Signals

As Marshall McLuhan famously noted, “The medium is the message.” I don’t know if Mr. McLuhan was an audio/video enthusiast, but that pronouncement, I think, perfectly describes a peculiar affliction that is all too common among us enthusiasts. Perhaps, just maybe, he was talking about you.

Every square inch of your roof is occupied with a solar panel. There is a wind turbine in your front yard, and another in the back yard. You laugh at the cost of electricity. However, Luddites like me are confronted with a monthly power bill. Which brings us to the question of televisions, kilowatts per hour, and your hard-earned cash.

We buy smart speakers and scatter them everywhere — living room, dining room, kitchen, bedrooms — how cool! So, our homes have speakers with built-in microphones, always-on internet connections, and lord knows how many lines of code. What could possibly go wrong?

I am doing spring cleaning. Yes, it is currently winter. But I live in Florida, and it's too damn hot to do manual labor in the spring. Ergo I am currently cleaning out my storage locker. As a result, I think I have to buy this Audio-Technica turntable. I'll explain.

Trinitron, Betamax, Walkman, PlayStation, Compact Disc, MiniDisc, Blu-ray – and EV. Yes, you read that right. In the not-so-distant future, you can pre-order your Sony Electric Vehicle. With a little help (or maybe a lot) from Honda, the proud block-letter logo of our favorite electronics company can now reside in your garage. And I'm not talking about that old Trinitron in the corner of the garage that you keep meaning to recycle.

The year is 2017. You are in Portland, or at least in the general vicinity. It is late at night. You are driving down a dark road. You turn on your radio, and happen to tune to 96.7 MHz on the FM dial. What you hear is something you've never heard on the radio. Something strange is going on, something very strange.

Late one night, unable to sleep, you fire up your short-wave radio and aimlessly tune across the dial. Broadcasts from close by and from distant lands, in English and in languages very much not English. Then you come across something unusual — a radio station with a voice endlessly repeating a series of seemingly random numbers. Congratulations. You have stumbled into the strange world of numbers stations.