omenti

trying to stay on track and finding some great questions along the way

Fourteen months ago I started a serious weight loss program that successfully transitioned into a weight maintenance program about three months ago.  Along with the weight loss and the associated benefits and problems that come with that, many questions presented themselves and finding answers and new questions has been a rich experience.

 

Some of the high points have been learning that, at least for me, losing the weight was much easier than maintaining it.  It turns out this is generally true and most diets end in failure.  Specialists in the field are not joking when they say “the best way to gain weight is to go on a diet.”  Why this is happens to be a rich area of academic study.  The general explanation most people use is the body needs less energy due to less weight to support, lower muscle mass, and a shifted metabolism.  But why does the urge to eat more than what the body needs at its new weight exist?  Is this relate to “plateauing” in weight loss?  What are the biochemical signaling links?  Why is this predominately unidirectional (why is it that underweight people are usually more successful gaining and keeping weight)? How much of this is genetic?  How much is epigenetic? ...

 

Curiously the exact energy available to us in food is only approximate.  Calorie charts must be viewed with a bit of skepticism, but they are still essential for tracking and it isn't terribly important that their listing may not match what your body is really doing - especially when what you eat doesn't dramatically shift.  You can learn to deal with the bias.  The same is true - but even more so - for exercise.  You can infer some of these relationships and adjust your calculations, like the Caloric calculations, with a weighting coefficient.  If you aren't into this sort of detail just adjust your intake downwards and/or increase your exercise if you are slowly gaining with time.

 

There are a pile of open questions and research is only beginning to probe some of them. Of course a magic bullet would be worth billions to the drug companies and many of them have tried to crack the problem with no luck.  The diet business is filled with pseudoscience and terrible nutrition advice.  Some of it may be good, some is neutral but doesn’t cause harm, and some of it is downright dangerous.  The best paths - and the best segments of the population - for dealing with the epidemic of obesity still are unclear, although prevention is probably the cheapest and most effective option at this point.

 

The fundamentals of controlling weight for someone who has never been overweight are well known, but the current level of inactivity coupled with the easy availability of low quality good make this difficult.  You would think children are important and in need of protection, but there are no signs they are well protected from this epidemic which seems to be lowering projected adult life spans in many countries.

 

In theory it is easy - eat good food, but don’t overeat, and get enough exercise.  Sadly that is impossible for the majority of the population.  

 

I’ve been overweight so I have to fight signals that my body is sending to return to a higher weight.  This means I have to monitor my activity and food intake.  Doing this isn’t too difficult with a little software assist as well as exercise coaching from a friend - basically I’m using techniques similar to those I used to lose weight, but with a different target on my daily energy balance. There are indications that the best techniques for losing weight and maintenance are somewhat different.¹  I keep a daily journal, but don’t worry about being a few hundred Calories over target here and there as long as I can cancel that excess from other days - I try to have a weekly balance where  my energy intake minus my energy expenditure are equal to my energy need.  Setting goals and giving myself rewards also seems to work for me.

 

To help with self-motivation I’m going to post the last nine months of my weight chart every few months.  It will be embarrassing to record a gain.  For background my doctor suggests the ideal weight given my height, age and bone structure is somewhere around 155 pound - conveniently close to the 70 kg assumption for a standard human used in many medical calculations.  He initially asked me to drop to something under 170.  

 

There could be some tools to make this easier and I’ll probably write one for my specific case.  I found it important to understand my regular daily energy requirement without extra exercise and had to extract that from my daily logs.  The number I come up with is about five percent lower than the standard medical calculations suggest and are probably related to a shifted metabolism.  Very interesting stuff!

 

Currently I’m experimenting on when I should be eating to feel most satiated. Earlier experimenting showed that taking my time to eat was important - one must learn to savor food, which has a real benefit of encouraging you to learn to become a better cook.  I suspect this is unlikely to generalize, but it is clearly useful for me if I’m to get to a point where I don’t have to monitor as much as I do.  In talking with some experts at Yale and the University of Toronto I’m coming to the realization that people who are successful in holding a proper weight after a significant weight loss (over 10% of their weight) need to be vigilant for at least a decade and possibly much longer before the body readjusts.

 

In the meantime I’ve learned that one needs to have quality food and real treats at times - as long as you don’t overdo it.  So there is no reason why you can’t make some delicious things. I can recommend Talenti gelato for example:-)

 

So apologies for something this personal and narrowly focused, but I suspect some of you have this issue or have family members who are trying to get to and maintain a healthy weight.  If so I strongly recommend using it as a learning experience and be able to sort out all of the snake oil.²  Informed common sense is very important in this game.  Just remember - losing weight isn’t easy, but is much easier than keeping it off.

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¹ My physician was very impressed with the success of my weight loss program.  The core learnings I had were I needed exercise and Caloric restriction - neither was sufficient by itself, although food restriction is much easier than enough exercise. A nonjudgmental exercise coach was very important.  I would not have had the motivation without her help.  Support from family and friends was also very important.  Being a vegetarian probably helps as does cooking most of your own food.  Weight has to come off slowly - nothing faster than 3%  month or you will probably fail.  And finally you have to let yourself eat healthy and delicious food - it isn't worth the effort if you are eating cardboard.

Note there is evidence long term success in keeping weight off is different from weight loss - here is an interesting resource. (pdf)

Then they looked for patterns among what successful losers do and patterns among what successful maintainers do. And they found significant differences. For example, people who exercised consistently or ate plenty of lean protein were almost twice as likely to succeed in weight maintenance. People who engaged in a variety of exercise activities or planned their meals ahead were about two and a half times as likely to lose weight.

For losers, the most statistically significant behaviors:

• Eating a lot of fruits or vegetables
• Eating healthy snacks
• Limiting the amount of carbohydrates eaten
• Controlling portions
• Doing different exercise types

For maintainers, the most statistically significant successful:

• Eating a lot of low-fat protein
• Following a consistent exercise routine
• Reminding yourself of the need of controlling weight

There was only one behavior highly significant among both losers and maintainers:

• Thinking about how much progress you’ve made

From the study 14 behaviors were associated with either loss or maintenance but not both.

More important for loss than for maintenance:

• Participate in a weight loss program
• Look for information about weight loss, nutrition, or exercise
• Eat healthy snacks
• Limit sugar
• Plan your meals and snacks ahead of time
• Avoid skipping meals - especially breakfast
• Do variety of exercise types
• Do exercises you enjoy
• Think about how much better you feel when you are thinner

More important for maintenance than for loss:

• Eat a lot of low-fat high protein foods
• Follow a consistent exercise routine
• Reward yourself for maintaining your weight
• Remind yourself why you need to control your weight
• Journal what you eat and how much you exercise

A rich source of scientific work in this area is the open access Journal of Obesity.

 

² The pseudoscience associated with the diet and nutrition industry is awful. It turns out weight loss isn't difficult using any number of techniques, but few are effective in the long term and some are unsafe. ping me if you ever want more information..

 

just past the solstice and nearing the sun

Happy Holidays to all!

 

I hope you have a great set of holidays with friends, family and nature and find some peaceful time for reflection and deep thought.

 

Thank you for all of the comments and suggestions for this blog.  A few very interesting conversations have taken place and some are still developing.   Any ideas, thoughts and criticisms are most welcome.

 

I've been spending a lot of time outside during the past few days.  One of the pleasures of working out of the home is that I take an hour walk every day at around noon.  After awhile the subtle changes of nature begin to dominate your thoughts and you escape the smaller issues of your own life and work.  These normally roll out over several days, but there are dramatic periods when a few hours makes an incredible different.  

 

We're nearing the quietest stage in the local woods.  The maple trees are about halfway through the period where they stopped converting sunlight into sugar and where their sap will begin to flow in mid February.  Last year the Winter was severe and the flow was delayed by nearly two weeks.  

 

The crows have been very active.  This happens around now and I don't know why, but it is welcome.  I need to track an ornithologist down one of these days, but there are so many other questions that need to be answered.

 

The divisions between night and are are particularly wonderful and focus your attention on the sky.  Sundogs, pillars and any number of wonderful things concentrate in the periods an hour or so from sunrise and sunset.

 

 

The Winter sky at night is a wonderful place and tomorrow you can watch a pretty conjunction of the Moon and Venus starting just before sunset and becoming dramatic as the sky darkens.  The other planet visible is Jupiter which is currently in Pisces.  A few days ago we had the "shortest" day - the least amount of daylight.  For most of us the earliest sunset came some days earlier and the latest sunrise is still to come  (in Basking Ridge New Jersey the earliest sunset  was on December  8 and the latest sunrise will fall on January 4) - our planet's tilt and elliptical orbit conspire to create the shift.

 

While all of this is happening, we are rushing towards our closest encounter with the Sun on January 5 at about 01 hours Universal Time (January 4th for folks in North America).  We'll get to about 147.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is elliptical will find us furthest away on July 5 at 04 hours UT (July 4 for most of us) at 152.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is nearly circular (the eccentricity is currently about 0.0167) but the  difference is significant enough to easily be measured if you are looking for a fun project.

 

Our elliptical orbit means the lengths of the seasons are not equal as our orbital velocity changes depending on where we are - we're moving fastest as we're nearest the Sun.¹  As a result Winter is shorter than Summer in the Northern Hemisphere by about 4.7 days.

 

With a bit of high school physics you can easily work out how fast we're going at our closest and furthest approaches to the Sun - 30,300 meters/sec in early January and we slow down to a mere 29,300 in early July.² 

 

There is great beauty in nature - a poetry that is much deeper than anything we can create.  While I love the arts, looking at nature and trying to understand a bit of it is so much more satisfying.  Feynman says it beautifully here:

 

 

Get out and walk with nature a bit over the holidays.  I guarantee it will beat any television you can find.

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Last night I made a simple sour cherry tart with some excellent canned pie cherries from Oregon Fruit Products.  The tart was the simple shortbread recipe presented here recently:

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

130 grams all purpose flour

35 grams powdered sugar

 a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

For the filling I just made a simple tart cherry filling.  There are many variations, but this was quick:

 

Tart Cherry Filling

1 can part pie cherries - approximately 15 ounces - drain cherries and reserve the juice

100 grams granulated white sugar

15 grams cornstarch

1/2 tsp almond extract

 

Procedure

° Cook cherry juice, sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan over medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture thickens - about ten minutes

° Remove from heat, add cherries and almond extract.  Cool to room temperature or below

 

When the tart and cherries are at room temperature sprinkle about 30 grams of finely crushed almonds on the tart and pour in the cherry mixture.

 

This is fantastic with ice cream.  I made a rich homemade vanilla with tahitian vanilla beans.  I've had some incredible cherry pies with chocolate ice cream too - so go ahead Nancy.

 

_______

 

¹ Kepler worked this out - an amazing piece of thinking

² You can easily derive the relation v = sqrt[G*M*(2/r - 1/a)] . Here G is the gravitational constant, M is the Sun's mass, r is the Earth's distance from the Sun and a is our semi-major axis - about 1.496*10¹¹meters. At perihelion our distance is a(1-e) and at aphelion it is a(1+e). 

from wash towels to exploring new worlds...

My grandmother had a most curious way of dealing with things medical.  Folk remedies were a speciality.  Colds and the flu were treated with hot mustard plasters on your chest - something so unpleasant that I remember being thankful that the flu came after she had returned to her home after a long visit.  Warts were to be subdued by stealing a wash towel from a neighbor, washing the wart with the cloth and burying the cloth under moonlight.  Within a month the wart was supposed to disappear. 

 

She was horrified when she learned that I was going to study physics.  To her physic took on an older meaning - a medicine that purges - she thought I wanted to be a proctologist.  

 

A visit to the dermatologist to deal with a stubborn wart reminded me of her.   Liquid nitrogen and scalpels rather than towels from unsuspecting neighbors.  While there I had a few suspicious moles examined.  It turns out the tool used was neat enough that I wanted one.

 

Basically a small hand-held low power microscope with a built-in digital camera, it had wifi and was linked to an iPad where the image was displayed and analyzed.  A biopsy was done on one, but the software and large image gave her a high degree of confidence that nothing was wrong.

 

The ProScope comes in models that are tethered to a laptop or desktop computer as well as the wireless portable model for iPads and iPhones.  They are a bit spendy, but the quality seems good and they are used in police labs and by medical professionals.  I suspect the wireless model and an iPad would be enormous fun in the woods.

 

A few days ago I wrote about getting into amateur astronomy.  Looking at the world differently can teach you a lot and lead to insight.  The slightly too small to see well is fantastic and is all around us.  So if you prefer the daylight and are inclined to the stuff of biology, a microscope can be a fantastic tool.

 

The problem, as is true with telescopes, is the low end models are poorly made and getting or giving one can be counterproductive.  Like telescopes power is the usually advertising point with 1000x or more being commonly advertised.

 

Don’t believe it.  A sub $200 microscope is probably a toy and anything with more than 400x magnifying power is probably going to cost well over $500 to deliver a good image.  It is possible to pick up used microscopes, but finding a good one that has been well maintained is difficult.  Amateur microscopy does not have the following amateur astronomy does, so it is difficult (but not impossible) to find a helpful mentor.

 

It makes sense to understand what you want to look at.  For most purposes I like low power microscopes that you can easily carry into the field.  Stereo microscopes can give a nice 3d images.  We have a neat little Nikon field microscope that fills the bill well.  Twenty power, a lovely image for the price and very rugged.  You can throw it in a pack and bring it out when you are curious.  They have a higher end model that allows you to attach a camera although you can do it on this one by finding a lens adapter.  This will open up an even more interesting world as you can collect and digitally analyze what you find.  There is a slightly less inexpensive model without an illuminator that is aimed more at kids - for the curious sort of kid who is strongly into getting dirty and watching nature this could be an amazing gift.  

 

If you get more serious you have to think about what sort of microscope you want and do you want to get into sample preparation. Higher powers are usually found by looking through the sample - which can require sectioning and staining the sample.  No big deal if you have some lab experience and certainly the results can be amazing, but your interests might lie in somewhat larger specimens.¹  There is so much that will be new and possibly a revelation.  Even the simple Nikon field microscope we have had led to many hours of wonderful exploration. The intricate structure of tiny flowers, the structure of a seed, even the detail on a piece of paper money.

 

You can do other things.  Pixar spent quite a bit of time exploring the world from the point of view of an ant.  Imagine walking through a lawn with blades of grass towering over you. They build specialized optics that a camera was attached to giving a view we normally don’t access.  Some areas became exotic tropical forests.  There is no reason an amateur couldn’t build something to do the same thing.  

 

You can also explore different time scales.  Many cameras have settings that allow you to take exposures at a regular interval.  The exposures can be combined into the frames of a video at video rate of 24 or about 30 frames a second to give the illusion of smooth motion.  Nature speeded up!  The inexpensive GoPro HD Hero2 cameras do this well - a friend has been shooting fascinating videos and sending links nearly every weekend. 

 

To look at short lived events you tend to need more exotic apparatus, but it can be very rewarding.  Drop a note if you are seriously interested in doing this and I can send pointers - there are many directions and it wouldn’t be productive to write twenty or more pages trying to cover something that is probably of narrow interest.  

 

Telescopes, microscopes and other tools are accessible to the hobbyist and expand your view into different scales, spaces and even timescales.  Doing it on your own rather than just reading about it is not time wasted.  You will discover many things for yourself and perhaps make a real discovery by yourself.²  I suspect the soil around a long decayed wash towel would offer many fascinating things to study at twenty power.

 

Nature is a great partner to play with.

________

¹ There are many good vendors. I have used Martin Microscope for lab and student microscopes and B&H Camera (for Nikon field microscopes).  If you are mechanical and understand optics there are great bargains on eBay, but stay away unless you know what you are doing.

² And you can make connections with other areas.  The physics of rainbows and other natural phenomena were heavily studied a hundred years ago, but only sporadically since.  Discoveries are still possible.  It turns out most of the old models assume raindrops are spherical to make calculations easy enough.  It is a good enough assumption most of the time, but real raindrops are hambuger bun or parachute shaped.  Recently some computer science types performed more realistic calculations and discovered a bit more about how the world works.

 

 

 

 

that first telescope - recommendations

On a clear moonless night near the Rockies you can see the black outline of the mountains cutting into the slowly rotating bowl of stars.  The sight can be mesmerizing - the sort of thing that can put you in danger of frostbite in the Winter.  But a clear night sky was often different.  On some nights the moon was wonderful lighting up the snow on the prairie,  each year, on about August 12^th the Perseid meteor shower gave an opportunity to spend the whole night outside on a lawn chair just watching, and every once and awhile the aurora would explode into view - sometimes so dramatically that you would wake the neighbors at 2am.

 

Even now with fantastic new imaging and results from professional astronomy, you can go out and wonder at the night sky.  Jeri suggested mentioning the Kepler 22-b discovery.  Around some types of stars there is a region where liquid water can exist - a requirement for life as we know it to evolve.  This particular discovery is beyond the capabilities of amateurs, but there are many others that directly involve both communities.  And such discoveries fire the imagination.  As soon as I learned about the discovery I wondered exactly where the star was and if I could see it.  It turns out to be an 11^th magnitude star in Cygnus near its junction with Lyra and Draco.  Something visible with a modest amateur telescope.   If you go out and look you will probably be taken with thought that perhaps there is life there - and that the light you are seeing took about 600 years to reach your eyes.

 

The night sky is a powerful destination.  There is a there there. (apologies to Gertrude Stein)

 

With the longer nights this is a time of year a lot of people think about getting a telescope for themselves or their children.  Most people see a telescope in their local big box store or perhaps in a catalog and just get it.    They, or worse their children,  find these telescopes to be difficult to use and the optics are often terrible.   The initial experience is awful and many of these scopes find themselves stored away and ultimately forgotten.  It is the worst possible outcome - the cost per use is ridiculously high, a piece of unused hardware uses space and the owner is left with a bad first impression of astronomy.  Experiences like this can kill rather than kindle curiosity.

 

Amateur astronomy involves a fair amount of learning.  Perhaps the best path is a bit less steep, but one with high visual rewards and a low initial investment.  

 

I'm going to recommend binoculars and a star chart program as the best "first telescope".

 

Binoculars have a lot of advantages.  You can look at something in the sky and easily find it by just pointing your binoculars at it.  They are very portable, the image is not inverted, they can be used for many other activities and a good enough pair is inexpensive.

 

To appreciate astronomy you really should learn the constellations.  While it is possible to avoid that with some automated telescopes, there is a richness that comes with the familiarity of the night sky.  Just going out and learning is good enough, but binoculars give you the excuse of searching for some specific objects and that rigor will help you learn more quickly.  You'll quickly discover if this is something you love to do.

 

There are many things to look at that are wonderful with the modest 7 to 10 times magnification binoculars give.  They are doing two things - magnifying the view a bit, but more importantly they are gathering more light that your unaided eyes can capture.  You can see much fainter objects.  A reasonable lens (lenses are called objectives) size if 50 millimeters in diameter.  If you are over 35 your dilated pupil is about 5 mm in diameter - so these lenses would bring in about 100 times as much light.

 

The shorthand used for describing a binocular is to list its power and objective size.  A 10x25 has ten power and 25mm objectives.  The best sizes for the beginning amateur are probably 7x50 to 10x50.  These are easy to hold and point at the sky for extended periods and bring in enough light to see some of the best common objects.

 

Go to a sporting goods store or, if you have one, a store that specializes in astronomy and try several out.  If you have astigmatism you'll need to wear your glasses.  You'll want to make sure they are well-made and comfortable, provide a clear image, have coated optics, have an exit pupil that matches your pupil size.¹  You should be able to find something good enough for about $100.  

 

The next thing you need is a star chart.  A year ago I would recommend a good star atlas, but developments in smartphone apps have completely changed the game.  I've used eight night sky apps.  The standout is Sky Safari 3 by Southern Stars for the iPhone and iPad.  Either device is good - the iPhone is highly portable, but the iPad gives you much more area to hold up and "match" to the sky.  These are so good that I would almost recommend getting an iPad before getting the binoculars - you can find a good used original iPad for about $200 these days.  Sky Safari is on sale for the next few days in three versions.  If you think you are going to be interested beyond looking at the sky a few times I would go with the Plus version which shows satellites and has a much deeper catalog.  The Pro version is deeper still and both of these versions can interact with many of the current "goto" class of amateur telescopes.  Star charts and programs can be studied indoors when you can't be outside observing and good ones encourage study. I grew up with the Norton's  Star Atlas - a wonderful resource that I still recommend - but Sky Safari is much deeper and interactive.  If you don't have an iPad, buy one and get the program.  

 

Armed with Sky Safari and a good pair of binoculars, you'll need something to look at. Your library will have a lot of beginner's books on astronomy that will offer suggestions. Binocular Highlights by Gary Seronik is a good resource that is well matched to the beginner.    Sky and Telescope magazine has a nice monthly column with objects in the current night sky that makes the magazine worth the subscription price, although most public and school libraries carry it.  S&T has articles for the absolute beginner as well as some of the most sophisticated amateur observers and telescope makers.  Astronomy is a field that sometimes mixes amateurs and professionals and the magazine has great columns that detail what is going on in professional astronomy and astrophysics at the level one expects in Scientific American.  A fantastic resource - I have had a subscription since I was twelve.

 

If you get to the point where you realize you love this and are beginning to learn the sky it is time to think about a telescope.  These cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars and up, but a great first telescope is a Dobsonian.  They have a very simple design that assumes you just want to point the 'scope at an object and gather the most amount of light for the money you have spent.  They don't compensate for the Earth's rotation and are useless for astrophotography, but they are inexpensive and can provide wonderful view of the night sky.  Chances that you will be frustrated are low assuming you have gained enough experience learning the sky first.

 

A good Dobsonian with an eight inch mirror can be had for $300 to $400.  Add a few hundred dollars and some are fitted with digital encoders that report the orientation of the telescope to a small computer.  When you first set up the telescope you are asked to point it at a few known bright stars and then the computer calculates the telescope's orientation relative to the sky and can give you directions to find thousands of other objects in its catalog.²  Using this star finding scheme is an easy and natural way to spend hours of time - I've gone from dusk to dawn just having fun.  You'll want to get the largest you can afford that can be easily moved to a dark enough observing area and that you can comfortably use.

 

This is a good time to find a mentor.  Astronomy clubs and societies often hold star parties in dark areas and a few have dedicated observatories or places out in the middle of nowhere.  You'll find many amateurs to be passionate and helpful.  You may want to do this before getting a Dobsonian, but it would certainly do it shortly afterwards.  You'll zoom up the learning curve.

 

Moving to a telescope with a mount that compensates for the Earth's rotation adds cost.  The mount quickly becomes a critical component.  Setting up the mount can be complex - a tricky enough procedure that many beginners can become discouraged so it is probably best to move to this class once you have some experience under your belt - or at least the help of a good mentor.  

 

Most people go for six or eight inch compound optics telescope - Schmidt-Cassegrain or Maksutov-Cassegrain designs being the most common.  These folded optical paths  reduce the length of the telescope making them relatively compact and easy to transport.  The price per inch of aperture is greater than a Dobsonian with an entry level eight inch telescope and mount staring at about $1000 with a nicer ''scopes going for about $2000.  It is very easy to move well beyond that with much better mounts and optics, but it is like high fidelity - there is a point of diminishing returns. 

 

At this point serious amateurs tend to specialize and specialized needs can dictate high quality refracting telescopes or specialized reflectors like Ritchey-Chrétien optical designs.  It has been observed that serious hobbyists often spend as much on their hobby as they do on a car.  Dedicated observatories with $50k telescopes on $20k mounts are not unheard of and specialized cameras and accessories can run the costs much higher.   Locations in very dark regions of New Mexico and Arizona are desirable, although getting there can be challenging.  A few communities devoted exclusively to advanced amateur astronomers have appeared along with some focused bed and breakfasts and companies that rent out remote telescopes by the hour.

 

I've used some of the exotic equipment, but don't personally own any "big glass."  I love getting out to these dark locations, but just being under the stars and gazing up often is enough.  I will take an SLR or DSLR and put it on a mount that compensates for the Earth's rotation so I can take a time exposure.  You get the sense of what the sky would look like if your eyes were a hundred or a thousand times more sensitive and you can bring out the colors.  I also like observing the Sun - something that works in heavily light polluted regions.  Traveling to solar eclipses and to places where there are likely to be auroral displays is also a great way to spend time.  Everyone develops some paths they love and these can change over time as you gain experience.

 

Sometimes people ask about activities for kids who are interested in science.  I'm not a fan of heavily scheduling kids with activities.   Instead I believe in a lot of free time and "free range" activities so they can explore and probe on their own.  Amateur science can teach you how to observe nature and ask good questions.  When I get involved in college admissions I tend to look for those who show real passion for such things - those are the ones who ultimately succeed in the sciences.³  These skills can be very useful for some types of work and people who have them are sadly too rare.  Microscopes, telescopes, a chemistry set, a rock hammer and other devices that extend our senses and, when combined with curiosity, can lead to much greater things.  I count myself as lucky that I had dark skies and the gift of unscheduled time along with a very modest amount of money to pursue a few passions.  

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¹  There are a lot of specialized issues.  Eye relief is the distance from the eyepiece to where you can see the full image.  Many binoculars are 10mm or less.  If you wear glasses you'll need more - maybe as much as 15mm or more.  The diameter of your dilated pupil decreases with age.  When you are a teen it is as large as 7mm, but drops to about 5 mm when you get to be 35 or so.  The size of the objective divided by the power gives the size of the focused image that can be delivered to the eye.  So a 7x50 would give roughly a 7mm image and a 10x50 a 5mm.  The first would be better for teenage eyes and the second for older eyes.  

Just trying the binoculars gives a good sense.  If you are using mail order shop with a company that specializes in amateur astronomy.  Celestron, Meade and Orion are good places to start that offer a lot of beginner's gear.  Ask for suggestions and tell them about your eyes.

I use Canon 15x50 image stabilized binoculars.  They are extremely spendy and overkill for the beginner who doesn't know if this is something they will come to love.  I them constantly for many purposes and they've given me a decade of service (so far) without any problems, so I'm happy.  Their big advantage is active image stabilization which allows you to comfortably use a slightly higher power than is possible with normal binoculars.  I would recommend them, but only if you know they are something you are going to use heavily.

² Normally I don't like giving specific recommendations without knowing more about someone's specific requirements, but Orion's IntelliScope Dobsonians are great for beginners.  The eight inch is about $550, can fit in most car trunks and breaks into two pieces that are both under 21 pounds.  Anyone over about 5'2 should be able to use it in any orientation without a stool.  Their 12" gives more spectacular views, but probably requires a large truck or an SUV or pickup.  The optical tube weighs 50 pounds and may be too much for some people.  Going a bit larger (14" or 16" in many designs depending on how fast the optics are)  quickly takes you to the point where only Colleen sized people can get away with using it without a stool - I've used one that was a bit too tall for me and found you can easily get into uncomfortable positions.  Some amateur Dobsonians can be huge.  I have used a 36" homemade monster in New Mexico that had a 16 foot optical tube.  You needed a tall ladder to observe and I saw people "hop" the ladders as they went from object to object.  Not exactly safe, but the view of the Andromeda galaxy was astonishing.   The warning for any telescope is to spend time worrying about how you can move it along with the ergonomics of using it.  Using someone else's at a star party can be very useful.

³ There is a lot of real science you can easily investigate on your own.  Figuring out ow to confirm old results is a great learning experience that get you thinking more deeply.  Measuring the speed of light by observing the moon's around another planet should be within the capabilities of a curious 8^th grader.  Your mind goes beyond that as you use your own observations to discover.  While most of the discoveries are known there is a thrill of stumbling onto something and creating dots of understanding in your mind that can later be linked.  I was about 14 when I realized the latest sunrise and earliest sunset did not occur on the Winter Solstice in Montana.  That led to puzzling out why and I ended up teaching myself spherical trigonometry in the process.  It was also about the first time I realized I had thought deeply about something that most adults are not aware of...

People sometimes ask how accurate the television show Big Bang Theory is:-)  While they clearly have a science advisor to get the terminology correct, it completely misses the sociology of science - at least the sciences I'm familiar with...

 

 

the delight of turning potential energy into kinetic energy

There have been too many weighty events this week - it is time for something fun.  

 

There is something wonderful about watching energy move backand forth betwen potential and kinetic energy even if there aren't many osciallations.  Swings, roller coasters, sailplanes, the arc of a tossed ball, chains of dominos ...

 

You've all seen videos of large domino chains.  By standing a domino on end you are increasing its potential energy.  Energy that can be released later when the domino tips, turning stored potential energy into the energy of motion - kinetic energy.  The key is to find an object that is usually stable, but can tip easily and move its center of mass a long distance in the process.  People make wonderful patterns using thousands of them - but there is another way to spend your day for a few seconds of delight ...

 

Wood is elastic and wants to return to its original position when bent - a property that allowed people to build bows that can propel an arrow at a high speed.  You can use this to store potential energy in a wooden stick.  When given a chance to release the stick will seek its normal shape and the resulting motion is a nice display of kinetic energy.  

 

With a bit of cleverness you can weave a pile of wooden sticks into a structure storing the energy that you used to flex them for later release.  Fifty sticks will give you and idea - a thousand will give you something wonderful.

 

A large number of weave patterns can be used - you just want to construct a regular pattern that bends the sticks enough without moving them past their elastic limit. Craft sticks are recommeded and are inexpensive at a few cents each in quantity.¹  A hundred bucks, a gym floor and a lot of kids would create a dramatic event. 

 

Like many things you can ask a few questions and gain a deeper understanding.  There is enough beauty without the questions, but new delights emerge when you look a bit more deeply.  How much energy is stored in a structure?  What is its energy density? What other materials could be used to improve it?  Could the shape and internal stucture of a stick be improved?   What weave patterns would be optimal? How much of the kinetic energy is turned into sound and heat and how much is goes into the bounce of the sticks?  Could you make a musical version? .. and so on.  Like so many interesting things, this is a rich playground for the mind.  

 

The artist and kid in you might try other weaves, adding some color or even making this part of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

 

 ________

 

The energy density of mechanical storage systems is not very high compared with other forms of storage the industrial world uses.   Try calculating the energy density of a hydroelectric project as an example.  What about the maximum energy density of compressed air storage? How do these compare to electric batteries and hydrocarbon combustion or hydrogen combustion?  Are you likely to ever see a spring powered cellphone? 

 

On the other hand mechanical energy storage is very useful and even beautiful at the appropriate scale. That scale turns out to be our scale and it is vitally important to many biological systems.   Among other things it lets us run efficiently and makes nearly every sport possible.  To us even a modest amount can seem significant.  An average person on a six story building stores about the same amount of potential energy as the battery in his smartphone, but even that small amount (small for the purpose of running the machines in our lives) is enough be rather unfortunate in a fall.

 

stay curious

 

__________

¹ stick choice is important. I haven't done this since I was an undergrad, but remember we tried tongue depressors and popsicle sticks - these days you can also buy craft sticks, which I've seen recommended, but I haven't tried.  The amount of "spring" in each of these, their elasticity, varies and will produce very different results.  It probably pays to try small units with a few dozen sticks each before settling on a material for a huge project.

We ended up with tongue depressors mostly because we found a cheap source and made a 500 stick weave.  It was addictive enough that we rebuilt it three times.

 

the streetlight effect

There is an old joke physicists like to tell to their graduate students...

 

It seems a policeman walking his beat at about three in the morning notices a slightly disheveled drunk on his hands and knees searching for something under a streetlight.  The drunk is very engaged and doesn’t take notice that the officer is watching him for about ten minutes.  He goes around and around carefully examining each bit of asphalt and then returning and starting over after the sweep is done.  Finally the policeman approaches the drunk.

 

“Excuse me sir, but what are you looking for?”

 

The drunk is startled, but not enough to stand up.  Getting eye contact he replies

 

“Hello officer.  I dropped my wallet and have been looking for it for at least an hour now.”

 

The policeman scans the area and sees nothing like a wallet.  

 

“Are you certain you dropped it here?”

 

“Oh. I don’t think so officer. I probably dropped it across the street.”

 

The policeman is now confused and a bit amused..

 

“Why aren’t you looking over there?”

 

“Can’t you see?” the drunk replied “the light over there is terrible..”

 

_____

 

Today I read an analysis of some smartphone usage patterns.  It was completely off base given the technique they were using.  Their technique is well known and easy to use, but completely across the street - there is no way they could find what they claimed to be looking for with their measurements and analysis and they pushed a null result.

 

Getting at the question they posed would be difficult, but not impossible.  It would require a different experimental model and they would need to measure different information. It was possible, but they opted to do something non-appropriate and got a result that didn’t make sense.  It was too easy for them to search in an area they knew.

 

You see this sort of thing a lot in pseudoscience and every once and awhile elsewhere.  If you are looking for something make sure you are looking in the right place.  If there isn’t a good streetlight, build one of your own or work out something else that is just as good - perhaps a lawn rake would have worked for the drunk.

 

_____

 

Looking at results in clever ways can make an enormous difference.  Sometimes seemingly complex patterns have simple underpinnings.  I was reminded of that by this beautiful youtube video Jeri forwarded 

 

 

(oddly enough I know three people with similar sounding names: Jeri, Jerry, and Jheri.  All of them happen to be very interesting people)

 

may they ever dance across the prairies in the moonlight

Hope is a wonderful thing.  Here is an example:

Thirty years ago today a  Black Footed Ferret,  assumed to be extinct, was found near Meeteetse, Wyoming.  The colony was on the verge of extinction and the few remaining ferrets were captured for a captive breeding program.  Slowly - sometimes eight steps backwards and nine forward - progress towards re-establishing these amazingly playful critters has been made.  

Watching one of them dance across the prairie in its freedom is one of those experiences that electrifies your soul. Perhaps they will be able to survive without our help in my lifetime - that would be sweet.  

Ferrets are part of our family.  Not the Black Footed variety, but domesticated close relations.  One of our was named Meeteetse and she was mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered a few times - including a sweet obituary.  It seems she  had a fascination for certain voices and would come running whenever Richard Harris - an NPR science reporter - was on the air.

Oddly enough the plural collective noun for ferrets is business.  If you want to probe the Oxford English Dictionary gives a bit of illumination where the term business came from and it is entirely appropriate to link it to a group of ferrets.

 

 

 

building things yourself

I'm far from being a craftsman, but I'm a big fan of building things.  As a kid I built my old eight inch Newtonian telescope, a spectrometer, several amateur radio transmitters and receivers, model airplanes and a few rocket motors and rockets along with bookshelves and other items for around the house.  Not elegant stuff, but great learning experiences that have given me an appreciation for those who know what they are doing along with a deeper understanding of how items are designed and made.

Amateur radio and astronomy were very good vehicles for learning some physics and engineering without realizing it.  Not textbook learning, but rather a good practical sense of how to play with light, understand how radio works (what I picked up there turns out to be deeper than a few engineers I've met), as well as what it takes to move a project from dream to completion on an extremely limited budget.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that most physics graduate schools mandate a shop class. I took metal shop and glass blowing.  After demonstrating competence you were given a shop key and the run of the place as long as you didn't break yourself or the tools.  It was a great playground.  For fun I designed a small two cylinder stirling engine and fabricated it out of aluminum, brass and stainless steel.  It only developed about 100 watts at about 5000 rpm, but was a great project.

These days schools seem to have eliminated shop - an enormous loss I think as this is the only place many kids are exposed to building and tools.  On a more positive note the maker movement is alive with people pooling resources and sharing equipment, spaces and expertise in several cities (there must be a dozen shared spaces in Brooklyn).  Ideally more experienced people will be able to mentor beginners and this can grow.  Unless you have access to a good enough shop, this can't be don't remotely and some of the mentoring is best done face to face.  Other programs like Dean Kamen's FIRST are wonderful for some kids, but more are needed.

Every few years I sit on a committee that looks for interesting young people to invite to a very well-known science college.  Even though this is one of the most competitive schools in the country, it is still important for them to actively search for talented and driven students who might not otherwise apply.  The most important criteria is how much amateur science they've done as teenagers. Much of this involves building apparatus (when looking for the diamonds in the rough we don't look for those from elite schools with established corporate mentors - those students already have a large advantage).  There are some amazing teenagers with great fire out there and this is a delightful task.

What triggered this piece was a video link noted by a friend.  I  built water rockets as a kid, but fifty feet was an impressive altitude for my designs.  The video is much more impressive and might spark a teen to think about the physics, engineering and design - perhaps enough to build something even better.

 

These days I no longer have regular access to a good shop and have to look around.  When something nice has to be made I either restrict myself to very small items that I can handle at home.  

If you have a teen or pre-teen who is interested in how things and nature works I strongly recommend they learn how to make things and perhaps they'll get to the point where they understand and can design.  Not all of them will take a science or engineering route.  Some may mix it up with art or music and explore other wonderful areas - I've had the discussion with Jony Ive and a fashion designer and found both were passionate about building and understanding as teens.  

Of course there is no reason not to take this up as an adult - I should think it very important if your business is trying to understand consumers and design and it is never too late deepen your education.

 

 

 

education - one small piece

Juliette gave a keynote address to a group of educators in Canada a few days ago and one of the podcasts helping me through today's workout was a WBUR interview of Salman Kahn of the Kahn Academy.  

This seems like a good excuse to talk about education.

Clearly I'm no expert on the subject, but like you I've been around formal and informal systems for most of my life.  I'm an admirer of what Kahn has done and hope it continues to grow, but it is only part of the puzzle just as are approaches like Jaime Escalante's.   I'm more interested in hows passion and curiosity are sparked.

My formal K-12 education was fairly vanilla - pubic schools in Montana. Two of my teachers struck me as outstanding at what they did, but neither ignited a passion in me - rather I saw a bit of their passion and learned more about the subjects they were teaching than I would have with other teachers. But the basic nuts and bolts were solid and helped prepare me for college where I found my passion could burn.  I think I had a good K-12 experience, but there was just one more thing that influenced me during those years...

A lifelong  passion did flicker into existence early on - probably when I was eight or nine.  Montana, it turns out, is "Big Sky Country."  During the day there were clouds, storms, rainbows, lighting, wind, the sun and any number of fantastic things to watch. Night was even better as the place could get impressively dark and the milky way was magnificent in the Summer along with meteor showers, auroras and much more.   You would see these things and you had to know why.  

The school and public library had some science books, but not all were accessible to kids.  Some were too easy and others were college textbooks that were way above me.  I needed to find the right level and was having problems finding adults who didn't find me completely annoying.  

Amateur radio was more popular then than it is today.  But even in its prime there was a fundamental education  problem - how to you teach an eleven year old kid electronic and radio skills that are usually associated with the freshman level of college?  Just as important,  how do you deal with the fact that the density of kids who are really interested is low as is that of adults who practice the hobby?

The solution the community came up with became known as elmering.  An elmer is a mentor - someone who would take a kid who had a passionate interest and provide them with books, instruction, usually some old gear to tinker with and a lot of experience that didn't appear in the books.  The idea was that at some point when you were a seasoned adult you would reciprocate and the hobby would perpetuate itself.

The beauty of a functioning student mentor relationship is the right level can be found along with the right encouragement.  There are even times, as I have learned as a mentor, that the roles can flip.

I was lucky enough to have been something of a free range kid.  I managed to get my homework done as well as work around the house and had enough free time to get involved in radio for awhile as well as to just stare up at that amazing sky and wonder. 

The librarian suggested that I write to professors with my questions.  It seemed like a good idea and I sent out dozens of letters scrawled in my twelve year old hand over a period of a few months before anyone answered.  A professor had written back, but rather than directly answering my questions he gave me some new ones to think about along with some hints about how to think about them. I had no idea what a physicist was, let along a solid state physicist, but here was someone willing to help.

I remember the first letter vividly.  It took me about ten days of thinking and working to get enough that I thought I had it.  I posted my letter and, mirabile dictu,  about six days later the reply came.  It was electrifying - while I had figured out a piece of the question, he carefully pointed out something else.  The problem turned out to be much richer than I had imagined and that struck me as beautiful.  Another week of answering his exercises and then nearly a week of waiting for his reply.

It was education by a sort of internet - one that used physical packets with a three or four day transmission latency.  The lengthy latencies turned out to be perfect.  Quick answers to my questions would have spoiled things and I would never have learned how to focus and concentrate deeply.  An added benefit was the attachments were sometimes chewy and chocolatey.

This extracurricular education went on until I left for college and grew to involve a second professor - an astrophysicist.  I never thought of it as education at the time, but they were teaching me how to ask questions and, more importantly, how to observe.  Why is it that the colors on the second rainbow are inverted?  Why is it that the region between the two rainbows is dark?  Is the light from a rainbow polarized and how would you go about measuring it?  Why do clouds look white and often have boundaries?  How do you measure the speed of light?  How do you find out what stars are made of?  How long will our Sun burn? How will it end? ...

You learn questions like these can be approached by a kid and later, when re-examined when you have more experience, the same questions have richer answers that tell you a bit more about nature. These answers, if you are lucky, have even richer questions attached.  You learn that watching and learning how to formulate appropriate questions - questions that you can actually answer - is a critical skill. You learn there are amazing surprises. 

Along the way there was a need to improve the tools I had at my disposal.  Some of the mentoring focused on this and, without realizing it, I was learning a fair amount of math.  I didn't really think of it as math at the time - these were just tools that made it easier to sort out what was going on.

There was a strong element of play to all of this.  You would work down a path and find that didn't make sense, but there was no penalty for going back to where you started and trying another path.  You lost a bit of time, but you also learned a bit.  It seemed very different from school where wrong answers were penalized.  

This wasn't rigorous science.  When I was finally in college and grad school some rigor came and the learning was more intense.  But it was an exciting exploration and it gave me a sense of what I wanted to do.

There were some downsides if the kid focuses too much in one area.  I wasn't exactly the most social kid in the world and some of that probably persists to this day. I didn't get involved in a rich variety of extracurricular activities and regret some of that.  In particularly I mostly stayed away from athletic activities which took years for me to realize their importance. But the mentoring did change my life and over scheduling would have been very counterproductive.  Kids need a lot of time for self directed playing, daydreaming and thinking.

Since then I've mentored perhaps a half dozen young people.  Some of this was working with students through a fantastic program the old Bell Labs had and some of it was more informal - just  having a curious kid get in touch about something.¹  

These days the Internet provides a lot in the way of new opportunity, but at the same time I think that some of the basic questions kids have are answered a bit too easily. There is something special about wrestling with an idea and the thrill of finding the answer a week or more later.  The Internet is great - but more is necessary.

I love what Dean Kamen is doing for aspiring engineers and I'm sure there are many opportunities in a variety of areas, but the creaky old postal system turned out to be nearly perfect for this person.

Curiosity and play are among the most powerful tools I know.  I wouldn't claim to know much, but I do know where there is adventure and realize asking questions and hoping to uncover more can last a lifetime.

And if you have never mentored anyone, I strongly recommend it.  When it works well there are few things as rewarding and you get more than you might imagine in return.

____

¹ One ninth grader was fascinated by cosmic rays and I showed her how to build a cosmic ray telescope ..  later I wrote up the notes for any teenager who might have a similar interest (three parts).  Oh - she went to Caltech a few years later.

 

 

exploring the difference in rod and cone based night vision

It is currently wonderful to be out at night in much of the Northern Hemisphere and there is much to appreciate.  Here is a some fun you can have exploring your own night vision

When you try to see in near darkness, any bright light will destroy your night vision for awhile and you have to wait in a dark area for it to recover.  This is why sailors wore eye patches when cannons became an important weapon - they could keep one eye dark adapted above deck and would remove the patch in the dim light below.  This turned out to be much safer than lighting a match to find the powder bag-)  I sometimes wear an eye patch around home when I'm going to be observing outside after dark.  It allows me to work in low light conditions without using a light - an old habit I picked up from my amateur astronomy days as a teenager

Here is the neat stuff.    Your eyes sense light through two main photoreceptors - rods and cones.  Both contain pigments that require time to chemically regenerate after they have been exposed to light.  A bit of light hits a pigment, some chemistry happens and a signal is sent out to the brain.  The problem is a lot of light can cause so much chemistry to happen that it takes a while before it is sensitive to light again.

The pigment in the rods is very efficient for very low light levels.  They need twenty to thirty minutes to recover after being light saturated (the term is "bleaching") ... .   When you go out on a dark night your rods are mostly bleached from bright indoor light and it takes up to that time before your eyes adapt to the darkness

The cones, where your color vision originates, have three pigment variations.  Their chemistry is different and they only need eight or nine minutes to recover from bright light.

The photosensitivity of your cones is much less than the rods, so when you are dark adapted, most of your vision is colorless.  But before that happens your cones are ready to go and your low light level color vision is at its best.  This is the best way to see the color in bright night time stars and planets -- the red of Mars, the yellow of Saturn, the brilliant green and yellow of a double star in Cygnus and the orangish-red of Betelgeuse in Orion  (the tip of the upper left arm).  As your rods recover the colors fade and, assuming the night sky is clear and dark, hundreds of stars come into view.  The effect is dramatic.

It is mostly too bright to do this in cites and suburbia, but try it when you are in a dark spot.  If you try it with an eye patch to check out the differences between a dark adapted eye and one that is still adapting perhaps you can make people wonder if you're a pirate.

This may seen removed from technology and business, but our connection to machines and other people is often mediated by interfaces.  How we perceive and interact with them is a subset of the overall user experience and failure to get it right can cause serious dissonances.  Engineering often amounts to a best effort to optimize a complex set of requirements but all too frequently some of these human factors are not known by those charged with creating the software and machines.  And, of course, this extends beyond interfaces. 

 

________

 

Speaking of the night sky, the Perseid meteor shower is almost on us. The normal peak falls on August 12, but this year the moon will wash out all but the brightest meteors.  You can still enjoy it as the shower builds up over several days.  In early August the sky will be moon-free from midnight to dawn with the moon eroding that window as time moves on.  The best time may be the few hours before dawn on August 8 through 10, but even if the shower is not as nice as it sometimes is, it is still an excellent excuse to lay out on your back watching the night sky on a warm Summer evening.