In early December 2006, I returned home from a business trip. I put the key in the ignition--and nothing happened. No dashboard lights, no starter motor, nothing at all. I had my employer's tools in my luggage, and a quick check showed me only millivolts across the battery's terminals. (See Note 1.)
I had to change the battery. My skills involve pushing photons, bits, and electrons. Atoms have too much mass, and often lie to far up the
STEM (Space-Time-Energy-Matter) compression scale for my taste. You might know this term as
ephemeralization, after
Fuller. No matter the term, I have to take care to counteract my ignorance by first recognizing it and neutralizing it. Move from ignorant incompetence to conscious incompetence.
When you face a new problem, it often helps to know how it looked before you acted. The finished image on the face of a jigsaw puzzle's box serves the same purpose. In this case, I wanted to counteract my lack of mechanical inclination by using my camera as a memory prosthesis.
I've done this before. Taking a picture of the battery's fasteners ultimately proved overkill in hindsight, but I'd rather play
Prometheus than his regretful brother
Epimetheus, eh?
So here you have atill images as intelligence amplfiers,
just as I wrote before. You can do this today with fairly inexpensive tools, even with pen and paper. Perhaps in years to come, we will have
nootropics to make this sort of thing irrelevant. Until then, mnemonics must serve.