I never said it wasn't fun or interesting. But look at the example you gave in the cartoon; it's not impressive unless you're heavily invested in the process.
Trust me, I know the great feeling when a piece of code works for the first time or some idea I have about signal processing yields an interesting result, or the excitement of getting the color of paint that I want because I learned about an interesting new pigment with excellent lightfastness properties. But nerd excitement isn't that interesting to other people. If you actually found a way to genuinely levitate, by contrast, people would go nuts just to witness it. When was the last time you saw people genuinely go nuts over something? I'm not talking about the last gushing article on the new Curiosity pictures, I mean something that people pay fat money just to have a glimpse of.
I mentioned signal processing above, which provides a useful counter-example. Synthesizers allow you to shape a signal (typically an audio signal) using various combinations of oscillators, filters, and modulators. This is tremendous fun if you're the sort of person who enjoys turning knobs and listening to bizarre sounds or watching them on an oscilloscope (thanks science). But it was also pretty expensive to make. Back in the 1980s as microprocessors became common people started using them or this purpose and it was so much cheaper to manufacture with microprocessors compared to analog circuitry, plus you could do things that were previously impossible thanks to digital precision, that digital keyboards and synthesizers took over the whole market.
After a while some people complained that the digital synthesizers were cool and all, but they just didn't sound that good for many purposes compared to the old analog ones. Proponents of digital argued with great conviction, backed up by lots of data, that digital synthesis could reproduce any imaginable analog signal and produce many other things that would be impossible to achieve using analog, and they were correct to a large extent. But as electronics manufacturing got cheaper, partly thanks to surface-mount technology and automation, and partly thanks to manufacturing in China, it became cost-effective to start making analog synthesizers and modules again. A few niche manufacturers did, then a few more, and a few more, and eventually (most of) the major synthesizer manufacturers caved and started reproducing their old analog designs and making new ones. It's not that digital was deficient, but people just prefer the sound of analog, perhaps for the same reason people often prefer to receive a hand-written letter to a printed one that elaborately reproduces the characteristics of handwritten text.
Trust me, I know the great feeling when a piece of code works for the first time or some idea I have about signal processing yields an interesting result, or the excitement of getting the color of paint that I want because I learned about an interesting new pigment with excellent lightfastness properties. But nerd excitement isn't that interesting to other people. If you actually found a way to genuinely levitate, by contrast, people would go nuts just to witness it. When was the last time you saw people genuinely go nuts over something? I'm not talking about the last gushing article on the new Curiosity pictures, I mean something that people pay fat money just to have a glimpse of.
I mentioned signal processing above, which provides a useful counter-example. Synthesizers allow you to shape a signal (typically an audio signal) using various combinations of oscillators, filters, and modulators. This is tremendous fun if you're the sort of person who enjoys turning knobs and listening to bizarre sounds or watching them on an oscilloscope (thanks science). But it was also pretty expensive to make. Back in the 1980s as microprocessors became common people started using them or this purpose and it was so much cheaper to manufacture with microprocessors compared to analog circuitry, plus you could do things that were previously impossible thanks to digital precision, that digital keyboards and synthesizers took over the whole market.
After a while some people complained that the digital synthesizers were cool and all, but they just didn't sound that good for many purposes compared to the old analog ones. Proponents of digital argued with great conviction, backed up by lots of data, that digital synthesis could reproduce any imaginable analog signal and produce many other things that would be impossible to achieve using analog, and they were correct to a large extent. But as electronics manufacturing got cheaper, partly thanks to surface-mount technology and automation, and partly thanks to manufacturing in China, it became cost-effective to start making analog synthesizers and modules again. A few niche manufacturers did, then a few more, and a few more, and eventually (most of) the major synthesizer manufacturers caved and started reproducing their old analog designs and making new ones. It's not that digital was deficient, but people just prefer the sound of analog, perhaps for the same reason people often prefer to receive a hand-written letter to a printed one that elaborately reproduces the characteristics of handwritten text.