358: Woodturning Influencer
Transcript from 358: Woodturning Influencer with Emily Velasco, Elecia White, and Christopher White.
EW (00:00:06):
Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, alongside Christopher White. This week we'll be talking about electric oddities, writing, and science with Emily. Velasco.
CW (00:00:18):
Hey, Emily.
EV (00:00:19):
Hi guys.
EW (00:00:21):
Could you tell us about yourself as though we sat down at a table at Supercon and had not yet met?
EV (00:00:30):
Sure. So I'm Emily Velazco. As a day job, I work as a science writer at Caltech. I work in the press office. So my job is to take the research that we do, 'cause we have a lot of faculty doing a lot of research and a lot of it is not particularly accessible to the public. And I don't mean they can't, the public can't find it. It's just that academic writing is not something that is geared toward a public audience.
EV (00:00:58):
So my job is to take the research papers that our faculty put out and kind of rewrite them in terms that the news media and the general public can understand. Outside of my day job, I don't like to call myself an artist because it feels weird and pretentious, but people say I'm an artist. I think of myself as more of a tinkerer. I have a little cottage with a little garage workshop and I make stuff. I make, I do woodworking and metalworking and electronics, and I work with animal bones, and I kinda put all those things together into a mishmash of strange things that kind of clutter up my house.
EW (00:01:46):
Okay. We would like to do lightning round. You're familiar with the show. So are you ready?
EV (00:01:53):
I am.
CW (00:01:55):
Trains, for or against.
EV (00:01:58):
For.
EW (00:01:59):
Complete one project or start a dozen.
EV (00:02:01):
Start a dozen, maybe two dozen.
CW (00:02:04):
VHS or Betamax.
EV (00:02:08):
Oh, gosh, I have a VHS player in my bedroom and I like it, but I would love to have a Betamax player. My parents had a Betamax player in their bedroom when I was a kid. And that was the fancy VCR that we weren't allowed to touch. And I think it'd be fun to have one of those.
EW (00:02:23):
If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach?
EV (00:02:28):
Definitely 3D design. There was a period of time when I had dropped out of college, and I went back to school at community college, and I took a 3D design class. And I had so much fun in that class because it was so open-ended, it was literally, use any materials you want to make whatever meets this week's theme. And it was, you know, if you want to use clay, if you want to use filing cabinets.
CW (00:02:53):
[Laughter].
EV (00:02:53):
I had so much fun in that class. It was, no literally, one of my projects, I built a maze out in the parking lot out of all the leftover filing cabinets that were behind one of the administration buildings. That class really just opened up my mind as to what kind of materials you could work with. And I've always thought it would be really fun to teach a class like that.
EW (00:03:14):
Yeah.
CW (00:03:15):
Well that sort of ruins the next question, which is weirdest material you've ever worked with.
EV (00:03:20):
Oh, well, I mean filing cabinets, I guess are, I mean they're weird in a mundane way, but I don't know. I don't think they're weird, but I work with animal bones and I know a lot of people think that animal bones are a weird thing to work with. So I guess it depends on your perspective, right?
CW (00:03:37):
And animals don't.
EV (00:03:37):
Animals don't at all, right?
EW (00:03:42):
Waffles or pancakes?
EV (00:03:45):
Waffles. With the little squares, not the big squares, not the Belgian waffles, the little tiny squares.
CW (00:03:51):
In your wildest dreams, what would you want to find on a loading dock waiting to be repurposed?
EV (00:03:57):
Ooh, something, gosh. Okay. It has to be, it can't be too old I'll feel bad about taking it apart. I don't know, some kind of equipment that has a lot of gears and motors and belts, but not just gears and belts, like lights, like they've got a really good control panel. I don't know, maybe a control panel from a nuclear power plant with all those switches and lights and things?
CW (00:04:20):
[Laughter].
EW (00:04:20):
Yeah.
CW (00:04:21):
Alright.
EW (00:04:23):
Weirdest 3D printing medium, filament?
EV (00:04:29):
The weirdest one. I don't know. They don't make a lot of weird ones. There's algae-based ones, but I think those are kind of cool. They look kind of organic. People 3D print clay and they 3D print concrete, but I've never heard of anything weird per se. Oh, you know what? I take that back. I have a 3D print here that I didn't do. But someone I know 3D printed me a cat skull -
CW (00:05:00):
[Laughter].
EV (00:05:01):
- and he 3D printed it out of a, [laughter], right? He 3D printed it out of filament that his company had specifically designed to mimic bone on X-rays because they wanted to be able to build 3D print X-ray models for medicine and for veterinary schools. And so this filament has a lot of calcium carbonate mixed into it so that it looks like bone under X-ray.
EW (00:05:28):
What about hair?
EV (00:05:30):
Hair? Yes. I've worked with hair. I can't remember where the idea for that came from, but I got an idea one day, last winter to, oh, I remember where it came from. I was 3D printing something and when my print was done, I saw that during the print, one of my hairs had landed on the print.
EV (00:05:50):
The hair from my head, and it got stuck in the print, and it was sticking out, and I yanked it. I tried to pull it out, and it was firmly stuck. So I yanked it, and it broke off. But then I thought that would be kind of fun to play with. And I spent one day last winter, literally nine hours in my garage, 3D printing a flesh-colored cactus, and laying hair.
EW (00:06:12):
Aah.
CW (00:06:12):
[Laughter].
EV (00:06:12):
I cut my own hair, right? I don't go to the salon. Most of the time I cut my own hair, and I decided to save my hair the last time I had cut my hair. And so I just sat there for eight hours, sprinkling my hair onto this 3D print, layer by layer. And it was a horrible [laughter] project. It looks horrible, but it was horrible to do. But now I have a cactus on one of my shelves with a bunch of my hair sticking out of it.
EW (00:06:39):
Horrible.
EV (00:06:43):
Yeah.
CW (00:06:43):
[Laughter]. Alright. One more. What is a tip everyone should know?
EV (00:06:46):
Use hot glue and don't be a snob about it. I know that a lot of people get really snobby about using hot glue. And when I use hot glue, they scoff, but use hot glue. It's great. Don't misuse it, but use hot glue. And this is something I learned last year, is that you can make hot glue pop off of something that you've glued with isopropyl alcohol? I had no idea...hot glue can stick really well, but if you just pour some isopropyl on it, it'll just come right off. It doesn't dissolve the glue. It just detaches, which is really cool.
EW (00:07:20):
That's a good tip. So you have a YouTube channel.
EV (00:07:24):
I do.
EW (00:07:25):
How would you describe it?
EV (00:07:27):
Neglected?
EW (00:07:27):
[Laughter].
EV (00:07:29):
Yeah, I should have done more with it over quarantine, but quarantine has made everything kind of weird. I think that it's sort of a, it's not a how-to channel, some people do how-to project channels. I I'd say it's more...like a project vlog, in that, when I feel like talking about a project I'm working on, then I'll put up a post about whatever it is. And they're never a step-by-step thing. It's sort of just this is what I did and here's what I came up with.
EV (00:08:06):
And I think generally the vibe is kind of, there's a thing in the popular aesthetic these days, that's sort of an occult oddities vibe, and I've leaned into that. I've always enjoyed that kind of thing, but I've really leaned into that with the channel, in that, a lot of my projects, I try to do something with electronics, but make it weird and creepy. And I'd say that is the vibe of the channel. It's sort of mad scientist, but mixed with witchcraft. Not all the videos get into the witchcraft thing, but I'd say overall the vibe is mad scientist, witchy-ish, I guess.
EW (00:08:51):
So a hair-filled cacti fits right in.
EV (00:08:56):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Or a clear personal pleasure product that has a raccoon spine in the center of it.
EW (00:09:07):
Please don't tell me any more about that.
CW (00:09:09):
[Laughter].
EV (00:09:09):
Okay. [Laughter].
EW (00:09:11):
And so arts and crafts supervillain, is that the direction you're hoping for?
EV (00:09:19):
Yeah. You know, I didn't coin that term myself. One of my coworkers, he called me that in a meeting one day at work -
EW (00:09:27):
[Laughter].
EV (00:09:27):
- and I was like, "Hey, that actually fits pretty well." So yeah. I mean, arts and crafts, I think kind of gets, these days, carries a certain connotation of cutting out craft foam and felt and scrapbooking. But I think arts and crafts, to go more back to its roots, whenever it was, at the turn of the last century, where it's sort of just working, more of handicrafts. A craftsman kind of thing, where you put a lot of care, and pour some of yourself into what you make. I tend to think of arts and crafts more like that. So yeah, putting a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears into projects, but making them evil.
CW (00:10:19):
It's definitely kind of a retro future aesthetic vibe that you put into your projects, 'cause most of the things that you've made, you could have just left as, take the most recent one, the optical film decoder thing, which was very cool by the way. You could've left that as a pile of parts, right? That just worked. But you spent a lot of time making the enclosure for the speaker part and thinking about the long pole that the film traverses.
CW (00:10:51):
And that had a vibe to it, and the Port-A-Vid had a vibe to it, all were kind of like a fifties retro future thing. And I have a question, where is it? Somewhere in my brain.
EW (00:11:03):
Is that intentional?
CW (00:11:06):
Is that intentional? And...where does that inspiration come from? And why don't you just stop at "This is functional" 'cause a lot of people do.
EV (00:11:17):
They do. And that's fine. I don't hold it against anyone. You know, everyone's projects are their own thing. It is intentional. I can't say from where the drive comes, because I don't know. A lot of my projects have their genesis in just an aesthetic feeling that I get for something. And the Optical Sound Decoder was a little different.
EV (00:11:48):
Because I had more of a concept that I wanted to prove, "Can I make this thing that turns optical film back into sound?" And then the aesthetics followed. But a lot of my projects do start with an idea of just a aesthetic vibe I want. And those kind of just grow like weeds in my brain. And I find that I have to pluck them or they just keep growing and sort of cluttering things up.
EV (00:12:18):
So I don't know why I've settled on this mishmash of, I don't know, I guess it's everything from 1970s hi-fi stereo units with that brushed aluminum and big chunky knobs, all the way to the 1920s, mahogany and Bakelite radios, and everything in-between. Industrial equipment, 1960s industrial equipment. I don't know why all of that appeals to me, but it does.
EV (00:12:50):
And I really like to make my projects look like that. And sometimes when I start with a concept of, "Well, here's a thing I want to try," like the Optical Sound Decoder, I will get it working, but then it doesn't feel complete until I've given it a look. And there's no way to quantify when the look is ready, other than I just stop having the itch in my brain, I guess.
EW (00:13:21):
Do you make it so that your builds are repeatable by other people? Do you have a goal of that for any reason, or are you building it mainly for your own self and your own aesthetic?
EV (00:13:34):
Absolutely for my own self and my own aesthetic. I've tried in the past couple of years to be better about documenting stuff. So I keep my code on GitHub in case someone says, "Oh, I really want to be able to make a video player like the Port-A-Vid." But a lot of people have asked me, "Well, would you do a tutorial on this?" And it's like, "Well, I would, but where are you gonna find a junkyard pressure gauge unit that you can use to make a video console that looks like this thing I made?"
EV (00:14:10):
I tend to use so much salvaged materials and scrap material and things I've repurposed that it's kind of impossible to make these things replicable. I mean, if someone was really creative, they could come up with their own housing and just reuse my code. But a lot of these things, they're one-offs, because it's a piece of junk I found in the junkyard, or something I found sitting behind the Ralph's grocery store, you know? They're not commodity items that someone can go to AliExpress and buy.
EW (00:14:43):
Do you ever sell them?
EV (00:14:45):
I have sold one. Yeah. I have only sold one thing ever. And it was a wooden icosahedron lamp that I made five years ago. I sold it to the person I was dating at the time, but I haven't sold anything really. I've been asked on occasion and I typically have found that people don't have a good sense of what art costs. And again, I feel weird about calling what I do art, but when they will say, "Oh, I was thinking a hundred dollars," -
CW (00:15:19):
[Laughter]. Geez.
EV (00:15:19):
- and I'm like "I spent six weeks on this. I can't sell it to you for a hundred dollars because this thing is kind of precious to me and I would sell it to you if I thought you'd really care for it. But I don't think you care for it very much for a hundred bucks."
EW (00:15:34):
Yeah. There's the, "If I make this, and you pay me what my normal salary rate was per hour, it would be very, very expensive, not counting the parts."
CW (00:15:47):
And not counting the, yeah, yeah, yeah.
EW (00:15:48):
And the idea and all of the things you should be paying for.
CW (00:15:51):
And that it's unique.
EW (00:15:52):
And it's unique and self-designed and -
CW (00:15:56):
People often think "Well, if I saw this on a Target shelf, it would cost this." Yes, but that's not what this is.
EW (00:16:01):
It's not the same at all.
CW (00:16:02):
Yeah.
EV (00:16:03):
Yeah. It's not. And I don't do it for the money. And so -
CW (00:16:07):
Right.
EV (00:16:07):
- even telling them my rate, I do freelance writing sometimes, and I'll tell them my rate based on my salary rate. But these things, I do them for the enjoyment of it. And when I'm done, it feels like I've put a piece of myself into it. And so,...that's hard to put a price on that, but I know it's more than a hundred dollars.
EW (00:16:30):
"I'd give it to you for free if you promise to love it."
EV (00:16:33):
Absolutely.
EW (00:16:33):
"But I won't give it to you for a hundred dollars because there's not enough love there."
CW (00:16:37):
You've already declared, yeah. [Laughter]. I do think that some of these would be really cool as installations in museums. The film thing, the Port-A-Vid, those are the sorts of things I imagine seeing in mixed media...exhibits and stuff.
EV (00:16:52):
That's kind of what my living room is turned into.
CW (00:16:54):
[Laughter].
EV (00:16:54):
I build display shelves for all these things now. And someone asked me last week if I'm turning my house into a museum. And I guess I sorta am.
EW (00:17:01):
Why do you resist the artist title?
EV (00:17:05):
I don't know. It's hard because "artist" carries a sense of, I don't know what. I didn't go to art school, and so it always just feels like this is what I do for fun. And it feels like artists do things intentionally in some artistic way. I don't know how to put that into words other than it feels like this is just a fun thing for me.
EV (00:17:39):
And it's not an artistic expression, which I know is not true. And it's probably some imposter syndrome talking, but it feels, I feel pretentious to call myself an artist. And if other people call me that, I don't tell them no, but I feel weird calling myself an artist because I feel like I'm being too self-important or something.
EW (00:18:02):
I understand. I really, really understand. It's one of the reasons I wanted to ask you about it, because...I see people grabbing the artist title for themselves, and more power to 'em, but I couldn't use it. It doesn't feel right.
EV (00:18:17):
It doesn't. And I don't know, I kind of feel like artist is a title that has to be bestowed upon you by others. It feels wrong to take it up as yourself and say, "This is what I am." But if other people want to call you an artist, well then, I mean, if the public says you're making art, then cool. But for me to say, "I'm making art." It's like, "No, I'm just having fun in my garage." I don't want to make it feel artsy.
EV (00:18:57):
Artsy just is, there's a certain snobbishness that oftentimes comes with people who refer to themselves as artists and maybe the term needs to be reclaimed somehow. But that snobbishness that comes from a lot of people who deliberately call themselves artists kind of turns me off to the term for myself.
EW (00:19:20):
I like tinkerer a lot. I don't know about artisan, maker is always fraught for me.
EV (00:19:27):
Yeah. Maker sounds, I don't know, it's taken on some neutrality just 'cause it's so ubiquitous, but just on the face of it, it sounds dumb. "I am a maker. I make things." That sounds really dumb.
EW (00:19:39):
[Laughter].
CW (00:19:39):
[Laughter]. I've never said that, but I've wanted to say it.
EV (00:19:45):
And "artisan" is, I don't know. I feel like an artisan is someone who makes really nice, a cobbler who makes really nice shoes, or someone who sells -
CW (00:19:57):
Cheese?
EV (00:19:58):
- ceramic pots, and they've been at it for 40 years. And that's their living. But to call myself an artisan, when I don't make a living off of it, I guess artisan for me carries a connotation of, this is what you do for a living. And you put a lot of pride into it. And I don't do this for a living.
CW (00:20:16):
There's even a divide, I remember talking to someone about this years ago, about people in music, "Are you a musician or are you an artist?" And what the meaning of, "Oh, I'm just a musician" is versus, "Oh, I'm an artist." And the artist was kind of, "Oh, somebody who writes and produces their own stuff versus somebody who is just a instrumentalist," right? "I play bass in a band. I'm a musician. I'm not an artist." And these terms are all very fraught and weird, and I don't like it.
EV (00:20:45):
They are, they are. I mean, that's the discourse, right? Every field has its own discourse about how you refer to yourselves and how you refer to others. And I guess the arts and crafts maker/tinkerer scene is no different, right?
EW (00:21:01):
That's true. So I'm gonna come back and ask you more about some of your projects in detail, but I want to talk about your other life. You work for Caltech, and science writing.
EV (00:21:16):
Yes.
EW (00:21:16):
What's a day in the life like?
EV (00:21:19):
Well, prior to 2020 -
CW (00:21:24):
[Laughter].
EV (00:21:24):
- a day in the life was go to work, and I have an office with my fellow writers. In some sense it was not super unlike, so to back up a little bit, I started my career as a newspaper reporter and working in the press office at Caltech in some ways is not super dissimilar from that. There's a few of us writers crammed into a room and we all have our own cubicle.
EV (00:21:47):
And we drink a lot of coffee and we talk to each other all day. But the actual nuts and bolts of science writing is, I have a beat. The Institute is divided up into beats, and within that beat, so mine, I actually have a beat, and a beat and a half. So my main beat is chemistry and chemical engineering. And so my responsibility is to cover everything that's going on in the division of chemistry and chemical engineering in a strategic way, which means, don't cover everything, but cover the stuff that is important, that people will be interested in, that will make the Institute look good.
EV (00:22:31):
And that means cultivating a lot of relationships with these faculty members, some of whom are Nobel Prize winners, which is weird, to sit down at their desk and be like, "Hiya, George, how you doing? Let's chat for a minute." But I used to go to their offices, and we'd chat, and I'd walk around campus. And I'd see the Nobel Prize winner, and they'd wave to me and be like, "Hi, Emily." These days with us working from home, I sit at my kitchen table and I set up Zoom calls with them.
EV (00:23:03):
They'll email me and say, "I have a paper coming out February 12th, it's on," I don't know, say, "ultrafast cameras that can take 70 trillion frames per second. It's going to be in Science Magazine. And would you be interested in covering it?" And I'll say, "Yes." Or if it's not something I'm interested in covering, I'll be like, "Let me take that to the meeting. And we'll get back to you on that." And then try to figure out a way to say, "This is not particularly newsworthy" without making them upset. But if it's something cool, then, or something that really needs to be covered, then I set up a Zoom call and I think up questions, I read the paper, and those papers are pretty dense usually.
EV (00:23:47):
So that usually means just reading the abstract and then skimming the rest. But, read through it, come up with questions, talk to 'em for a half hour on Zoom and then write something. And try to make it pithy and try to make it understandable. So I mean, no knock on my mom, my mom's a smart lady, but she didn't go to grad school. So she doesn't know anything about Smear cameras or any intense physics. So write something that my mom will be able to understand without having to open a physics book.
EW (00:24:24):
So "Love and Hate in the Mouse Brain."
CW (00:24:28):
[Laughter]. What?
EW (00:24:29):
Tell me more.
EV (00:24:31):
Okay. So, this was something I worked on back in December. One of our faculty members who his push, this is actually something that's outside of my beat. This was something from our biology part of the Institute. But his push is to understand how neurons and neural connections and brains make emotions, which is a pretty hot topic in a lot of areas. It's like, well, whatever our emotions are feeling, they have to be coming out of the hardware of our brain. So how does that hardware work?
EV (00:25:06):
So everything he does is aimed at understanding that better. And he decided to look at mice, and specifically he wanted to look at mice when they do their mounting behavior. Which is,...when your neighbor's Chihuahua humps your leg, that's mounting behavior, right? And he wanted to look at that behavior because there's two ways that mice mount each other. There's the more expected way of, "Hey, you're a really pretty little girl mouse. And let's have a good time together," but then there's also, "Hey buddy, I don't like you very much. And I'm going to show you how much I don't like you by mounting you." So, you have these two distinct -
CW (00:25:56):
So many titles we can't use. [Laughter].
EV (00:25:58):
Right? You have these two distinct emotions, if you want to call them that. There's love, and then there's hate, but the behavior is the same. And they decided to look at that behavior specifically, because that's a control right there, right? They can look at a mouse doing one physical action, which takes out some of the variables, but they can determine which part of the brain is driving that action.
EV (00:26:32):
And in doing so, they found out that there's one part of the brain that, when the mouse is mad and humping out of anger, there's this one part of the brain that's responsible. And when the mouse is humping out of happiness and being turned on, this other part of the brain is responsible. And furthermore, they found that these two parts of the brain are on a seesaw almost, like a teeter-totter. So if one part, if the horny part activates, then the anger part turns off. And if the anger part turns on, then the horny part turns off.
EV (00:27:09):
And so, now that they've made this determination, it's a mouse brain, it's simpler than a human brain, but these are parts of the brain that are like down in the core of the brain. It's not the cerebral cortex. It's not the higher thinking part of the brain. So we have those parts of our brain too. So it would follow naturally that we have analogous things going on in our brain. Now, of course, they haven't studied human brains on this, but that's the idea, is that there's a little piece of the brain that will make you horny. And there's a little piece of the brain that will make you mad. And they tend to be in opposition to each other.
CW (00:27:45):
We have to pause for Elecia to compose herself here.
EW (00:27:47):
Well, I mean, I knew that some of your personal projects I wasn't going to ask about, because I mean, it's a family show, but I didn't expect your work to be - [Laughter]. That makes me giggle. Okay. Let's move on to Jupiter. Because there's nothing that can be interesting about this. I mean, it's interesting.
CW (00:28:14):
Let me tell you what Jupiter got up to.
EW (00:28:19):
Jupiter's storms behave oddly? I didn't even know that.
EV (00:28:24):
Yeah. I didn't know that either until I started working on that. And that's something that's kind of cool about my job, is that, I find out all these things just in the course of my work. But, yeah. If you look at the bottom of Jupiter or it's the top, I'm for sure going to get this wrong. I think it's the south pole of Jupiter. You'll see what look like a bunch of hurricanes down there, but they're all sort of clustered around each other in sort of a geometric pattern, with one at the center, and all of them in a ring around it. And it sort of makes, I think it's a hexagon. Yeah. And when they, I think it was the Juno space probe, flew down there and saw that, and they were like, "Whoa, what is going on here?"
EV (00:29:08):
And one of our faculty members, he thought, "I think that...I have an answer for this," and the answer that he has proposed and that his mathematical simulation looked at uses some very old math that was proposed by Lord Kelvin who, he was a scientist. For sure I'm going to get all these details wrong too. He was a British scientist, or he could have been Irish, or he was from the British Isles.
EV (00:29:38):
For sure, British people are going to be mad at me for getting this wrong. But he had looked at the way water swirls, and he found that if you have an eddy, a whirlpool, and you have another one in the same bucket of water, sometimes they will merge into one bigger whirlpool, and sometimes they'll sort of bounce off of each other. And he investigated why, and there's a lot of math to this, and you have rotation and counter rotation. But essentially, if you have the right combination of a storm that's rotating, say clockwise, and another storm that's rotating clockwise, sometimes the other storm can have counter rotation around it.
EV (00:30:26):
So if the storm is going clockwise, sometimes it can have a ring of fluid around it going counterclockwise and those two will repel each other. And nature and physics being what it is, these patterns are also found in magnetism and the way magnets repel each other. It's all very cool and very weird. But this researcher at work found out that this very old principle from 150 years ago explains why Jupiter's storms bounce off of each other, whereas on Saturn, they merge into one big giant storm, which is pretty neat.
EW (00:31:04):
Okay. One more question about an article that caught my eye, that made it sound like humans would be good battery sources, thereby proving The Matrix was right, as long as we get sweaty?
EV (00:31:17):
Yeah. We have a faculty member who, he's very into wearables, and he works on stuff that you can stick to your skin, that will take readings and give you very precise readings about "How stressed are you? Because I have this little patch on my skin that can tell how much cortisol is in my blood right now, or how much blood sugar do I have so I can monitor my diabetes".
EV (00:31:43):
But the drawback with all of these is that you have to power them, and having someone stick a battery to themselves is maybe not always the easiest thing to convince someone to do, just because it's in the way. So he started looking at, "Can we find a way to power our electronics with something that's already available on the human body?" And he built a very thin and flat fuel cell that sticks to your body.
EV (00:32:12):
And it uses a component in human sweat to generate tiny amounts of electricity, really small amounts, but enough to power the electronics. So you can stick one of these things to your arm, and the little bit of sweat that collects under it will keep it powered, and then it will charge up a little battery or a capacitor. And then when it has enough power, it will beam a Bluetooth signal to your phone and give you a reading on whatever it is that you're trying to read, whatever compound is in your blood that you want to check. So, could you run a whole matrix off of those? I dunno, we'll give him some time, but you can definitely run a little Bluetooth module, which is pretty neat.
EW (00:32:58):
That is really neat. I mean, there's so many wearables that would become more possible if we could get the energy from motion or sweat or combination.
EV (00:33:11):
Yeah, yeah.
CW (00:33:14):
But the antiperspirant lobby's gonna kill all that.
EW (00:33:14):
[Laughter].
EV (00:33:16):
[Laughter]. They're not going to be happy. Yeah. I wanted to, I got very intrigued about using one of those fuel cells in a project, and I was like, "Oh man, I want to ask him if I can have one to play with and tinker with." But I felt like it might be inappropriate to try to mooch off of a faculty member for my projects in the workplace. So I didn't, but I still think it would be really cool to do something with one of those in more of an artistic way, rather than the scientific way he uses them.
EW (00:33:46):
Does talking to the scientists and faculty give you ideas about your projects or does it inform your aesthetic at all?
EV (00:33:56):
I guess maybe occasionally, but a lot of times the science is so far removed from anything that I have access to that it's hard to translate those things. I think that maybe in a broader sense, working around a lot of really smart and intelligent people, and then having to creatively turn their work into something that people can understand, kind of...keeps my brain sharp. There are some similarities between writing a story for work and working on a project at home.
EV (00:34:39):
In that, they're both forms of creative problem solving. With my projects, it's usually, I have a concept and I need to make it into reality somehow, and I need to find a way to express whatever this thing is I'm feeling, in a way that other people will be able to see it. And at work it's, "Well, I need to take this high-minded, complex concept from this research and turn it into something that regular people will understand." And there's a certain kind of common process there as far as thinking goes, that you have to work through chipping away, little bit by bit from this thing that is hard to understand, and slowly like chipping away the marble until you have something, you have this statue of what it is that you wanted to portray.
EV (00:35:39):
So I think in that sense, yes, I think in a more direct sense, not too often because...a lot of my work is writing about a new catalyst or a new enzyme, an enzyme that generates oxygen in fuel cells. And those kinds of things are not necessarily conducive to turning directly into art if that makes sense.
CW (00:36:04):
Yeah, yeah.
EW (00:36:06):
I have a listener question from Svec. Do you have a favorite guide for getting better at technical documentation?
EV (00:36:15):
Do it.
EW (00:36:15):
[Laughter].
EV (00:36:16):
I don't mean to be snarky, but there are some things that people will talk about as though, "Well, if you just follow these step-by-step directions, you'll be good at something." And that's not always true. There are some things that really are an art, and this is more of in the artisan sense, in that you just have to hone your craft. And I know that when I started off doing communications as a reporter, a decade ago, I wasn't very good at it. And the longer you do it, the better you get at it, and you need to get feedback from people.
EV (00:37:00):
But I don't have a guide per se. If you want to know how to be a better communicator, a better writer, look at technical writing, or science writing that you like, and look at science writing or technical writing you don't like. And try to just be aware of what it is that works and doesn't work. You can learn a lot from seeing how other people do things. So if you're reading a science story and you're not understanding it, step back and ask yourself, "Why am I not understanding it? What have they not explained well?" And when you are reading something that makes it clear, think about, "Well, how have they structured this story? How are they explaining things?"
EV (00:37:46):
And learn from their examples. And then if you want to write stuff, when you write something up for your project, or for work, if people are confused, take their feedback. I find that people who take feedback without getting offended improve a lot, and that's true of all fields. But writers as well. If you're willing to take people's feedback and learn from it, you're going to learn your own craft a lot better than you would, if you have too much ego and you don't want to admit that you could have done better.
EW (00:38:24):
Okay. So Svec, I think what Emily is saying is that you should get back to work on the blog.
CW (00:38:28):
[Laughter].
EV (00:38:31):
Yes. Work on that blog, and solicit feedback from your friends, and solicit honest feedback. I know a lot of times people will say, "What do you think of my blog post?" And friends will be like, "Oh, it's great. It's great. It's so good." 'Cause they don't want to say, "Uunh, I'm not sure about this one, buddy." But tell him, "Honestly, give me your real feedback on this." And if you really reassure your friends or your colleagues that you want honest feedback, they'll usually give it to you, and they might tell you, "I thought this blog post was too long" or "I thought you could have explained this better." So yeah, just be open to feedback and work on that blog. And you'll get good.
EW (00:39:16):
A couple of people asked me to ask more about your CRT videos as they're incredible and very "arty". Sorry. It was in the question.
EV (00:39:26):
I assume that they're talking about, I don't know, the Lissajukebox, maybe?
EW (00:39:34):
I think so, yes.
EV (00:39:34):
I mean, yeah. If that's what they're talking about, I don't know, did they have a question, or do they just want to say that they thought they were cool?
EW (00:39:44):
I haven't seen it. What is it?
EV (00:39:46):
It's a thing that I built. Alright. So I'll try to make it short, but...when we could still hang out with people in public, I had a local maker group I used to go to, and we had a CRT that we took out of a TV, and it was just the bare CRT. And we decided, "Can we power this thing without any of the TV hardware?" And we did. And I got the idea to try and draw Lissajous curves on it. And these are these patterns that you get,...if you plot a sine wave in the x-axis, and a sine wave in the y-axis, you'll get patterns that result from that. And they can look like figure eights and they can look like complex knots.
EV (00:40:30):
We did it in the maker group and it was like, "This is cool, but I want to make this a thing that people can use." So I spent a couple months repurposing a little, it was a security camera monitor. So a little black and white TV. I completely gutted it and took all the guts and rebuilt a new housing around it. And I gave it a whole bunch of knobs that change. Frequency of the sine wave in the x-axis, and the frequency in the y-axis, and knobs that you could use to adjust between sine wave and square wave and triangle wave.
EV (00:41:08):
So the result was you have this thing with a whole bunch of clicky, good knobs, knobs that have very good tactical feedback. And you get to draw these swirly geometric patterns on a screen. And that thing's actually broken right now. And it's also sitting in my office at work that I can't go to, but that's the Lissajukebox. I don't know. It was just another one of my weird ideas that I spent a lot of time working on.
EW (00:41:39):
That's one you documented on Hackaday.
EV (00:41:43):
Yes.
EW (00:41:43):
So there is some build information there.
EV (00:41:46):
I was trying for a while to be more diligent about documenting things, and that one was one that at least most of the parts were off-the-shelf parts. I ordered some little mini function generators off of eBay, I think. And I ordered some audio amplifiers. All these little components that you could buy on the internet. And I did drop a wiring diagram and a schematic. And there was no code to it. It's all just analog hardware. So there was no code to document, fortunately for me, 'cause I'm terrible at coding and documenting my code.
EV (00:42:27):
But yeah, I wrote it up. A couple friends encouraged me to write it up. Documenting it was horrible. And I'm really, this is kind ironic, since I document in a sense stuff at work all the time for other people, I'm really bad about documenting my own stuff. But I did document that one, and that was maybe one of the ones I spent the most time documenting. And I don't know that I've documented any other projects to that extent since.
EW (00:42:57):
I don't blame you. I mean, you write for a living at work. At home, you want to do the things you want to do, and having to think about a professional level of writing, I dunno, that would get kind of old.
EV (00:43:13):
It does. Working in my workshop is a chance for me to unwind. I go out there and in some sense, I turn my brain off. My brain gets used for what it's getting used for in the moment, but I turn my brain off and just work. And if I have to stop and say, "Alright, I'm going to write down this step. I'm going to take photos right now," it breaks the flow. And then it's like, I don't know if you guys are familiar with this, when you're reading a book sometimes, you kind of fall into the book after a while?
EW (00:43:48):
Yes. [Laughter].
EV (00:43:48):
Where the whole world sort of shuts off around you and you're just in the book. But if you keep getting distracted, instead of being in the book and experiencing the book, you're instead reading the words on the page, if that makes sense.
EW (00:44:02):
[Affirmative].
EV (00:44:02):
And the same thing kind of happens with the projects in that, if I have to stop and take photos, then I'm not falling into the project. I'm not losing myself in the project. So absolutely, it's just, I don't want to do it all the time. I don't want to document things all the time. 'Cause I need that space to decompress. Especially when things are as stressful as they have been in the past few years.
CW (00:44:26):
It's really interesting to hear you say that because I think the tendency over the last few years, with social media becoming a big stupid thing, is that all artists, all people who make things, all people who have a process, it seems like there's almost a feeling, "I have to document this. I have to put up the process. I have to take a video. I have to livestream me doing this. I have to have an Instagram story about, whatever," but I've been thinking that about myself.
CW (00:45:04):
I was like, "Well, as we work on the record we're working on, should I live-stream doing a mix? Would that be cool? Should I take a video of me trying to play this part so that we have kind of a record of that? And maybe I can put that on social media" and every time I've tried to do that, it's like, "Okay, I've just spent 30 minutes trying to get a video set up, and now I'm totally self-conscious, and I'm not doing this." And I've lost the creativity -
EV (00:45:28):
Yeah, yeah.
CW (00:45:28):
- because it's more about, I need to be something else.
EV (00:45:33):
Yeah. And I think that...there is a place and a time to do that. There are times when I do a live stream, but when I do a live stream, which is not that often, I try to treat it more like a social time -
CW (00:45:49):
Yes.
EV (00:45:51):
- rather than a self-promotion time. It's like, "Alright, well, I'm bored, and I'm going to go out, and I'm going to go use my lathe for three hours and I'm going to live-stream it." And people can ask me questions, and then I can just have a conversation with them. And that's fun. But if I'm trying to just show myself off, as some kind of self promotion, I get super self-conscious and it does totally ruin it for me.
EV (00:46:15):
And I think that some of this insistence that people do that is this modern concept that everyone needs to have their own brand. And everyone needs to be their own agent. And you need to be hustling, even in the art world, you should be hustling, and you don't have to hustle all the time. I think a lot of people think you have to have a hustle, and you don't, you can just do things for fun, you know?
EW (00:46:41):
There's a lot of pressure to document what we do. If we're doing it for fun, if we're being makers, we have to document it. If we're being artists, we have to sell it.
CW (00:46:54):
Yeah.
EW (00:46:54):
...And sometimes I just want to make a freaking snail. I don't want to have to show it off.
CW (00:47:03):
[Laughter].
EV (00:47:03):
Yeah.
EW (00:47:03):
I don't want to have to explain it. I just want my head to do what my hands want and maybe turn off my head for a little bit so that I can have what I want. I don't understand why we have so much pressure to make things less fun.
CW (00:47:22):
Well, it goes back to the question earlier on, was it earlier on or before the show, where we were talking about "Why don't you sell things," right? And that's the same kind of thing, right? As soon as you start turning something into a business, it's a different thing.
EV (00:47:40):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, if this has always been part of our culture in this country, or if this is something unique to the dot-com era we live in, that Silicon Valley hustle culture has kind of permeated everything. I don't know, 'cause I'm not old enough to have really experienced life before that, but there's definitely a sense that people feel like they have to be writing everything down and promoting themselves in some way, or they're not doing enough. And that's a bummer because people should have the ability to just enjoy their hobbies for what they are without being guilted by wider culture.
EV (00:48:21):
Yeah. That's one quibble I have with maker culture, is that there's so much pressure on people to try to make themselves famous, and to try to parlay what they're doing into something else, and try to get sponsorships. And if that's how you want to make your living, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But I think a lot of people fall down the hole of thinking they have to do that, or they're not being a real maker. And that's just a bummer, just make things because you want to and enjoy it.
EW (00:48:55):
I think that's something we've forgotten. And it's a lesson I've learned multiple times. I remember trying to sell pottery, long ago, shortly after I graduated. And it totally destroyed doing pottery for me, because I suddenly was far more critical, and I had to do the promotion part, which I hated. And it took this lovely hobby and made it into something I couldn't do.
EW (00:49:27):
And I hate that we do that. And it's not just me and pottery. I see a lot of people doing this where they're like, "Okay, I'm going to do really cool things." And then they get so submerged into the things they think they have to do, that they forget that they went out to the garage to play on the lathe, to do what they wanted, not to show the world, whatever the world thought it needed to be shown. I don't know where I was going with that.
CW (00:49:56):
[Laughter].
EV (00:49:57):
You can just, if you want to turn a bowl on your lathe, turn a bowl on your lathe, you can do that, and that is great. You don't have to be aiming to be the next woodturning influencer, you know?
EW (00:50:13):
Okay.
CW (00:50:14):
Woodturning influencer. [Laughter].
EW (00:50:14):
"Social Media Goddess" was among your titles at one point.
EV (00:50:24):
Yeah.
EW (00:50:24):
That's kind of the opposite of what we're talking about, but -
EV (00:50:27):
Right.
EW (00:50:28):
How does one become a "Social Media Goddess?"
EV (00:50:32):
That was also a title that was bestowed on me. I don't ever give myself titles. But in my previous job, I worked in the press office at a different university, Cal Poly Pomona. And one of my jobs there was to run social media for the university. And I fell into that job before really anyone had any sense of what a professional brand social media was supposed to be. It was an afterthought. And they were like, "We don't have anyone to do this. Please do it."
EV (00:51:03):
And I didn't know what I was doing. And I didn't really have any guides to follow, but I spent five years running social media for the university. And I guess people liked what I did. And one day my coworkers showed up at my office door with a gift. And it was a little, those little plaques that you'll see, sitting on someone's desk that says what their name and title is. With the little engraved piece of plastic that slides in.
EV (00:51:29):
And they had brought me one of those that they had custom-made that said, "Emily Velasco, Social Media Goddess," which was really sweet of them. And so I just left it on my desk, and now it's out in my workshop. I don't do social media professionally anymore, so it's sort of just an artifact of a previous time in my life. But yeah, I dunno, my coworkers called me that and I thought it was nice and sweet. And so I liked it.
EW (00:51:57):
Do you have advice for people who do want to get better at social media?
EV (00:52:02):
Gosh, don't. [Laughter]. I don't know. You know, social media, I have such a love-hate relationship with social media. It's so good in so many ways, especially when I can't go out and see people in real life anymore, most of the time, it is my social lifeline to be able to have my friends online, and to have people to talk to. But at the same time, it is absolutely a massive time suck and it is really easy to let it capture your attention. If you want to get better at social media, I would say the thing that people do bad most of the time with social media is not producing enough of it, which goes back to the time suck thing.
EV (00:52:56):
But if you want to have a good social media presence, you have to have the faucet open all the time. You have to be just pouring out stuff for people to consume. And that's kind of sad, but that's the reality of how social media works is, if you want people to pay attention to you, you have to give them something to pay attention to, and you have to give them something to pay attention to all the time. People want a diversion. And if you're putting content in front of their eyes, they're going to pay attention to you. Don't get too -
EW (00:53:30):
But it has to be good content.
EV (00:53:32):
It does have to be good content.
EW (00:53:32):
It has to be diverting. You can't just say, "Buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff."
CW (00:53:36):
[Laughter].
EV (00:53:37):
Absolutely...When I did social media for the university,...I kind of had a personal philosophy of, that I didn't want to give the audience too much just boring administrative stuff. Which is honestly the main point of having the social media accounts, was that, if today is the last day, for add/drop, let them know through social media. But if all you do is post, "Today's the last day for add/drop," and then the next day you post "Parking rates are going up to $150 a semester," and it's just an endless stream of like horrible administrative stuff, no one's going to want to pay attention to it.
EV (00:54:21):
So you have to give people what they like. And you also, if you have a reason to do social media, if you are trying to promote your business, mix that stuff in. But do you want to see nothing but posts about someone's sales on whatever they're selling? Do you want to see nothing but posts encouraging someone to sign up for someone's newsletter? No, you don't like that. So don't post stuff on social media that you don't like to see. Think about, what do you like to see? What do you find interesting? And post that stuff if you can, but tailored for yourself, of course.
EW (00:54:58):
You're telling me I need to post more ocean puns, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium does?
EV (00:55:02):
Absolutely. I mean, I have a love-hate relationship with puns as well, but if you love puns -
EW (00:55:07):
It looks more like a love relationship, when I see it, especially when you and Christopher are going through a pun war.
CW (00:55:14):
I usually just attach myself to a preexisting pun.
EV (00:55:17):
Right. We have a mutual friend who trolls me with puns as much as he possibly can. And I like good puns, but he deliberately throws bad puns at me all the time. And I just tell him how much I hate him every time he does it.
CW (00:55:32):
[Laughter].
EW (00:55:33):
Ah, you know. That's what friends are for.
EV (00:55:36):
Right, right.
EW (00:55:37):
Of the projects you're working on now, or have been working on recently, do you have a favorite?
EV (00:55:41):
Yeah,...we've talked about the audio decoder a little bit, and I think that's my current favorite just because I finished it three weeks ago. But I would say that my project that I have enjoyed the most in the past year was my Port-A-Vid, which we've referenced, but we haven't talked about it much other than-
EW (00:56:00):
We haven't talked about it.
CW (00:56:00):
Yeah.
EV (00:56:00):
Yeah. It's a little video console thing. This was one of my projects that came out of a junkyard trip. I went to the junkyard and I found this thing that was a Snap-On Pressure and Vacuum Gauge kit. I guess if you're a mechanic, you just grab your thing for checking vacuum or pressure. And I really liked how it looked. It has a very 1960s, there was a certain vibe of stuff in the sixties that was Mid-century modern, but not meant for a home. It was industrial Mid-century modern. And it has that look, it's very simple.
EV (00:56:43):
It's got a brick red case that's out of stamped steel. And I took it, I bought it for $10 from the junkyard, and I didn't know what I was going to do with it, but it had this really big round gauge that was for showing pressure. And I took that out and it left me with a big circular hull. And I thought, "Well, I could put a speaker in there and make this into a synthesizer, but I do a lot of sound projects." And I thought, "Wuuu, I want to try doing something with video instead." And so, what I did was, I put a lens in that hull with a 3D printed bezel, and I put an LCD screen behind it. And inside of this thing, there's just a Raspberry Pi. And the Raspberry Pi does only one thing. And it just shows videos.
EV (00:57:30):
And I have loaded, I think, 48 videos into this thing now. And some of these are videos that I found online through the internet archive, and maybe half are things I found, and maybe half are ones that I've shot myself. And they're just short videos, a minute or 30 seconds or two minutes. And all you do is you press, there's a big green button, and when you press the button, it picks one video at random out of the selection, out of that whole pool of videos. And then it plays it. And then when it's done, it briefly shows some static on the screen, and then it goes back to waiting and you press the button again. And then it shows another video.
EV (00:58:06):
And I did that this summer. This was an anxious summer I think for a lot of people, with all the... -
EW (00:58:14):
Pandemic?
EV (00:58:14):
- how upset everyone was. The pandemic, and the George Floyd protests, and here in California, the wild -
EW (00:58:29):
US politics.
EV (00:58:31):
Yeah. Politics, and the wildfires. I mean, you guys are here in California too, so you probably remember we had weeks of nothing but smoke. I was feeling really anxious this summer, and I wanted to come up with a thing to self-soothe. And I started by shooting videos, with a 1980s security camera in my front yard, and just making lo-fi videos of my cat lying in the sun, and put some like nice lo-fi beats to it. And I thought, "Why don't I just take all these videos and put them into an object that I can hold?"
EV (00:59:07):
And, so yeah, the idea was, I'm stressed out. I'm going to sit down with my little mini retrofuturistic TV and press a button, and then just watch a video of hummingbirds eating at my hummingbird feeder, with some nice classical music. And that's the Port-A-Vid.
EW (00:59:26):
I want one.
CW (00:59:29):
You went so far as to write up what you felt was a period-appropriate user manual for it.
EV (00:59:36):
I did. That was not part of the original scope of what I was doing, but I think I was just, I remember now. I had gotten to a point in the project where I was sort of stuck, as you get sometimes in projects. And I have found that as I've gotten older, in the past, if I had gotten stuck, I would have just abandoned the project. But now I find that if I just take a break, then I can come back to it. And if I give myself a way to get out my frustrations, then I won't kill the project. And so, I had gotten to a point where I was stuck on the code, because it just wasn't working, and I didn't know why. And I was sitting around and I just, for some reason, the idea came to me that it would be fun to make a fake cover for a manual as though this had been a real consumer product.
EV (01:00:31):
And so I made up a fake cover and it looks like it had been photocopied 10 times, photocopy after photocopy, and photocopies of photocopies, and rumpled. So I made a fake cover, and I was like, "This is pretty cool." And then I couldn't stop myself. And I made 12 more pages explaining how the thing works, with that very 1960s, 1970s, manual language about "Welcome to being a proud owner of a Port-A-Vid. You have fine taste in electronics and you've joined a growing number of aficionados," yada, yada, yada.
EV (01:01:13):
I spent two weeks making these pages from scratch, just in Photoshop, on my computer. And also going in the internet archive and looking at old manuals for stuff, 'cause this is something that if people aren't familiar with, you can find a lot of manuals on the internet archive. And some of them are for things that you have, and maybe you want to fix. So always check the internet archive if you have an old thing you're trying to fix. 'Cause they might have a manual.
EV (01:01:40):
Anyhow, I spent a lot of time looking at old manuals just to get a feel for how do the manuals look, and how do they write, and what's the language, and what do the pictures look like? And yeah, I spent a lot of time making that manual just because the impulse came to me.
EW (01:01:57):
Those are fun to follow.
CW (01:01:58):
It's doing stuff like that that sometimes takes your project to "This is a complete statement," right? From, "Okay, this is cool," but just this one extra thing just kind of makes it a whole, there's a whole story behind it instead of this is just an artifact, right?
EV (01:02:15):
Yeah. And what was really fun is that a friend of mine who runs the Media Archeology Lab, I think it's at University of Colorado Boulder, which is a very cool thing. It's a little museum of antiquated and obsolete technologies and they would bring school kids in and let them learn about, "What's a VCR? What's a floppy disk?"
EW (01:02:37):
"What's an Ethernet port?"
EV (01:02:39):
Yeah. "What's an Ethernet port? What is a touch-tone telephone? What are punch cards? How does a sewing machine work?" All these things that people maybe don't interact with in their everyday life. Well, they also have a big collection of manuals, old vintage manuals, and she loved the manual. And so I made her a copy and she put it in with their manuals, even though it's a fake manual.
EW (01:03:03):
[Laughter]. That's almost worth going to see.
EV (01:03:05):
I know. I need to get out there when we're allowed to travel again.
EW (01:03:09):
Motivation, especially right now, has been tough, and you're using some of your projects to self-soothe, which makes a ton of sense, but it's still hard to be motivated. Do you have any suggestions?
EV (01:03:23):
Yeah -
CW (01:03:23):
For me personally.
EW (01:03:26):
[Laughter].
EV (01:03:28):
For you personally. Well Chris... No, you're right in that I do use them to self-soothe. I guess I find that when I am sitting there doomscrolling, and feeling awful, and feeling anxious, I just have to be mindful. And I hate the overuse of the term mindfulness these days, but just try to remember when I'm feeling really awful to just stop whatever I'm doing. Whatever I'm doing is probably making me feel awful. So if I'm feeling awful, stop and remove myself from whatever I'm doing and go do something that makes me feel good.
EV (01:04:08):
And going out to the garage is a lot healthier than going to the liquor store. So I just go out to the garage and work, and I'll work, and pretty soon I've forgotten how awful I feel. And then I realize it's 7:30 and I haven't eaten dinner and I'm starving. But I've gotten something done. So, I don't know, I think it's just a matter of trying to be aware of yourself and your emotions and redirect that energy you're feeling, 'cause bad energy is still energy. And if you can just turn it towards something more useful than scrolling through Twitter and feeling like the world is ending, I think you maybe would find that you have more motivation than you think.
EW (01:04:54):
That's a great answer.
CW (01:04:55):
Looking at how you do things, and the projects you do, it seems like you aren't afraid to kind of just, "This is what I want to do. And maybe I don't know how to do this piece of it, or I'm not an expert in X, Y, or Z, but I'm just going to push through." How do you learn to do some of the tactical things that you have to do to finish a project when you don't know them?
EV (01:05:22):
I guess I just, I don't know, I'm just ready to fail, and to be comfortable with the feeling,...the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing on a lot of my projects. And honestly, a lot of times I find myself completely frustrated because I'm stuck, and I don't know what I'm doing. And I don't know how to fix whatever's not working. You just have to be willing to accept that this is a learning process. And part of learning is frustration. And if you want to try something new, don't go into it expecting you're going to be an expert and you're going to get it right the first time.
EV (01:06:05):
I think that that, at least for me, and maybe for some other people, when you get into the trap of thinking, I have to do this right, it becomes very demotivating when you don't do it right. So...if you remind yourself that "I've never done this before, and it's okay if it doesn't work," you're already going to put yourself in a better spot. Because you can tell yourself, "Well, I'm learning right now."
CW (01:06:32):
[Affirmative].
EV (01:06:32):
And maybe I'm really, really mad because I've been working on this code for three hours, and it doesn't work still. I'm really mad because this thing I was turning on the lathe just exploded, and I have to start over again. That's fine. Be upset. It's natural to be upset, but don't beat yourself up over it. Don't say,...don't let yourself say, "I'm a failure." Don't let yourself say "I'm bad at this." It's true. You are bad at it. Because you've never done it before, and that's fine. You shouldn't expect that you'll be good at it the first time. So I think I just have to remind myself that this is a process, and that there are going to be setbacks along the way. And that that is fine.
CW (01:07:17):
Cool.
EW (01:07:18):
Emily, do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with?
EV (01:07:21):
Yeah. Do things for the enjoyment of them. Please, we have so many things to feel bad about these days. Let yourself enjoy something. Go out to your workshop today, or tomorrow, or this weekend, and just do something for the fun of it. And be proud of what you've done, 'cause you deserve it. Everyone deserves to feel good sometimes.
EW (01:07:45):
Our guest has been Emily Velasco of Emily's Electric Oddities YouTube channel and Science Writer at Caltech. She also has a very active and entertaining Twitter.
CW (01:07:57):
Thanks, Emily.
EV (01:07:58):
Thank you, guys.
EW (01:07:59):
Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to our Patreon supporters for Emily's mic. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm.
EW (01:08:12):
And now, an incredibly appropriate quote to leave you with, this one from Dr. Seuss, in "The Cat in the Hat." "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how."