SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Who or what piqued your interest in technology?
| 1% | 7 votes |
| 18% | 67 votes |
| 1% | 7 votes |
| 5% | 19 votes |
| 8% | 30 votes |
| 49% | 175 votes |
| 5% | 19 votes |
| 8% | 31 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Who or what piqued your interest in technology?
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 48 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
You humans are all alike.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by engblom on Wednesday February 25 2015, @01:57PM
By curiosity I went through several meters of encyclopedia as a kid. The same with chemistry, physics, maths and programming books on my own. I always wanted to know how stuff works and if I see a chance to learn the theory behind anything I eagerly read.
I wonder if it is possible to keep an interest up unless there is some curiosity mixed in?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:10PM
I learned about technology by stealing it from geeks and wimps at school. I remember stealing a Sony Walkman from this dork who started crying, and then I smashed it on the sidewalk in front of him.
Looking down at the pile of rubble, I was overcome by a paradigm shift - why was that circuit board green and what were all of those little striped thingies all over it? Then I figured out that I could take a Walkman I stole from another skinny wimp, and make the motor turn by connecting a battery directly to it.
I realized that skinny wimps were easy pickings for not just Walkmans but solar-powered calculators, bleepy LCD games, and many other toys I could steal from them and gut later to satisfy my curiosity.
Later, I was stealing their Nintendo cartridges and Game Boys that they were stupid enough to bring to school, and their parents didn't do a goddamn thing about it because their parents were skinny wimps like they were. A few wimpy parents actually tried to call the cops but the cops laughed them off the phone every time before telling them to handle it like men. One time one angry parent found out where I lived and went to talk to my dad about it, and fortunately my dad also hated skinny wimps so he told that parent to get the fuck off his porch before he knocked his ass out.
Hey, poindexter, that's a pretty nice phone you got...and I think you should let me see it before you get pounded into the gutter, bitchboy!
(Score: 4, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday February 25 2015, @04:46PM
Hey look, a self-hating nerd.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 26 2015, @04:08PM
The name is misleading: the life-blood of Ethanol-fueled is quite clearly bitterness.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Kell on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:36AM
Talk in the locker room is that someone stole his walkman and gameboy when he was a kid, and he's been inventing stories every since...
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:25PM
I got two books:
1) When I was a REALLY little kid, barely able to read, I somehow obtained a picture book ish explanation of the thermodynamic cycle of a coal power plant. Probably some kind of "TMI for kids" BS or something. I know this sounds weird but it really existed. It was pretty trippy as a little mind to equate the light switch to copper wires to an endless loop/cycle of water in the primary coolant loop. Now being a kids book it was kinda simplified and didn't use engineering terms but all simplistic stuff "the water boils into steam" "the steam spins the turbine" "the electricity goes down the wires" almost see spot run stuff. Pretty amazing stuff. Like magic except its real. Probably 4 years old at the time? It was picture book format, turn the page and see the steam go into the turbine with a simple one liner, etc. I enjoyed that book immensely as a little kid and was unable to find anything like it for my own kids, unfortunately.
2) Some encyclopedia in one volume probably from goodwill or library book sale, like a phone book size. I skimmed the whole thing and I found the tech stuff way more interesting than the entries on the life and times of the Bronte sisters (they were novelists, BTW). So I read all kinds of stuff that little grade school kids can't or shouldn't know, like how is steel made, or how does clay turn into pottery, the lightbulb has not existed for all eternity its relatively new. I was probably about 1st or 2nd grade, maybe the summer between them. It was the paper and ink version of surfing wikipedia. So start with "magnets, how the F do they work?" and three hours later somehow I end up on "how is babby formed?".
I was an extremely aggressive reader, the most aggressive I've ever met, that I know of. When other kids found a word they didn't know, they'd cry or ragequit or ask an adult, I was always "who cares" skip over it and figure it out by context or just plain old ignore the word, its not like I was being graded on recreational reading so if I don't get it who cares, plenty of other fun stuff to read, lets see what I can get out of the next page... But by osmosis I figured out most vocabulary and turned into a little monster of a reader at a young age. Odd how well I used the same strategy with math, engineering, programming... I guess I figured out "dating" and "romance" the same way too LOL, plenty of hilarious cringe in the teen years. Learning most things I know from my own reading lead to some weird ideas, like telling a teacher in grade school I read a little bit of "meee tah physics" from this "air is tole" guy I found at the library who the encyclopedia implied was quite smart, but I didn't understand most of it, that was comedy gold, meanwhile my fellow students were writing their book reports on Encyclopedia Brown.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25 2015, @02:54PM
And all these years I thought they were dinosaurs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 25 2015, @03:14PM
And all these years I thought they were dinosaurs.
Thinking of the Apato sisters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maude_Apatow [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 04 2015, @04:40PM
I wondered about
until I reached this:
Now I understand.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Michael.Jackson on Wednesday February 25 2015, @04:42PM
I had an ancestor that married a niece. That played havoc with my assumed numbering scheme. I started courses to solve that one issue and ended up in software engineering.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 03 2015, @11:16PM
tHE BUZARD CUZ BEOFURE i KNU NOTIN BOUT CLIMUT CHANJE, BUT BUZARD TOT ME ABOUT CUNTOLE CONDISHENS. MY FRENDS CALL ME PROFESER NOW. THANK u BUZARD
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Covalent on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:01PM
Probably Star Trek (TOS) was my first exposure to "Nerds are important...you should learn some stuff". Every Sunday night at 6PM, reruns of that show made me want to go to space and explore strange...new...worlds...
Next up was a book I read in elementary:
http://www.amazon.com/Travellers-Space-Time-Patrick-Moore/dp/0385190514 [amazon.com]
Uranus and Neptune were visited by Voyager II while I was in elementary school, so I was lucky to enjoy the first close-up images of these worlds with the rest of humanity while still a youngster.
Now I'm a chemistry and physics teacher trying to get my kids excited about space and science and technology. Most of them are woefully indifferent, just like when I was a kid...
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Wednesday February 25 2015, @05:05PM
A few things, like my curiosity and a few random-but-critical events, helped. But if I had to pick something it would be my mom encouraging me to look up words I didn't know in the dictionary and concepts I didn't know in the encyclopedia, and my parents shelling out for those and other books on things like how electricity worked. Curiosity's all well and good, but if you're not in an environment where you are encouraged to satisfy it then it will die.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by WizardFusion on Thursday February 26 2015, @04:36PM
...encouraging me to look up words I didn't know in the dictionary and concepts I didn't know in the encyclopedia...
Exactly this. Todays TV doesn't stretch the minds of young people, they cater for the stupid.
TV for me in the UK used to be about science, maths and learning, and if there was something you didn't know or understand you looked it up in a book (this was before the WWW).
Johnny Ball [wikipedia.org] was a huge influence on me too, along with The Great Egg Race [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by engblom on Monday March 02 2015, @06:36AM
Even though curiosity was the biggest reason for the interest, my mom played a certain role too.
She always talked about how she hated maths, chemistry and physics. If you look at her old notes from school, you will notice she rather played Gomoku than solving the problems she was supposed to solve. She said those subjects are really boring and way too difficult.
All this negative attitude towards maths, chemistry and physics caused me to be even more curious. Is it true what she said about those subjects? Are they really boring and way too difficult? I had to know.
(Score: 3) by arslan on Wednesday February 25 2015, @09:58PM
Video games was the catalyst for me.. it got me curious with computers and the rest as they say is history.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 26 2015, @04:15AM
Bit of a misused term. It's only history if others can look it up easily. Call it the bookish version of "I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by smaniak on Wednesday February 25 2015, @10:48PM
Television in the 60s. We had Star Trek and live coverage of the Apollo spaceflights.
Who wouldn't have been piqued?
- smaniak
Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time. -- Unknown
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday February 28 2015, @01:42AM
The Wild Wild West was another. Who couldn't love all those gadgets that West and Gordon had.
The Apollo 11 moon landing was the first time I'd ever been allowed to stay up so late just to watch TV (was 7 whole years old. ;)
(Score: 1) by smaniak on Monday March 02 2015, @08:42PM
"Wild Wild West". I forgot about that. That was fun too. But nothing topped the Apollo coverage and to this day I can still hear in my head, "This is Jules Bergman, ABC News..."
Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time. -- Unknown
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SrLnclt on Thursday February 26 2015, @12:02AM
When I was small it was probably any number of DOS based computer games from the 80s and early 90s. As my access to technology grew so did my knowledge. When my parents got a new computer when I was in High School (likely around 1999), I called dibs on the old one. It had two physical HDD's, totaling a whopping 9GB or so at the time. I remember finding a copy of Win 98SE from a buddy, wiping the drives, and reinstalling Windows so I could get partitions larger than 2 GB by using FAT32. I must have been a little too excited to get started, as I ended up with 640x480 resolution and only the box of 16 crayola colors on the monitor, no sound drivers and no drivers for the 56K modem (broadband was still a pipe dream for me at that point). Waiting for drivers to download at a few KB/s on another machine, splitting files across 1.44MB floppies, only to find out you grabbed the wrong modem driver was a pain.
I guess that's how you learn. By a year or two later in college I was the guy would get a knock on the door when anyone in the dorm would have a HDD crash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @06:17AM
I picked gadget because - COMPUTER
(Score: 1) by Aussie on Thursday February 26 2015, @12:12AM
For me it was Heinlein books, particularly "Have Spaceuit Will Travel", though Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series contributed to an interest in lockpicking :)
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday February 26 2015, @08:47PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 26 2015, @09:17PM
I was lucky to have a math teacher who allowed me to do value tables and graphs with my PC, if I wrote the software myself (quite simple for loops, and some graphical output) and was able to explain the logic to him correctly.
Later on, I was allowed the same for nested intervals. This showed me that applying some logic can save me a lot of tedious work. Until today I'm convinced that most software engineers got to their profession because they are passionately lazy ;-)
Actually I was considering to check "curiosity" or "parents" because without curiosity I wouldn't have come to the point where the math teacher could have made that offer reasonably. And my dad, who was working for a landline phone company, brought home some old phones with round dials sometimes, and we could pick them apart. With a simple battery and some wires it was possible to build a simple intercom. But I found the story of my math teacher was in the end probably the most decisive for my career decision and the longest lasting effect.
Nowadays it is more difficult to spike the interest in children: Most simple problems are solved, there is virtually no incentive to learn programming for smaller tasks. The devices are so small, fragile and encapsulated that it is virtually impossible to take them apart and build something new.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @04:55PM
Bill Gates — 'I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27 2015, @04:53PM
It started with him. Then encyclopaedias, Asimov, Star Trek, C64, numbers, and so on.
Posting AC because of modpoints,
(Score: 1) by skater on Friday February 27 2015, @05:54PM
We had a PCjr from when they were new (I think we got ours after they started issuing non-Chiclet keyboards, though), but I never thought much about it - I mean, I played games, probably typed a paper or three, and programmed in BASIC, long before most people had PCs, but it wasn't really a thing for me; I guess I didn't appreciate what I had. I remember my dad buying airline tickets for our big Florida vacation in '84 through the SABRE connection on Compuserv. I played a little with GEnie and CompuServ, but the hourly costs were prohibitive (especially if they were long distance calls). Then, we got an IBM clone built by a local computer shop, and a friend of mine told me about a local BBS his father ran. It was all downhill from there...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by FlatPepsi on Friday February 27 2015, @06:29PM
I escaped into technology. I was smaller than most of my classmates, and quiet. Sports were merely a way to fail and get hurt by bigger kids. The ever present bullies made social groups painful and mostly negative.
As a result, I retreated into solitary activities. Started with Atari, then expanded into the Commodore 64. It was a world where I could find success, challenges I could meet, and an environment that, at every level, could be understood.
Since then I've developed social skills & other pursuits - but I wouldn't go back to those days for all the money in the world.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday February 27 2015, @10:17PM
I would go back -- I'd go back with my knowledge that bullys and clique-people would become irrelevant in the future and that they have no actual power over me other than what i give them.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 28 2015, @01:55PM
As a result, I retreated into solitary activities.
My advice to kids or folks who can give advice to kids is take up weightlifting / strength training.
We didn't have stuff like "starting strength" when I was a kid and frankly kids aren't as disciplined as they think they are, so for safety I'd say stick to the machines. Slower gains vs blowing out your knee / back for the rest of your life, isn't much of a decision when you're a teen.
Its plain old good exercise, and if you're into metric minmax grinding there's nothing like tracking your stats. Aside from that, at least while in school I wasn't "huge" but I was big enough that bullying wasn't even an issue. For a variety of no good excuses I'm not lifting now, and I want to restart because in daily life it frankly feels better when plain old life is easier.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Monday March 02 2015, @06:31PM
for me, the bullying stopped the day I punched the cunt so hard in the face his feet left the ground and he went through a glass door. Making sure it was in front of the entire school who had up to that point seen the extent of his provocations.
Suddenly I had seven hundred new friends.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Friday February 27 2015, @08:24PM
at the time in the late 1970's a math teacher was the closest thing to a computer teacher and he let several of us help him assemble a heathkit computer, such as it was called back then. Thanks Mr. Bejere.
http://www.heathkit.com/ [heathkit.com]
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by pTamok on Friday February 27 2015, @09:00PM
The death of Leonard Nimoy made me stop and think.
It wasn't the prime mover in making me interested in science and technology - from almost as soon as I could talk, I wanted to be 'an inventor' - but ST/TOS gave me a role model in Mr Spock. I always found the Kirk character irritating, even from a very young age, but the character depicted as Mr Spock gave me a positive role model of rationality which helped me survive the illogicality of my peers.
As for being an inventor, I suspect what helped cement that was the character of Caractacus Potts in the 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang' film of Ian Fleming's (yes, THAT Ian Fleming) novel "Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car".
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Saturday February 28 2015, @01:07AM
oooh, that brings back fond memories... dick van dyke, if i remember correctly. I haven't thought about this movie for long time...
(Score: 2) by Kell on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:18PM
I concur with the value of the positive and oft-neglected inventor archetype. I was always fascinated by machines and contraptions and wanted to be an engineer before I knew what an engineer was. I was also entranced by the way that a crackpot inventor could be lauded for doing his own thing (being wacky, wearing bowties, etc), rather than frowned upon; the inventor was typically rich and highly respected despite his quirks. As a research engineer today, I like to think I've kept the dream alive - I sometimes even teach wearing a bow tie. :)
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday February 28 2015, @01:16AM
Though the buzzard didn't seem all that mighty after I dissected it...
Seriously, it was a lot of things. My dad was a high school science teacher (biology, but switch hit on chemistry, anatomy and microbiology etc.). Star Trek TOS aired when I was 5, and I watched it with my dad and brothers all gathered around the TV like an altar. I didn't "get" everything about it yet, but it was damn cool. My brothers were all geeks. I had a neighbor who was a ham radio operator who peaked my interest in electronics. Books on tech, science and especially space were constant companions.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 28 2015, @07:02AM
It was many things. Wanted to play games, and make my own. And curiosity, definitely. It was sometimes as much or more fun to crack the copy protection and hack the game than play it.
Also, the realization of what computers could do reinforced my determination to understand them. My mother wanted me to take piano lessons, and I did, but reluctantly. When I saw that the computer could play any song, perfectly, every time, without practicing, I realized how utterly futile it would be to become a professional musician, or take up any other similar career. Yes, as my mother argued, people still play musical instruments for fun and to relax, and men play to impress the ladies (she didn't mention that part), and there still are professional musicians, and composers could benefit from knowing how to play instruments. But I abandoned musical instruments and nagged my parents until they got me a decent computer. My father tried to appease me with a cheap TRS-80, and then a VIC 20, but I wasn't putting up with that. Got an Apple II+.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Saturday February 28 2015, @08:59AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dexter%27s_Laboratory [wikipedia.org]
This cartoon made me want to be like him. When I was that young, eh, 5/6, my head was bizarrely large. Far larger than anyone else I have ever seen before or since. They thought I had cranial swelling when I was a baby. When I was little I was told and believed I would be a genius because of this. As it turns out, I'm of average intelligence, but I *am* a programmer, so that much came true.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:01PM
Ah yes! Dexters Lab is a favorite of mine as well. I too had a freakishly large head growing up, thankfully I almost have grown into it. It isn't nearly as noticeable, I think, though when I buy hats it is from a specialty shop. I never hit the genius mark either, but I have an innate ability to do well at pretty much anything I throw myself into and I believe it has helped me immensely doing DevOps work.
(Score: 2) by hash14 on Saturday February 28 2015, @03:43PM
I value technology as a way to get my work/shit done. As an engineer, I enjoy nothing more than solving problems and technology is very simply the set of tools you use to do just that. Whether it's manufacturing better batteries, developing better custom lasers for manufacturing and information/communications technology, building better civil infrastructure, pursuing new software platforms for working and collaborating, etc., it's knowing that we have the technology for solving these problems that helps us understand what we're capable of, as well as distinguishing between what's possible and what's fantasy.
In short, anything that helps us work better, smarter and lazier is of interest to me.
(Score: 1) by hurwitz on Sunday March 01 2015, @12:33PM
I honestly do not remember; I was rather young. I voted curiosity, but you can't discredit parents. They say I learned to type before I could walk. Thank the gods, dead or alive, we had computers in the house. A 486 Ambra, and a NEC. With a Pentium. My father wrote computer programs for a living at one point, so none of this is unusual. Computers were great, but it was mostly games & stuff (kidpix); no Internet.
Then my [older] sister took a required Computer Science class in high school. She took it over the summer to get it out of the way, some nonsense. Little kids have absolutely nothing to do over summers, so I watched. C programming, looked like Borland. I eventually pulled The Art and Science of C off the shelf, by some big beardy Stanford guy. I remember reading the intro, seeing the hello worlds get longer and longer. No wonder these programs take forever to write; they get gigantic. Then he explained the function call, where you can write one line to carry out ten. I was stunned. I did not know much, but I knew that was power.
Had I been born before computers, I probably would be an accountant.
(Score: 1) by TLA on Monday March 02 2015, @06:23PM
...my brother and I picked apart an antique Singer sewing machine which was set to be trashed (everything had jammed, locked or seized), and over two days had it working again. It lasted our mother another twenty years before she sold it at an auction.
I was five at the time.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 1) by Megahard on Wednesday March 04 2015, @05:08PM
Granted the Mars rover is a huge success, but I had no idea it had inspired so many people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06 2015, @05:30PM
PETA is currently fighting the rover because Curiosity killed the cat. ;-)
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Wednesday March 04 2015, @09:57PM
Still trying to figure out how to make my flux capacitor, but I am not using a Delorean, hell no, I am going to use a Tesla :-)
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2015, @04:10PM
Flux is magnetic field per area, therefore obviously a flux capacitor is simply a coil. Indeed, Tesla sounds about right in that context. ;-)
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Thursday March 05 2015, @11:11AM