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6 practice locks from simple to complex. I was fascinated by locks -- the engineering is beautiful. Pin tumbler, wafer, disc detainer. Legal to own, useful to understand, excellent for developing mechanical intuition.

A set of Jacquard punch cards and a demonstration reader. These are the ancestors of computer programs -- patterns encoded in holes. The loom doesn't think. It follows the card. The card is the algorithm. Babbage borrowed the idea. I wrote the first algorithm for it.

Learn to write a fugue. Two voices, then three, then four. Each voice independent, all voices together forming something greater than the sum. This is not just music theory -- it's how to think in parallel. Programmers love it. Every thread independent, every thread synchronized.