When I was a child I fell in love with the idea of thermostats. The lowly thermostat was, I came to understand, the perfectly minimal example of an actual working robot. When the temperature went up, a sensor triggered the thermostat to produce cool air. When the temperature went down, the sensor triggered the thermostat to produce warm air. It was simple, but intelligent.<\/p>\n
It was a robot in my house. What more could any kid ask for?<\/p>\n
When I was a child there were also mechanical men. They were on TV, in movies, and in exhibitions, and they were called robots. But I understood that these were not robots at all — they were simply puppets dressed to look like robots. The thermostat, humble though it may be, was the real thing.<\/p>\n
And then I discovered it had cousins, like the governor of a steam engine. If a steam engine runs too hot, its governor spins faster, and the two steel balls it carries are flung outward through centripetal force. This movement causes a lever to be pulled downward, which partly closes a throttle, thereby cooling the engine down.<\/p>\n
My grandparents owned an old telephone they never used, which I was given to play with and take apart. I found an electromagnet inside, which pulled upon a spring metal bar which held a clapper that rang a bell. But as the clapper moved toward the magnet, an electrical connection was broken, and the bar snapped back. This reconnected the electric circuit, and the cycle began anew.<\/p>\n
The phone ringer didn’t look anything like the thermostat, or the steam engine governor, but I knew they were all cousins.<\/p>\n
And then one day I learned the truth about circles.<\/p>\n
More tomorrow. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a child I fell in love with the idea of thermostats. The lowly thermostat was, I came to understand, the perfectly minimal example of an actual working robot. When the temperature went up, a sensor triggered the thermostat to produce cool air. When the temperature went down, the sensor triggered the thermostat … Continue reading “Circles”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12467,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12466\/revisions\/12467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}