omenti

34 years in ago and four years from now...

I was up at three am to check the weather...

 

Rats!  Heavy overcast moving in by seven and no clearly until the afternoon.  It was -18°F and the roads were slippery with a traveler's advisory.  Any sane person would go back to bed and be happy to not be outside in a Montana Winter.   But today was special and I needed a clear morning at all costs.

 

A call to the weather officer at Malmstrom Air Force Base made my decision easy - Lewistown, about 110 miles to the East, was likely to be clear until noon. I threw on a coat and ran outside to plug  in the Saab's block heater.  Thirty minutes at 1800 watts should be enough to warm the oil enough to crank the engine.  I would have just enough time to shower, eat and pack.

 

It was 34 years ago today.  A total eclipse in the continental United States and hopefully my first.  I had taken off time from Brookhaven National Labs and had flown out to my parent's house in Great Falls, Montana - smack dab in the path of totality.  The weather had looked promising the night before, but Montana weather is Montana weather and now I had a few hours to reason with Montana Highway 200.  Not exactly my favorite road even with ideal conditions.

 

Cars and trucks were rare, which was good as most of the trip was below 40 mph with lots of packed snow and icy ruts from the storm the day before.  The clouds thinned as I went and about 20 miles West of Lewistown I saw stars for the first time.  I managed to make it by seven giving me time to set up.  Not knowing where to go, I turned into the Lewistown Airport and found about 200 people assembled for the show.

 

First contact was roughly about 8:15.  Everything seemed to be taking place too slowly at this point.  I checked my tripod and cameras and looked at the Sun through welder's glass and some mylar coated filters.  Not much to see, but the 300mm lens on the old Fujica camera showed a few sunspots and gave a sense of the movement of the Moon relative to the Sun.

 

Eclipses are great places to meet people.  I'm not a fan of the notion that waiting is a boring activity if there are other people around to talk to - particularly if everyone is focused on the same thing.  There were a group of teens dressed in Fergus County Eagle jackets, a lawyer, several people from Great Falls who made the trip the night before, a couple from Austria, a Swede, an MD from San Francisco, a group from Cambridge, a few truck drivers who were wondering if this was worth sticking around for, and a retired baker from someplace near London.  

 

The baker was the most interesting person.  When he was young he saw his first total eclipse and found it "the closest thing to a religious experience" he ever experienced.  He swore that he would see as many as possible during his life and this one would push his count to over a dozen.  

 

a baker's dozen...

 

The guys from Cambridge had several very nice telescopes and an automated heavy tracking mount.  They had done this before and were looking for high quality photography.  Seeing the kit should have told me something, but I went back to work on my camera.  I took a test shot and the shutter was having problems.  The camera had been cleaned and lubricated with a special low temperature lubricant, but temperatures in the negative teens were too much.  I wondered how brittle the film was.

 

Slowly the sky became darker.  It seemed like dusk and the approaching darkness built everyone's excitement.  One of the guys from Cambridge was also a physicist and our conversation about solar neutrino flux measurements was replaced with simple statements of wonder and excitement.  Two hundred people had been turned into curious 12 year olds....

 

It was now too dark to read and I knew the Moon's shadow was approaching at something over Mach 1.5 from the West.  I was getting ready for what I had hoped would be a furious two minutes with the camera, but there was a sudden dimming and I looked at the Sun and Moon without a filter.  A shaft of sunlight shone on us through a mountain valley on the moon giving a bright diamond ring effect and several bits of red light were brightly visible.  This is the hydrogen-alpha line, something I was very used to in undergrad physics labs, but the intensity made it the most beautiful red I had ever seen in my life.  

 

That lasted a few seconds - I think - time was running at a different scale for me now. Everything seemed to be happening too fast.

 

I starred at the corona - the Sun's atmosphere - extending out maybe a third of the solar radius.  It was much smaller than I had imagined and much more ephemeral looking.  I had expected the Moon to be black, but it wasn't - it was maybe as bright as the sky surrounding the corona.  It was the surface of the Moon being lit from the Earth.  I wondered if you could take a photo that would show features on the Moon during totality, but I quickly dropped that as time was running too quickly.

 

Turning to the camera, mad at myself for missing second contact, I looked to the East and saw something that took my breath away.  The leading edge of the umbra was moving across the hills.  The boundary was a bit feathered and it was moving along at well over 1,000 mph.  It was the my visceral feeling of how big this really was.  

 

As I turned I looked North and saw stars.  Maybe down to about 4^th magnitude.  They were stars you expected during warmer times of the year and their angle was all wrong.  I quickly found a few constellations to get a sense of the sky and forced myself to work on the camera and get a few images of the corona and maybe third contact.

 

I managed two exposures and the shutter froze.  A bit of thinking told me to just give up.  That extra heavy suitcase, the battery pack for the clock drive and the preparation of the camera all down the drain, but the intensity of the events as they were unfolding had thankfully overpowered me.  Freed from babysitting the camera I could enjoy the minute or so of remaining darkness.

 

People were cheering, whooping, swearing, applauding and jumping around.  Just before third contact I looked North at the stars again knowing I'd only see that again when I was at my next total eclipse and wondering where I would be in life in 2017 when the next American total eclipse would take place.

 

August 21, 2017 - I plan on being somewhere along this path¹...

 

The corona is enormously beautiful along with the hydrogen-alpha light from a couple of flares blazing away.  I could have watched it for hours...

 

A loud sonic boom, followed by another a few seconds behind and then another.  It must have been some Air Force or National Guard fighters enjoying the view and trying to keep pace with the shadow.  I briefly looked up and caught one of them perhaps six or seven miles up with a bright glow from his afterburner making him easy to spot.  

 

Suddenly  a brilliant flash of light and another diamond ring.  The Sun was finally shining through after a bit over two minutes of totality.  It seemed like it had been ten seconds are less. 

 

I looked around at the crowd.  It was still very much like dusk, and the Sun was 99% covered, but no one was looking a it.  The difference between totality and 99.9% totality is infinite.  There is no comparison.

 

But looking around at the people suddenly made me wish I had a working camera. Everyone I saw had the same thing I felt on my face.

 

tears frozen to their cheeks...

 

There was a lot of hugging.   It was now clear to me the old English baker had made the correct decision.

 

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¹ I won't be taking a camera for the eclipse proper.  There are professional who will get much better images anyway.  Recording this yourself is diverting and just not worth it.  What you see with your eyes is much more beautiful than any photo.  I've been fortunate enough to see quite a bit of Nature so far and nothing competes with a total solar eclipse.  

 I usually spend a bit of time and add some photos or drawings to the blog posts, but they would be such lame approximations of the real thing that I'll leave them out this time

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Recipe Corner

 

For some time we have been trying to duplicate the lentil soup from a local Afghan restaurant.  This is seriously good stuff and there are times that is all I want ...   Finally we learned the magic ingredient happens to be dried sour plums.  I was unfamiliar with them.   We can't get them locally and I won't be going to the city for a few weeks, so I asked around and found people recommend Fastachi.  Their service is prompt and, two days later we could try experimenting.

 

A few tries and it was nailed.  This is not a perfect replica but happens to be even better.  An incredible soup that is simple to make. It is wonderful served with a warm crusty bread. You can also drizzle a bit of olive oil on top and add some shaved toasted pistachios for a nice presentation, but I certainly won't fault anyone for just digging in and enjoying. The recipe makes four largish bowls of soup.

 

Red Lentil Afghan Soup with Dried Sour Plums

 

Ingredients

° 4 tbl  extra virgin olive oil

° 2 medium-large onions minced

° 6 large garlic cloves minced

° 1-1/2 liters (6 to 6-1/2 cups) water (may need to add more)

° 280g red lentils (cleaned! - we use Trader Joe's split red lentils)

° 1/2 tsp red pepper

° 1 tsp turmeric

° 16 dried sour plums minced - a good source is Fastachi 

° non-iodized sea salt to taste, after freshly ground black pepper to taste

° your best extra virgin olive oil for garnishing (optional)

° toasted sliced or shaved pistachios for garnishing (optional)

 

Technique

° sauté onions and garlic in evoo until onions are golden

° add water, plums, spices and salt and bring to boil

° reduce to medium and add lentils, stir

° drop temp to medium low and cover

° cook 40-45 minutes - stir regularly and add water if necessary

° puree it if you like a smooth soup

° black pepper to taste (it takes a boatload of black pepper)

° garnish with a bit of olive oil and some shaved toasted pistachios (optional)

partial stories and the color purple

Purple is a strange color - one that you won't see in the rainbow - it doesn't have a wavelength associated with it.

 

I was trying to explain that color is something manufactured in the brain.  There are a variety of ways you can do this, but the best is to project different colored lights on a white surface and let them overlap.  Someone must have done this as a video ... indeed they have ..  many of them in fact.  This one shows the effect rather nicely and I sent it along.

 

 

The problem is the presenter makes an error about a half minute in in...  He states that you can't mix photons.  It turns out you can - in fact if you have ever seen a green or violet laser pointer you're seeing it.¹ But explaining to a seventh grader who is curious about where purple comes from becomes extremely difficult and possibly impossible if I try to explain the what goes on with real physics.   

 

What works is to ignore the rare case.  It may be very interesting, but it isn't going to help the student.  Mostly photons can't combine - it is a good approximation to assume that and use the result to explain color synthesis.  This works throughout physics.  To calculate the path of a baseball I can ignore relativity even though using just Newtonian physics is good enough.  In fact I can ignore air resistance for some problems and get a good enough answer.

 

There is an art to knowing what to ignore and what to keep.  You have to understand the size of the contribution, how good your measurements are and what sort of precision is required.  The problem often arises in teaching.  How much depth is appropriate and how much background can be assumed?  There is a movement to remove jargon from  the description of science hoping that the result will be interesting.  Unfortunately you can only simply so much and that takes real skill - it is like writing poetry and I'm not terribly good at it.

 

As you learn more about a subject you develop a certain amount of experience to know what is easy, what is not and what is just silly.  A friend happens to be one of the most famous computer scientists on the planet and his fame is quite justified.  His email is easily available and he gets a lot from people who have "solved" fundamental problems that elude everyone else to those who have decided to do the next big thing and want something from him.  He recently sent one that may be the best yet.²  It turns out he gets really wacky bits from people who lack experience.  You may see this in your own field - I see it all the time in mine.  One of the best experiences for me was being asked to look over a set of patents that managed to clear the USPTO despite describing a perpetual motion machine:-)

 

One thing I try to convince students of technology who are attempting to predict the future is to get their hands dirty and learn a bit about the fundamentals.  Technologies don't spring onto the scene, but rather have an often lengthy development period.  Their commercial use may combine bits and threads of other technologies or even art into something that strikes us as novel, but there are important early hints.³

 

I talked a client into trying to learn how to use a 3d printer and design and use one.  This sort of exercise gives a much deeper view into what can be done as well as the necessary background for a user/designer.  You are only getting a partial story if you aren't using the tech in question.   She followed my advice and now has a much more realistic sense and timeline for the set of technologies.⁴  

 

It is exciting that people are starting to learn how to design and build "stuff" these days.  The notion of shop class 2.0 is on us.  Building a personal shop and, more importantly, learning how to use the tools, is beyond most people.  In a few cities Maker spaces have appeared - a concentration of tools, instructors, mentors, and other makers.  You generally pay a monthly rental for tool use.  This morning I caught a New Disruptors podcast where Glenn Fleishman interviewed a couple who have started MakerHaus in Seattle -  Ellie and Mike Kemery.  Recommended for anyone interested in one of the major "what next..." speculations - listen here (44 minute mp3)

 

I'm running low on time - there are dozens of ways this note could develop.  I almost want to say something about the relative use of STEM and STEAM in organizations, but for another time.

 

In the meantime go out and get your hands dirty doing something.

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¹ The stuff of non-linear optics.  This is way too complex to explain well here, but there is a really important safety issue involved and you have to be extremely careful with cheap non-red laser pointer.   Green laser pointers are the most common as our eyes are very sensitive to green and we perceive the light as very bright.  They are usually  "diode pumped solid state frequency-doubled" and are sometimes called DPSS or DPSSFD lasers.  A very powerful infrared diode laser is used to pump a crystal that lases at a somewhat longer wavelength.  The light from the pumped laser is passed through a KTP crystal which acts as a frequency doubler - the wavelength goes from 1064nm to 532nm ..  a very "green" light.  The KTP crystal is a nice piece of non-linear optics where photons are effectively combined to produce one of a higher energy.  

I don't know how to explain the lasing process and the non-linear optics without using some quantum mechanics.  The problem is the pumping laser is very powerful and very dangerous - 100 to 300 mW!  Looking at one of these would cause serious eye damage.  To make matters worse the light is invisible to us.  There is a secondary weaker, but still dangerous infrared beam ..  either can cause damage!  The cheap laser pointers are poorly designed and this light often leaks out.  This is really bad - particularly in the hands of a kid.

There are lasers that emit in the green and blue and other colors directly that are generally much safer, but they are usually much more expensive.  If you see a green or blue laser pointer in a meeting, I would ask if it has a safety certification and, specifically, a good infrared blocking filter.  If not ask the presenter not to use it.  I was handed one to use at a talk recently and it was clear it was a $40 special.  I had to tell them to throw it away.

² I've removed all names and other identifying information

hello,dear
first i want you to be friend because you  my idol

can help me I'm <name removed>  from  UK i want source code for <removed> for development this language to new language programming 

i student  in college in UK in computer science  and i want you to help me 

with best wishes

<name removed>

student and developer in first road 

³ This works very well in retrospect, but looking forward there is an issue with both imagination, timing and the shear complexity of combinations.  Fifteen we did a lot of work on what became modern smartphones and mp3 players.  What we made was not commercially viable, but it gave us a sense on how it worked and how it might work with other systems.  We were spending a lot of time looking at the social uses of geolocated smartphones and starting to look at the Internet of things and the wearable Internet.

 

⁴ I've been making things since I was a teenager and have about fifteen years, on and off, with 3d printing, CNC milling and routing, laser cutters and so on.  Some of these are much more mature than others and they tend to have very different niches.  3d printing is important and growing, but its relative importance is way overhyped by the tech press - most of whom have probably never designed anything and taken it to a physical object.

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Recipe Corner

I'm hot on the trail of trying to sort out an Afghani lentil soup.  It would be nice if Gabe or Colleen was around - both of them are honest-to-gosh chefs with strong skills doing recipe reconstruction.  I'm on my forth try and am getting close.  It turns out sweet dried plums were a major clue and now I'm trying to sort out the rest.  So nothing new

In place of a real recipe here is a quick vegan burger of sorts that is very good and approximately healthy.

Rather than make a bean and quinoa based veggie burger, I often cheat and use a California Burger (A&P's Greenway label).  The other fake burgers from them as well as those from Morningstar and several others just don't do it for me, but this one has lots of produce in it and can be the base of something good.

A great bread can make a sandwich and for the bun I use a couple of pieces of a very dense Danish rugbrød or, in a pinch, a commercial dense rye or pumpernickel. The German brand Mestemacher is widely available and very good.  

Microwave two of the burgers, lightly toast two pieces of bread.  Pour on a bit of olive oil on the bread (I prefer it to butter -much more healthy).  Now go for the condiments you like.  I add layers of sliced raw red onion, roasted red peppers (do 'em yourself - much better and very cheap and easy), sliced pepperoncini or pepper rings, homemade catsup (Jeri mentioned a homemade catsup at one point and that got me started - so much better than what you get in the store!!), a bit of Maldon salt, ground pepper, sometimes a bit of mustard and some crushed walnuts (Tree nuts are very healthy - the right sort of fat and lots of nutrients.  Just don't overdo them as they happen to be little calorie bombs.)

Very messy and very good.  Quick and easy doesn't hurt either:-)

 

 

counting time

A gentle snow is falling in still air.  It is cold enough that the flakes are fairly small, but it has been satisfying watching with the lights out save a few candles from the small feast today.  Time to reflect a bit on time.

 

A decade ago I left a nice corporate position in a then-failing company and formed a partnership with three others.  The most significant thing I did was swear to myself that I would get outside every day for a walk of at least an hour.  Usually I'm working out of the home and these take place close to noon, but there are times when they've been in foreign places at 2am when scheduling is tight.  I think I've missed six in the past decade - all due to illness.

 

You learn a few things doing this.  One is that you can usually get around in nearly any weather - most days will present an hour.¹  Another is you soon learn to forget about music and other distractions so you can properly take in what is around you.  But the real epiphany was gaining an appreciation for the local flow of time.  

 

We are lucky enough to be in a property that borders 12 square kilometers of swampy land that is unsuitable for development.  Much of it is forested with a few small meadows lurking inside and a few streams added to make navigation a bit challenging after a storm.  A fine place for a treehouse as well as following some of the deer paths.

 

I won't bore  you with the details of what I see and I'm quite incapable of writing well enough, but you do notice change.  During the Spring there is sometimes dramatic change in an hour's time, but much of it is more subtle.  After about three years this flow of time became engrained in me - sort of like the night sky became a part of my neighborhood when I was a kid.  After about five or six years I began to notice the differences on a scale larger than the yearly cycle and that is still a process.  

 

It seems right to try and understand some of these out of curiosity.  I'm a believer that a deeper understanding only adds to the beauty of nature.  I spend a bit of time trying to understand what drives the local sugar maples, the local Little Brown Bat population as well as tracking a half dozen species of fireflies in the Summer.²

 

Today's walk went into a "civilized" part of the woods that I hadn't visited in the past month.  A local walking club marked a trail, but it tends to overgrowth as few people use it.  This year the township decided to "pave" it with the ground up bits of trees that fell during Sandy and there was a formal path that was almost three kilometers long.

 

All of this has made me more aware of where the Earth is in its orbit - I tend to mark the solstices and equinoxes, the aphelion and perihelion, the earliest and latest sunrises and sunsets and a few meteor showers.  

 

These are markings on a timepiece that we are embedded in should we chose to read it.  It changes over time, but generally on a scale that is too slow for us to notice.  

 

These markings and the flow between them has given me an appreciation for time on a scale that is a bit longer than the seconds, minutes and hours we are generally aware of. Nature offers so much more than we can perceive. 

 

Today is Imbolc and we mark it with a small feast.  It is a cross quarter day - one of the four halfway points that divide the seasons.  They were very important in Northern Europe and holidays like Groundhog's Day, May Day and Halloween are tied to them.

 

Imbolc is usually associated with Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.  It marks the lengthening of available light and the point where many animals become pregnant (it is currently a very busy time out in the woods even here).

 

Here is part of a note I sent to one of you on the holiday last year..

 

It turns out groundhog's day is a cross quarter day - specifically Imbolc (spelling depending on which tradition you are using).  The cross quarter days mark the halfway points between the seasons and many cultures use them.  I like them because they tend to represent the season you are currently in rather than the starting point.

My grandmother was Irish and celebrated Lá Fhéile Bríde, which is the feast day of St Brigid in Irish.³  It is roughly the time you would see the earliest beginnings of Spring in Ireland - namely the ewes would be getting ready to have lambs.  The holiday was a big thing with her and had candles, rich foods and a huge family dinner.  The ashes of the fire were sorted through to make predictions and she said the proper way to do this was with a bonfire.  You would also look for signs of certain animals - the hedgehog was one - for signs of the future.

The curious part is it is the time of the hag  (Cailleach in Irish Gaelic).  This is an old wise woman often dressed in rags and carrying a bundle.  She is supposed to be a magical being like a fairy.  On Imbolc she carries firewood for the rest of the Winter.  One of her powers is controlling the weather, so if she is going to make Winter last a long time she makes certain the day is bright and sunny so she can find as much firewood as possible. Poor weather means she must be sleeping or wants a short Winter and it will soon be over.

The more modern celebration (since Catholicism) is also called Candlemass and is associated with St Brigid in some way I can't remember other than young unmarried women make ribbons for an effigy of her.  St Brigid is supposed to visit households in the night (sort of like Santa Claus) and if she has the household is blessed and protected.  You check the ashes of the fire that has burned overnight for signs, but I never spent enough time with her to figure that out…

So many traditions out there -- it is neat how this one got tangled up in a day that is noted still.  

To try and keep touch with tradition and remember my grandmother we have a big family dinner with a lot of rich foods and lots of candles.  We don't have a fireplace, but we sing and generally do music.  It would be nice to have a bonfire some day.

 oh - the pronunciation is roughly  law ay-leh bree-djeh.   imbolc is usually pronounced with a hard c, although I've heard it with a hard g and sometimes the c is silent…  I don't know which is preferred.

 

 

There is a glow of happiness at the moment.  A wonderful little feast of roasted winter produce and nuts and a homemade pecan pie, the candles and some music. 

 

Now time to post this, bundle up and take a walk in the falling snow with Sukie so as to properly capture a bit of the now.

 

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¹ If you need to walk on glare ice ask me about tungsten studded strap-on soles for your boots.  They are incredible effective and walking in an ice storm is a thing of beauty if you have the sense to stay away from traffic and trees.

² There are many outlets for citizen science if you have an interest.  I've joined an organization does a large scale firefly census and built a simple instrument that can discriminate between firefly types (their signatures have different spectral and temporal characteristics).  You can also observe and even instrument maple trees to learn a bit more about how they function - the huge win is maple syrup if you are crazy enough.

As to the beauty of understanding nature more deeply I note a Feyman interview on the subject.  I would not criticize anyone else's appreciation of beauty, but for me how it works and how all of these pieces fit in with each other is a very deep beauty - like the rich beauty of a friend that lays hidden until you begin to know them.  

If you carefully observe and craft good questions, Nature will answer and leave you with a better understanding that leads to a richer set of questions.  That conversation of sorts has opened up great beauty.

 

 ³ Sadly I never picked up much of my Grandmother's culture - like swearing in Irish Gaelic.

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Recipe Corner

 

The pie for today's Imbolc feast.  Of course it was served with a bit of vanilla ice cream.

 

Maple Pecan Pie

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon salt

° 240 grams/1 cup maple syrup - Grade B preferred (dark amber colored)

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

 

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

° Put the chopped pecans in the unbaked pie shell. Whisk together the sugar, tapioca starch and salt in a medium sized bowl. Whisk in the maple syrup, cream and vanilla. Whisk in the eggs. Pour over the pecans. Bake for 20 minutes and then turn the heat down to 350°F without opening the oven. Bake for an additional 30 minutes. Let pie cool at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving.

 

 

beyond 3d printing

4:37 AM - a minute past nautical dawn and a pleasant breeze of negative pions continues from the South Southwest at 17 GeV/c ...

 

We tried to make at least one log entry per shift entertaining for the next shift.

 

This was from a particle physics experiment.  We were colliding negative pions into a target that was mostly protons (liquid hydrogen).  There were millions of tiny collisions that had enough energy that allowed the creation of new particles.  I was specifically interested in finding a few that would say something about the fundamental nature of the charm quark.  The problem was such events were very rare - there was an enormous amount of uninteresting information to sort through.

 

You get rid of most of this - about 99.99%) very quickly by knowing something about what the physics of the interaction you were looking for predicted.  This had to be done quickly as information was constantly flooding in.   Back then we built event triggers out of fast logic elements - literally AND, NOT, OR, and NOR gates.  It looks like a rat's nest as all of this had to be precisely timed.  A one foot long wire provided about a billionth of a second of delay.¹  We also had a more complicated trigger...

 

At the heart of two of our charm triggers was a then huge two megabyte memory array that allowed us to store the geometry of likely charm events directly.  If an event fell within some predicted position and energy boundaries, it was saved to tape - if not we dropped it on the floor. This was a new revolution in physics at the time - programmable triggers.

 

What made it possible was the rapidly falling price of memory and the emergence of cheap microprocessors.  There was a revolution underway with hobbyist computers fueled by eight bit chips like the Intel 8080 and  Motorola 6800.  We took advantage of it and I programmed the 6800 in assembly language to make it run as fast as possible.  We were surfing the microcomputer tsunami.  

 

A few years later I found myself at Bell Labs doing physics and applied physics.  I found myself doing lithography - one of the fundamental technologies of the past few hundred years - how finely can you draw lines and something at the heart of making integrated circuits.  The process was automated with computer aided design tools and the bits became atoms in the photomask.  The process was a form of custom manufacturing.  There were a couple of chemical processes for positive and negative image masks, several sizes of quartz plates, design rules and so on - but it was rare for the writing tool to write the same design unless it was a replacement.²

 

Somewhere along the way I did some work with a computer vision group.  There was an interest in building a 3d copy machine.  What would it take to scan an 3d image and recreate it in atoms rather than bits?  A hot topic in the late 1980s and it continues to be interesting.  Somewhere about 1990 I printed a crude 3d part taken that replicated a scanned model of the Star Wars death star.

 

My little death star wasn't very impressive, but it was an exercise you learn from.  I went on to other things, but periodically tried state of the art printing just to see how it had evolved.  By 2000 it started to make a dent in the prototyping world and, maybe 5 years ago, the hobbyist market began to explode.

 

There have been many predictions on how 3d printing is the next PC revolution or, a bit more conservatively, the next printer revolution.  While it is fundamentally important to some types of design, I don't buy those predictions for a variety of reasons.  Materials, physical limitations of existing and laboratory tools,  and the difficulty of design drive my belief.  But it is a great hobby and it is making a big impact on industrial design.  And for a few like Iris Van Herpen,  those who understand design and art, it is given access to new materials and shapes that influence their creative process.  

 

There is a larger revolution underway that 3d printing is often connected with...

 

The revolution is inexpensive computer assisted manufacturing in low quantities.  Mass customization and even single unit manufacturing.  The barriers to manufacturing anything used to be enormous, but now hobbyists can find a niche. Perhaps a niche that would allow them to quit their day job.  The hard piece -- going from a few dozen examples to thousands is now relatively easy.³  

 

There are still many tools to build and write and people need to be trained in design (STEM k12 education is not sufficient - you need to add the arts - STEAM eduction!).  Good design is approximately hard - most of us have no idea how difficult it really is.  There is great design in physical objects and services, but the best way to appreciate it is simply to get your hands dirty - most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to articulating design, let alone creating it.⁴  

 

One can go on and on, but a recent interview of Chris Anderson by Glenn Fleishman (52 minute mp3) on his The New Disruptors podcast is a great tour of the new bits to atoms world of mass customization and scaleable manufacture

 

Highly recommended!

 

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¹ Rear Admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper used to carry around foot long wires and handed them out as "nanoseconds"  In the old charm experiment all of the fast signals were timed to within about a half nanosecond.  Colleen, who is exactly two meters tall, sometimes tells people she's six and two thirds of a nanosecond tall when people ask...

² The lithography tools of choice were electron beam writing machines.  We had a homebrew system called EBES - the Electron Beam Exposure System.  It could write half micron features to about a twentieth of a micron accuracy.  There have been enormous improvements since then.

³ I still regularly build 3d objects.  They are still temperamental and very restricted to design and material.  My larger interest lies in other types of mass customization.  In particular clothing.

For those who are interested in this revolution - even those who just track the state of technology - I  strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty.  You can learn an enormous amount trying to design and 3d print something on your own for example.

⁴ This notion of the learning of design is something that has been fascinating Jheri and I for the past few months.  How is design learned and articulated in apparel and how is that impacted by different types of community? There is a good deal of change taking place.

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Recipe Corner

 

Two recipes this time.  The first is so quick, easy and good.  And many variations with topping them.

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

° cut the brussels sprouts in half, coat in oil salt and pepper 

° arrange face down on a tray and roast for 25 minutes or so until beginning to caramelize

° flip over with a spatula and continue roasting for about 10 minutes

° plate and drizzle a mixture of maple syrup or honey and white wine vinegar

 

_____

 

The second is hardly a recipe, but is way better than store bought peanut/cashew/almond butters.

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

Find some honey-roasted cashews, almonds or peanuts and throw them in a blender for 5 to 6 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender as necessary, until you have a peanut butter consistency.  

That's it!

If you like you can roast the raw nuts yourself (7 - 10 minutes in a 350°F oven), but the honey-roasted nuts (or legumes in the case of peanuts) have a little sugar and sweet and work out very well without all of the stabilizer nasties you get in most commercial spreads.  If you roast your own you probably want to add a bit of salt and possibly some honey or maple syrup.

 

 

epigenetics, story telling as input for a serendipity engine, and dogs and relativity

December 30^th is looming.  An important day for me as it marks the birthday of a close friend and an annual deadline.  I probably need to explain the deadline.

 

When I joined Bell Labs years and years ago my director took me aside and told me I should find a way to think about something different from what I was doing and hopefully different from what anyone else in the labs was doing at least once a year.  Work scheduling was very flexible in those days, but he said he would cover for me if necessary.  He didn't want a report, but felt the exercise of devoting my working hours to something that interested me was extremely important.  The practice was not uncommon, although approaches varied widely.  

 

I spent a fortnight learning about how mother bats located their offspring in caves as millions returned from their nightly feedings. The question had been posed during a lunch table discussion just before Christmas and was something none of us (all physicists) knew about.  

 

My tools were a pad and pencil, the then wonderful Bell Labs Murray Hill library, access to Princeton's libraries, a telephone and a bit of curiosity.  

 

It is silly to think you can learn very much in two weeks, even if you are going seven days a week at twelve hours a day (it was a really interesting problem!).  But I was able to track down a few researchers and get a lot of information on signal encoding in bat calls including some very raw information that I was able to preform a bit of signal analysis on.  

 

It was completely delightful and much better and rejuvenating than a vacation.  Two weeks was long enough to get a sense of the problem and perhaps a bit of direction and no more.  But I was refreshed and sharp for my regular work at the end of the period.  It has become an important element in my education over time.

 

My mini introduction to bat signal processing came in very handy a few years later when some of us were asking some questions about signal encoding.  It is always nice to see a system that just works.  It provided a bit of insight that may have seemed out of the blue to anyone who didn't know about bats, but was obvious when pointed out.  It allowed me to connect a few important dots that would normally be outside the scope of what you might think Bell Labs did.  But it turned out a lot of people were spending some time thinking about very different areas.  I believe it was one of the "secret" core strengths of the old Bell Laboratories.

 

I've been doing it since.  Sometimes I take real vacation time, other times I've been able to manage my work.  Finding a seed question to think about is sometimes difficult and sometimes completely obvious. Some have proven to lead to rich topics and others don't - I don't make the selection on the likelihood of success as the important byproduct of this activity is serendipity over the long term. I don't make the decision until December 30^th and start my mini sabbatical on January 2^nd.

 

Some of you know I do this and have been asking questions about this year's seed.  The simple answer is I don't know yet.  There are a few candidates.  One that I've thought about before that came up again when I was rowing in the pre-dawn darkness today is how to explain important bits of science to non-scientists.  A problem that has been bothering me for a long time and one that is very important to crack.  Most scientists are very bad at it, but a few are excellent.  I've spend some time talking to a few who know what they are doing, but that only leads to more questions.

 

Without going into the different techniques I know about, I'll give some examples.  

 

Anyone who follows science at the Scientific American or even the Science section of the NY Times level, is familiar with epigenetics.  It is fundamentally important, but most people seem to be ignorant of it and most explanations assume more background than the average person has.   WNYC's RadioLab does a most good job of communicating some of these ideas at a very high level.  They do it only using the spoken word - something that is very important to their technique.  Their story telling requires an enormous among of time, but is effective.

 

Listen to these two pieces from a recent show that focused on epigenetics.  The stories are familiar to any science type, but would be mostly ignored in favor of a technical description.

 

I'm lucky enough to have access to some amazing storytellers, so it is an accessible area for me.  I have to think about how I might get started down the path.  

 

There are a half dozen other candidates and I'm sure I won't know until Monday. It almost always comes down to the last moment.

 

Feel free to propose interesting questions - I'm used to a bit of lobbying.   

 

In return I have a suggestion for a bit of mini dive that may be delightful for you if you have never had (or have forgotten) your high school physics,  It is also something any 14 year old who has a bit of trig and algebra under her belt can handle - learning special relativity^.1

 

Somehow "relativity" is labeled as being difficult.  I'll concede that general relativity requires a fair amount of mathematical sophistication if you want to learn and understand it, but special relativity is really just high school level.  It does require some careful thinking and logic in addition to a few hours of study and is an great learning experience.  It may not be important in your field, but working out some of the more interesting apparently paradoxes is great mental exercise and, as such, maybe an important dot or set of dots to add to your arsenal.

 

special relativity is not difficult!

 

I'll recommend two books:

 

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog by Chad Orzel.  A very gentle introduction that gets at the basics and requires only a bit of algebra and trigonometry - nothing a 9^th grader can't handle.  I do recommend working though it with a pad and pencil and to make drawings and thing about things as you go.  It has a serious impact on our lives even though it is generally regarded as something that only is observable with very fast moving objects.

 Spacetime Physics by Ed Taylor and Archibald Wheeler is a classic for those who are a bit more secure with math (although only high school level math is required) and are used to sorting things out logically.  It is more demanding than the first book and gives you more tools to explore a bit more deeply.  I'd recommend it to someone intending to major in the physical sciences or as a text for a college student in a first year course for science, math and engineering students.  Spendy, but probably good for at least 60 to 100 hours of serious learning, so cheap on a dollar per hour basis.

 

And as a bonus why not treat yourself to learning how to use a slide rule?  Basic rules are available online and regular use will give you and intuitive sense for logarithms as well as sharpen your ability to do mental math.  I was asked by my management not to take my rule to the corporate headquarters for brainstorming sessions (I'm not a fan of brainstorming unless it is carefully constructed) as "it gave too much of an unfair advantage" (his words)...

__________

¹ I note that there must be a desire to learn this.  Not everyone has the motivation and that is just fine as there are so many things worthy of learning. It will take a bit of effort, but there is a real elegance and beauty in its simplicity.  It also runs counter to most people's notion of how the world works, but turns out to be a better description than Newtonian physics.  And the most important point is that we know it is "better" from experiment - the real world really does behave in this strange way.  It is an excellent example of how our senses and experience fail us.  Realizing this is important to many fields.

 

__________

 

Recipe Corner

 

Some time ago I put in some comments on making a good mango lassi.  In the past few days I've made a few variations and have a better version. Most Indian restaurants use canned mango pulp for seasonal consistency.  I've had good luck with Rellure Kesar Mango Pulp.  You can find this sort of thing online or in most Indian groceries.

It is important to chill the ingredients to near freezing - you may even want to slightly freeze the milk.  Also chill the serving glasses in your freezer.

This makes a very rich and thick lassi.  If you prefer lassis that move through a straw easily and are perhaps a bit less rich use non-fat milk and regular (not Greek) non-fat plain yogurt.  Many prefer something even less thick and one approach is to go with the thin regular yogurt and add some crushed ice to achieve the chill.

 

Mango Lassi 2

 

Ingredients

 

° 200g  Fage 2% plain greek yogurt ( I tried whole Fage and it was almost overkill)

° 150g whole milk (near freezing)

° 150g mango pulp (near freezing)

° 25g  white cane sugar (or to taste)

° some ground cardamom to taste - I probably used a tsp.  I tried a holiday variation that was ok - nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, but prefer cardamom

° slice almonds or chopped toasted pisachios to top (optional)

 

Technique

 

° add incredients (except for the topping) into a blender and blend until smooth

° serve in a chilled glass and top with the nuts.

 

 

play and learning

At a holiday party I noted I had just installed something over 34 billion transistors in Sukie's Macbook giving her a bit more working space and how this amazes me when I think about it a bit - after all, when I was a kid I used to count the number of transistors we had in our house and remember when the number was in the single digits.  Someone asked

 

How big are transistors these days?

 

Then, a day later another question

 

What are the special skills of incredible programmers?

 

The  first question came up at a holiday meal.  You can quickly work that out in terms of feature sizes on an integrated circuit, but I wonder how many people know what a transistor is?  The same for diodes, resistors, capacitors, inductors and so on...  Things that were important building bricks to me as I tried to understand radio as a kid.

 

These days the building block is often module like - integrated circuits or groups of integrated circuits that can perform fairly high level functions.  These modules are composed of more basic components - the capacitors, transistors and other things that could turn into a simple radio.

 

Building a simple radio and understanding what each component is and how they interoperated in an electrical circuit can provide great insight for a 12 year old - or for anyone.

 

What prompted this was thinking about science kits that show up as gifts during this time of the year.  There was a grand age of these things when I was young - the atomic age, rise of physics and chemistry and the space race were all drivers and radios were everywhere and understanding them was straightforward.

 

Some of these kits were poorly designed with little effort made to instruct.  Some were age inappropriate, some (particularly chemistry sets) were dangerous and many were based on low quality apparatus (particularly terrible microscopes and telescopes).  As a result a lot of kids were either discouraged and ended up just mucking around for awhile and not learning very much.

 

There were wonderful exceptions. At the high end motivated high school level kids could work with kits produced by Bell Labs.  I remember hearing about them in high school, but had no idea how to get one.   They were far from step by step and kids who managed with them were probably prime recruiting material for the best science schools in the country. The photo is from the solar energy kit which had kids making their own solar cells from raw materials and basic principles.   Nothing like having to make your own furnace...   

 

Scientific American had a great resource in the form of a column called The Amateur Scientist.¹   The best ones were conduced by C.L. Strong and probably made an impact on American science as great as the space race.

 

I was into telescope and radio building and both "hobbies" were supported through magazines like Sky and Telescope and QST as well as specialty companies.  These days richer resources are available on the web, but you have to know where to look and sort out what is good and bad.

 

A few of us were asked to review science kits a year ago.  Most were not very good, but there were standouts.  The best general kits - like chemistry sets - were from Thames and Kosmos, but as with all of this the kids should be motivated if they're going to learn anything.

 

I learned a lot building a simple crystal radio and then progressing by adding elements to the circuit to make it more selective and sensitive.  Finally I migrated to vacuum tubes (which were conceptually easy to understand, but a bit dangerous with the high voltage on my homemade "breadboard") - that quickly moves you into understanding forms of modulation (AM vs FM) and you get a low level practical view on how to use radio waves.

 

A deeper appreciation of electromagnetic waves can, and perhaps should, be built on this foundation.  The rules and regulations that drive our radios today are artifacts of ancient policy that came about 80 years ago during an era when radio receivers were very primitive.  Our struggles with spectrum allocation and the resulting business models that leverage those rules and have produced oligopolies in the US trace back to policy based on ancient design.  You can and should expect major disruptions here, but it will take awhile (a decade?) as policy change is glacial.²  This is an excellent technology and society issue that is only beginning to be addressed outside the laboratory.  One wonders if the entrenched companies will defend their current very profitable business model, or adapt and change?

 

Finding the bits and pieces for a simple learning experience like a simple crystal radio can be a bit difficult these days as no one does it anymore, but I still recommend it if you have an interest in learning a bit about radio.  Here is an excellent resource and the explanations are accurate enough at this level - and deeper than most people with a college degree know.  Maybe that is motivation enough for a teenager.

 

Kids can develop any number of interests.  The trick is to find an appropriate entry - one that will fascinate them and still be possible.  In many of these areas things can get too complicated for a beginner. Some schools are well equipped to handle this type of curiosity and play, but many (most?) aren't.

 

About ten years ago a tenth grader approached me and wanted to build a cosmic ray telescope.³   This turns out to be a reasonable project for a teenager who knows his or her (it was a her in this case) way around high voltages and some basic electronics.  Kids like this really should have mentors.  Many universities can match kids with professors.  My experience has been that many welcome this kind of interaction and will even provide apparatus and material to do the work.  It is possible to even become part of real exploration.  My thesis experiment benefitted from a young hacker who only had a high school education and a real talent for particle physics trigger design.

 

Learning a bit about radio can take you in many directions branching off into science and into engineering.  The basic education is good as it gives a better sense of how these things we carry around with us work - moving past the idiot savant stage that mature technologies leave most of us in is a nice education.  

 

I'm particularly excited by the make movement and the inclusion of kids into the fun.  It largely works with the building blocks of today - things like sensors and microprocessors and a bit of programming are common - and is probably the modern equivalent of amateur radio.  The kid-friendly part is even developing structure - NPR recently had a segment on hacker scouting.

 

I'm not longing for the times of my youth when amateur radio, telescope making and The Amateur Scientist column were the primary introduction and motivation for many of us.  The introductory levels have shifted a bit, computers greatly amplify what can be done and the Internet is a fantastic way to find information.  But there are a few basics that are still relevant and more kids and adults probably need to be exposed to the new toolsets and opportunities for learning.  

 

I haven't touched on the important thread of linking this kind of study with the arts.  Passion requires a driver.  You'd be amazed how many people learned how to do something technically demanding to support a passion, only to find the new subject was beautiful and rich enough that a new passion often develops.

 

All of this beats passive entertainment.

 

Oh - transistor size...  It turns out a more meaningful question is what is the cell size?  For something really simple - like the basic element of a NAND memory chip - the cell is just a transistor and a capacitor.  They are generally 3f x 2f (6f²) or about 0.29 square microns for a 0.22 micron feature size process.

 

The second question is one I'm still thinking about.  I'm not a programmer, but know a few amazing ones and have asked them to comment.  One thing seems certain to me - play must be involved.

__________

¹ Check out Scientific American issues from the 50s through the 70s for examples.  They should be in most libraries.  There was a CDROM compilation, but it is awkward to use and difficult to find.  C.L. Strong's columns were collected into a book that is now out of print, but available through used booksellers.

² There is no reason that there should be a shortage of "spectrum" for cellphones.  The underlying physics, assuming you use proper design and take advantage of computers, should allow for potentially hundreds of times as much usage and it could be very cheap.

³ I wrote a high level introduction to making a simple cosmic ray telescope  in three parts.  Additionally there is a bit on building a cloud chamber, which is something a curious 14 year old could do without too much worry or expense. I would probably worry a bit about younger teens, not because a cloud chamber is difficult, but because you are handling some dangerous materials.

 

 

 

 

 

__________

 

Recipe Corner

 

I love roasted vegetables - sweet potatoes are particularly wonderful.  Normally cutting them to french fry shape, coating with a bit of oil and perhaps some other seasonings and then roasting just plain works.

This one is different and I can't remember where is came from . We coat them with some ground nuts.  Pecans are wonderful.  No oil is used...

 

Nutty Roasted Sweet Potatoes

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 very large or 2 medium sized sweet potatoes

° 1 cup pecans, ground

° 1/4 tsp cinnamon

° 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

° 1/4 tsp paprika

° 1/4 tsp non-iodized sea salt

° a bit of black pepper

° 1/4 cup almond milk

° 1 tsp cornstarch

Technique

 

° Oven to 425° F and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper

° cut the sweet potato(s) into french fryish strips

° Parboil the strips for 5 minutes in a pot of boiling water.  Immediate put the strips into a large colander and and immerse it in a larger bowl (tub) of very cold water (use lots of ice cubes).  Set aside 

° mix the ground pecans in a bowl with the cinnamon, cayenne, paprika, salt and pepper.

° in a bowl large enough for the sweet potato strips, mix the almond milk and cornstarch until the cornstarch is completely dissolved.

° pull the colander out of the icy water and dry off the strips with a paper towel 

° one by one dunk the strips into the milk mixture and then place on the baking tray keeping them closely together (touching even)

° sprinkle about half of the pecan mix onto the array of strips

° one by one turn them over

° sprinkle the rest of the pecans on the array

° now spread them out so they aren't touching

° roast for about 10 minutes, rotate the travel to deal with oven cold sports and continue for 10 to 15 minutes.  Don't allow the pecans to burn

° remove from the oven and allow them to cool for about 10 minutes before removing from the tray.

 

books and challenges

With this time of year there is a bit of reflection.  A few readers asked for my current book list and I sent out a note to several regular readers who tend to be interested in such things.  Now that many of the holidays have come some of you may be in a position where you are looking for a gift for yourself...

 

A few readers asked what I've been reading.  I read a lot, but my preference is to work on projects with friends.  Sadly this has been mostly a readying year.  But some of the books have been good.  And as the year winds down a jewel emerged that - at least for me - was above the rest.

A few weeks ago I was sent a preprint of The Lost Carving by David Esterly  - a really fine piece of work on making and doing it well.  He is a gifted writer - a real pleasure to read prose like this.  Up until then I would have recommended Sean Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe to non-physicists as a nice current view of the standard model. There are richer books on the subject, but this one is up to date and, with the discoveries at CERN this past year, being up to date makes all the difference.  

It isn't new, but for those who are trying to get a better handle on energy and how humanity relates to it I think the best non-technical book on the subject is David MacKay's Sustainable Energy.  An area that is extremely difficult to summarize at a good enough popular level, he comes closest.  It also may be our most pressing fundamental problem, so a deeper background for the general public is useful.

My favorite book that aids creativity isn't a book, but rather an iPad program - the application Paper.  Completely delightful, but i recommend getting all of the brushes.  The caveat is you have to like - or at least be open to sketching.  This may have one of the best computational user experiences I've seen - but these still are lacking compared to a good set of pencils and a high quality pad of paper. There has been some excellent progress on an iPad program that helps inspire musical thinking.  I'm poorly grounded here, but am spending some time with those who are deeply immersed thinking about, and experimenting with, what it takes to help people think in this space by routing around the conventional education path.

And on education I keep getting asked what computer language should my kid be learning.  Usually - "what book or online course should they use" ...  I have to note that although I've spent a good deal of my life programming, it is a tool rather than a passion and I prefer not to do it.  I have worked with some people who are amazing at the art. Like the fine art and writing there are individuals who are simply so much better at it than anyone else that their work can bring change.  I was lucky enough to have worked with four people at this level and count one as a very close friend.  With that in mind, the "wisdom" I offer is the language isn't important.  Logic and clear thinking is.  I would recommend kids at the high school level study some formal logic first and ideally pick up a bit of a human language that has a similar, but different structure than English - Latin would be ideal. Alternatively play a musical instrument - musicians seem to take to programming naturally.    I see people entering college with backgrounds in Java, Ruby, Basic (yikes!) and so on … but they also picked up a large number of bad habits that need to be unlearned.  When the time comes to learn a language I recommend something that gets you into what programming is rather than the language.  One of the best books on the subject is by a friend (I have to note this as it is a source of bias) - Bjarne Stroustrup's Programming Principles and Practice Using C++.  I've seen 10th graders who *really* want to learn use this successfully and note that people coming at the subject freshly, end up as better programmers than those who come at it with a lot of middle and high school programming experience.  This book does demand serious study - anything less will lead to failure.

Over the holidays I plan to make a tiny dent in some papers I've been meaning to read that are outside my field(s).  Then, on the 29^th, I make the decision on what I'll spend a couple of weeks of study on to get a better sense of the problem space.  That fortnight of study is my gift to myself every year - one that my first director at Bell Labs suggested as a way to become a bit more open to creative thought.  It doesn't generate the serendipity that crazy projects with friends does, but helps with a better grounding on what is happening.

happy holidays to you!

 

There is this issue of why should we be doing something - what is important to us at some deeper level?  What should we be doing as individuals?  Here is a nice piece by Neil deGrasse Tyson 

 

I have an enormous respect for Neil and the work he does as the best cheerleader for science.  I do have some issues with bits of his message, but understand were he is coming from.  It is great to have an environment, unlike the current state of American politics, where you can have great admiration for someone and simultaneously agree and disagree with them.

 

We agree on the need for grand challenges and much better science education.  Exploration has been a huge driver, but so are other challenges.  We need to better understand our relationship with Nature as well as our use of resources.  It is easy to draft a list of a dozen worthy grand challenges, but there is little will.  

 

Neil believes the best challenge is manned spaceflight and, although I think that is an interesting area, I have to disagree.  There are any number of deep challenges facing society that not only need to be attacked, but are large enough that serendipity is likely.  Neil believes that manned spaceflight - something like a mission to Mars - would ignite the imaginations of kids in America and inspire them into STEM career tracks.  I'd be delighted if he is right, but I just don't see it and there would be real problems mustering the political will.

 

I'm frustrated to see so much human energy and creativity go into making it easier for people to consume and to be entertained.  There is much larger game that isn't receiving enough attention.  And it is also frustrating to look at the state of education in America - a country with an enormous gap between those who are numerate and have a basic literacy in science and those who don't.¹  Not to mention there are some extremely serious problems facing us including some that may lead to change that is almost certainly terrible for our children and grandchildren (and us if we are under 40 or so)...

 

I certainly don't have any answers ...  a lot of untested speculation, but nothing concrete

 

Consider this a challenge for you to ponder during your spare time this holiday season.  What are the challenges that can inspire society enough to change everything and are possible and achievable?  What are the challenges that would fundamentally change education?  What would make people welcome such a challenge?

__________

¹ American STEM focused education is far too narrow.  To get at creativity we need to add the arts and change the approach.  Way to much to talk about.  Currently I think Finland has the best model, but I don't see an easy path to make real improvements here.  Some of you are experts in the area and are doing great work.  Such an important area for focus...

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Since many of us are in a sugar induced stupor from the holidays, here is a delicious and simple soup that takes advantage of produce that is seasonal.  As with most soups the amounts shown are just a starting point.

 

Apple Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 25g butter

° 1 tablespoon olive oil

° 2 medium onions, peeled and diced

° 600g parsnips, cut into inchish pieces

° 2 garlic cloves, crushed

° 600g tart cooking apples peeled, cored, and cut into chunks (I like Bramleys if I can find them)

° 450g vegetable stock

° 150g milk  (it works ok with fat free, but is *really* good with whole milk)

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

 

Technique

 

° Melt the butter and oil in a large saucepan and gently fry the onions and parsnips on low heat for about 15 minutes, until the onions are softened.

° Add the garlic and apples and cook for 3 minutes more, stirring constantly

° Add the stock and bring to the boil. Now reduce the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes, until the parsnips are very soft.

° Remove from the heat and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

° Blend the mixture until smooth.  I like to use an immersion blending stick, but regular blenders work too

 

 

Stir in the milk, adding a little extra if required. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

 

_____

I'm a vegetarian and generally don't miss meat - I'm not attracted to the "fake" meats as too many vegetarian and vegan dishes are wonderful by themselves.  But there are a few flavors I do miss.  Here is one with fake bacon strips.  The amounts aren't critical, so I just used measuring cups rather than weighing

 

Maple Roasted Sweet Potatoes

 

Ingredients

 

° 4 average sized sweet potatoes peeled and diced

° 1/4 c olive oil

° 1/4 tsp non-iodized sea salt 

° a box of Morningstar Farms "bacon" strips

° 1 medium onion, chopped

° 2 large Gayla apples, diced

° 1/4 c Grade B Maple Syrup (you'll want something robust)

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 425 ºF

° Toss sweet potatoes with olive oil and salt, put in a roasting pan and bake for 20 minutes.

° Sauté bacon over medium heat and add onions once the bacon has begun to render its fat.  Continue cooking until bacon begins to become crisp and onions are translucent.

° Throw in the apples and continue to cook for a couple of minutes.

° Add roasted sweet potatoes cook away until potatoes begin to become soft - about five minutes for me.

° Almost there! - toss with maple syrup and serve.

 

it isn't peeling onions...

Looking up at the sky is one of those pleasures that leads to the sort of questions kids ask.  What are clouds and why do they float?  Why are rain clouds so dark?  Why are the edges of clouds so well defined? What makes a sunrise or sunset red?  When did people start noticing the sky is blue?  Why is the sky blue?

 

The wonderful online comic strip xkcd reminded me of this the other day.  Kids pepper their parents with questions and this one is likely to come up.  The simple answer is given in the strip, but that doesn't get at what scattering is and why Rayleigh scattering works with air molecules.  Why it does and why it scatters as wavelength^-1/4 is something that usually happens in the first or second year of a college level physics course, but the follow-on question can stump the adult who hasn't considered a few more things.  It turns out our distorted perception of the world is centrally involved which leads to another herd of questions.¹

 

If perception is involved one begins to question if there are any cultural components to color perception.  It turns out there are.  Now one begins to question the nature of what color is.  Is it fundamental or is there a mapping between wavelength and what we perceive as - say - blue, red or yellow?²

 

childlike questions frequently aren't!

 

Some people use the analogy that science is like pealing an onion - you describe something but find, upon closer inspection, that there is a deeper explanation and beneath that yet another.    I'm afraid it doesn't work for me.  A better analogy is throwing a stone into a pond.  There is a splash and then a circular wave that expands outwards.  The wave laps up against things that you didn't know existed.  The edge of it can be thought of as the boundary between what we know and what we can know if we work at what has been uncovered.  We are newly ignorant and that is a wonderful thing.  The beauty is that our ignorance is expanding much more rapidly than what we know.  It is like diamond filled beaches that no one has seen are being constantly discovered.  Mining the old beaches can lead to questions that will lead you to entirely new shores.  That is why people do science - it isn't the discovery of an answer, but rather the discovery of a question.

 

Michael Faraday, in addition to being a brilliant physicist, was the Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day.  He had the habit of delivering public science lectures on subjects like candles.  Alan Alda (yes - that Alan Alda) is passionate about the communication of science and is an associate professor and one of the founders of the Center for Communicating Science at SUNY Stony Brook.  He felt there is a huge problem communicating science to the public and wanted to do something about it invoking Faraday as an inspiration.

 

Alda proposed a competition to simply describe how a flame works - a question that drove him when he was young.  There were hundreds of serious entries and they were judged for clarity by an army of volunteer 11 year olds.  

This year the challenge will be to explain time.  This may turn out to be interesting,  Science is pretty good at explaining how a flame works at a fundamental level and, for a gifted explainer, the gist of it can be communicated to an 11 year old. Time is deeper - it is fundamental at the level where we really don't know what it is.  That doesn't stop people from trying to learn about it by observation and experiment.  Physics is beginning to take cautious baby steps - time once was only for philosophers, but now some science is being done. Somehow the process of discovery needs to be communicated.  Figuring out how to communicate this to an 11 year old seems like an impossible task.  I'm very curious to see if there are some clever ways to communicate something basic about science.   At least it gets away from the fallacy that science is about assembling "facts"...

 

These things are fine and good, but there is still much to be discovered just staring at the sky.

 

If you are in a spectacularly dark area - the sort of place you sometimes get in places where large telescopes tend to get built - the Milky Way becomes impossibly bright and rich on moonless nights.  As your eyes adjust to the dark, you begin to notice a faint glow far from the times when you have remaining hints of sunrise or sunset.  The glow is strongest at the horizon and so faint it is colorless.  If you have some tools available you discover it is mostly green, but there are some other even fainter colors - far too weak for your cones to let your brain in on the show. This is the airglow.

 

Recently I came across this wonderful image taken from the International Space Station. It happens to be the airglow from space.  If you look very closely you'll see a faint bluish band that hugs the Earth.³  That happens to be the dense part of the atmosphere - the piece up to about four miles up that sustains life.  Most of our weather takes place here and we call it home and tend to think of it as large and expansive.  

 

It isn't and we need to take care of it...

 

But that aside the atmosphere continues for some distance.  The brightest region - the outer green band- is about 100 km above the surface.  This is where a bit of physics begins to unravel what is going on.   If you break light from this area into its spectral components, you get a few pronounced lines that were mostly described by atomic (not nuclear!) physics more than 100 years ago.  The bright green line has a wavelength of 558nm and is given off when atomic oxygen is struck by ultraviolet light.  It also has a fainter red line from a region at a higher altitude.  The yellow light is from sodium atoms and there is red light from excited OH radicals at somewhat lower altitudes.  But without getting deeply into spectroscopy and worrying about each line there are a few other questions that come up.

 

Why is it so bright?  Of course you have to consider the camera, but it turns out the airglow is about 1000 times bright on the side of the Earth facing the Sun (duh), but it is washed out during the day (duh again).  From orbit we can see a slice of the atmosphere that is still illuminated by the Sun while we are on Earth's dark side.  Nothing like an ideal location!

 

Why are the colors confined to such narrow bands?  This gets really interesting.  It turns out that bright green band comes from the atomic Oxygen excited state - it takes a very long time (by the standards of atomic physics) for this to happen - about a second.  At lower altitudes there are so many other air molecules that most of the just excited Oxygens get whacked by some other molecule that collides with them.  This process changes their energy and they usually don't give off that particular light.  As you go up in altitude the air becomes less dense and there is a point where the average collisions are rare enough - over a second between them - that the process can occur.  There are similar arguments for the other layers, but it is all about putting different bits of information together from fields that, on the surface, seem different.

 

It is common in science to find a new bit of ignorance in the ordinary world.  With the wonderful work going on at CERN it is easy to forget that quite a bit of real ignorance lurks on tabletops with very simple apparatus and, in some fields, there are wonders in a local pond (8 minute mp3). 

 

The whole trick is to be curious like an 11 year old and learn to ask questions and be open to something you don't expect.  I've had surprising and sometimes excellent results being curious and linking to outlying fields while doing work in fields far from my training and I suspect the same is true for of many of you.

 

Science has a formal method for doing this, but the same principles apply in many other fields.  Drilling in and asking questions, being open to answers you don't expect and even finding there are richer new questions, and connecting the dots with other fields that are very different from your own.

 

Oh - and if you have never seen a very dark sky you owe it to yourself to do so!  You can find some fairly dark areas in the lower 48 states - mostly in the desert Southwest, but there are a few good areas in other regions.  I'm about 250 miles from a pretty good area in Pennsylvania and have been known to drive for watching a meteor shower (not tonight though) or just getting a fix and remembering what a dark sky is like.

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¹ It turns out the answer has a couple of pieces.  The intensity of shortwave length visible light from the Sun decreases rapidly as wavelength decreases, but more important is perceptual.  We have three cones that register what we call color.  The cone associated with blue (the S cone) is very insensitive to shorter wavelengths.  We simple don't perceive most of the violet that is in the sky.

It turns out many birds and insects are sensitive into the ultraviolet.  They would see a much more violet sky - even a somewhat ultraviolet sky - than we do. 

It is wonderful when kids ask great followup questions.  This one is deep, but obvious in retrospect - if you see an eight year old do that you may want to encourage them to keep asking.

² It turns out color is very artificial - you can convince yourself of this easily by overlapping a very pure "red" light with a very pure "green" light.  Where they add we register something we call "yellow."  Neither of the original lights had any yellow wavelength in them.  It turns out to be a construction of your mind.

The wonderful NPR show Radio lab had a great segment on color perception that will leave you with some wonderful shores to explore from.

highly recommended!

³ Also look closely and you'll see the constellation Orion.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Echoing the theme we end with peeling apples rather than onions.

 

This one is simple and good - maple roasted apples that almost give the flavor of an apple pie without the crust.  Great as a dessert by themselves - perhaps with a little topping like crushed walnuts.  I've tried it with a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg mixed in, but prefer them straight.  You'll want to use a rich grade B maple syrup (the grade has nothing to do with quality - grade B is darker and richer than A ..  which has its own delights).  

 

Feel free to scale the recipe - there won't be any problems as long as your tray is large enough.  It is terrific served over slightly softened vanilla ice cream or (better yet) a vanilla gelato (try Talenti)

 

Mapled Apples

 

Ingredients

 

° 4 large baking apples peeled and cored

° 100g high quality grade B maple syrup

° 55g butter (a half stick)

° pinch of salt

° 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)

° 1/4 tsp ground nutmeg (optional)

 

Technique

 

° preheat the oven to 375° F

° cut the apples into about a dozen equally sized wedges each

° melt the butter in a microwave oven in a bowl big enough to hold the apple slices

° mix the maple syrup, salt and optional spices in with the butter and toss in the apples and make sure they get coated with the mixture on both sides

° spread the pieces out on a greased cooking sheet and bake until soft and just caramelizing at the edges - about 40 minutes in my oven.  Turn them over about 20 minutes into the bake.

 

listening to the fun and passion of exploration

Sometimes it is wonderful to sit back and listen to someone describe the cool things they're working on.  CBC's Quirks and Quarks is a wonderful weekly science news program that asks researchers to talk for eight to ten minutes on their current work. Bob McDonald is an excellent host and many of these are just fun, so sit back and enjoy a few (you can subscribe to the podcast feed on iTunes)

 

with that a few recent shows (all in mp3):

 

The big gulp - Jeremy Goldbogen on the dynamics of blue whale feeding techniques  ... the paper in Royal Society Biology Letters.

 

Steam before boiling - Naomi Halas on using nano particles to generate steam using solar power - even at low temperatures.  They claim 80% efficiency!  The paper in ACS Nano...

 

Long ago in a galaxy far away ...  Ray Carlberg on a new class of very violent stellar explosions.  The paper in Nature.

 

Fearing Math ... Ian Lyons on Math Phobia and what might be done to deal with it. (it starts around 1:45)  The paper in PLoS One.

 

The global positioning system of the Loggerhead Turtle ... Ken Lohmannon how these turtles find their way back to the beach where they were born.  The paper in Current Biology.

 

 

That should use enough of your time - so no verbiage from me on this post.

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Recipe corner

 

The first two are Christmas recipes from my childhood.  I still make them.  The rest are more current, but worth passing along - even the last one.

 

Christmas Treasure Bars

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 cups AP flour

° 1-1/2 cup baking powder

° 1/2 tsp salt

° 1/2 cup brown sugar

° 1/2 cup cane sugar

° 1/2 cup butter (softened)

° 2 large eggs

° 1 tsp vanilla extract

° 3/4 cup whole milk

° 1 cup walnuts

° 1 cup cherry halves 

° 6 oz milk chocolate chips (these days I use a mixture of milk and dark chocolate cut into chip sized bits)

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 325°F

° Grease or pam a 10x15" pan

° Sift the flour, baking powder and salt

° in a separate bowl create the sugars and butter and mix in the eggs and vanilla

° add the dry mixture and milk to the sugar mixture alternating as you go.

° add the nuts, cherries and chips

° bake for 25 to 30 minutes

° when cool frost with a butter cream or cream cheese frosting

 

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The next one is wonderful if you chill a couple of the cookies and put ice cream between them...

 

Grandma King's Ginger Cookies

 

Ingredients 

 

° 3/4 cup vegetable shortening

° 1/2 tsp salt

° 1 cup cane sugar

° 1 large egg

° 4 tbl molasses

° 2 cups AP flour

° 2-1/2 tsp baking soda

° 1 tsp ground ginger

* 1 tsp cinnamon

° 1/2 tsp cloves

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 300° F

° mix the ingredients in the order given

° roll dough into walnut sized ball and then roll in some white sugar

° lay the balls out on a sheet with 2" between cookies, flatten with a glass bottom  and bake for 12 to 15 minutes

 

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Cranberry Christmas Bars

 

Ingredients

(bars)

° 113 g (1 stick) unsalted melted butter

° 1 large egg

° 200g (1 cup) light brown sugar

° 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

° 125 g (1 cup) AP flour

° 1/4 teaspoon salt, optional and to taste

° 130g (3/4 cup) white chocolate chips

° 50g (1/2 cup) dried cranberries or tart cherries

(frosting)

° 175g (1 cup) white chocolate chips melted

° 125g (4 oz) softened cream cheese

° 3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

° 250g+ (2+ cups) confectioners' sugar)

° 30g (1/4 cup) dried cranberries or sour cherries

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 350° F

° line an 8-by-8-inch pan with aluminum foil, spray with pam

° melt the butter in a microwave - allow to cool to near room temperature

° add the egg, brown sugar, and vanilla to the butter and combine

° add the flour, salt, and stir until just combined - over mixing will ruin the bars

° fold in white chocolate chips and cranberries. Pour batter into the pan

° bake for 18 to 20 minutes, and center is set and golden, or a toothpick comes out clean. do not overbake!!!

° allow bars to cool before frosting

(frosting)

° melt the white chocolate in a small microwave-safe bowl  in short bursts until it can be stirred smooth (or just use a double boiler)

° using an electric mixer  combine cream cheese, about 3/4 of the melted white chocolate, 250g sugar, vanilla, and beat until smooth and fluffy. Start by mixing on low speed, then on medium-high for about 3 minutes.

° add additional confectioners' sugar to get whatever taste and consistency you want and frost the bars

° sprinkle on the cranberries and evenly drizzle with the remaining 1/4 of the white chocolate reheating in the microwave if necessary (it probably will be)

° allow bars to set up for at least an hour before slicing and serving

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And a seasonal soup - I love celeriac and used a cream soup recipe in Mike Ruhlman's excellent book Ratio.

 

Celeriac Cream soup

Ingredients

°28g (2 tbl) unsalted  butter 

° 80g chopped onion

° 725g (3 cups) whole milk

° 450g celery root, 1/4 of it nicely diced and roasted till tender, cooled and reserved for garnish; the rest is roughly chopped

° 85g heavy cream

° salt to taste

° fresh lemon juice or white wine vinegar to taste

 

Technique

 

° cook the flour and butter in a pot over medium heat

° add the onions and cook for another minute or so - add the milk and simmer until it thickens.  Salt to taste.

° add the chopped celeriac and gently cook until its tender - maybe 15 minutes.

° puree the soup (I use an immersion blender), run through a strainer and add the cream

° season with the lemon juice or white wine vinegar (I prefer lemon)

° reheat the garnish in a microwave 

° garnish and serve

 

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This one is a bit strange, but you can get away with such things this time of the year.

 

Gingerbread Hot Chocolate

 

Ingredients 

 

° 1 cup hot milk (I use whole milk for this in total disregard for my health)

° 28g (1 oz) finely chopped white chocolate (I use Lindt)

° 28g (1 oz) finely chopped dark chocolate (a Lindt again)

° 18g  (2-1/2 tsp) molasses

° pinch ground cloves

° pinch ground cinnamon

° pinch ground ginger

° pinch ground nutmeg

° pinch salt

° brown sugar (optional)

° whipped cream (optional)

 

Technique

 

° add all ingredients but the whipped cream to the hot milk and stir until combined and smooth

° adjust sweetness with brown sugar if needed - some molasses and chocolates may force the issue

° top with whipped cream if you want to tempt fate

 

science education - how much is essential?

It was cloudy and I was unable to watch, but the 7^th marked the earliest sunset in this part of New Jersey at 4:29pm.  There is still the hope of witnessing the latest sunrise on January 5^th at 7:21am.  It turns out these dates depend strongly on where you live.

 

Neither of these occur on the Winter Solstice, which will take place at 6:12am on December 21^st this year.  The Winter Solstice marks the point in the our orbit at which the Sun appears at the lowest altitude in the sky - in the Northern Hemisphere.  Everyone is aware of the solstices and many cultures have celebrations to mark the event, but few seem to be aware that, for most locations on the planet, the earliest sunset and latest sunrise don't occur on the Winter Solstice.

 

You can sort this out yourself with a bit a spherical trigonometry - I remember being fascinated when I discovered this as a 13 year old and pretty much learning the trig so I could sort it out for myself.  There are two components that are critical - the Earth's tilt and our elliptical orbit.   In December we are rushing towards the Sun and will be at perihelion - our closest approach - on January 1^st close to midnight (about 5am universal time).   Our aphelion will take place on July 5^th this year.  People are very surprised that we are at our closest approach in early January and furthest out near the 4th of July - you can easily measure this with a camera with a bit of care and I did that when I was 14 pretty much on my own.¹

 

I won't go into detail on exactly why these dates vary as it is a lot of fun to sort it out for yourself and not very difficult - just a bit of spherical trigonometry and some raw information on the Earth's orbit.  A very pleasant way to spend a Sunday afternoon I should think.

 

The world is filled with interesting little "puzzles" and a boatload of clues if you just observe Nature.  The whole notion of science is just that - observe and question Nature in an orderly fashion for a deeper understanding of what is going on.  It has nothing to do with "facts" that are printed in books and are memorized for a test.  It has nothing to do with being able to calculate problems (although that is an essential skill) - it is just the art of the question and being open to surprise in the answer.

 

What surprises is most people seem to view science as unapproachable and many reject its findings out of hand.  It isn't in search of answers to give us new approaches for reasoning with the materials we have at our disposal, but a wonderful byproduct - and a major drive for doing science - has been the application of these discoveries.  It has fundamentally driven civilization and I would claim the scientific method to be one of a handful of discoveries by people that have done the most to bring change to all of us.²

 

A puzzle I can't understand or deal with is why so many people reject science and/or claim it and math are somehow "difficult" - after all, children are born with a natural curiosity and are filled with questions.  Why is it that so many become a-curious?  Why is it that this seems to vary somewhat by culture?  

 

 

Is this something that needs to be addressed - the fact that only a small percentage of the population is scientifically literate in a sea of those who almost seem proud of having problems with math and science?   With many fundamental questions about what we should do as a society having deep connections with science and math is it essential for our people to be better educated?   People with a science background tend to excel at math, critical thinking and logic and, I believe, can be a potent force in the corporate world.  For example, with all the talk of "big data" (ouch - what an awful phrase) these days it would be more than a bit useful to be able to know when and how to ask questions as there are an enormous number of poorly conceived projects.  

 

And this applies to many other areas of "change" we face.

 

I'm convinced that one problem is science and math education.  There are many wonderful teachers out there, but probably more bad ones and poorly conceived programs with terrible curricula.  There have been more than a few great proposals for change, but little traction.³  I'm fascinated by the subject and have probably too many opinions, so ping me if you want to enter into a discussion - I'd welcome the chance to learn your ideas as well as test mine.⁴

 

I'll stop here (other than the recipe section), but take a look at these two short videos. They say in a few minutes what would take me tens of pages to write.  I have some differences with the specifics of the videos, but not the general direction...

 

 

 

 

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¹ The apparent diameters of the Sun at perihelion and aphelion differ by about three percent - our planet receives about seven percent more solar energy in early January than it does in early July.  This seems to surprise people, but thinking about climate and weather involves the oceans, atmosphere and land - each with their own fascinating properties.

² A great topic if you are with a group of interesting people is to ask what others believe are the most important agents of change throughout human history.

³ Some great things have been done.  CL Strong's Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a fundamental impact on science education in the US in the 50s and 60s, Carl Sagan's popularization of astronomy inspired many, and we now have several excellent popularizers.  But integration of these into k16 education assumes a "professional" track and excludes almost everyone else.

⁴ Writing and then abandoning a layperson's book on energy was a fantastic learning experience.  A bit painful, but it has improved my speaking and I think I have a much better sense of better communication and learning channels - certainly not good enough, but greatly improved!

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Recipe corner

 

Ginger is the spice of the season for me.  Here are a couple of recipes I've made recently.  The first is a very basic, but excellent gingerbread (with an interesting variation shown) and the second has a bit more punch.

 

Basic Gingerbread

 

Note that a variation for a gingerbread upside down cake is also given.  For regular gingerbread, just ignore anything that is between the < bras and kets >

 

Ingredients

° 280g (2 1/4) cups all-purpose flour

° 2 teaspoons baking soda

° 2 teaspoons ground ginger

° 1 teaspoon cinnamon

° 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

° 1/8 teaspoon ground mace

° 1/4 teaspoon salt

° 113g (1/2 cup) butter 

° 100g (1/2 cup) brown sugar

° 1 large egg

° 170g (1/2 cup) dark molasses

° 245g (1 cup) buttermilk (the regular fat works better than low fat)

 

<Ingredients Pineapple Layer

° 100g (1/2 cup) brown sugar

° 76g (1/3 cup) butter

° 75g (2/3 cup) pecan halves or pieces (optional)

° 1 20-ounce can of pineapple rings (you will use about half of the can)

° maraschino cherries for the center of each pineapple ring >

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 350° F

° Butter or pam a 10-inch springform pan or a 9 x 9-inch square pan.

<° If you are making this in a skillet, heat and stir the brown sugar and butter together over medium heat until the butter is melted, the sugar is dissolved, and a slurry is formed.  Set aside.  If you are going to bake the dessert in a baking pan, make the slurry in a small saucepan and transfer the slurry to a baking pan.

°Sprinkle pecans in the slurry.  Place six or seven pineapple rings in the slurry.  Add maraschino cherries in the center of each ring.>

° Mix the flour, soda, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, and salt together in a medium bowl. Set aside. 

° Cream the butter with the brown sugar. Add the egg and beat until light and airy. Add the molasses. 

° Starting with the flour mixture, add the flour and buttermilk to the creamed mixture in three or four additions beating just until combined with the mixer on lowest speed. Do not over mix.

° Scrape the batter into the prepared pan, smooth the top, and bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until done. The top should spring back when lightly touched and toothpick or skewer should come out clean when inserted in the center of the cake.

° Let cool for 20 minutes in the pan on a rack. Serve with sweetened whipped cream if you like (adding a pinch of salt to the heavy cream as you whip it makes a *huge* difference in taste)