wasted everyone’s time with pointless busywork. I got the sense that the incident room was blanketed by a dense, electric cloud of dead ends and turf wars and that nasty sinking feeling.

The talent code is built on revolutionary scientific discoveries involving a neural insulator called myelin, which some neurologists now consider to be the holy grail of acquiring skill. Here's why. Every human skill, whether it's playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin's vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps a copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.

Perhaps I shall be understood better if I substitute the terminology of physics for that of the more appropriate psychology, and say that life will only flow in circuit; insulate it, and it becomes inert. Let us take the human personality as an electrical machine; it must be connected up with the power-house, which is God, the Source of all Life, or there will be no motive power; but equally it must be "earthed," or the power will not flow. Every human being must be "earthed" to the earth, both literally and metaphorically. The idealist tries to induce a complete insulation of all earth-contacts in order that the inflowing power may not be wasted; he fails to realise that the earth is one great magnet. Tradition declares from of old that the key to the Mysteries was written upon the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, whereon were inscribed the words, "As above, so below." Apply the principles of physics to psychology, and the riddle will be read. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

For nine months, the engineers had been testing and calibrating and retesting all aspects of the system, especially the behemoth Westinghouse dynamos. Lead engineer B. J. Lamme described what happened during one early test in Pittsburgh of a giant dynamo when numerous little temporary steel bolts had “loosened up under vibration, and finally shook into contact with each other, thus forming a short circuit…. In a moment there was one tremendous [electric] arc around the end of the windings of the entire machine…. It looked, at first glance, as though the whole infernal regions had broken loose. Everybody jumped for cover.” One man managed to shut down the machine, and gradually the huge flaming electrical arc that had engulfed the dynamo subsided. Peering forth from their shelters, the engineers then rushed back and “someone climbed underneath to see what had become of our man inside … expecting him to be badly scorched…. He said the fire came in all around him but did not touch him.”30 No one present had ever seen such a sight.

I described living cells as being crammed full of protein molecules. Acting individually or in small assemblies, they perform reiterated molecular processes that can be regarded, I argued, as a form of computation. Moreover, large numbers of proteins linked into huge interacting networks operate, in effect, like circuits of electrical or electronic devices. Networks of this kind are the basis for the animate wanderings of single cells and their ability to choose what to do next. Here I have broadened the view to encompass multiple cells - 'societies' of cells. Through a variety of strategies - including diffusive hormones, electrical signals, and mechanical interactions - the computational networks of individual cells are linked. During evolution, cells acquired the capacity to work together in social groups; it became advantageous for most cells to become highly specialised. Liver cells, muscle cells, skin cells, and so on abandoned their opportunities for unlimited replication. They began the communal expansion of interlinked abilities that led to the plants and animals we see around us today. But the basis of this diversification of cell chemistry was yet another form of computation - one that operates on DNA. Control mechanisms, again based on protein switches, created extensive but subtle modifications of the core genetic information.

Despite international calls for Chernobyl to be decommissioned at once, it endured a very gradual demise. On October 11th, 1991, just five years after the Unit 4 explosion, there was a third major accident at the plant, this time at Unit 2. Prior to the event, the Unit had been taken offline following another accident - this time a fire in its section of the turbine hall, which had broken out during minor turbogenerator repair work. After extinguishing the blaze, the generator had been isolated and its turbine coasted down to about 150 rpm when a faulty breaker switch closed, reconnecting it to the grid. The turbine rapidly sped up to 3000 rpm in under 30 seconds, then, according to a 1993 report by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “the influx of current to TG-4 overheated the conductor elements and caused a rapid degradation of the mechanical end joints of the rotor and excitation windings. A centrifugal imbalance developed and damaged generator bearings 10 through 14 and the seal oil system, allowing hydrogen gas and seal oil to leak from the generator enclosure. Electrical arcing and frictional heat ignited the leaking hydrogen and seal oil creating hydrogen flames 8 meters high, and dense smoke which obstructed the visibility of plant personnel. When the burning oil reached the busbar of the generator it caused a three-phase 120,000-amp short circuit.”265

The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions. Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. Science resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything—including its single source of light and warmth—makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet’s surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hint of who or even what it is, and only then can it start to relearn absolutely everything its forebears had already bothered to learn? Where is the artistry in a thinking engine whose sweetest fuel can only be embezzled from other thinking engines?

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

Television* means ‘to see from a distance’. The desire in man to do so has been there for ages. In the early years of the twentieth century many scientists experimented with the idea of using selenium photosensitive cells for converting light from pictures into electrical signals and transmitting them through wires. The first demonstration of actual television was given by J.L. Baird in UK and C.F. Jenkins in USA around 1927 by using the technique of mechanical scanning employing rotating discs.However, the real breakthrough occurred with the invention of the cathode ray tube and the success of V.K. Zworykin of the USA in perfecting the first camera tube (the iconoscope) based on the storage principle. By 1930 electromagnetic scanning of both camera and picture tubes and other ancillary circuits such as for beam deflection, video amplification, etc. were developed. Though television broadcast started in 1935, world political developments and the second world war slowed down the progress of television. With the end of the war, television rapidly grew into a popular medium for dispersion of news and mass entertainment. Television Systems At the outset, in the absence of any international standards, three monochrome (i.e. black and white) systems grew independently. These are the 525 line American, the 625 line European and the 819 line French systems. This naturally prevents direct exchange of programme between countries using different television standards.Later, efforts by the all world committee on radio and television (CCIR) for changing to a common 625 line system by all concerned proved ineffective and thus all the three systems have apparently come to stay. The inability to change over to a common system is mainly due to the high cost of replacing both the transmitting equipment and the millions of receivers already in use. However the UK, where initially a 415 line monochrome system was in use, has changed to the 625 line system with some modification in the channel bandwidth. In India, where television transmission started in 1959, the 625-B monochrome system has been adopted.

A detonation in space would generate a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) which could knock out electrical circuits and power grids across a continent. America’s EMP Commission, a body assembled by Congress to study such a threat, reckoned in 2008 that two-thirds of Americans might perish in the first year of a societal collapse that would follow a nuclear blast in space above the central United States.

The events in computers do not amount to genuine understanding. Indeed, given that symbols are symbols only to someone who understands that they are symbols, events in computers considered in isolation from conscious human beings do not even amount to the processing of symbols. There is merely the passage of minute electric currents along circuits which may or may not cause other physical events to happen, such as the lighting up of a screen in a certain pattern.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

Voltage is measured in volts. Current is measured in amperes. Resistance is measured in ohms. One volt is the electrical pressure required to cause 1 ampere of current to flow through a resistance of 1 ohm. Scientists have made experiments which show that 6280 trillion electrons pass a given point each second when there is 1 ampere of current in a circuit.

Electric Feel" All along the western front People line up to receive She got the power in her hand To shock you like you won't believe Saw her in the amazon With the voltage running through her skin Standing there with nothing on She gonna teach me how to swim I said ooh girl Shock me like an electric eel Baby girl You turn me on with your electric feel I said ooh girl Shock me like an electric eel Baby girl Turn me on with your electric feel All along the eastern shore Put your circuits in the sea This is what the world is for Making electricity You can feel it in your mind Oh you can do it all the time Plug it in and change the world You are my electric girl Said ooh girl Shock me like an electric eel Baby girl Turn me on with your electric feel I said ooh girl Shock me like an electric eel Baby girl Turn me on with your electric feel Do what you feel now Electric feel now Do what you feel now Electric feel now Do what you feel now Electric feel now Do what you feel now Electric feel now Do what you feel now Electric feel now

Now we saw that when you put motor and sensory nerves together into a reflex arc, the current flow formed an unbroken loop. This solved the mystery of what completed the circuit: The current returned through nerves, not some other tissue. Just as Gerard had found in the brain,nerves throughout the body were uniformly polarized, positive at the input fiber, or dendrite, and negative at the output fiber, or axon. We realized that this electrical polarization might be what guided the impulses to move in one direction only, giving coherence to the nervous system.

More than three hundred and two,” said Desh wryly. “One hundred billion,” said Kira emphatically. “One hundred billion! And on the order of one hundred trillion synaptic connections between them. Not to mention two million miles of axons. Electrical signals are constantly zipping along neuronal pathways like pinballs, creating thought and memory. The possible number of neuronal pathways that can be formed by the human brain are basically infinite. And a computer uses base two. A circuit can either be on or off; one or zero. But your brain is far more nuanced. The number of possible circuits your brain can use for calculation, or thought, or invention, puts the possible number available to computers to shame.” “Okay,” said Desh, nodding toward her

By analogy with electrical engineering, democracy might be defined as a system of safety switches and circuit breakers for protection against currents overloaded by the national or social struggle. No period of human history has been—even remotely—so overcharged with antagonisms such as ours… Under the impact of class and international contradictions that are too highly charged, the safety switches of democracy either burn out or explode. That is what the short circuit of dictatorship represents.

Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.

A wire attached to the brass axle, and a wire heading in a wire brush pressed against the copper disk, made a circuit with the galvanometer. When Faraday cranked the copper wheel through the magnetic field, the galvanometer registered a flow of induced electric current that continued so long as the disk was cranked. So electricity produced magnetism, and magnetism produced electricity. The two forces were indeed one powerful, invisible force: electromagnetism. That deep proof won Faraday the respect of the scientific world. It also cleared the way to generate electric charge steadily, in any volume, without the need for batteries. Faraday’s copper-disk generator was a simple magneto, a first example of a mechanism that would become common in automobiles and other machinery, a way to convert mechanical work into electricity.

To sum up: it's time to rewrite the maxim that practice makes perfect. The truth is, practice makes myelin, and myelin makes perfect. And myelin operates by a few fundamental principles. The firing of the circuit is paramount. Myelin is not built to respond to fond wishes or vague ideas or information that washes over us like a warm bath. The mechanism is built to respond to actions: the literal electrical impulses traveling down nerve fibers. It responds to urgent repetition. In a few chapters we'll discuss the likely evolutionary reasons, but for now we'll simply note that deep practice is assisted by the attainment of a primal state, one where we are attentive, hungry, and focused, even desperate. Myelin is universal. One size fits all skills. Our myelin doesn't “know” whether it's being used for playing shortstop or playing Schubert: regardless of its use, it grows according to the same rules. Myelin is meritocratic: circuits that fire get insulated. If you moved to China, your myelin would wrap fibers that help you conjugate Mandarin verbs. To put it another way, myelin doesn't care who you are—it cares what you do. Myelin wraps—it doesn't unwrap. Like a highway-paving machine, myelination happens in one direction. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can't un-insulate it (except through age or disease). That's why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviors—by myelinating new circuits.

The nine energy systems include the meridians, the chakras, the aura, the electrics, the Celtic Weave, the basic grid, the five rhythms, triple warmer, and the radiant circuits.

In Olsson’s view, there could be other ways to regulate electrical impulses in mycelial networks to create “brain-like circuits, gates, and oscillators.” In some fungi, hyphae are divided into compartments by pores, which can be sensitively regulated. Opening or closing a pore changes the strength of the signal that passes from one compartment to another, whether chemical, pressure, or electrical. If sudden changes in the electrical charge within a hyphal compartment could open or close a pore, Olsson mused, a burst of impulses could change the way subsequent signals passed along the hypha and form a simple learning loop. What’s more, hyphae branch. If two impulses converged on one spot, they would both influence pore conductivity, integrating signals from different branches. “You do not need much knowledge of how computers work to realize that such systems can create decision gates,” Olsson told me.

think that you probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you.

There were certain people in the hardcore traditional or revivalist folk movement who saw us as perhaps encroaching on their territory and taking liberties with “their” music,’ says Simon Nicol. ‘It’s a preposterous attitude, because they’re just songs, they don’t exist under glass, they’re not exhibits in a museum that you have to preserve in amber.’ In any case, remembers Swarbrick, the English folk circuit was in a pretty stagnant state by the end of the decade. ‘I used to go out with Ian Campbell to pubs and all you could hear was the dominoes clinking. It was an effort to get things going.

ca într-un gărduleţ, ca într-o dantelă metalică Privit în lumina vînătă a asfinţitului, Bucureștiul pare un șobolan mort, unde sînt eroii noștri, marii bărbaţi ai trecutului, cei din superproducţii, din cărţile de aur n-am norocul unui chinez, ginsberg și lenin blocaţi pe culoarele unei gări estice, jucăuși precum zeii între drogaţi și vînzătoarele de bilete cît de sinistru putea fi atunci time magazine? cît de sinistră intoxicarea de acum? În lumina crudă totul pare un film pentru pedofili unde e sufletul-nostru-ca-o-pasăre, unde e sănătatea noastră perfectă, gălăgia noastră perfectă, unde sînt extaticele vibraţii, unde sînt marijuana și visele, delirul și nenorocul din camere mici, asudate, revolta învechită ca un film cu ţărani. Sinele meu trist croșetează un pulover din părul lung al sinelui anilor șaizeci sinele meu trist nu vrea să fie cu gașca. Sinele meu trist se scufundă în cîmpul lui cu ciori roșii ca steagurile pe care ei nu le-au văzut sau le-au văzut și au zis că sînt căpșuni. Sinele meu trist pipăie pereţii camerei în care stau și simte ceva ca un curent electric. Oh, am decăzut în cîţiva ani și nici asta nu putem spune cu exactitate și fără să ne fie puţin rușine. Mîna ne tremură deja pe clanţă și ce va fi mai încolo asta chiar că nu vrem să știm. Cînd bem seara noaptea nu putem dormi televizorul merge în continuare, programul s-a terminat de mult Sinele meu trist linge ecranul ca într-un videoclip și o clipă se simte mai sigur pe sine. Culorile se amestecă pe retină, sîrmele se amestecă pe retină, ca într-un gărduleţ, ca într-o dantelă metalică. Nu mai vreau nimic din gălăgia asta. Nu vreau nici să mai aștept nu știu ce, nu vreau să trăiesc treizeci de ani, iar aici nu mai prea vreau să trăiesc deloc. Vreau pornografie și igienă în mijlocul unui deșert nuclear. Şi vreau bani și abţibilduri lisergice. Vreau o benzinărie în cîmp sau un bar de contrabandiști. Vreau să moară cvt și gc și db la fel de mult cum voiam cîndva casetofon. Vreau de fapt bani. Şi vreau bani. Şi vreau bani. Încet camera se umple cu apă. Încet ea devine o mlaștină vie. Încet sinele meu trist se tîrăște spre ecran și se cuibărește acolo ca într-o gaură vie. Între lămpi și circuite ca într-o gaură vie. Se deschide acolo mai trist ca un cimitir de elefanţi, mai trist ca un schelet de locomotivă carbonizată, ca un stern de pisică pe argila roșie, în soare. Încet mîinile se adună. Noaptea ne ridică în aer ca o lingură imensă, carnivoră. În est totul e bine, în vest totul e bine, în mîna mea stîngă totul e bine, în mîna mea dreaptă totul e bine. Sinele meu trist vede că totul e bine. Că moartea e de fapt o mașină stricată aruncată la cimitirul de mașini și că viaţa e și ea o mașină stricată aruncată la cimitirul de mașini. Bucureștiul se deschide ca o uriașă floare sifilitică și știu că nimic, nimic nu mai poate opri dezastrul zdrenţelor minţii mele de douăzeci și trei de ani. Nu sfinţenia Tangerului, nici narcoza, nici fluturii orbecăind prin abatoare, îngrozind lucrătorii. Nimic din toate acestea, nici dresajul, nici bisericuţele, nici sexul orașului violînd noaptea, nimic doar liniștea unui cîine înecat plutind în jos pe rîu, în soare.

Unemployment, too, has taken on new meaning. It is no longer a strategy of capital (the reserve army of labour). It is no longer a critical factor in the play of social relationships - if it were, since the danger level was passed long ago, it would necessarily have sparked unprecedented upheavals. What is unemployment today? It too is a sort of artificial satellite, a satellite of inertia, a mass with a charge of electricity that cannot even be described as a negative charge, for it is static: I refer to that increasingly large portion of society that is deepfrozen. Beneath the accelerating pace of the circuits and systems of exchange, beneath all the frenzied activity, there is something in us - in each of us - that slows down to the point where it fades out of circulation. This is the inertia point around which the whole of society eventually begins to gravitate. It is as though the two poles of our world had been brought into contact, shortcircuiting in such a way that they simultaneously hyperstimulate and enervate potential energies. This is no longer a crisis, but a fatal development - a catastrophe in slow motion.

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #20601, Bitsbox #CN329) with at least 30 rows. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery to the circuit. A standard LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) A 330 Ω resistor (Jameco #661386, Bitsbox #CR25330R) for limiting the current to the LED. A polarized 1000 µF capacitor (Jameco #158298, Bitsbox #EC1KU25)

Step 1: Start with the LED Circuit Follow the instructions from “Project #9: Your First Breadboard Circuit” on page 84, making sure you end up with a working circuit that lights an LED. Then, disconnect the battery and move on to the next step.

Step 2: Add the Capacitor Connect your capacitor to the battery. Because the capacitor is polarized, place the pin marked with a minus sign or a zero in the same breadboard row as the battery’s negative leg. Connect the other leg to the same row as the battery’s positive leg, as shown.

Step 3: Charge the Capacitor Connect the battery to the clip, and the LED should light up. At the same time, the battery should have very quickly charged the capacitor.

Step 4: Use the Capacitor to Light the LED Watch the LED while removing the battery. The LED shouldn’t turn off right away when you disconnect the battery. Instead, it should stay lit for a second or so and then fade out slowly until there’s no more energy left in the capacitor.

Step 5: What If the Circuit Doesn’t Work? First, check whether the circuit works without the capacitor. If not, then go back to Step 1 and get the LED circuit working before you move forward. If the LED lights up with the battery connected but turns off the instant you remove the battery, then something is wrong with the capacitor part of your circuit. Check that the capacitor’s positive leg is connected to the positive battery leg (row 1 in the photo) and that the other leg is connected to the negative battery leg (row 10 in the photo). If the circuit looks correct, confirm that the capacitor value is at least 1000 µF; the value should be written on the capacitor. If it’s less than 1000 µF, try a bigger capacitor.

CHECKING CONNECTIONS AS A TEAM Finding circuit problems is called debugging, and it’s easier to do with some help. When you get stuck, ask someone else to look at the circuit diagram and say the connections out loud one by one while you check the real connections. For example, if your friend is reading the schematic and you’re looking at the breadboard, you might have a conversation like this: Friend: “The positive side of the battery is connected to one side of R1.” You: “Got it!” Friend: “The positive side of the battery is also connected to pins 4 and 8 of the IC.” You: “Got it!” Friend: “The other side of R1 is connected to pin 7 of the chip and to one side of the resistor R2.” You: “Oh, wait! I don’t have the connection to pin 7!” And just like that, you’ll discover the problem.

We have already said that many devices will have no need to be on the Internet. But, perhaps certain devices won’t be allowed to be on the Internet. Just as today’s electrical codes require a strict separation between 120 volt power circuits and low-voltage wiring such as doorbell circuits, it may be that strict rules about sequestering certain basic functions from the public information space will prove to be the ultimate protection against malicious remote tampering. Similarly, certain combinations of computational and physical power in the same device might be proscribed. One

ADD A BUZZER TO YOUR GAME Congratulations: You’ve finished the last project in the book! Now, it’s up to you to decide what to make next. If you’re not sure where to start, why not add more circuits to your reaction game? The LED in the middle is where you want the light to stop, and I suggest adding a sound circuit to bring some excitement to hitting your target. To do this, you could use an active buzzer like the one in “Project #2: Intruder Alarm” on page 11, as shown in this partial circuit diagram. The darker part of this circuit shows new components you’d need in order to add a buzzer to the reaction game project. The lighter components are just a section of the original circuit diagram. Connect the positive leg of the middle LED through a 1 kΩ resistor to the base of an NPN transistor. Then connect the buzzer to the transistor’s collector. Connect the positive side of your battery to the other side of the buzzer, and connect the negative side of the battery to the transistor’s emitter. You should end up with a circuit that makes a little beep every time the light passes the middle LED. If you can stop the light on the middle LED, the buzzer should beep continuously to indicate that you’ve hit the main target. When you’ve customized the game to your liking, solder it onto a prototyping board. Maybe you’ll even want to place it in a nice box to hide the electronics and show only the buttons and LEDs.

TRY IT OUT: CHANGE THE LIGHT’S SPEED To change the speed and difficulty of the game, play around with different values for R1, R2, and C1 around the 555 timer. Smaller values will make the game go faster. Larger values will make the game go slower. Flip to “How to Set the Output Speed of the 555 Timer” on page 166 for the calculations to figure out specific resistor and capacitor values based on the frequency you want. Note that R1 should not be less than 1 kΩ, as lower values might damage the 555 timer. But what if you want to change the difficulty on the go? Just replace resistor R2 with a potentiometer. Then you can change that resistance value by rotating the potentiometer shaft, which changes the speed!

Check for Power If the connection to the NAND-gate IC is correct, use a multimeter to measure the output voltage from the start/stop circuit to see whether it’s working correctly. Set your multimeter to measure voltage. Make sure the black measurement lead is connected to the multimeter’s COM socket, and the red measurement lead is connected to the V socket. Touch the tip of the black lead of the multimeter to the negative side of the battery, and touch the red lead to pin 11 on the 4011 NAND-gate IC. You should see a high signal—about 9 V—after clicking the stop button and a low signal—about 0 V—after pushing the start button. If not, check the connections of the SR latch circuit to find the error.

Check for Bad and Good Beeps Now, plug your battery clip into the breadboard as you would normally, but without the battery. Touch one measurement lead tip to the positive connector and the other to the negative connector. If you hear a beep, there’s a short circuit, and you need to fix it! Check all your connections to the positive and negative supply columns. Next, check the connection between pin 11 on the 4011 NAND-gate IC and pin 13 on the 4017 decade counter to make sure they’re connected correctly. Use the continuity tester to check that you have a connection by carefully touching the lead tips on the IC pins. There isn’t much space between IC pins, so take care to be sure each tip only touches the correct pin. This time, a beep is a good sign.

NOTE Many electronics enthusiasts also call continuity mode beep mode.

Check the Continuity First, check that you don’t have a short circuit between the positive and negative columns. To do this, use the continuity function on your multimeter. A continuity test checks for a direct connection between two points in a circuit. The symbol for the continuity tester usually looks like the one shown here. You don’t want a direct connection between the positive and negative columns because that would short-circuit the battery and stop the game from working. Use the continuity tester to check for short circuits. Turn the dial on your multimeter so that it points toward the continuity symbol. Plug the black measurement lead into the multimeter’s COM socket, and plug the red measurement lead into the multimeter’s V socket. Touch the tip of the black and red measurement leads to each other, and you should hear a beep to indicate that there’s a direct connection.

Step 5: What If the Game Isn’t Working? If you’ve followed my instructions so far, the circuits from Steps 1 and 2 should be working. If your circuit isn’t working, the only sources of error left are the start/stop circuit you just built and the connection from this circuit to the 4017 decade counter.

Step 4: Practice Your Reaction Time! All that’s left is to connect the battery to the supply columns. The button at the bottom of the board is the Reset button. Use this to start the game and to restart the game after each player attempts to stop the light. The button next to the LEDs should stop the light when the game is running. See how many turns it takes you to get to 50 points!

Step 3: Build the Start and Stop Circuit The last piece of this project is the button circuit that starts and stops the LEDs. Make these connections now: Connect one push button at the bottom of the breadboard, across the notch in the middle. Plug the 4011 NAND-gate IC into the breadboard, a couple of rows above the button. Make sure its chip marking points toward row 1 on the breadboard. Place the second button above the IC on the right component side so that it’s easy to reach it with your finger. Connect the two resistors, R13 and R14, as shown in the circuit diagram. Then, use jumper wires to make the remaining connections in the SR latch circuit, as shown in the following breadboard diagram. Connect the positive and negative supply columns to the NAND-gate IC (pins 14 and 7, respectively), and connect the wire from pin 11 of the NAND-gate IC to pin 13 of the 4017 decade counter.

Step 2: Build the LED-Controlling Circuit Now, you’re going to connect the 4017 decade counter with resistors and LEDs. There are a lot of connections, so take as much time as you need to get them all correct. Plug the 4017 decade counter into the breadboard so that the middle of the decade counter is around row 20, with the chip marker pointing up toward row 1. Then, take out five LEDs and ten 100 Ω resistors. Connect each LED’s negative (short) leg to the negative supply column on the right, and connect each positive (long) leg to its own empty row in the component area on the right. Place the green LED in the middle, the two blue ones on each side of the green LED, and the red ones on each end. Then, connect the ten 100 Ω resistors. In the circuit diagram, notice that pins 1 to 7 and pins 9 to 11 of the 4017 decade counter each connect to one side of a resistor. The other side of each resistor needs to be on a row by itself. Take care to ensure the resistor legs don’t accidentally touch one another. Look at the following breadboard circuit to see how I connected them: Now, connect the LEDs to the resistors on the 4017 decade counter, and connect the decade counter circuit to the 555 timer circuit according to the circuit diagram. Jumper wires are the best way to make those connections. From each resistor, connect a jumper wire to the corresponding LED. Look at the circuit diagram and notice, for example, that the other side of the resistor connected to pin 4 of the 4017 decade counter should connect to the positive pin of the green LED in the middle. Go through the pins in the circuit diagram to figure out which LED to connect each resistor to. Connect pins 8 and 15 of the 4017 decade counter to the negative supply column, and connect pin 16 to the positive supply column. Use a wire to connect the output from the 555 timer (pin 3) to the clock input of the 4017 decade counter (pin 14). Make sure that you have positive and negative connections in all of your power supply columns. The breadboard I recommend in this project’s Shopping List (page 267) divides its power supply columns into two sections, one upper and one lower. Just connect each of the upper and lower halves on the left side with a wire to bridge the gap, as shown. Do the same on the right side. Alternatively, use two jumper wires from the left columns to the right columns. You can use a jumper wire, or you can cut off a small piece of wire, as I’ve done in this photo. Then, use two long jumper wires to connect the lower-left power supply columns with the two lower-right columns. When you’re done connecting the two circuits and all the power supply columns, your breadboard should look like this:

Before you move on to the next step, check that this circuit is working by connecting an LED with a resistor to the output of the 555 timer as follows: Connect the negative side (short leg) of an LED to the output on pin 3 of the 555 timer. Connect the positive side (long leg) of the LED to a 100 Ω resistor, and connect the other side of this resistor to the positive supply column. Connect your battery clip to one of the supply column pairs as usual. Then plug in the battery to check that the circuit works. If your LED blinks really fast, then you’re ready to move on. If not, recheck your connections to find out where the error is. When you know the 555 timer circuit works, unplug the LED, 100 Ω resistor, and battery clip.

Step 1: Build the 555 Timer Circuit Plug the 555 timer into the breadboard all the way at the top so that you’ll have room for the other parts of the circuits farther down. Then, connect the capacitors and resistors to the IC according to this project’s circuit diagram. The capacitor I suggest in this project’s Shopping List is a nonpolarized capacitor, so it doesn’t matter which way you connect it. If you use a polarized capacitor instead, connect it according to the plus marking in the circuit diagram. Use wires to make connections as needed, as I show in this breadboard diagram. In this project, it’s best to use the supply column pairs on both sides to make connections easier and keep everything as tidy as possible. The breadboard that I recommend in this project’s Shopping List doesn’t have blue and red markings, but the positive and negative columns are the same as in breadboards with the stripes. The left and right sides of the breadboard each have a pair of supply columns. The positive supply column is the left column in each pair, and the negative supply column is the right column in each pair. Use a red wire to connect the positive column on one side to the positive column on the other side, and do the same using a black wire with the negative columns. As you follow my instructions, connect everything in the 555 timer circuit that should connect to VCC to one of the positive supply columns, and connect everything that should connect to GND to one of the negative supply columns.

Tools A wire cutter (Jameco #35482, Bitsbox #TL008) to cut small pieces of wire. A multimeter (Jameco #2206061, Bitsbox #TL057, Rapid Electronics #55-6662) to debug your circuit if it’s not working correctly.

Shopping List A breadboard (Jameco #2212218, Bitsbox #CN204) with at least 60 rows. Breadboard jumper wires (Jameco #2237044, Bitsbox #CN236)—you’ll need around 35 for this project. Standard hookup wire works, too. A standard 9 V battery to power the circuit. A 9 V battery clip (Jameco #11280, Bitsbox #BAT033) to connect the battery. A 555 timer IC (Jameco #904085, Bitsbox #QU001) to create the timing. A 10 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691104, Bitsbox #CR2510K) to set the game speed. A 100 kΩ resistor (Jameco #691340, Bitsbox #CR25100K) to set the game speed. A 1 µF capacitor (Jameco #768183, Bitsbox #CC006) to set the game speed. A 4017 decade counter IC (Jameco #12749, Bitsbox #QU020) to control the LEDs. Two standard blue LEDs (Jameco #2193889, Bitsbox #OP033) Two standard red LEDs (Jameco #333973, Bitsbox #OP002) A standard green LED (Jameco #34761, Bitsbox #OP003) Ten 100 Ω resistors (Jameco #690620, Bitsbox #CR25100R) for limiting the current to the LEDs. A 4011 NAND-gate IC (Jameco #12634, Bitsbox #QU018) to create the SR latch for starting and stopping the game. Two 1 kΩ resistors (Jameco #690865, Bitsbox #CR251K) to act as pull-up resistors for the start/stop circuit. Two push buttons (Jameco #119011, Bitsbox #SW087), one for resetting the game and one for playing.

AN LED REACTION GAME It’s time to put all the pieces I showed you together to build the reaction game. This circuit has a lot of connections, but I know you can make it. Just don’t rush. Take your time and test each part of the circuit after the step where I explain how to build it. I also recommend using a bigger breadboard than you’ve used in the previous projects, because this circuit is huge!

A Latch to Start and Stop the Light Do you remember the SR latch from “Saving One Bit at a Time” on page 240? The start/stop circuit for this game is a similar SR latch but built with two NAND gates. (The SR latch in Chapter 11 used NOR gates.) The SR latch is a circuit that can remember a single bit. Its output is either 0 or 1, and it keeps that number until it gets set or reset with a new input. You can create a circuit that tells the latch what to output with two buttons: one for setting the output to 1 and one for setting the output to 0. Using NAND gates instead of NOR gates means the buttons must make the inputs low to output a 1. In this circuit, it doesn’t matter whether you click the buttons quickly or slowly. The 1-button always sets the output to 1, and the 0-button always sets the output to 0. That’s perfect for the reaction game! Connecting the output to the start/stop pin, or pin 13, on the decade counter gives you a button for starting and stopping the LEDs.

A Counter to Turn the LEDs On To control the LEDs, you’ll use a decade counter, which is an IC that counts input pulses. Every time the clock input on pin 14 goes from low to high, the counter increments by one. It counts from 0 to 9, and it has 10 outputs marked 0 to 9. For example, when the counter has counted three input pulses, output 3 (that is, pin 7) is high, and the other pins are low. If you connect an LED to output 3, then when the counter is at three, the LED will turn on. If you connect LEDs to several output pins, then as the counter increases, the LEDs turn on in order, according to their output pins. When the counter is at 9 and receives a 10th input pulse, it goes back to 0 and turns the output pins on in order again. But the counter counts pulses only if pin 13 is low. This means you can use pin 13 to tell the game when to start moving the light across the LEDs and when to stop the light. Each output has a resistor to reduce the current through the LED and make sure the LED doesn’t get destroyed. Because two output pins connect to each LED, the resistors keep the voltage to each LED high, even though one output will be low and one will be high. The resistors also ensure that two outputs aren’t connected directly together, which could damage the IC when one output is high and the other low.

A 555 Timer to Set the Light Speed The circuit that sets the reaction game’s speed will be built around a 555 timer, and it’s similar to the circuits you built in Chapter 8. The components in this circuit diagram will set the game to a “medium” speed: it’s not super fast, and it’s not super slow. Every time the output from the 555 timer goes from low to high, the light moves one step to the side. The number of times the output from the 555 timer goes high per second is the frequency of the output. As I showed in Chapter 8, the formula for calculating the frequency of the output of the 555 timer is The following values from the 555 timer circuit diagram correspond to that formula: R1 = 100 kΩ R2 = 10 kΩ C1 = 1 µF Plug these into the formula, keeping in mind that 1 µF = 0.000001 F and 120 kΩ = 120,000 Ω, and you get this: This means the output will go high 12 times per second and the light will change places 12 times per second. You can experiment with the component values for R1, R2, and C1 later to speed up or slow down the game.

WHY IS IT CALLED VCC? The positive voltage symbol is called VCC because of old naming conventions. VCC was the voltage supplied to the collector side of a transistor in common transistor circuits, usually through a resistor or some other components. The collector is where the “CC” comes from. You’ve used a bipolar junction transistor throughout this book, but there’s another type of transistor called a field-effect transistor (FET). The pin that equals the collector on this type of transistor is called the drain, so the voltage that was supplied to the drain side of the FET was called VDD.

MEET THE REACTION GAME CIRCUITS The reaction game will consist of three circuits: A 555 timer circuit that determines the speed of the game A counter that controls which LED light to turn on An SR latch that will add a reset button and an action button This section explains each circuit, but to help you understand their diagrams, let’s meet two new circuit symbols. Meet the VCC and GND Symbols Circuit diagrams don’t always use a battery symbol like the one used throughout this book. Sometimes they use the VCC (or VDD) and GND symbols instead. If nothing in the circuit diagram or its description says otherwise, you can assume that VCC represents the positive side of the battery and that GND represents the negative side, or ground. The symbols sometimes look a little different, but the VCC symbol usually shows a wire connecting down from its symbol to the circuit, while the GND symbol shows a wire connecting up from the symbol to the circuit. In bigger circuit diagrams, like the one you’re going to build from in this chapter, these symbols make the diagram much easier to draw and understand.

LET’S MAKE A GAME! You’ve built all sorts of small circuits in this book, and each circuit was designed to teach you a particular concept. In this chapter, you’ll combine all your new skills to build a reaction game. The game has a row of five LEDs that light up one at a time so that a light appears to run back and forth. The goal of the game is to stop the light when it’s in the middle of the five LEDs. That gives you 10 points. If you stop it on an LED next to the middle one, you get 5 points. But if you stop it on one of the end LEDs, you lose all your points and have to start over from 0. Try to reach 50 points! You can play this game by yourself to practice your reaction time, or with as many friends as you want. If you’re competing with friends, I suggest giving each player only one attempt at stopping the light before the next player gets a turn.

This is, in fact, exactly how electrical engineers go about understanding and debugging circuits such as computer boards (to reverse engineer a competitor’s product, for example), using logic analyzers that visualize computer signals. Neuroscience has not yet had access to sensor technology that would achieve this type of analysis, but that situation is about to change. Our tools for peering into our brains are improving at an exponential pace. The resolution of noninvasive brain-scanning devices is doubling about every twelve months (per unit volume).31 We see comparable improvements in the speed of brain scanning image reconstruction:

Under certain circumstances semiconductors are also known to be good “rectifiers”; that is, they allow an electric current passing through them to move in only one direction. This property made them potentially useful in certain kinds of electronic circuits. Shockley believed there could be a way to get them to amplify a current as well. He intuited that one common semiconductor—copper oxide—was a good place to start.

Scientists and engineers tend to divide their work into two large categories, sometimes described as basic research and directed research. Some of the most crucial inventions and discoveries of the modern world have come about through basic research—that is, work that was not directed toward any particular use. Albert Einstein’s picture of the universe, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Niels Bohr’s blueprint of the atomic nucleus, the Watson-Crick “double helix” model of DNA—all these have had enormous practical implications, but they all came out of basic research. There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs. The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor. A British physicist, Sir Ieuan Madlock, Her Majesty’s Chief Science Advisor, called the integrated circuit “the most remarkable technology ever to hit mankind.” A California businessman, Jerry Sanders, founder of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., offered a more pointed assessment: “Integrated circuits are the crude oil of the eighties.” All

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

It’s more than just an electrical conductor, it’s a superconductor. “You might think of it this way: the conductor is a road with lots of obstacles in it. The electrons carrying the charge are deflected from their path so the traffic is slowed up. But this plastic is like a wide speedway. The electrons can move in large loops and avoid all the obstacles. So they go around and around at high speed, and if the speedway is a circle, they will never stop.” “Never?” Danny gazed up at the Professor in wonder. “You mean it would be a kind of perpetual motion? But I thought that wasn’t possible.” “Nevertheless, that’s just what it would be.” Professor Bullfinch leaned forward to inspect the plastic. “Look here. The two ends of this coil are touching. It forms a closed ring. When you dropped the cable, it started a charge going through the coil. Now, my boy, a moving charge of electricity flowing around a circuit produces a magnetic field. What we have here is a very powerful ring magnet, so powerful that when I tried to touch it the magnetic field caught and held the metal of my wrist watch.” “A supermagnet,” said Danny. “That’s right. And it will go on being a magnet, with the current flowing on and on around the circle until I break the current. Like this.” Professor Bullfinch glanced about. He found a pair of heavy rubber gloves and put them on. He seized the coil and pulled its two ends apart. There was a flash and a snap. The Professor turned to Dr. Fenster. “As you can see, this means—” he was beginning.

the air of expectation, empty, one last static slip, as if breaking the circuit on the electric fence but her mind had traveled miles up to this point, and she could only go alone

Shannon was interested in building a machine that could play chess—and more generally in building mechanisms that imitated thought. In 1940, he published his master’s thesis, which was titled “A Symbolic Analysis of Relay Switching Circuits.” In it, he showed that it was possible to build electrical circuits equivalent to expressions in Boolean algebra. In Shannon’s circuits, switches that were open or closed corresponded to logical variables of Boolean algebra that were true or false. Shannon demonstrated a way of converting any expression in Boolean algebra into an arrangement of switches.

If for some reason the normal response is blocked—for example, when people are held down, trapped, or otherwise prevented from taking effective action, be it in a war zone, a car accident, domestic violence, or a rape—the brain keeps secreting stress chemicals, and the brain’s electrical circuits continue to fire in vain.2 Long after the actual event has passed,