dunno if I am stupid or what...

[miriam_e]

I was mucking around last night still trying to design this frigging VR language and was thinking about datatypes. I want this language to be typeless because humans have better things to do than worry about types. Let the computer worry about that. Anyway I was thinking about fixed point arithmentic like we used to do in the old days before floating point units became a part of all desktop computers. Then I somehow got distracted... (what, me?) and was thinking about how logic gates are actually designed. Nobody thinks about this stuff anymore. This is a waste of time, right? I try to shake myself out of it but my mind is like a dog snuffling in the undergrowth and I feel like some part of me is shouting at it, "Come out of there, you're wasting time. Hurry up. Look, I'm leaving without you..." But no use. It wouldn't budge. It had found something. It was old and smelly and probably no use at all, but it was kinda odd.

I'd noticed that a see-saw is an inverter: You push one end down and the other end pops up.
I'd also noticed it is easy to put two see-saws side by side so that something on one end of both forms a NOR gate: Push one see-saw down and it lifts the thing on the other end, push both see-saws down and it lifts the thing on the other end. The thing on the other end is only down if both see-saws are up. If down is 1 and up is 0, the two see-saw ends you push are A and B, and the thing on the other end is C then:

A	B	C
0	0	1
0	1	0
1	0	0
1	1	0

A NOR gate is one of those magical devices -- you can build any other logic gate from it.

I suddenly realised I could build a computer from paddlepop sticks.