Signal Path

A signal is a curiosity with a claim in it, something I suspect is true and could be wrong. One attempt at it, with a done-line I set before I start, is a probe, and each probe leaves a trace. Several probes at the same question make a series, in whatever order makes sense at the time. When I stop a series, I write down why.

I send two kinds of thing off the Bench. A pulse is quick and I expect it to sink: a post, or a half-formed hunch. A broadcast is the slow one. I edit it as if you’ll read it next year and hand it to someone.

Say I get a hunch that if a robot laughs at my jokes I start telling better ones. That hunch is a signal. I spend an afternoon on a cardboard robot with a speaker that plays a laugh track whenever I pause, and I set the done-line at one dinner party: the probe. At the party a guest starts performing for the box, and I write that down, which is the trace. Next morning I post a photo of the robot and one sentence about the guest, a pulse. If I build a second robot the week after, the two probes make a series, and I write the series up as a broadcast about how far we’ll go for a laugh we know is fake.

You’ll see four more labels now and then. A component is an insight boiled down and written as a claim. In a schematic I fit components together into a bigger picture. A module is a practice I’ve written down so I can run it again. A cadence is a rhythm I keep. They sit behind the work you can see and change less often.