Hardbreak: Hardware Hacking Wiki
This was a cool little find. I’ve always played with software in one form or another, but besides building PCs actual hardware hacking felt out of reach. Maybe I can start with some simple things like radio hacking.
The beauty of understanding
My love for science seems to always involve some sort of rube goldberg machine: you set things up just so and discoveries magically flow out. Sure, designing pretty experiments is difficult and there is a lot of literal and metaphorical heartbreak along the way but to finally discover the way is all frisson.
Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan conducted a study about that feeling. From the study website:
From the easier to digest Aeon article by the same authors, How the search for beauty drives scientific-enquiry:
At the deepest level, what motivates scientists to pursue and persist in their work is the aesthetic experience of understanding itself. Centring the beauty of understanding presents an image of science more recognisable to scientists themselves and with greater appeal for future scientists.
Do you hate it when scientists unbraid a moonbeam? Well, there’s three types of happiness scientists feel, apparently:
- Sensory beauty – what is visually or aurally striking
- Useful beauty – involves treating aesthetic properties such as simplicity, symmetry, aptness or elegance as heuristics or guides to truth.
- Beauty of understanding – grasping the hidden order, inner logic or causal mechanisms of natural phenomena.
Perhaps Edward Tufte knew a thing or two when he named his book Beautiful Evidence.
Aneesh Sathe 
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