If you’re looking to avoid the long lines at the florist or your sweetheart has an unfortunate chocolate allergy, why not give them something from the heart instead? Granted, it’s from someone else’s heart, but they don’t have to know that.
Engineer Matthew Dalton composed this poem to “prove to myself that love can be found anywhere, even soldered to a circuit board.”
“Sure, engineers have been stereotyped as nerdy, desperate, and dateless,” wrote Dalton on Passions in Poetry. “But years ago, when I sat in class reading that Dilbert, I just snapped. Engineers aren't all sad and lonely, and just because I was sad and lonely didn't mean that everyone else was.”
Dalton has kindly allowed us to reproduce his poem in full:
An Engineer’s Valentine
I was alone and all was dark
Beneath me and above
My life was full of volts and amps
But not the spark of love
But now that you are here with me
My heart is overjoyed
You've turned the square of my heart
Into a sinusoid
You load things from my memory
Onto my system bus
My life was once assembly code
It's now like C++
I love the way you solder things
My circuits you can fix
The voltage 'cross your diode is
much more than just point six
With your op-amps and resistors
You have built my integrator
I cannot survive without you
You're my function generator
You've changed my world, increased my gain
And made my math discreet
So now I'll end my poem here
Control, Alt, and Delete
For more Valentine’s Day engineering, check out this 3D-printed trinket.