00:11
So we've been talking about your PC building stuff, but as a, you know, normal person who
don't try to build a PC, you know, we buy PC typically.
I want to know what the hell got into you to want to build your own PC to begin with.
I was expecting... Was that a rude way of asking the same question?
Well, no, you know, Asami, you are never rude. You are perfectly to the point.
I will admit I was taken aback by the questions forwardness, but
avoiding the fact that non-normal humans are categorized as those that build PCs,
um, not to be called out like that, the way that I got into building PCs in the first time that I
did it was by a friend of mine who brought up the idea, right, who had already had a little bit of
computer savvy, computer knowledge, and was like, okay, so from them sort of like paraphrasing,
quoting, I want to build a PC. We want to play games together. I think this is a good chance.
Also, like all the parts for building a PC are currently very cheap. So that was a good time
to sort of get into it and start the first time that I did it.
So like you had a financial incentive to like, okay, if I could pull this off,
I can get a way higher spec PC for, I don't know, 50% of the price or something.
Yeah, it was pretty much something like that. I mean, my first PC was able to do
mid to high-end range gaming stuff, right, in the 2010s, and I spent maybe $600 to $700 on it.
I want to ask, maybe even take a step further back.
Yeah, sure.
Was the concept of, I want this, I don't have this, let me make it,
like, was that kind of always in you?
Yeah, that's, I am going to say yes. I would actually say that nowadays, it's harder for
me to feel that. And it's probably because, as many people today might say, adulting is hard,
03:05
I think is the terminology.
And also you want things that aren't easily accessible.
True. Yeah, true, true, true. Like, I didn't have a lot of projects when I was younger, but
I did, I was on a robotics team during high school.
Right.
And I really enjoyed that. I always sort of imagined the making of things, except I didn't
always have the tools on hand to do so. And so, like, you know, I wanted to make and create and
solve them myself if I could, but I didn't always get the chance to do so, would maybe be where that
was. But, I mean, how about you? I know you mentioned to me before you weren't on like a
robotics team or anything.
I mean, not in electronics way at all, I think.
Okay.
But when I was like way, way younger, like pre-elementary maybe, I think I was a fan of
making things, like whatever that meant. And for some reason, I think my parents were a good
convincing person to not buy us kids a whole bunch of toys. I mean, they did buy us some,
right? They weren't that frugal, but they were just good at, you know, distracting us enough
that they weren't buying new things left and right. And to the point that I had made a bunch
of, you know, makeshift stuff that wasn't exactly replacing what I actually wanted.
But like for the time being, maybe like an origami version of Nintendo DS was like satisfying
enough for me, you know, like that kind of thing. And if we don't have it, let's make it was kind of
a like a thing that I grew up with. Whether, yeah, like a bunch of crafty things, I guess. And
I don't know when that died, because I had a little dip, right? I think,
I think, yeah, middle school, high school, I wasn't super into creating like materializable
things. I was more interested in, like, being creative in other ways, you know, whether it's
dancing, choreography, things like that. But not, not like items, like not material things.
06:01
And then now, in my research lab, you know, and in grad school, I feel like sort of that type
of resourcefulness, like before we buy things, like, can we make it with the stuff that we have
in our lab? Or like, can we at least test the proof of concept before we buy the expensive stuff?
That kind of resourcefulness came back in the grad school, like in the in the research format.
And, and I really, I enjoyed doing that. And I realized that not a lot of people do enjoy this.
I think a lot of people, much like how I wouldn't really think about buying a building a PC myself.
A lot of people, especially in my current field of conservation science, which tends to be housed
in museums, people prefer to buy commercial instruments, because that comes with some
kind of field service if things go south and whatnot. But there are things that are not
commercially available. And you can do a lot with like, a very, you know, straightforward,
white light generating super continuum laser. And it's to me, it's like a very versatile item worth
investing. But to somebody else in my lab, it's like, oh, you have to work out so much around
it in order to make it useful. Why don't you just buy a commercial system that like you just flick
a button and like, you know, laser comes on and you can do what you want already. But I'm like,
but by having this laser, you know, you can hook it up to different system, different things,
you can do different analysis. They're like, why? I didn't realize that not everyone enjoys making
or building things relatively from scratch. Yeah, that's why I'm asking you if you kind of
always enjoy doing this, or if it's just like a PC specific thing. Yeah, that through through
you describing how you see other people now do it, there's another thought coming to me. So
yeah, this. That's, it's interesting to hear that you sort of remember more of that feeling
of designing things when you were really young. And then it sort of vanished, but it came back in
a way that you will want to do that. But it's just with the stuff you like really know how to do
something with, right? You're like, I know we can do something with this. And I would prefer to have
my hands on it and have all the freedom of flexibility. I mean, sometimes I don't know,
09:01
like, okay, in research, I feel like, so I didn't build my PhD instruments, like from scratch, like
some of the other colleagues. Yeah, I had an annexed, like a another arm. Yeah, to it. Yeah,
to the existing system. And I coupled it because I needed a specific kind of lasers and specific
kind of light. So I did a lot of like, measuring, designing, and things like that. And purchasing
was also pretty scary, because these are like, expensive stuff, like BBO crystal for ultra fast
lasers, it's like, what, like less than a millimeter, and the aperture of like,
five millimeters by five millimeters, right, tiny little piece of glass, essentially,
costs like, few thousand dollars if it's really thin. And like, you know, I can't just like,
casually buy it, maybe, maybe not use it, you know, I need to really know my design. So
it was pretty scary. But I put together this like, new harmonic generation stuff for my lab. And
now my like, kohai is using them. And it's so and they just asked me questions about it yesterday.
I was like, maybe so happy that someone's using it. But like, it's, it's so much, you know,
it was so exciting when I actually saw, like fourth harmonic, I was like, Oh my god, my
calculation and all of my plans worked. Like I actually generated a fourth harmonic, like that
was super exciting. So maybe maybe that's why I have this like, love for designing and building
things. But yeah, I don't know, maybe I always had it. Maybe it got revived in grad school. But
yeah, it doesn't really matter whether you know, it works or not. I still I mean, the stakes were
higher in research. But yeah, I liked like, like, there's nothing quite like, you know,
planning and designing things for a long time, and finally committing it. And then seeing it worked,
like, it's pretty exciting. Yeah, that. I like that summary. I think it matches with what I did
with the PC, right? Where it was like, it wasn't as long, not nearly as intense as the PhD program,
right? Like, but you you knew that your success rate is fairly high. Yeah, I was ready. I was
ready for the and at the same time being ready for the types of failures I was likely to have.
Right. And even the particularly small, not failure, but like current thing where I'm like,
12:02
yeah, that can be made better, right? But it is it's coming to that completion. And now you have
this thing that you have put together, you now understand it better. It's like an awareness to it.
These are all, I think, really important pieces that I wish more people could both experience and
have. But it doesn't have to be for everything, right? Like, you know, it can be for these
particular things that you and I want to do. I don't necessarily have to know all the inner
workings of I'm like, looking around my room to identify something. How? I don't know the
refrigerator is designed, I do sort of know how the refrigerator is designed, but like,
not enough for me to like, put one together, right? Like, no way. Please, I will just buy a fridge,
you know, like that is the way more effective use of my time. But with people maybe being
given more opportunity, maybe the fridge connoisseurs out there might want to build
their own connoisseurs, you might you might want to build your own, it might be those that really
care about temperature control, because these fridges, not temperature controlled. Like I mean,
maybe maybe they only want to tolerate plus minus one degrees. Yeah, yeah, this is like plus or minus
10. So like, you know, like, you got a pretty big error bar here. You know, sometimes I get frozen
eggs in the back of the fridge. It's like, you know, weird stuff there. But yeah, yeah.
I do feel like if I didn't have this kind of experience of making something, something worked,
something didn't. And also my even my like, fourth harmonic generation, which was just like
one part of my thesis. It like, I just looked up because I was answering my co highs question,
right. And I have 11 iterations of this design, like 11 recorded iteration of this design,
okay, which means I probably tested out like three times more in between that was not worth recording.
Yeah, I understand. So so it's like, it was a pretty long ordeal. I worked on it for like,
almost half a year starting from conceptualizing, ooh, do I need this in my research? Yeah, to like,
to the actual generation of the first light. It took me a while and your first project should not
be that level. Like, no, start enter with something. Yeah. I do like I feel like being
encouraged to do lots of arts and crafts type activity at young age did, like,
at least planted, you know, the ideas of like, ooh, like, I see, I can get better at making
15:04
something if I do many times, or I can now modify give a twist of my own that was not in the written
instructions and like, make it cooler. You know, things like that. And yeah, I feel like it's it's
it could be something that like, kind of planted at early age. Yeah. I planting it at an early age,
I think is a great place to do it. Because it probably helps to have that feeling before
all of the concerns and like the worries surrounding the failure portions, or in particular,
which is inevitable. And also something I've been thinking of, which could maybe be separate,
we can summarize this year, is the financial and cost associated with the failures of a project,
right? Like, those don't match well with the enthusiasm, you might feel at first getting
into a project. So yeah, you're taking on quite a level of responsibility, which is something we
slowly learn to do over time, or at least we hope to learn how to do over time. But on top of that,
you're having to come to your own approach on how you find a level of confidence in there,
right? Like when, when or how do I become confident enough that the nervousness or the fear
of, you know, where the money is coming from, or how much it's going to cost or what happens if it
fails, is now kind of being balanced in a way that you can move forward. And that is, yeah, hard,
very, very hard. Let's take this to the next episode, because I feel like I want to talk
more about this. Cool. Let's do that. Okay. That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and
find us on X at Eigo de Science. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time!
