VOLUME 1
This is the BOOK ONE essay. It's not pretty. Skip to the first chapter (Stealth Mode) if you prefer not to read the essay.
Alan Turing was L-I-T-E-R-A-L-L-Y cracking the German Enigma when he discovered something that changed computing forever. One man and his love for math algos, pwnd the Nazi's.
Yup.
Sound like a movie? Yeah. It's not.
Hacker is a term for both those who write code and those who exploit it. Even though these two groups of hackers have different goals, both groups use similar problem-solving techniques. Hacking is really just the act of finding a clever and counterintuitive solution to a problem.
Nikola hacked Edison too. He threatened his DC empire when he discovered alternating current.
"Tesla? A hacker? Bruh. This is really does sound like a movie."
It took us almost 100 years to realize we were killing our planet with fossil fuels before we took solar power and electric vehicles seriously. Now look what Elon Musk is up to. Tesla just acquired Solar City!
Acquihire? No idiot. Seriously, I don't know why I bother with you. Dum dum.
Bruh; Tesla, Facebook, AMZN and Alphabet - they're all investing in space travel; self sustinability.
What type of # $ % @ they on Gou?
You don't even want to know. Elon's on point. And he's baller.
There always something M-E-S-S-E-D U-P going on with humans and tech.
Some big mistakes in our very recent past really sucked. There's consequences to everything, sometimes, it's unfair - look at nuclear energy; this G-O-S-H-D-A-R-N science is making the planet sick! It's poisoning our land and oceans!!!! Damn you Fukishima.
It's messin up the whole West Coast. and N-O-B-O-D-Y's even talking about it!
AUTHOR NOTE: _ I think about the teenager who is reading this bookn and what their generation must be up against. I think about the responsibility they will have at some point to shape the horizon - to fix all this "technical debt."
Check this out. The Hacker Way is a philosophy. It can act like a religion, and in the end, it's nothing more than a way of thinking shaped by nothing more than a collection of words and emotions, behaviors and attitudes. It contains the theory that we as a people, will not stand for bullshit.
W-H-A-T T-H-E?
If everything we do in life is dictated by words in our vocabulary (the thoughts in our minds and what fascinates us), then it might also be said that language and culture can shape our future. Then I must ask; is there any way we could come to know a more universal language of technology, something that integrates the culture, emotion, global state and technology, with problem spaces that are deeply important to our civilization.
Among the teachings of science and technology, we include love, family and well being. It seems we can't get away from tech, and when learning it, we must not forget what it means to be human.
But despite all the readily available inspiration and information, what motivates students to flock to Universities around the world that offer clean rooms, academic research programs and places where the toughest problems on the planet are being solved, like Argon and Fermi, is still somewhat of a mystery. My point? How we are each led to these places seems all too random.
In case you're not following, in the end, what's happening is pretty simple. Technology is fairly new to humans. Apparently, modern humans have been running around this planet for 200,000 years without any of it. None of this. No phones, no google, no internet, no cars or tv's, no chips or radio waves, not even electric lights. But now, in just a fraction of that time, all those things exist.
According to mainstream archaeology, we've existed as a human race for approximately 199,800 years without any modern technology. And in just 200 years, we used what we discovered with dire consequences. And there are a lot more people now.
A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in less than 30 years (1959), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).
During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion. In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now. Because of declining growth rates, it will now take over 200 years to double again.
That must be a lot on millennial and generation Z. At some point, you have to wonder, is it our very next generation that we will struggle to communicate with next?
You also have to think; with so many people, all over the world, doing so many things, do we ever get lost? Do scientists communicate efficiently with other generations? Or is all our efforts real value hidden in more and more papers that no one is reading. Is crap lost in big fat books and massive online documents, or on Khan Academy?
Dr. Louise Banks in the movie Arrival said, "Before we start throwing math problems at them, how about we try and talk to them first." A linguistics professor, she said this as she argued with her scientific counterpart sent out to greet the aliens. How one first might try and communicate with another intelligent life form is how I like to think I'm trying to communicate with teenagers reading this book.
After all, you (teenagers) are the ones who will carry on and shape all future tools and realize all future science. Naturally, other generations are concerned. What's guiding you? What paths will you take? Are your brains decensitized by all of this? Is it too overwhelming?
If an older generation were to develop a global language for communicating with the next generation, they would have to agree on certain things first. What are the first things we might all agree on? Will they be concerns for our planet? Will both generations agree on what could be holding humanity back? Is it all a zero sum game if we can't agree?
The brain is a powerful thing. In the 10 years from 9-19, it could process as many as 200 million thoughts. It has tremendous work to do in filing those thought. Processing them, deciding where they go, disposing of some.
Let me make this easier on you.
Follow the stone.
In my observations of millenials and generation z learners, I've observed a few things.
Millenials are wicked fast on technology. They use shortcuts, find information out quickly and are incredibly omnivorous in how they learn, but they also fall into different types of traps than older generations expect them to, and they often take a lot of blame for that. They value learning deeply over money more so than any prior generation, yet they deal with life differently than we do, and other generations have a hard time understanding that. They don't get it.
As an example, they are texted to, not called. Facetimed, not visited. They are pushed but would rather be pulled. They get their news differently, make their decisions their own way, and so on. They value friend time like any other generation, and doing stuff, but in terms of education and careers, they compete in their own ways.
What typically drives anyone, millenial or not, is: wants, needs and desires. It's also often observed that discipline is driven by pressure, success by gratification, careers by challenge and passion by love and appreciation.
Take for example, the 15 year old boy Malawian, William Kamkwamba, who after reading a book called Using Energy, decided to create a makeshift wind turbine at his family's house in East Africa using blue gum trees, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrapyard.
Since then, he has built a solar-powered water pump that supplies the first drinking water in his village and two other wind turbines (the tallest standing at 12 meters (39 ft)) and is planning two more, including one in Lilongwe, the political capital of Malawi.
Learning Computer and Electric Science is no different. I suspect the next generation will want to know all of it, deeply, but that their impetus for doing such will be something beyond other generations comprehension. Ultimately, their decisions will be fueld by their concerns for the future, while their actions will be dictated by the things they know, the words in their vocabulary and state of their environment.
And we must accept that it could take years for a bright mind to discover their calling, and that right after high school or college, millenials might not be that concerned with settling down in the way previous generations had been. Eventually, those who are led to this will make their way.
So rather than aimlessly stack scientific concepts and experiments one after another, directly on top of each other, this book elaborates on the universal language and emotion around the science, and on how those same feelings are ultimately responsible for what we might choose to do in this industry.
Enter The Node Chronicles Book One, The Hacker Way.
The stone Gou Sokeyo creates contains a language of ideas and symbols called axioms. Axioms can be very simple, or contain a collection of other symbols or ideas that operate like a system. When prioritized in a certain order, they can be learned sequentially, but when rearranged, they can be experimented with. Each has a range of complexity, each typically has a connection to at least one other symbol. At face value, the symbols can be studied and learned from. When explored more forensically, they can be used to inspire new experiments and products. Symbols might also be things like; love, prosperity, earth and the word, prudent.
Need you be reminded of the crazy stuff going on right now with VR/AR, Hololens, BioHacks, Data Science, AI, Bayesian Systems & Neural Networks and Higgs Boson? It's as if a new periodic table was formed right under our noses in the past 20 years and we're just learning how to use it.
Before we go too far, let's look at an example of how everyday people like you and me end up adding onto our planets runaway innovation curve.
So here is an example of something I may ultimately contribute to the world (granted it's a merely a novelty, unlike Williams wind turbine). I want to make an AR Harry Potter Wand, that can beam huge bolts of lightning anywhere I point it in an augmented reality environment.
I want to create a piece of scientific equipment, in the shape of a wizards wand, that can log movement from tiny IMU's within the stick and use real-time Kalman filtering to ultimately generate AR visualizations.
A project like this could take 2 years to make on ones own, but none the less, it would have only been made possible due to the words in my vocabulary, my imagination and the recent advancements in technology within my environment.
It's all quite magical, and that's sorta what this book does. It shows all the cool technologies and their connection to eachother.
My recent stint with Harry Potter and awareness of Microsofts new product, Hololens, plus my fascination with making custom PCB's and expiraments with certain MEMS sensors all have me poised to create something totally off the wall that could be wildly awesome. Figuring it all it is the fun part. Digging through docs, ordering parts, working with experts on the minutia. Just pondering all the things I'd need to learn to pull this off excites me. The challenge alone is incredible.
You're about learn more than the technology itself, but what roads some of the best inventors had to travel to get there.
Follow the Stone.
The Hacker Way is the first volume of The Node Chronicles. Biomechanics, hacks and physics and data will come next. If this community survives, we will get to all five major volumes. There shouldn't be many more, as learning more than 7 entire fields within this field is too much.
All 5 volumes represent the anatomy and unique facets of our technological capacity as a human race. My goal is to complete all five volumes by 2018. The first volume, "The Hacker Way" teaches you the foundation, gives you the tools to dig deeper, introduces you to circuitry and programming with many refrences to the culture and lifestyle. With just this first volume, I believe that a lot is possible.
Volume 1, the first book, entitled "THE HACKER WAY" has 4 parts.
Chapter 1 (Stealth Mode**) - **Tesla and the basics of electricity and circuitry with references to John Bardeen and Jack Kilby. Experiments with the Arduino and blinking lights, electricity, voltage, measuring voltage, the very basics come together here while Gou fires up some basic breadboards and circuits. Enter Banzi and demonstrations of the Uno or Nano with relation to Energy! Theoretically, this chapter gives us a neat little intro to energy, voltage, electricity, basic circuits and some simple Arduino test projects that include resistors, capacitors, voltage, flow, current - very basic and simple circuit patters, gates, logic, fields, electromagnatism and sensors like hall, etc. We also disect an Arduino and get into it's anatomy and GPIO. You'll walk away with a reference to electrical engineering symbols, ability to read basic schematics and a good understanding of fields, forces and flows. You'll finish with a higher level program, possibly in C or Python that ties together the stuff you learned in a program that can loop across the electrical setup you've put together (possibly blinking led patterns or a motor project) - something very basic, and don't worry if you haven't been exposed much before.
Chapter 2 (Code Crackers) - Turing and the invention of the FSM and modern varations of turing machines. This gets us to the point where we learn about binary, machine code, classifiers, algorithms, compilers, memory, stacks, heaps, etc. We get into the lowest level science of computers possibly then bring you back up high level so you don't have to re-invent the wheel or know too much of the low-level stuff. IE so you can use higher level language to abstract to do cool stuff (ie do you really need to know all the deets about garbage collection?), yes, enough to know what's really going on under the hood but not too much. There are many experiments and tests that can teach us about this and we will start by running them on our laptops in a fool-proof, simple to setup environment, before we even get into the PI. Once setup with some tools and an editor, we will dissect a PI and get into the anatomy of how they work, it's processor and eventually boot it and run some benchmark, memory and overclocking hacks. You'll ultimately walk away with a really good understanding of the tenants of computer sciences, how programs work and with the ability to execute your own scripts from your laptop or right from the PI using it's peripherals. It's the hello world chapter to computer science with some deep dives into low level computing and it finishes with the writing of a high level program, an intro to object oriented programs (C program) and a hello world script that takes full advantage and demonstrates the low level stuff at work.
Chapter 3 (Neck Beards**) - **This chapter starts off with Ken and Dennis, creators of Unix at Bell Labs, inventing Unix on the PDP-11. It ends with Gou and his crew completely owning a Linux environment with all modern tools, which could have never happened without Unix.. ie, Bash, NPM, Node, Git, Terminals, tools, etc. Getting right into these meta tools (Macro Axioms) unlocks the power to do many other things later on, including installing different binaries, getting packages to run, getting Node.js running and we end by booting up some cool tools that users can instantly appreciate. You'll walk away with a good understanding of Linux and it's power, and knowledge of it's commands, file system, hierarchy and the basics of bash scripting, package management and installing virtually any package by reading it's readme.md while practicing getting up and running. The section wraps up with again, the running of a higher level, object or functional program (node.js) that ties everything together from a programs point of view.
Chapter 4 (Network Access**) - ** After, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gives us the invention of the internet and protocols like TCP/IP/HTTP and we can segue into SSH and getting into our PI's and Arduinos remotely with SSH and VNC after playing around with some network tools that are just down right cool. We get our environments fully internet ready and run our first Terminal driven IOT test after being networked into our PI from a remote machine. Book ends on that note, giving kids the ability to do things most adults can't. This chapter gives us a deeper look into the internet, protocols, IP addresses and how data and packets move across wires, so that later, IOT options make that much more sense, including some basics on storage, ssh and remote controlling devices over different transport protocols ranging from WIFI to BLUETOOTH or GSM. By the end, we learn to execute remote tasks on our machines, connect our PI to our Arduino so that we can flash it with scripts and we get our blinking light experiment created by RUSHI (the pi currency script) setup whereby a little precursor to data is unveiled. Big data could become the 2nd volume as opposed to the 5th. All future sensor projects require data. You'll walk away with knowledge of ports, packets, protocols and servers, with the ability to demonstrate how you can hack into your machines, remotely execute programs and get your machine to talk and listen while your not there (alias say='echo "$1" | espeak -s 120 2>/dev/null'). Processes, networking tools, pinging, etc will all make sense and be in constant context. You'll finalize this chapter again by wrapping all this into a higher level program (Python) that will prime your eventual IOT experiences in future volumes and abroad.
**NOTE: **Each chapter has a blend of history, present day fiction built ontop the history and theory ( storytelling with the cast), hardware and programming. The chapters (and volumes) all build on each-other until eventually, readers have a complete knowledge of EECS AI systems.
All future books will be based in the order:
Volume 1 - The Hacker Way (in progress)
Volume 2 - Big Data (need name)
Volume 3 - Biomechanics (need name)
Volume 4 - Biosensing (need name)
**Volume 5 - **Robotics (need name)
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