re420: The Radio Dial (*please read my question in the description)

[00:00:00] The radio dial. If you're old enough to remember the analog dial on a radio, you'll get this visual much more quickly if you're young enough to not quite have that visual. Here's some help. [00:00:15] Before digital radio stations, or rather digital receivers, you had to turn a dial on the radio to try to get the best reception from the radio transmitting tower possible. [00:00:27] It was an art as much as a science, as we didn't have the easy to read numbers, for example, 87.5, but rather a guess based on the indicator and how close it was to the station you wanted. [00:00:42] Dare I say, it wasn't so much digital or exact, but rather analog and a feeling. It was almost like safe cracking, where you close your eyes and listened to see if the station was coming in at the best frequency that you could achieve. [00:01:02] You would hear the crackle and the static of the world in between. So you turned the dial slowly and deliberately and listened for the silence. And soon, if you had the patience and the persistence, the music and the voices would come through clearly. [00:01:20] If you are of a certain young age and are reading this and wondering why anyone would go to all of the trouble turning a dial and hoping and feeling in order to connect, and why wouldn't we just match up a digital number and know it was the best connection, and not to mention the only connection we have or needed, then this is a perfect opportunity to create the metaphor of how and why. This book isn't about a precise digital frequency that we can tune into every single time easily and automatically, but rather an analog world that uses feel and touch and doing crazy things like closing our eyes to focus. Better to go briefly into the mathematics or the physics of radio waves. Think of the radio waves in their visual form of mountains and valleys. They are floating everywhere around us at all times, and we can connect to the frequency that matches our station only when we tune our dial to that same frequency. [00:02:28] I'm sure in this book I will use the radio dial metaphor in many ways, but here's another beautiful one to take in here at the beginning of this book. [00:02:38] Think again of the radio as a receiver. And yet it's not just one station that we receive. It's not just 87.5. There are radio waves all around us and we can connect to most, if not all, as long as we are in tune with that same frequency. All we need to do is tune into the frequency where we want to be.