My Bike and A Podcast: We Take Our Digital World For Granted

My Bike and A Podcast: We Take Our Digital World For Granted

Over the past year or so, I’ve been cycling a great deal. To me, cycling in sunny and warm weather is just a bit boring. In fact, I love cycling in the rain and wind— including yesterday when I got soaked through. Overall, we should enjoy an ever-changing climate — and it’s just one of the reasons I love living in Edinburgh. In fact, my winter cycling is some of the most enjoyable, especially being wrapped up in my own little cacoon. Why? Well, it gives me a chance to focus, as it’s often difficult to concentrate in our modern world, as there are so many distractions … such as News Alerts coming through on an hourly basis.

Basically, we should all have something that takes us away from our busy lives, and gives us time to study, to think, and to learn. Gaining knowledge and expertise is worth so much more than all the money that we can ever earn, but increasing our world is full of surface learning. Why learn anything, when Chat-GPT can give us an answer straight away? Why learn? Well, it’s you, and you are not a slave to the machine. You are unique. Everything you learn makes you a better person.

And, so, I’ve always loved radio, as it allows me to work and listen to something in the background — and I especially love Internet radio and DAB. But, for my bike, it’s podcasts that I’ve fallen in love with. Why? Because I can actually concentrate and listen. I can think properly.

Unfortunately in our modern lives, we get very little chance to actually think. I can listen to Bill Bryson telling me about the wonder of the body, or wonder at the Physics of Quantum Computers. I have the world of books at my fingertips — the largest bookshop ever created (and growing by the day). One book can stimulate another. But, my real favouriate thing is to hear the book narrated by the author — as if I was there listening to them. To me, the lecture situation is something that will never be replaced by online activity. So, while I cycle, I hear the words as they are meant to be heard — straight from the author.

To me, we take our new digital world — The Internet — for granted. Few wonder about the amazingness of having a precise location tracker on their phone, and which is in constant contact with at least three satellites. And, when I was younger, the only way to access music properly was to go and buy an album. But now we have access to every single album possible. In four or five decades, we have built a completely new world and remodelled our society around it.

And, so, we take it for granted. When I was younger, I continually spent my time taking the back of electrical devices, and discovering what they were actually made from. It was those three-legged transistors that made the magic happen. Now, we have billions of them in our devices, but few people ever think about how they have changed our lives.

Without really making a career choice, I fell into electrical engineering when I left school — mainly because my father and grandfather had both been electricians. But, as I worked in electrics, I saw the wonder of this new kid on the block — the transistor. While our college lecturers - at the time - tried to explain the physics of the n-p-n or the p-n-p junction, I just knew that this was to be my future.

A core memory of this time was the binary divide between two types of lecturers in electronics. There were those who were still teaching vacuum tubes and said things like, “These new plastic devices will never replace the tube”, as they held up the most beauty of structures. To this day, I still think that vacuum tubes are still one of the most captivating of all our technological components. On the other side, were these new trendy lecturers who knew all about transistors, and about the black art of the microprocessor. It was the days of the 8-bit microprocessor, so you couldn’t do much more than basically press a few buttons, and make a few LEDs flash — but it was fun!

As I worked, I marvelled at the way that these transistors could implement digital logical, and I could see how the electrical relay methods of the past would be replaced by electronic logic gates. There was only one thing for me, I was off to learn about these devices. Over my career, I have continually moved and advanced, and make sure that my knowledge never becomes redundant. I’ll update you on the rest later.

And, so, back to podcasts and my bike. Personally, I love Audible, as I can get access to the books I want to listen to. And, so, if you want to hear from some of the most amazing people who built the security of the Internet — including two Turing Prize winners — try here:

or:

or:

Conclusion

Go and find the thing that helps to focus and concentrate. Think, learn and feed the most amazing structure that has ever been created: the human brain. Without this, we will increasingly become dehumanised and a slave to the machine … not the bike, of course, but the Internet!

It is interesting that the presentations that students mostly study within our Applied Cryptography class are not the ones of the video recording from the class, but the ones with a few Sharpies and some audio. Perhaps, our brain needs to find its own way to learn, and something that is just a bit more human — Podcasts take me there, and allow me to think about things. The more time we think, the more inventive we become.

So — ask yourself — when was the last time you properly read a research paper from start to end (and tried to make sense of it), or properly sat down to study a new topic? Find your space to think and learn …