July 22, 2004
#163 :: Blinky pin
Random signals:
Wow. Printed circuits are much older than I thought. Pin it on your shirt, touch it, and the LEDs blink in random patterns. It's powered by two #192 button batteries. The symbolism is oblique at best: alien communicator? Space captain's badge? Cyber-hottie's brooch? It is, quite possibly, the least useful or meaningful HLO in my collection.
How can you say it's the least useful or meaningful HLO? Doesn't it encapsulate the entire history of culture's sideways appropriation of utilitarian technology? Let's break it down: the LED was initially commercialised by Monsanto (yep, the genetic engineering bogeyman) because it had piles of phosphate it didn't know what to do with. Printed circuit boards sprang to life to deal wartime death. Mr Ohm made resistors in order to get a better job as a university professor; while the integrated circuit really earned its wings as part of the US missile programme.
And what do we do with all this peculiarly begotten ingenuity? Make something pretty to wear to get other people interested in you, quite possibly connected with primate status and sex. And what could be more useful than that, eh?
Und zo, ve zee zer zelfish gene at vurk vonce again, risking global nuclear destruction in its mindless yet devilish ingenuity.
R