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     Art/Simple Beauty, (circumlunar), 11/08/2018
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Somewhere, someone once said that "simplicity is beauty." It
might  have  been Goethe  or  Plato  or Emerson  or  Dorothy
Parker; I'm not exactly sure who  to credit. But it has been
said,  and it  was  before  my time,  and  it's true.  99.9%
guaranteed.

I have  a friend  back in  Arizona who  is a  pathologist by
trade, and  a gardener,  prepper, ham, and  carpenter (among
other things) on the side. He collects and uses antique hand
tools for  woodworking, because  he loves the  simplicity of
their design, and the very  connected experience he has when
using them. To me, his  tools are beautiful because they are
simple and well-made.

We were visiting his house once when I noticed that he had a
thermometer outside  his window,  between his house  and his
garden. He mentioned  off-hand that he used it  to tell when
it was getting too cold out.  I don't get out much, I guess,
and I hadn't  seen this before, but I noticed  then that his
thermometer was able  to show him a max-high,  and a min-low
temperature via a simple mechanism  that pushed a dial to an
extreme as the temperature changed. He'd look out the window
in  the morning,  and  he could  see if  it  had been  below
freezing during the night.

Contrast that with  my solution, in which I  had connected a
raspberry pi up to temperature, light, and humidity sensors,
then logged the  data in a database, which I  could query in
the morning.  Sure, I had a  lot more data, but  we had both
solved a problem,  and he had certainly  invested less money
and time in his simple and beautiful solution.

Technology is beautiful  to me too, don't get  me wrong, but
sometimes it all  feels like too much, and I  want to go out
and get a low-tech thermometer and some hand tools.

I found something like the one my friend has here:

http://www.leevalley.com/us/garden/page.aspx?cat=2,43224&p=60068