Slashdot Mirror
R.I.P for D.I.Y Or Long Live Open Source?
Embedded Geek writes "Scientific American has an article on the decline of science hobbyists. It presents a long litany of woe you'd expect about the "Good Old Days" (the death of classic electronic tinkering magazines, Edmund Scientific's corporate changes, and the cancelation of SciAm's own "Amateur Scientist" column), but also discusses some of the real trends in technology that have caused these changes. Declining manufacturing costs now make it cheaper to buy a telescope, radio, or computer than to build one yourself. The increased complexity of our gadgets doesn't help either (Ever tried to fix surface mount components with a soldering iron at your kitchen table? Don't!!)
"
Personally, I found the tranformation of science amateurs into "quasi-professionals" intriguing. The Society for Amateur Scientists now holds sessions on how to publish research and how to claim tax deductions for home laboratories. Also, amateur astronmers are making great strides in comet discovery. Being that most of the people in the open source movement are software professionals, it becomes easy to draw an analogy between it and tinkering of yore.
Cheaper professional quality equipment doesn't mean an end to amateur science. It just means a refocus.
Where 20 years ago, the efforts of the amateur were largely directed to the construction of equipment, now he or she can work at actual research.
This is of course an extreme generalization, but just because the days of saudering irons and garages might be winding down, that doesn't mean that dedicated individuals outside of the academic and professional communities will no longer be contributing to the advancement of science.
I will miss the amateur column in Sci Am though, I got a lot of good ideas from there.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I forget who said it, but it bears repeating: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." It's the same thing. If my friend's interests were with tinkering with lenses and long metal tubes, he'd be doing that.
If there were some special need he had that no manufacturer met, some special lens he needed, maybe this would be an issue. But companies stay in business by providing what their customers want. Especially when their customers are chiefly hobbyists.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
I did what the Society for Amateur scientists suggests and set up a home laboratory i collect tax deductions on. Setting up a home laboratory is easy, you can have fun with it, and make some profit as well. I'm a big proponent of it. I do research with mine. In chemistry. Chemistry research.
It of course has nothing to do with Ecstasy at all.
What? the DanceSafe Bumper stickers? Um.. i just, uh.. support their cause and all. That's all. Excuse me, i have to go now.
From this page, a very nice history of the column in SciAm (though it was apparently a bit optimistic at the end of the piece):
A Brief History of
"The Amateur Scientist"
Albert Ingalls
"The Amateur Scientist" traces its pedigree to 1928, when famed astronomer Albert Ingalls began the column as "The Backyard Astronomer." Ingalls told amateurs how they could get personally involved in astronomy by building professional-quality instruments and carry out cutting-edge observations. Eventually Ingalls chose to broaden the column's scope to include "how-to's" from all fields of science. When he did, he also changed the department's name to "The Amateur Scientist."
C. L. Stong
Ingalls wrote his column for almost 30 years. When he died in 1954 the publisher selected C. L. Stong to continue the feature. Stong was an electrical engineer for Westinghouse and a master tinkerer who brilliantly extended the column, frequently peppering it with extremely sophisticated projects including home-built lasers and atom smashers. Many working professional scientists say that they first got hooked on science through Stong's amazing columns.
In 1960 Stong compiled a book titled The Amateur Scientist, (Simon and Schuster) the only collection of articles that has ever been published from this column. However, limited to paper and ink, Stong could only fit in 57 projects. Despite being only a partial anthology, never being advertised in Scientific American , and appearing long before the rise of home schooling, Stong's book sold over 10,000 copies. It went out of print in 1972 and is much sought after today by amateur scientists.
Jearl Walker
Stong ran the department for over 20 years until he died in 1977. In 1978, Scientific American hired Jearl Walker, Ph.D. to take over. Walker had caught the publisher's attention thanks to The Flying Circus of Physics, a book Walker wrote which highlighted the fascinating physics of the everyday world. Under Walker's stewardship "The Amateur Scientist" presented fewer how-to projects, and instead focused on the physics of common phenomena. Walker's columns are still frequently consulted by educators and students alike.
Walker resigned from Scientific American in 1990 after 12 years. Collectively, Ingalls, Stong and Walker account for 90 percent of all articles.
Forrest Mims
After Walker left, Scientific American decided to rededicate the column to hands-on projects and so they hired Forrest Mims III, a renowned writer of books for Radio Shack and an accomplished amateur scientist. They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins. Not wanting to be perceived as supporting Creationism, Scientific American fired Mims. Mims charged religious discrimination and the story was carried through most major US news outlets.
Although the incident didn't diminish Scientific American's commitment to the column, it did make them gun-shy about hiring another amateur scientist to write it. But professionals tend to be too narrowly focused in their own disciplines. The publisher invited many potential columnists to submit individual articles, and most of these were published under "The Amateur Scientist." But the magazine was unable to find anyone with both professional credentials and the incredible breadth of science knowledge necessary to recapture the popularity the column enjoyed under Stong and Ingalls. And without a regular columnist, the department languished, appearing only sporadically between 1990 and 1995. Most Scientific American readers stopped looking for it when they got a new magazine.
Shawn Carlson
In 1995 the editorial staff discovered the Society for Amateur Scientists. It's Founder and Executive Director was Dr. Shawn Carlson, a physicist and established science writer who had left academe a year earlier to devote his career to helping amateur scientists. Dr. Carlson took over the column in November of that year and immediately returned the column's focus to cutting-edge projects that amateurs can do inexpensively at home. Today, over 1 million Scientific American readers turn to "The Amateur Scientist" every month. The column has never been more popular.
Got Wisdom?
I remember when I was a kid, people actually used to be able to fix thier own TV's and stereo's. My parents had this really cool stereo that included a circuit diagram. (Who does that anymore?) Now adays it requires special training and tools to fix some of these things, IF you can even find spare parts. And if you do there isn't any guarentee that the parts will even be cheaper, than the cost of a new one. The compressor on my fridge goes out. I get a quote for $540 to fix it. I only paid 560 dollars for the thing brand new. I ended up buying a new one. The picture tube goes out on my TV. Well I didn't try to have it fixed. I just bought a new one.
The scale of economics in building consumer devices in 3rd world countries is so great that it isn't really worth the cost of having them repaired. It's often cheaper to buy an new one, and even if it isn't the new features available in the latest devices still make it worthwhile.
My Weblog
I've actually been doing more hobby stuff lately. Having more disposable income than your average kid makes a difference. Another difference nowadays is the greater variety of cool gadgets available and the Internet for obtaining them. I actually took time out of my busy weekend to build a flashlight out of super-magnets, some copper wire, and a couple white LEDs. To see the plans, look here. Next weekend, I think I'll do something with muscle wire. Oh, and those 100 ball bearings I just won on eBay, just wait and see...
That sucker never saw my friend's house again -- the stuff you could make was incredible, and clearly from a time before anyone thought about suing authors for writing potentially injurous copy.
You could build (I kid you not):
(The latter, now that I think of it, would make a great case-cooling system. Gotta go to the garage and find that book...
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
The increased complexity of our gadgets doesn't help either
:-)
Or the (un)availability of not-so-complex devices. (1)
It's easier to make a funny thing with a cheap Motorola 6800 or a Zilog Z80 than with a Intel586 or AMD K7. Both for the hardware side (it's only 40 pins and 2MHz) as for the software side (just a couple of registers).
Also, how "easy" is it these days to add an self-developped extensionboard into your computer? The P2000T and MSX had some nice eurocard extension-slots with an easy to use bus. Heck, you even got the full specifications of everything when you bought the computer.
(1) When I told this on IRC some people responded that I still can mail-order Z80s for AUS$ 20,- (same price as the i386
bash$
They quickly learned, however, that Mims was an supporter of so-called Scientific Creationism, a movement that attempts to include the creation story of Genesis in biology curricula as a scientifically viable account of human origins.
This is actually a pretty sad story. Mims's treatment at the hands of Scientific American is an atrocity on par with anything the medieval Catholics could have come up with, at least without resorting to pitchforks and thumbscrews. They certainly guaranteed that at least one agnostic (myself) will never burden their subscription department with correspondence.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
DIY nuclear reactor, no joke.
:-)
He almost turned his backyard into a federal toxic waste site, and shortened his life by 5 years or so, but hey, it almost worked!
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
dobplans
Build Your Own 4 Inch Dobsonian Telescope
Telescope Making
Dobsonian Evolution
Small Dob Web Site
I built my own Dobsonian!!
> (Ever tried to fix surface mount components with a soldering iron at your kitchen table? Don't!!)
I've always found that working with SMT is easier than through hole. You have gravity on your side. It will hold the component on the pad while you tack it in place.
Just use a decent soldering iron that has a small enough tip and don't make the mistake of using too small a tip. A too small tip doesn't hold enough heat to flow the solder onto larger SMT pins.
Also make good use of brush on flux and desolder braid. They are your friends when reworking SMT boards.
When laying out your own PCB, SMT components let you get away with drilling far fewer holes and zero ohm resistors let you 'jump' over tracks without using vias.
When it comes to probing, all your signals are generally available on one side. Most SMT parts (except BGA and LCC styles) don't shroud their leads like stand-up electrolytics and transistors do.
One of the primary barriers to messing with this sort of stuff in America is the crappiness of component supply for the hobbyist. I have yet to see anything that comes close to the likes of Radio Spares or Farnell in the UK.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
For some people, the construction of the equipment is the whole point. And while I'm sure some DIY hobbies are in decline, others have absolutely taken off in recent years.
I never got into building electronic stuff, but I'm interested in building guitars. Lately, I've been itching to build my own guitar amp. There is even a website devoted to it. Thanks to the numerous web resources out there, I can learn to build all sorts of crazy things that I never could have figured out on my own.
I suspect that the people that like soldering electronic gizmos together in their garage are still around, just doing different things. A surprising number of the amatuer guitar builders are techies, for instance. There's a whole lot of awesome stuff left to build, so I don't think that people are hanging up their soldering irons yet.
Steve
This is hitting amateur radio hard. Most hams purchase their equipment these days; it's nearly impossible to obtain modern levels of performance on home built transceivers. (Well, that's a generalization; antennas are often homebuilt, and some diehards do build their own rigs.)
Why would people trade images with SSTV (slow scan TV, basically a codec for TV-resolution images sent over the radio) when they can email jpegs? For the most part, the people who do it are just in it for entertainment, not utility.
There is still room for tweaking; in fact, the amateur radio community strongly encourages it. Radios still usually come with complete schematics (pages and pages of schematics, in the case of some of the larger units in the local radio club's shack). But it's pretty uncommon to pull out the soldering iron these days and work on the actual equipment.
Better or worse? Neither. There will always be a small segment of the population that finds any given field (astronomy, radio, etc) exciting. New technology will just change their focus, but the interest is unlikely to go away.
-John, KG4RUO
> (Ever tried to fix surface mount components
> with a soldering iron at your kitchen table?
> Don't!!)
Why not?
I just soldered a couple of surface mount memory chips into my Tivo. Sure, the days of using a $12 Radio Shack soldering iron are long gone, but there are inexpensive Weller soldering irons that are well suited to todays ambitions hobiest.
Telling someone not to make that surface mount repair is adding to the very problem you are complaining about. Don't encourage people to be afraid to experiment and learn. You may not be able to make that repair, but that doesn't mean someone else can't.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
Oh please. I build stuff all the time at home and in the lab, last time I checked, places like Maxim have -free- sample quantities in packages you can work with if you have a good iron (SOIC, et al). Getting boards done in small volume is cheap, use a tool like Eagle, which is even available for Linux (but not OS X, doh!). Spend a few bucks and get a quality board done at a internet based low volume PCB shop.
There are evil packages, but the truth is a lot of the prototyping and test work is done on hand placed boards. Even evil packages can be used if you get an adapter board, there are a few of them out there.
What's more telling is that now instead of messing with token things, and "wow, I actually got something to show up on the display", you can do some real work with your computer and designs and instruments. I realized awhile ago I was spending far too much of my time tinkering with things and not enough accomplishing things.. but I guess some of that is the Linux mentality too. :) Now I figure out what I want to accomplish and use the best tool, rather than attempting to make everything into a nail for my hammer.
For $300 or so you can even get prototype boards for FPGAs if you want to do custom hardware. $150 will get you a decent micro development system, and AVRGCC is gnu, runs on linux and windows (but not OS X :), and lets you program cheap cheap cheap AVRs to do just about anything you want. Mix with ADCs and some transistor fed relays or PWM control to do whatever. You can get software to turn your PC into a function generator to test, or if you hunt around, you can get a nice old digital oscilloscope AND a real function generator AND a bus analyser suitable for 8 bit micros (or more) for less than the cost of a PC 4 years ago.
Same thing applies for most other scientific equipment. Be careful when sourcing chemistry gear, even broken stuff, or you might have the DEA paying you a little visit if you happen to live in the USA. If high voltage fun is your bag, there's companies for that. There are even companies that sell cold fusion experiment kits - although most of the magic there seems to be in the process used to create the electrodes.
I contend there's never been a better time to BE a amateur scientist! You can actually afford to have a decent lab since last year's gear can be tracked down on the cheap.. and accomplish real work, too! How many high res night shots could you store on a $200 80gb drive? Etc, etc, etc, etc.
Death of amateur science predicted! Film at 11.
..don't panic
Adult "born again rocketeers" are building larger, faster, and more powerful rockets -- and the kids are following suit.
In all these cases, we've taken the manufacturing boom and used it to support our hobbies. It's not the same as tinkering with low-level parts and raw materials, but in the end you still learn a whole lot about physics, materials science, electronics, etc.
About a DIY operating system, but I'm danged if I can remember what it was called.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
With the loss of the Amateur Scientist column along with Connections (my two favorites), I find little left in the magazine (excluding the usual hand-waving fluff) to keep me coming back. I let my subscription lapse 6 months ago; every once in a while, I'll browse the monthly copy at the local B&N, but I have yet to find a compelling reason to buy.
Meanwhile my home-built gravimeter sits quietly on the shelf, recording local feline Tachyon emissions...
Yeah, right.
SciAm's behaivor was completely uncalled for. Mims is a very credible source for electronic's hobbiests. His pencil drawn handbooks contain technical writing that is as clear and succinct as I've ever seen.
I would not take Mims seriously speaking as a creationist or Intelligent Designer or whatever they are going to call it next week. However, I take him very very seriously when it comes to electronics. Fair is fair, and there is nothing inappropriate about recognizing his electronics competence.
SciAm tarnished themselves by not recognizing this and gave creationists one hell of a talking point. Shame on them.
What an idiot. We have just largely stopped using magazines in light of the Internet.
I've learned almost everything I know about electronics from the Internet.
Look at these books! Look at them! All Free, as in Liberty AND No-Cost. These are some of the very best books I have found on electronics, on-line or off. Forest Mims the Third, eat your heart out.
Do we want to talk about mentoring and serendipity?
There you go.
If anything, I'd say that amateur science and learning and construction is more popular now, because it is more accessible.
It just doesn't take the form of magazine articles.
I don't know any EE today that wasn't into electronics as a hobby before they actually got their degree.
How old are these EE's? I'm a 28-year-old EE, and I'm the only EE I know who was into electronics before getting his degree (and still is a little). In fact, I'm the only EE I know who has any technical hobbies whatsoever (electronics, auto mechanics, OSS programming, Linux, etc.). And I work at a certain really huge processor manufacturer, where I'm surrounded by EE's (though none of them are over ~33).
Trust me, for most engineers, engineering is just a way to make money, not something they do out of any huge interest in electronics. And if you're really interested in electronics and are considering getting into electrical engineering, don't. You'll be severely disappointed. I was.