omenti

the intersection of tech, art and the social - and the beginnings of change

People are often perplexed when they learn I have an interest in fashion. No one has successfully accused me of being a snappy dresser or understanding trends, but it does happen to be one of those areas with rich and dynamic intersections of other fields - specifically the arts, social sciences, and technology.  It also happens to be an enormous worldwide industry and one that is likely to undergo enormous change in the next decade or two.  Observing and trying to understand a developing revolution is, for me, time well spent.  If Apple has Apple TV as a hobby, this is sort of my hobby at this point..

 

About two weeks ago I visited Fashion Week in New York mostly to observe and listen.  I set up a few interview sessions, spent a bit on snacks and coffee and went into learning mode.  After thinking about the experience for awhile, I wrote a brief note to capture what seemed significant.  The note went out to a few people and two encouraged me to expand it in a blog.  To save time I’ll do the next best thing.  Here is the letter followed by some other comments that may be of greater interest to this group. (for those who have read it, I changed a few bits)

 

I have an interest in the social mechanisms of fashion, the changes being driven by a shift in communication modalities and emerging changes in manufacturing and distribution.  Fashion Week in NY is a good place to observe and ask questions.  I have a close friend who happens to be a well known model - this is her fifth year,  She has her own perspective and helps getting contact with interesting people.  This year talking to some small designers as well as the street fashion people and some fashion bloggers.

 

I went in on three days and the two of us talked to about 20 young women, a few other models and some people associated with one name and three small labels.  It turns out that a top model is attracts a lot of attention among the young street fashion types.  There were four discussions in a cafe with five or six of them at a time running an hour or so each.  I bought the coffee and a few pastries (the beer and pizza technique and the cheapest way I know to conduct this sort of interview).   The labels were by separate introduction.  It is good to know fashion royalty.

 

The industry has a very convoluted structure that defines a series of "looks" for a season and has rather strictly defined roles and information sources (last year I sat down and came up with a diagram showing the flow of information, material and money at a high level - ugh).  This traditionally comes out of an interplay between the designer and influential magazine editors. Prototypes are show to buyers who must sort out what will work in their stores about six months down the road.  Orders are placed and a rather clunky mass production web starts into action. Recently the time from prototype buy decision to delivery to the shelf has been dramatically tightened - down to a few weeks.  A few retailers (Zara, H&M,etc) have achieved a more or less constant flow of new fashion that is less coupled to the traditional model.

 

Fashion distinguishes itself from apparel by being all about an out of band communication - one that tends to be more important for women than men (and nearly non-existent in people like me). Its social nature means someone usually goes to a store and puts together the basis for combinations of pieces using what is available as a their pallet.   There is a lot of reference to what other people are doing and this is shifting away from the magazines -- quickly in fact. Fashion sites and blogs, at this point, have probably replaced physical magazines as a core sources of ideas.  The magazines all seem to have their sites, but the street fashion people and their followers aren't paying much attention.  There seems to be an explosion of interest in street fashion over the past few years.

 

Bringing up the subject of Pinterest brought a lot of conversation and debate.  It is clear there is a love/hate relation with it …  mostly love from the sample I spoke with.  It seems to be a natural extension of the pinboarding activities common among teenage girls - only it is now distributed to a larger group.  It involves this same out of band communication - or at least part of its vocabulary and I suspect it can be considered basic.  It certainly isn't optimized and one suspects more specialized versions will either emerge organically and/or be supported by Pinterest.  It is not the sort of thing I can imagine Google or Facebook - or Apple or Amazon for that matter - pulling off well.  I can imagine some of them getting involved as partners.

 

In the twenty and early thirty year old group Facebook is still a necessity - but something that can be frustrating and isn't the sort of thing people find cool anymore.  Time is still being spent there, but some of the apparel makers I spoke to suggested FB has almost no value to their business. They all have presences, but none of them can show the time and money they have put into it has been rewarded. Pinterest, on the other hand, is already making a change and driving business.  It is much more closely linked to the model of how some people communicate what "the look" will be - at least among their group.

 

"The look" is something very important that needs a lot of consideration.  It used to be dictated, but now there is a lot of communication from people who wear clothing.  There are still constraints as the pallet of available clothing is limited, but that is changing as mass customization emerges.  The industry has always been plagued by misjudging what the look and in recent years there have been more mistakes than the sour economy might suggest among the major players.  It is probably part of the growing disconnect between magazines and the consumer as the later group patches into different sources of active and passive communication. 

 

The structure of the industry is cumbersome and reminds me of the talent/production/distribution mechanism of the music industry fifteen years ago.  To the labels the end customer is really the store buyer - not the consumer.  Similar to the cellphone manufacturers - where most see the mobile service providers as their primary customer, and the four ecosystems - where Google and Facebook have different primary customers than the end user. In the examples of the music and fashion industries this creates opportunity.

 

There was an awareness of mass customization.  Most see the real benefit as better sizing, but freedom of personalization is also a benefit.  This is interesting as the size variation of the groups I was with is much less than the general female population (they were all young and mostly thin) where the need for better sizing is much stronger.   I brought up Threadless vs a few others as examples of image customization and a few of the shoe companies.  In general the Threadless model was preferred - very interesting as it is also constrained.

 

Many other questions come to mind, but time was limited and I was mostly injecting questions along with my model friend (who is absolutely great at this) and observing.    

 

I'd hate to be in the fashion magazine business

 

Separately my friend notes, and I saw a few examples, of how the catwalk itself is changing.  Tech is mixing in as part of the art, but also video is important.  All of the important shows were streamed and most had expert commentary and/or community commentary - almost like a sporting event. Some of the labels produced separate video spots that allowed a much closer look at the piece and there was experimentation with letting the model have a personality.  Probably due to the economy there were more beginning B-list models being used …  the sort who will probably not walk next season.  The whole notion of what a model does seems to be changing a bit, although high fashion runway models are still pretty much unchanged from those 10 years ago.  I'm told catalog modeling has seen a much larger shift as online catalogs become more important - things to say on the modeling piece, but I'll stop here…

 

A few additional observations:

 

° iPads, iPhones and MacBook Airs were everywhere.  The great majority of those I spoke to had Apple kit and 100% had smartphones. I asked a few questions and the fact this group has bought into the Apple platform is key.  Their music is from iTunes, apps are *extremely* important, and the Air is the only laptop they consider.  Granted this group is obsessed with style and fashion, but there is certainly no movement to Android.  I was frankly amazed by the acceptance of the Apple platform. 

 

° Most of them owned iPads.  It is seen as being hired for a different task than the iPhone or the Air, but the fact that these products link up and synchronize through the cloud mostly seamlessly was important.  The cafes I used had net and there were people, mostly women, watching the walks in being streamed live from the runways across the street.  There was a lot of social commentary going on face to face (ear to ear?) as well as in chat windows and text messages.  Twitter seemed to be an important space for commentary. Facebook seemed absent.

 

° People couldn’t stream to their phones or iPads.   An iPad linked to WiFi might seem to be the ideal viewing platform, but it was impossible as Flash was used.  They complained about the failure, but didn’t blame Apple.  The blame goes to whoever was doing the streaming.  There were also complaints about poor cellular service in the area - again it was not seen as Apple’s responsibility.  Flash on tablets and phones really is a non-starter at this point.

 

° Space doesn’t permit me to write the pages I learned about street fashion, which may be a central piece of the developing future as magazines lose influence and the process of fashion becomes even more social.  Material, money, and information flows are all in the process of changing.

 

° The backstage use of iPads surprised me.  I don’t think I’ve seen that density outside an Apple Store.  There appear to be several important custom apps as well as regular commercial apps.  One young designer joked that they are moving to the paperless atelier...  Steve Jobs would not approve that I saw a few people frantically sketching with a conductive stylus for last second visual notes to be communicated to others.  There was also a great deal of photographic annotation.  

 

__________

And a recipe or two!

 

After a few people saw this post, two wrote and asked where are the recipes?  OK - here is a fun one with a bit of science.  But first a word on measurements.

 

Most of my recipes have approximate measurements.  When cooking with fresh ingredients it is often necessary to adjust for the freshness and taste of the ingredients as well as your own tastes.  I'll try to supply weight and volume measurements, but encourage you to move to just weight for anything that isn't a liquid at the very least when amounts are important - some types of cooking and most types of baking.  Get an electronic kitchen scale that can tare - it will change your life in the kitchen.  Good enough ones aren't expensive.  I use the  EatSmart Precision Pro- about $25.

 

Now on to the food!

 

Maillard Reaction Squash in a Pressure Cooker

 

The Maillard reaction is this wonderful event that takes place between an amino acid, a reducing sugar and some heat.  Without going into details a complex mixture of molecules forms that are involve in the flavors and smells of many foods.  The browning of meats, the browning on toast, french fries, fried onions, roasted coffee, the browned sections of cakes and cookies.  In short it has a fundamental importance in baking and cooking.

 

Most of these reactions begin at around 300°F, although some start much lower - perhaps 250°F.  It would be nice to cook with the reaction, but in a boiling or immersed environment.  The trick is to use a pressure cooker.  Most will go to 15psi - pushing the interior boiling temperature to something past the threashold for some of the reaction.  Physics just works - increase the pressure of the gas over water and the boiling point increases.

 

It would be wonderful to get that great taste on something like squash in a pressure cooker.  It turns out a bit of experimentation shows the way.  Some of the experiments didn't work, but were edible none the less.  Adding a bit of baking soda increased the reaction just enough to make everything work (alkali environments generally encourage the reaction - we're sitting on the fence at 15psi and need to be pushed just a bit)

 

This one works:-)  

ingredients

° 55g (4 tbl) unsalted butter

° 0.75kg (1 1/2 lb) delicata squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into half inchish cubes

° 1/2 lemon grass stalk 

° 1 tsp kosher salt

° 1/2 tsp baking soda

° honey to taste

method

1. Melt butter in a pressure cooker. Stir in squash, lemon grass, salt and baking soda. Cover tightly with pressure cooker lid and cook at a gauge pressure of 1 bar (15 p.s.i.) for 20 minutes. Begin the timing after the pressure has been reached.

2. Depressurize the cooker according to the pressure cooker's manual.

3. Remove lemon grass. Blend the squash to a smooth purée.  Add honey to taste.

 

mmmm

 

Pressure cookers, if you haven't tried one, rule.  I use a Kuhn Rikon¹ and love it - spendy, but you probably won't find a better pressure cooker.  A core component of the kitchen and safe. 

_____

 

And a somewhat unhealthy, but delicious bonus.  This is especially good on a chilly night and guests love it.

 

Baked Hot Chocolate

 

ingredients

° 250g (9 oz) very very good quality semisweet chocolate (Lindt, Scvharffen berger, Guitard, etc) - maybe 60% to 70% - finely chopped
° 85g (6 tbl) unsalted butter cut up.  excellent grade butter only
° 4 large eggs
° 50g white sugar (1/4cup)
° whipped cream to taste

method

1. Preheat an oven to 350° F


2. find four oven proof coffee mugs or similar sized ramekins and put them on a pan


3. melt butter and chocolate in a double boiler and whisk until smoothly melted and mixed. Remove from heat and set aside


4. Stir eggs and sugar in a mixing bowl over simmering water until warm to the touch.


5. Beat egg mixture with a beater until light and fluffy - 3 to 5 minutes. Gently fold the egg mixture into the chocolate


6. Spoon batter into cups and add enough hot water in the pan to come up halfway on the cups


7. Bake until top of mixture looses its glossy look. About 15 or 20 minutes.


8. Remove and let cool to a bit above room temperature on the outside.  Put on whipped cream and serve

wicked fine

 

_________

¹ A review of the pressure cooker I use.  It was about $200 and worth every penny.

 

 

 

 

the delight of playful creativity

At five thirty this morning I made my way to the basement for the morning rowing.  I sat on the machine, cued up the WBUR OnPoint podcast (I usually listen to whatever is current on Thursdays) on the iPod, pushed play and pulled backwards.  Little did I know...

 

Forty seven minutes flew by and I was ready for the next podcast to begin.  I knew I had something to blog about, that was different from what I was thinking about at five twenty five as I started to the basement, and I knew an apology would be necessary.  I rowed on in silence lost in thought and stopped about forty minutes later.  My ergometer said I had delivered 202.4 watt-hours to the flywheel.  Better than 150 watts on average - not bad for me.  

 

Before getting into what I was thinking and why I saw the need for an apology you need to listen to the show. (mp3)

 

Trust me - it is worth the time.

 

An interview and some samples from beatbox cellist Kevin Olusola.  While he's not technically a great cellist, he did get Yo-Yo Ma's attention.  Kevin's playfulness and experimentation and curiosity inform his creativity.  In creativity and playfulness he reminds me of musicians cellist Zöe Keating, Björk, and Reggie Watts and more than a few scientists.¹

 

When you are exposed to something like this you want to find more and let your friends know.  That made me think of one of you - Jheri.  

 

Jheri is this amazing person - creatitive, funny and kind.  The sort of person who amazes you by being a friend.   She knows exactly what I mean when I say play is a fundamental component of creativity and she is off-scale playful.  She also happens to have a hearing impairment.  I want to share this with you Jheri, but I know it won't work so I must apologize... 

 

or maybe not...

 

This is an opportunity.  Jheri is amazingly perceptive visually.  She is aware of the nuances of out-of-band communications that take place in face to face communications that most of us tend to miss.  She sees much more deeply than the rest of us and is a natural empath.  So while people like Niki, Lorraine, Linda and a few others will probably love listening to Kevin, I began to wonder about the part of the world Jheri sees that I am visually deaf to...

 

This is a chance for serendipty. Jheri - perhaps we can  investigate the parts of the world that are beautiful to you that are mostly invisible to people who hear well...   I know they exist - would you like to collaborate and sort a bit of this out?  Thinking about that excites me much more than listening to Kevin's wonderful music.  It is much more fun playing and learning than sitting back - even if what you are witnessing is as wonderful. 

 

Kevin is having wonderful fun and is bringing pleasure.  He started with a simple set of questions.  There is no reason why you can't have the fun in your domains.

 

Let's play Jheri

 

In the meantime I strongly recommend listening to the interview!

________

¹ Reggie performed just before my TED^x talk and his performance completely captivated me.  Look him up - he's amazing.  We were talking immediately after TED and it turned out he is from Great Falls, Montana - he lived about 500 feet from our house.

on the fantastic flying books of mr. lessismore

The first release from Moonbot Studios, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Lessismore, has been out for awhile, but I tend to discover things at a slower pace.  The illustration is quite wonderful and there is a distinct style that has a fine antique feel to it.  There is much to recommend as you will see with the video, but you should know that you shouldn't watch it.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

(sigh - they have made this link private...)

 

You see the real experience is to be had in the iPad version and its interactivity.  Every page has a bit of something and the viewer becomes engaged leaving passive viewing behind.  And this interactivity is artistic and engaging.  It points in the general direction of the future.

 

Play with something like this and $10 seems like way to much to spend for a movie.  Perhaps $2 seems like too much ...

 

It will take decades for Hollywood - or whatever that becomes - to discover how to use the power of an interactive digital network connected sheet of paper that goes to someone's lap, but there will be illuminations along the way.  This is the first I would consider worthy of the new medium.  There have been a lot of experiments, but this one also mixes in real storytelling and art.

 

I'm guessing a lot of lightbulbs have been fired over the heads of the artistic set.   If you worry about this sort of change you really need to explore with an iPad.  But if you don't have one yet, I would wait a few months ...

 

(a short post as I spent most of the time with the "book")

 

 

 

tools for the mind

Much of the playing around with ideas that I do relies on visual thinking and drawing diagrams and just sketching an extremely important tool for me.  So important that I wish I had taken formal art classes.  Paper and pencil are great, but for standing or collaborating with others in a room I can think at a whiteboard, but a quality slate blackboard and good chalk “feels” better to me.

 

In the mid 90s AT&T split into AT&T and Lucent.  I had been working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ but my move to AT&T Research meant a move to Florham Park, NJ.  The new location was a nice building in a very nice setting and a lot of attention was given to making us comfortable.  We had a lot of choice when it came to our office furnishings and - to me - the most important choice was slate vs whiteboard.¹

 

My first office had a great view and an even better piece of slate on the wall.  Bliss.  All was well with the world, but  and all was well with the world but a year later I moved to a different office with - shudder - a white board.  A bit of after-hours reconnaissance turned up a few slightly damaged slate boards in the basement and a Ben Franklin slipped to the head maintenance guy with my help at 6 am caused the white board to disappear and be replaced by the slate.  The chalk wasn’t great, but I knew where to buy the good stuff.

 

Sadly I’m no longer there - a loss of several fine minds and that big piece of slate.  As it happens one of the readers of this blog is now occupies that room enjoying “my” old slate.  Tom, I hope it is as good for you as it was for me. 

 

I use computers for sketching ideas, but the interface is not just as nice as the physical world   I use a Wacom tablet and SketchBook Pro on my Mac - good enough, but not great.  Better yet is Procreate on an iPad.  A third party pressure sensitive pen will be out in a few months and, if the iPad 3 appears, I may cave and make the purchase.

 

But for working something out nothing comes close to pencil and paper.  I constantly doodle and sketch as part of thinking and manipulate a lot of equations by hand. Pencils and paper are a wonderful technology for this purpose.²   But they begin to fall apart when you start to worry about authoring and making work, probably more polished work, available to others.

 

In many settings - particularly education - books still rule although many of them are appearing on ebook readers of one form or another.  I’m of the opinion that technology can be used as a supporting tool that can be used to help revolutionize education. It should not be central and arguably a revolution can take place without technology - my path was reasonably computer-free until I was in college and might be considered revolutionary by today’s standards.  But I think it is important to rethink the interaction between teacher and student as well as among students and rethink what a book is.  Augmented books show a lot of promise and may fit into some rethinking of education, although it will take decades to really sort out what works and what doesn’t - but for the time being there is a large authoring problem.

 

 

ebook authoring tools basically suck and there are a variety of standards.  Without waking up that dragon I note that Apple’s iBook Author and iTunes U announcement represents the first easy to use authoring tool for next generation ebooks.  There are any number of issues and the program is in its infancy.  Hopefully others will compete and hopefully they’ll create human usable tools.  I do worry that it may take a for profit company to play this game as the open source community has a poor track record when usability is involved. 

 

________ 

 

I spent the morning playing with Apple’s program and sent this note to some folks who are interested in education.  Any comments about this class of learning are appreciated - if anyone wants to talk about such things.  This was a quickly written email that was just capturing my immediate thoughts.  They’ve advanced a bit since then, but this captures what struck me at the time

 

I like playing with tools and product rather than reading reports, so when I found myself with three spare hours this morning I decided to spend it with iBooks Author - the free iBook authoring tool Apple announced yesterday along with the expansion of iTunes U and iBooks 2.  It gave a few answers and opened many more questions.

 

To first order Author is a mixture of Pages and Keynote - since I don't use MS Office I'm reasonably skilled in both of these and my learning curve was small. For test content I tried a few chapters of the energy book I had been writing with my volleyball friend Colleen as well as a couple of chapters I had contributed to a technical book (astrophysics) a few years ago.

 

There is a huge need for a good ePub3 authoring tool and I was hoping for just that.  It is not a generic tool for any sort of publication.  The EULA restricts you to selling through Apple if you want money - you can put it up for free and (presumably) publish in other places.  Of course Amazon (unlike everyone else) doesn't support ePub3, so that is another issue.

 

Author can't handle technical formatting.  Equations are mostly laid out in LaTeX these days and it just doesn't work with that.  In theory you can use a third party app that allows you to render and put LaTeX into Pages and then import, but those tools are not very good and the one that sort of works costs about $60 for an academic license. This is a big hole for any middle school or beyond science text or any math book.  I tried to import a Pages document that had embedded LaTeX, but there were issues with the rendering and it was not possible to make changes in Author.  A big lose for me…

 

If you are adding multimedia, photos, slide presentations - etc - the process borders on being trivial.  The tool seems to be set up for fairly complex books - textbooks - with chapters, sections, subsections, appendices, glossaries and so on.  You could, in principle, create simpler books using it, but there is way too much stuff getting in your way.  I was hoping for something that I could just important a Pages document and use it for adding bits and pieces rather than getting involved in a major project.  This isn't it.  This is so much easier to use than Adobe or other standard authoring tools that there just isn't any comparison.  It is also $0 vs $a lot.  Of course you don't have many options if you want to make money.

 

It seems very well suited for largish projects that a textbook maker might do.  It also seems excellent for the sort of publications that some teachers might produce as their Summer projects  - it is almost tailor made for that.  

 

Well - almost well suited I should add.  There are no provisions for collaboration and none for automation - both seriously important if you have more than one person involved and if you plan on regular updates or perhaps a serialization.  Of course this is 1.0 and *every* 1.0 Apple product has been an outline of what eventually rolls out.  Perhaps Apple wants to get people used to the simple tool rather than overwhelming them (how un-MS and un-Adobe!)

 

The iBooks 2 app, and I didn't get to play with it much as Sukie owns the family iPad, in conjunction with iTunes U strikes me more as a course syllabus tool rather than a simple book reader.  You can, in theory, do a lot with it and it is much cheaper (free) than Blackboard which is a somewhat ugly and expensive, but nearly ubiquitous tool at many Universities.  Apple may have something here for HSs and Universities - but I would wait for comments from the edu crowd before commenting more than I have.

 

Apple tends to start small and then grow products.  There is a huge need for a simpler tool (yes - Pages can output ePub, but it isn't a real authoring tool for a book).  It would probably be too much for Apple to just announce something like that now - plus the people who would benefit are those who are motivated to sell on Amazon.  I suspect something will happen - perhaps it will be Pages '12 when that is finally announced.  It isn't a great leap to see Apple doing this.

 

They need to add bits and pieces that would make this a better technical tool. That means LaTeX or similar support.  They might also do something with Wolfram (a trusted source told me they have recently looked at buying Wolfram, but I have no idea what the status of that is - it certainly makes sense as it links in with Siri)

 

In the end Apple wants to sell hardware.  I can't see many k12 schools jumping with the current book selection and shoes have to drop for that to improve.  Maybe a year from now. I can imagine a boatload of teachers creating content for it this Summer though and that may be important. If I was making ebook textbook content I would certainly consider a branch and the basic port would be easy … making it dance much more difficult.

 

The iTunes U part is potentially big and college students would be the ones buying the iPads rather than school districts.  There is a chance for some disruption here and the price of college texts is high enough that an iPad would pay for itself if you could get half of your books this way.    The openness of iTunes U and the universities offering free courseware is such that it would be very attractive for lifelong learners - I will certainly be using this part of it.

 

The K12 piece requires a cheaper iPad.  It appears that the iPad2 will continue to be sold - and that would be Apples standard pattern - iPods and iOS devices traditionally see version 2 models sold at a lower price point when version 3 is announced. If history is a guide I would expect a $349 price..  Apple may also add a stripper with limited memory (the additional memory isn't expensive, but it is an easy way to create a bump) or possible not having the camera - for $249 or $299.   If it was featureless enough - say 8 GB RAM and no camera, the $349 regular iPad 2 would still sell well along with the $499 iPad 3 (picking arbitrary numbers).  Of course pure speculation - but Apple needs to announce a cheap edu model and the announcement has to fit the k12 procurement cycle.

 

It strikes me this could be a powerful tool for eMagazines.  Not what currently exists, but the basic bits and pieces are there.  

 

There is a lot of promise, but there are some big holes that need filling before it is a real offering.  My guess is the holes are not there out of cluelessness….

 

___________

 

I welcome what Apple has done.  They are doing it primarily to make money, but it may ignite a competition to come up with something - one of the basic cogs of education - that better.  That is exciting.

 

And if you want to make a difference in your own visual thinking as well as that of your kids or students I strongly recommend learning a bit of art - just basic sketching.  Mine is self taught and crude, but has proven to be enormously powerful.  I frequently use it as a repeatable entry point for achieving “flow”.  It is a shame that art and music (also very important for thinking - more on that in a post to come) are not taught much these days. These are important tools for learning how to “connect the dots”.

 

_____

¹ I talked to the guy who runs the company that made the slate boards.  The last of the breed in the US and most of their business came from math and physics departments.  I assume if I hadn’t discovered the feel of a good piece of slate as an undergrad I would have come to love white boards and the smell of magic markers.

² Paper and pencils are a very personal thing.  Mostly I use art sketchpads, but I also love bound notebooks from Field Notes.  They have fine pencils too, but you need some sharpening technique.  pencilrevolution is  good resource for all things pencil.

 

occident flies!

When we first moved to New Jersey I was taking a walk in an area known as The Great Swamp - a place where it is possible to get a mile or so away from other people if you pick a quiet time and a very beautiful and peaceful place.  About two miles in I found a guy intently studying a flower from behind the view glass of a beautiful wooden frame four by five inch view camera.  He had lugged in an enormous tripod, the camera and quite a bit of kit. Very impressive as he was not a very large person.   Normally I would stop and ask questions, but he was intensely into the moment and I was enjoying my walk too much.

 

I continued for a few hours and turned around finally coming back to the meadow and the photographer.  He was still at it, now working on an old fallen piece of tree.  This time he was hunting for something in a gear bag, so I stopped and chatted for awhile.  It turned out he had taken three photos and his goal was five or six for the day.  For someone who was used to a much smaller camera that lacked the control of a view camera I was amazed as he showed me what he could do.

 

Recently Om started me thinking about images again in one of his blog posts.  I’m strongly taken with motion as well as still photography - but for very different reasons.  

 

I have tried some video, but it generally is very much youtube friends waving at the camera work.  My still photography is better and I’m more comfortable thinking about an image and setting it up than shooting and editing segments of video.  Both can be the basis for good stories and I’m in awe of people who can do both.

 

For recreation I love to draw.  Some of you - Nancy, Jessica and my sister Corinne - are much better artistically than I will ever be, but I enjoy losing myself in an image.  A moment of time can stretch into hours and I frequently achieve flow.  When I do physics I tend to be visual and much of the early stages of work are playful with me drawing or imagining drawing images in my mind’s eye.¹  

 

When flow occurs time seems to move at a different rate.

 

Time

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about it in the past two weeks as it is the subject of my mini-sabbatical.  How do relate to time and how has that changed over time?  How important is it to change itself?  My suspicion is that we are living in a period of change where our current notions of time are outmoded and we’re inventing new conventions and relationships even now.  

 

We think we have a good view of our natural world through our senses, but in reality they are very limited.  We only hear a fraction of the sounds around us - much of it is too quiet and much of it has wavelengths too long or too short for us to perceive and much of what we might see is far too dim.  Our sense of smell is limited compared to other animals.  Our vision only covers a very narrow fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum.  What we do have is still very impressive as animals go, even though some overtake us in one or more of them, and have served us well.  But science exploded when we started to build tools that allowed us to extend our senses.  We found a much larger and richer Universe and improvements on these sensory extensions continue to drive the sport.

 

We also live in a world defined by time.  A mountain range may take millions of years to push up, a flower takes hours to bloom, a bullet striking a balloon leaves a rich record of the collision.  We see the results of these processes, but the details are lost to us unless we build tools to somehow live in their time.

 

Leland Stanford was into race horses in a big way and was particularly proud of his trotter Occident.  Stanford had a real interest in studying the motion of horses so as to improve breeding and training techniques but a better, albeit manufactured, story is that he bet John Isaac $25,000 that Occident always had at least one foot on the ground at all times.

 

In other words - there may be horseflies, but horses do not fly...

 

Stanford was approximately richer than god and hired Eadweard Muybridge (a most unusual name and not a spelling error) to create a photographic record of the behavior of the horse.  He used a dozen cameras spaced 21 inches apart.  Each camera had a shutter speed of a 1/1000^th of a second and the shutter was connected to a trip wire.  The horse effectively had a series of closely spaced slices of time created at different portions of its stride.

 

As you can easily see, horses do fly...

 

If you arranged the photos in a pack and flipped through them at the right speed - the lag between images being about the time it takes the horse to travel 21 inches from camera to camera - your mind stitches the still images into a reasonably smooth motion and we perceive the flow of time.  One of the earliest forms of the movie...³

 

There is a lot to talk about the perception of time and I will, but I want to keep this post short.  Movies and video are all about the illusion of combining still slices of time.  

 

Oddly we all live a tiny bit in the past -  our perception of now is inaccurate, but it works for our biology and most of the interactions with our world that helped chart our evolutionary path. 

 

We worked very hard to synchronize time over the years.  First for relating to nature and agriculture, then for studying the stars and prayer.  Time was critical to sorting out the sky and navigation and later we found ourselves synchronizing ourself to its flow for work and travel.  

 

Time is everywhere and as we find our way through the fabric of space and time we have a sense that there must be a master clock of sorts - that time must be universal.

 

Except it isn’t.  With high school geometry and algebra and the knowledge that light has a fixed speed you can convince yourself that time is relative.   Walk down the street and the clocks in the buildings along the way tick at a slightly different rate than your watch - an act that gives me great pleasure at times when I am on a long walk in Manhattan.

 

It turns out athletes - the really good ones - are expert at shutting off much of the thought in their minds that is extraneous to the task at hand,  They can quickly put together solutions to the kinetic problems they face a few tenths of a second earlier than the rest of us as a result.  An artifact is that they become immersed in a state of psychological flow - that Csíkszentmihályian flow that is so addictive that I find sketching and doing physics and a few other things.²  Athletes also seem to create mental movies of the likely future - “forward models.”  A volleyball player notices the position of the other players and gets a sense of how the ball will be returned so she can position and launch herself with timing good to the hundredth of a second.  There are midcourse corrections to these movies that take into account the spin on the ball and local wind conditions.  These predictions are consistent with Bayesian decision theory that combines previous experience with a stream of new information.  The brain gets to focus on sorting out what is likely and telling the muscles to act on it appropriate.  It is not a simple lookup mechanism and the magic in sport often arrises when the mind comes to a novel solution and gives the ok to try it.  Elite athletes are sometimes good at finding these novel solutions for interacting with a complex situation as time flows.

 

And my encounter with the photographer in the Great Swamp years ago?  It turns out he worked for Bell Labs too and we became friends fifteen years later.  A few years ago we worked on a project that required us to watch for a motion that we knew was happening, but was too fleeting to observe.  We rented time on a camera that took video at 8000 frames per second - sort of faster than the roughly 30 frames per second our vision uses.

 

Here is some popcorn popping at 6200 frames per second - the motion  is "slowed" down a bit over 200 times ...

 

What fun! 

 

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¹ Well - sort of visual.  I have synesthesia and vision for me is a mixture of images and sounds - or sound is a mixture of vision and sound. I can’t cleanly separate them and would love to feel what it must be like to have cleanly orthogonal senses.  You begin to understand why it isn't terribly common as many synesthetes are uncoördinated.

² ok - I know what you're thinking.  It is mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee-an

³ At least the photographic form of movie. Earlier experiments and toys played with the persistance of vision too.  Roget published the first paper on the subject in the mid 1820s and neat machines like this appeared shortly afterwards.  Yup - that's the same Roget who did the Thesarus.

 

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.

 

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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). 

losing the training wheels

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I sketch for recreation.  My pieces aren’t very good as I have never focused and developed technique, but it is a way to express yourself and, more important, it is a way to think.  

 

It turns out sketching is much more important to me than just recreation.

 

Much of my thinking is visual.  It helps me observe and explore.  When I’m exploring new ideas there is quite a bit of play taking place. Lots of little experiments with most of them failing, but you tend to learn from each one.  Seeing what is going on is a terrific advantage.  Sometimes you use computer programs to think visually¹ , but there are even more times when creating a model in your head is faster and more powerful.²  The act of sketching can be powerful tools for getting to those mental models - almost like keyframes that allow you to easily assemble an animation that you can manipulate.  A serious tool for quickly constructing and testing mental models and a tool that happens to be fundamentally playful.

 

I find some tools that support sketching to be very important - a sketchpad with the right paper, the right pencil, a proper slate blackboard and good chalk, a shared visual space with collaborators and so on..  More recently I’ve been using art creation applications on the the iPhone and iPad - two devices that have the fundamental ability to become immersive creative tools.

 

Among other things Autodesk makes high-end sketching tools.  A few years ago they announced a $100 program called SketchBook Pro that ran on Macs and PCs.  It had a powerful interface and seemed to be designed for serious art professionals who wanted to make sketches that could form the basis of more refined pieces.  Using it required a Wacom drawing tablet - you can find one for under $100, but a tablet good enough for most purposes started at three times as much.  

 

I had a good Wacom tablet, so I ponied up the cash and began to play.  Although it was a very capable program, it was complex enough that it got in my way and I fell back to using other tools.³

 

A few years later they released a version of  SketchBook for the iPhone.  To say the least I was very skeptical, but it was only a few dollars a piece by Jorge Colombo had recently graced the cover of the New Yorker.

 

Somehow everything was different.  Although the screen was tiny and the controls more limited, I was directly manipulating the objects just under the glass.

 

I was drawing.

 

I found myself using it to play with ideas and found myself recommending iPod Touches and iPhones to friends who have integrated sketching into their way of thinking.

 

A much more dramatic development came with SketchBook Pro for the iPad.  Suddenly the interface was about the size of a piece of paper you might find in a physical sketchbook and interaction with your art could be completely immersive.  For anyone who thinks visually and uses sketching as a tool this is reason enough to buy an iPad.  The same is true for a kid who is learning how to think visually.  Even, perhaps especially, if the kid has a mathematical and scientific bent, encourage playing with art and get them an iPad.⁴  

 

 

Tools like SketchPad on an iPad have been disruptive for AutoDesk .  The company now has a vastly expanded user base and many of them are finding use for sketches in their professional work and, I’m sure, as a playful tool to sharpen their thinking.

 

AutoDesk is having great success, but there are a variety of programs. I find my current favorite, Procreate,  to have an even more natural interface.  

 

All of these are inexpensive, so try a few of them and spend a few hours playing with them to see which works best for you.

 

Even the original iPad is still a very powerful and far from a mere consumption device if you are clever enough to approach it as a blank slate.  It frees you up and helps your mind glide through playful thought.

 

Truly a bicycle for the mind.

 

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¹ Maple and Mathematica are both extremely powerful and useful tools that should be part of your playful thinking arsenal even if you have a modest background in math.  Both are spendy in their professional versions, but the home version of Mathematica is under $300 and student versions of Maple range from $100 to $200.  A regular reader of this blog is a fashion model who happens to have a serious interest in forest ecology.  She has done some nice work using Mathematica as a modeling tool for exploration.

² The creative arts are very important subjects and can form the basis for powerful tools for people who are expected to do “creative” work.  De-emphasizing them in the schools is a tragic mistake.  Even though my skills are limited, my ability to do a bit of art and music has given me a powerful advantage in the playful portion of creative thought.

³ Oddly enough Adobe's Photoshop can be immersive.  I use it for exploration as well as what amounts to my own flavor of art.  I don't know that I would recommend it as a general playful exploration tool though...

Find the tools that fit your needs and don't worry about the latest and greatest.  But at the same time be aware of potentially game changing tools.  I'm currently curious about the Wacom Inkling, but it is vaporware at the moment.

Some tools can be unusual and very individual. I find a bit of fine chocolate, particularly when working with collaborators, is very useful when used sparingly.  A good Lindt is fine, but my favorite is from Mast Brothers.

⁴ You can find used original model iPads that are more than good enough in the $200 range.