omenti

a solar puzzle, 16 inch guns, and home repair

It looked awfully painful, but the burns didn't seem to bother him that much.  Ray plopped his tray down and the table and listened to catch the drift of of the lunchtime conversation.  Brookhaven was a wonderful place at the time.  Some of the best scientists in the world worked there and many were great at spending time with grad students and postdocs.

 

Ray Davis was already something of a legend in the late 70s.  He came to BNL in the early 50s to work on big problems.  Eventually he came to work on one that was fundamental - what are the mechanisms that power stars.  

 

Most of the energy on Earth originated in the Sun.  Your lunch today was probably sunlight that left reached our planet in the past year.  The gasoline in your car is older solar energy that has been stored for tens of millions of years.  The core mechanism that produces this sunlight turns out to be fascinating.  In the eighth grade you probably learned it is through nuclear fusion and in high school physics you may have done a simple mass to energy calculation.  The real mechanism turns out to be a tad more complicated that hydrogen fusing to helium.  There are several steps, but it can be roughly expressed as 

 

Four protons (hydrogen nuclei) are burned to a single helium nucleus, two positrons (positive electrons), two electron neutrinos and some energy.  The four hydrogens are a bit heavier than the helium nucleus and the positrons.  The mass difference is transformed into its energy equivalent and carried off in the form of a high energy photon called a gamma ray.  That energy eventually makes its way out of the Sun and radiates into space mostly in the form of visible light.  A tiny bit of what leaves the sun - about a ten billionth - makes its way to the Earth.  

 

Ray had a neat way to verify part of this - he could measure the number of neutrinos that left the Sun.

 

Hold up your thumb to the Sun.  Every second tens of billions of solar neutrinos zip through it.  They fill the space around us.  How hard can it be to measure them?

 

This turns out to be extremely tricky business requiring enormous care in experimental design and analysis.  Neutrinos were thought to be massless at the time and they interacted weakly with the forms of matter we're familiar with.  A solar neutrino striking the earth has a one in a thousand billion chance of interacting with anything.  Hold up your thumb and you would wait a century or so for anything to happen.

 

Ray's group used a 100,000 gallon tank of perchloroethylene - simple cleaning fluid which is chlorine rich).  It was buried almost a mile underground in an abandoned mine in South Dakota to act as shielding from other particle reactions.  If an electron neutrino with enough energy strikes a Chlorine atom, Argon-37 and an electron are produced.¹  

 

Every day about ten billion billion neutrinos would pass through Ray's tank and about two would react.

 

Every few weeks the tank was flushed and the Argon-37 was trapped in a charcoal filter and returned to BNL.  Ray happened to have access to a gun barrel from a 16 inch WWII battleship.  It was cut into a convenient eight foot, eight ton section that happened to make a dandy shield for low level radiation detection.²

 

Ray was very patient and very careful

 

The experiment went on for years and years - Ray and his group were seeing only about a third of what was expected.  Either the experiment or theory were wrong.  In cases like this you try to figure out just what went wrong, but the experiment was solid and the theory was very predictive and had become accepted.  Everyone knew Ray was missing something.

 

It turns out theory was wrong - or more correctly incomplete.  Twenty years later it was discovered neutrinos had a tiny mass.  They weren't pure electron neutrinos, but rather an admixture of states.  They would start out as electron neutrinos and during the journey to the Earth some would oscillate to the other state that was undetectable by Ray's apparatus.  

 

Oh - Ray's burns.  They were from a home repair incident.  They happened all the time.  He would do ordinary tasks to relax and think about other things.  There were times when his mind, which was working away at something, would shift to the problem and the real world would bang into him.  This certainly wasn't the only time and I'm afraid it happens to me more than I'd care to admit.

 

Last week I was walking down a street just before dawn.  It was amazingly beautiful with a thin cloud bank forming a few feet about the ground.  It wasn't more than ten feet thick.  I felt my mind wandering and suddenly I knew how to work a problem that  I had abandoned a month before.  I find putting problems aside that require creative energy to be extremely effective - assuming you have the raw material of richly diverse experiences and connections floating about.  Recently Jean and I were talking and she mentioned she sees a few levels to this and has relied on scheduling this offline creativity.  Mine isn't that polished, but I require spaces where I'm not focused on current problems if I want to be creative.  Thankfully my parents allowed me a great deal of freedom. Had I been scheduled to the point where I didn't boredom and freedom it is possible I would have been locked out of fields I love.

 

Neuroscience notes that creative bouts tend to occur when our heavily organizing frontal lobes lose a bit of control and free association in other parts of the brain lights up.  Being able to partly shut down the frontal lobes may be the key to creative thought, but you wouldn't want it to take place all the time.  A fascinating hypothesis that is currently being investigated is known as transient hypofrontality.  Some people are very good at it.  When very creative people are interviewed they all seem to have tricks to put themselves into this state where they can be highly creative.  There are lots of techniques including meditation, home repair, taking long walks in nature, alcohol (more than a few writers) and other drugs, and so on.⁴  You find what works for you.  I share walks in nature with Beethoven and Einstein although I'm not in their league.  Sketching is also very effective for me along with getting lost in music.  Whatever works and I'm far from an expert.   Creativity is much much deeper and richer than this, but it is a fascinating idea and these practices are very common in some groups.

 

There is something else that is beautiful about transient hypofrontality. Neuroanatomists note the wires that connect up different regions of our brain are myelinating as we develop. It peaks in our frontal lobes in our early 40s, and then begins to unwind and demyelinate, starting at the front of the brain and working backwards.³ Our frontal lobes become poorly at conducting signals, so our ability to move the connection processes to other areas of our brain may increase after the age of 45 or so.  Perhaps we can become more richly creative with age  - also if you are creative, it may stick around longer than some other processes.  I caution this is only a hypothesis at this point, but it may explain a lot and some of the initial experiments are promising.

 

In 2002 Ray Davis shared a baptism with Swedish holy water with two other physicists.  A richly deserved reward.

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¹ Nuclear physics involves alchemy - one element can be transmuted to another.  It turns out the detailed process that goes on in the Sun has a branch that produced neutrinos from the decay of Boron-8.  Those are the only neutrinos in the Brookhaven experiment with enough energy to convert Chlorine to Argon)

² Argon-37 is radioactive and has a half life of a bit more than a month.

³ Think of myelin as the insulation that shields our neural wiring.  It allows signals to transmit quickly and efficiently.  

⁴ Seymour Cray dug tunnels and built a boat every year.  The boats were burned at the end of the Summer to give reason to build a new one.  Of course finishing a boat was not the point of the work.

 

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Recipe corner

 

A simple avocado salad based on a recipe by Mark Bittman

 

Avocado Salad with Ginger Dressing.

Ingredients

 

° 85g rice vinegar

° 50g white granulated sugar

° 2 tbl minced peeled fresh ginger

° 2 avocados pitted peeled and seeded

° 75g chopped roaseted peanuts

° cilantro sprigs

 

Technique

 

° Put vinegar, suar, pinch of salt, and 2 tbl water into a small pan over medium heat  Cook until the sugar dissolves

° add ginger and continue cooking until the dressing thickens - about 5 or 6 minuts.

° Remove from heat cool and cover.  Let it chill at refrigerator temperatures at least an hour.

° Place a few cilantro sprigs on salad plates and overlap avocado sliceon top.  Drizzle wit the ginger dressing and garnish with peanuts and a bit of a finishing salt if you like.

 

blowing in the wind

While computational models have made big strides there is a large gap between model predictions and the real world.  If you are serious about how something interacts with the air moving by it you need access to a wind tunnel.  This gets interesting with athletics.  At the highest levels in cycling wind tunnels are used, but only sparingly as wind tunnel time is hard to come by.  It was interesting that one of the big three bicycle makes recently opened a private wind tunnel to sort out bicycle aerodynamics.  

 

I'd much rather see focus on the real issues of increasing bicycle commuting, but the fact is that much of the upscale market in the US is built on the bike as an expensive toy and exercise machine.  Competition in making racing bikes is fierce and I expect the other major makes - especially Trek - to build their own facilities in the near future.  

 

Of course I'm assuming they will have people who know how to properly design the experiments and analyze the information.  It makes me think about the current big data explosion.  Some will do great things, but getting there isn't easy and requires very careful design and the right people.  Just going out and hiring "data scientists" and "data vis" people won't work and may even be counterproductive.

 

Any time you are dealing with data (I would say information) analysis, it is important to know what it is, where it came from, how noisy it is, and possibly many other things.  You have to know about the manipulations and filters it passes through.  Are your questions   for the data set?  How biased is your analysis?

 

Look up at the night sky and constellations pop out.  Constellations are artificial and offer no physical meaning.  In fact they led to early counterproductive models of the cosmos and some people still attach meaning to them.

 

Humans are naturals at apophenia - we have evolved to easily find artificial patterns in information.  We find it in scientific, engineering, financial, weather and most other forms of data.  We can and do make serious mistakes.  Hunting for patterns in large data sets can be enormous fun, but it can be very misleading - as the Danes would say: there are owls in the marsh....  A deep tool and domain knowledge is essential.  Given how many misuse spreadsheets and simple statistics, I'm not universally optimistic. But others will be very good at avoiding the pitfalls.

 

There are ways to guard against mistakes.  Science is built on these procedures, but there are those who see big data as the shiny new thing.

 

I was interested in measuring how efficient a human could be on an average bike.  There are a lot of numbers, but they vary dramatically.  Using a numeric model and a digital wind tunnel we are talking about serious big data.  For fun one can get time in a low speed wind tunnel.  There is much more going on than in the digital model, but a bit of clever design means we are not recording that many numbers.  With some care we can understand what is going on throughout the experiment - something that isn't as easy with the digital model.

 

The opportunity presented itself and I was able to record a nice round number - From an earlier post a friend on a commuter style bike can exceed the equivalent of 1,000 miles per gallon.  a few details:

 

Looking at someone in good physical condition riding in an upright position with no external wind on a very non-aerodynamic bike.  At 22.5 kilometers per hour (14 mph) she needs about 80.6 kilojoules to cruise along for a kilometer.  This works out to about 31 nutritional calories per mile.  She is burning something like 434 calories over her basic needs to cycle for an hour.

It is interesting to calculate the power she is getting from the metabolism of her food at this steady pace.  In an hour she requires about 1814 kilojoules of energy, so dividing by the seconds in an hour we get a bit more than 500 watts. Not all this food energy is being converted into useful mechanical work.  It turns out many of the muscle movements we make have efficiencies around twenty percent.  Colleen happens to be a trained athlete with wonderfully smooth motions and is a bit over twenty percent efficient on a bike.  She is delivering about 100 watts of power to the pedals and most of that (about 95%) is making it to the rear tire.  

Imagine a car that gets 30 miles per gallon.  A bit of arithmetic shows 30 mpg of gasoline is about 2750 kilojoules per kilometer.  The car uses a bit more than 34 times the energy Colleen does to travel the same distance.  Of course she is only carrying around a bike and a car has to carry a lot of weight besides the driver.

She is close to 1025 miles per gallon - if  fueled by a gasoline near equivalent like a vegetable oil.  That doesn’t work for her so you can figure out what she gets on a gallon of Ben & Jerry’s if you like. 

 

There are a lot of ways to come to different numbers and not everyone has the access to a wind tunnel and the metabolic measurements that an Olympic program uses.  If the information is found it is necessary to know something about it.  There are a lot of specialized conditions that go into this little number.  One can ask many other interesting questions and learn even more, but I only show the rather flashy economy number.  

 

In the end just doing it was much more efficient that building a model and using computational fluid dynamics.  If I was asking a more isolated question - perhaps a design question - the model may have been the way to go.  A bit of experience goes a long way.

 

My worry is that many decisions come down to needing a simple and clearly stated result.  The culture of those who describe the information and those who act on it may be so different that the analysis is worthless or even dangerous.   Domain knowledge is critical.  Even Nate Silver gets silly when he is away from politics and sports.

 

You have to be careful and critical - doubt and curiosity are very important tools as is playfulness.  Science is lucky.  There is an absolute right that can be independently tested using multiple approaches.  Along the way there are many wrong descriptions, but over time they are stripped away and a clearer picture emerges

 

There isn't any magic in it.  Big data will be great for some organizations, and others will get results that lead them down mistaken paths (ask Mitt Romney).  How an organization builds this into their culture is critical.   It should also be stressed that some organizations that have a good understanding of their domain using conventional techniques may find this counterproductive.  Other companies may find it much more useful to continue to build more conventional techniques to understand their customers and operations - Trader Joe's comes to mind.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I've been seriously occupied for the past few weeks and did very little in the way of interesting cooking.  So here is a fundamental technique I use all the time - brazing and glazing vegetables.  It is very useful to master this one:-)

 

° Cut some firm vegetables (I love this with sweet potatoes, it doesn't work well with produce that isn't firm) into roughly equal sized pieces so they cook at similar rates.  Put them in a pan with a lid that fits well and is just big enough to hold them in a single layer.

° Add enough water to cover the bottom of the pan along with a little olive oil or butter.  Add any seasonings that need cooking - garlic or shallots for example.

° Place the pan over a medium heat, cover and stir every few minutes to see if the veggies are getting tender.  You can add a bit of water if needed.

° When they are getting tender, remove the cover and crank up the heat to high. Stir constantly and wait for the water to evaporate and the veggies to start to turn brown - this many only take a couple of minutes.

° Add whatever spices you need.  Salt, pepper, some chopped herbs etc.  It often helps to add just a bit of acid - a squeeze of a lemon or a tbl of vinegar.  

° serve

 

 

placetime

trees are the poems nature writes to the heavens

 

I need to find a suitable tree in the woods.  Sandy caused so much damage as did Irene and the pre-Halloween snowstorm.  Finding the right tree has not been easy this time.

 

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

When I was an undergrad I read Polya and decided to write down some steps on problem solving.  This is not meant to be specific to a field and it tries to be serious even though some of the steps may seem trivial.  It isn't a checklist - just a rough structure for approaching a problem.  I wrote these on a sheet and keep it above my desk.  

there are many techniques. Not every problem would have all of these steps and some would have new ones.  I've added a bit of annotation (in blue) to the original for clarity, but feel free to skip down.  The point is I wanted to impose some structure to make progress.

1. Understand the problem

 

- do you understand all of the words and equations in the problem?

- can you restate the problem in your own words?

- can you think of a picture or diagram to help understand the problem?

- what do you want to find or show?

- what level of accuracy do you need?

- is there enough information to find a solution?

- is the problem a relevant problem or is it gibberish?

- what is the scale of the problem?  can you do it in an hour or will it require unobtainium?

2. Devise a plan

 

- guess and check

- consider special cases.  what are the boundary conditions?

- select your tools

- do you fully understand your tools?

- draw a picture

- solve a simpler version first

- create a model

- use approximations - but understand their impact

- work backwards

- be ingenious …  this comes with experience and often with re-thinking the problem in a different context.  

This and the next step - connecting the dots are the non-trivial piece!!  Remember:

play and your ability to fail with grace are essential

curiosity is your driver - remember informed ignorance rules in science and math! never lose fact that your final job is to expand your ignorance - results are a by-product!!

- connect the dots - this is a subset of being ingenious

serendipity is another driver.  remember that serendipity is making discoveries by accident, but you must have enough sagacity to note what holds potential.  

dot connecting is best done using averted attention.  Don't tool constantly on your problem.  Focus hard, but pivot off to equally long period of something completely different. This may even fool others into thinking you have a life. 

3. Carry out your plan

 

- find a quiet place with no interruptions.  nature is your friend

- use some care and be a craftsman

- if you get stuck, take some time off and try to forget about what you are doing

- if you fail, use another approach

- know when you have failed

- if you are working with others know where the strengths are and divide appropriately

4. Check with reality

- does your answer make sense?

- can your solution make testable predications?

- ask an expert in your field to examine your work for flaws

- reflect on what you have done and examine what worked and what didn't

 

 

This approach helped with physics and math problems, but needed modifications for doing real science - something that I began to taste in grad school.  Observation and experiment have their own techniques and learning that answers may not be what you are looking for requires adjustment.¹

 

There are many places to jump from here.  Several have been mentioned in earlier posts, but I want to concentrate on how this fits with place and time.

 

Finding a bit of nature has been important for me - even in city environments.  As an undergrad I would spend time in the library listening to music for awhile and then going to "my rock" - a large rock just inside a small wooded area that no one seemed to walk through.  Being able to lay on my back and look up through the trees seemed to clear my mind and it was easy to tune out other noises.  

 

You can always build a simple tree platform or even a tree house.  These don't have to be elaborate, but they have the feature of purposefully removing you from some of the world.  Of course it is important to not have electricity and you need to leave your mobile phone behind, or at least turn it off.   

 

Working mostly out of my home these days I'm finding the woods to be an extremely important place and tool.  In addition to spending time working there I take a daily walk around lunch that allows one to mentally shift.  There is something constant, but always changing nature about the place that is worth a lot to me. 

 

I was lucky enough to have started in a lab at Bell Labs that strongly believed in some daily private time.  Even the phones went dead for incoming calls during the period.  You could chose to collaborate, but the choice was yours.  When I moved to other organizations that didn't have this policy I found myself coming in very early to get a few uninterrupted hours.  

 

The organization that first used the private time approach evolved a few curious practices that seemed to be organic extentions.  There were a variety of small collaboration areas outside the (private) offices.  If you wanted to collaborate and could find someone else agreeable (signaling was done with colored flags just outside your office door),  you would often meet in one of these areas - somehow that was better than either office.  They had nice chairs and a blackboard and were tucked into quiet out-of-the-way parts of the building.  Places for special collaboration times.

 

Intersection and collaboration with others is also critically important.  The old Bell Labs Murray Hill installation was something of a maze.  Throughout a career your office would move and would find yourself collaborating with people in other parts of the building.²   I don't believe in most forms of brain storming, but I've seen it work in some small and stable groups.  These groups were usually attached to place, time and often had some ritual.  One of my favorites was unscheduled, but usually took place late on Friday afternoons (three to seven pm was common), invovled a couch, a nice view of some trees, had three or four regular participants who were friends and was fueled by chocolate covered coffee beans.  

 

Collaborations can, of course, be remote.  There is a growing understanding of what works and doesn't.  Collaborations in place often fail and remote collaborations are sometimes fruitful.  It is important to understand for you and your organization what works and what doesn't and why.  Much of it comes down to personality and relationship strength, but corporate culture often has a role.

 

Working on some ideas and projects, one tends to run into walls.  Ideas and approached become stale and work slows to a crawl.  A good approach is to shift the primary focus to something else - something entirely different.  Sometimes a break to an extremely different activity or place is called for.  Somehow the mind seems to be considering the original problem and a flash of insight can come.  

 

Proper toolkits help a lot.  Perhaps it is the time I'm from, but a real slate blackboard and high quality chalk are important to me. Whiteboards don't cut it.  When AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ after the AT&T/Lucent fission, the head of research recognized this and gave everyone a choice of board.  The same holds for paper and pencil for sketching - get something that feels wonderful when the pencil is in motion.   Sketching can be anything of the moment - sometimes visualization of the problem, sometimes working through equations and sometimes doodling or trying to focus and draw something.  The last is a form of meditation to me and a often a path to clearer thinking.  The paper has to feel good under a good sharp pencil.  Everyone will have something that is important to them - the point is figure out what it is and use it.  These are cheap paths that can encourage flow.

 

These are some of the tools I find useful - time from an earlier post and place and the interaction of time and place.  The point is you should find what placetimes and supports to them work for you.

 

Back to the beginning of the post.  Clearly the line is much more beautiful than anything I would pen.  Yesterday Om tweeted an Instagram post of his with a somewhat similar line by the poet Kahlil Gibran.  I've read quite a bit of his work. This one is famous and, while beautiful, breaks into sadness

 

Tree are poems the earth writes upon the sky

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That they may record our emptiness

Several years ago one of you had a similar line - the one at the beginning of this post - and I had to ask.  It turns out she had rewritten a someone similar line from a much older poem in her native language

 

God's fingers are the trees painting the sky

 

I realize poetry often doesn't translate, but consider Jheri's inspired variation much better and have been using it.  

 

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¹ I can't stress enough how important simple things like wiring are a well as trying to deal with all sources of error.  Play is even more important as is the ability to play with others who have different skill sets and views.  There is also a realization that hunting for the discovery - that rare eureka moment - is not what science is about, but rather finding new questions is much deeper.  But that is a core theme of this blog (hopefully)

² It is wonderful that cross disciplinary collaboration is "hot" again in some institutions.  I've never seen a place that supported it better than the old Bell Labs.

making use of time

Mary Roach is one of the more entertaining non-fiction authors and I've been enjoying Gulp over the past few days.  Highly recommended, but I'm afraid this isn't what I like to be doing.  Don't get me wrong - I love to read for pleasure, but there are other things that are better.  Things like tithing my time.

 

I've written about it before - the short version is I was looking at a few practices in religion that didn't make much sense on the surface to see if there was anything I could adapt.  I started tithing my time as money seems like a silly thing for the purpose if it is to be meaningful.  First it was about four hours a week to a variety of causes, but I wasn't learning.  Somehow I started working on the projects of friends and the epiphany came.  I was getting back much more than I offered.

 

I'm lucky enough to have friends with a range of very different interests and this has become a rich source of new learning and even serendipity.¹  These days my practice is to tithe my waking hours - about 11 hours a week.  I read for pleasure is there isn't a project to work on...

 

My goal, of course, is to be as poorly read as possible.

 

This is centrally important of my practice and to me as a person - perhaps something that differentiates my work from others.  It has given me a rich set of connections far removed from my normal boundaries.  One of the brilliant features of the old Bell Labs was its rich diversity in research interests.  While perhaps not optimal for some tasks, it was fantastic for discovering new areas.

 

Mentoring fits in with this, but there are times when you are working with people of different interests that the act of mentoring has a strong two-way flow and you find yourself being mentored.  It can be a waste of time if you lose your curiosity and just try to teach. 

 

Jean has been talking about time lately and Charlie has suggested I put together a post on the subject.  I'm not exactly a model user of it so caveat lector...

 

I don't multitask well when I'm supposed to be thinking deeply about something.  Multitasking is something that is generally inefficient - while there are a large number of processes running in our brains, the conscious mind seems to like single tasking and context switches from task to task when presented with multiple tasks. There is a cost in context switching ..  somehow the state of what you're doing needs to be saved and  the new process started.  When you re-enter the original process you have to somehow re-create the state of where you were.  For simple tasks this may not be difficult, but deep thought can be a disaster.  There are cases where it is impossible to recreate where you have been.

 

To single task I give myself blocks of time where I cut distractions.  The phone goes off, no net, no distractions from other people or even the critters.  The go is to find a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow - largely because it feels so wonderful and it has traditionally been very useful to me.   The first lab I was in at Bell Labs had this as policy.  Researchers could pick a three hour block in the morning or the afternoon.  When I moved to different organizations I had to create blocks of time.  If they were adverse to it I would come in before others started work leading to my practice of arriving at about 5:30am.  Others feel into the same practice - more than a few people in the Labs referred to going into cave mode.² I find it interesting, talking to some friends who teach graduate courses in physics at some of the best schools in the world.  They note that few of their successful students have any major involvement in social media and they tend to focus - no laptops during lectures, no smartphone use, etc ...  very much in contrast to what one sees in undergrad classes.

 

When I'm working on very deep tasks I tend to not work on them all day.  I do them as long as I can manage and then shift to other, usually easier, tasks.  If I haven't made progress in a month, and that is common for many tough problems, I set things aside and do something challenging that is completely different.  It doesn't have to be formal work - sometimes physically building something or getting heavily involved in a drawing is sufficient.  The remarkable thing is, during the different task, the mind seems to be continuing on with the original, but at a lower layer so I'm not conscious of it.  Sometimes there is a realization of what should be done, but more often the problem is much easier when I finally get back to it.  

 

I mentioned drawing...  I'm no artist, but I draw recreationally.  It is a very convenient way for me to empty my mind and prepare to move to focused work.  I'm picky about my drawing tools and usually throw the results out, but it is probably the closest I come to meditation.  A lot of people do variations on this - an athlete friend does photography and writes poetry to get into a state where she can focus on training and playing.

 

Playing ...

 

Play is centrally important.  Playing with others and their ideas when I can and approach work playfully where possible.  This means not being afraid to fail assuming you can learn from your failures.  It means that you have to budget time to allow for this.  Sadly many forms of work don't allow a playful approach.  I suspect it is not only useful for creative work, but at some level necessary.  Probably something for a future post.

 

There is more to say (the importance of exercise and the use of iPod time-shifting to give myself the luxury of at least 90 minutes a day), but I'm approaching my one hour limit.  I find it useful to put a limit on some tasks as it gives focus and forces single tasking.  It also prevents me from reading and editing what I've written, which for the purpose of this blog is a feature.

 

 Drop a line or leave a comment if you want to talk about this at a deeper level... and if you're looking for an entertaining read try Gulp.

 

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¹ I gave a TED^x talk on the subject of serendipity and collaboration.  Time tithing is central to that practice.  I should note that I use the old definition of serendipity - namely it is the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice there is something new and interesting.

The talk isn't well done - I'm not a good public speaker.  Also the format of these talks is very restricted and not something I feel works well.  

² One of the companies I've worked with decided to try this internally.  My understanding is several hundred of their people use a two hour slot every day.  They can focus on their own work or use it for collaboration with others who agree and don't want external distractions.  It should be noted the employees have separate offices and a flag that indicates they can't be disturbed.  They've told me they consider it an important tool and something they hope their competitors don't adopt.

Many types of work don't adapt to this as interruption is a necessary feature.  There is a lot of very interesting research on the subject and some HCI workers are trying to offer the right interruptions at the right time - not an easy task, but potentially valuable.  

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

I'm a big fan of soups - particularly easy soups.  This one is mostly for a food processor, is simple and easy to modify.  It is particularly good with a warm crusty baguette

 

Avocado and Corn Soup

Ingredients

 

° 1 avocado

° 3 cups almond milk

° 4 cups corn kernels

* tbl finely chopped yellow onion

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1/8 tsp turmeric

° sea salt (I use Maldon)

° freshly ground pepper

° coriander chopped (you could use parsley) 

Technique

 

° blend everything but the corn and coriander in a food processor.

° add the corn, season and heat until warm - I think it is better warm that hot

° serve into bowls and garnish with the coriander

 

 

the car as an accessory for your phone

Today I was asked to give some educated guesses about industries that were ripe for disruption.  One immediately came to mind was automobiles.  Lots of forces that everyone talks about, but a last year a young friend mentioned it was frustrating that she couldn't send a message to her car.

 

It is odd when you think about it.  Most of us walk around with network connected pocket computers and think nothing of communicating with people around the world in many ways.  These computers have a growing number of sensors that provide information to us and other people or systems.  The most basic new cars have an order of magnitude more sensors than the most complex phones.  These are connected to a few networks and usually dozens of small computers (usually called electronic control units) that mostly lied buried away making sure some rather sophisticated systems mostly function.  But we are more aware of an infotainment layer - a layer that usually has a terrible user interface and user experience.  Not only is the experience bad, but we are stuck with it for the life of the car.¹ 

 

There are a lot of reasons why the industry moves slowly on automotive software. I won't get into that now as I only have an hour, but the infotainment systems do not require the type of careful design and testing required by drive train, stability control or restraint deployment systems.  In theory these could be more like PCs or smartphones.

 

Or - as my friend suggests - perhaps they should be designed to use her iPhone as a network connected controller and display.  Perhaps the car is properly just the transportation attachment to her phone and networked life.

 

Others have thought about that - Automatic uses a small box that connects to your car's OBD-II data link connector.²  This allows them to tap into realtime information that normally is only available to your mechanic and beams it to your Android or iOS phone via Bluetooth.  Now a lot of clever things can be done on your phone.  

 

What impresses me is not what it does as it could do much more - but that no car maker has gone this far.  I'm guessing they have a half dozen competent software engineers.  A large car maker has hundreds - but no imagination.  This is basically a hack using an available port that was never intended to do this sort of thing, but it works and people will see it as amazing and desirable.  

 

Much has been written on the relationship between people under 35 and their cars, but one thing I keep coming back to when I work with this group is the notion of a car has changed.  The old images conjured up by Ned Jordan for the Jordan Playboy in the Saturday Evening Post no longer cause the imagination to fly.³  The car has become more of a high maintenance appliance.  A very comfortable and useful one perhaps, but still an appliance that is not as central to your life as your smartphone.  It should be an accessory to your phone.

 

A few years ago I visited a dealer to look at the current version of our then eight year old car.  I've been happy with the car and its relatively clean interface and delightful shifter and clutch. The new model looked dramatically better on paper, but a test drive told me I couldn't live with the user interface.  I made the decision then and there to do some work on our car with the intention of keeping it at least five or six more years.

 

I understand why the car companies aren't going in this direction, but they are opening themselves up.  Someone, perhaps a Chinese, Indian or Korean company, could build a car that made sense as a smartphone accessory.  While it may not be mechanically brilliant there may be a generation that considers that point irrelevant.

 

There are many other interesting forces in addition to this ..  a lot of risk for some of them, but there are a few with little risk and nothing but upside.

 

So our cars are information producing objects and we're not terribly in the loop.  There is much more information than we could use and the relevant question is to consider what we need and how it should be manipulated and used.

 

Recently a short piece by E.O. Wilson appeared noting that not all of science is intensely mathematical.  

...

I was never more than a C student while catching up, but I was reassured by the discovery that superior mathematical ability is similar to fluency in foreign languages. I might have become fluent with more effort and sessions talking with the natives, but being swept up with field and laboratory research, I advanced only by a small amount.

Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Everyone sometimes daydreams like a scientist. Ramped up and disciplined, fantasies are the fountainhead of all creative thinking. Newton dreamed, Darwin dreamed, you dream. The images evoked are at first vague. They may shift in form and fade in and out. They grow a bit firmer when sketched as diagrams on pads of paper, and they take on life as real examples are sought and found.

...

 

While math is basic and essential for many areas of science, it is observation, logic, clear thinking and abstraction that is most important.⁴  In some areas there can be partnerships.  Nothing comes directly from playing around with pure math and hoping it appears in the physical world.  Nature doesn't make it that easy.

 

My background is very mathematical and it is a centrally important tool in my sport, but it is a tool.  One learns how and where to use tools and importantly, how and where to use information.

 

There is a tendency to measure everything and try and use it - extreme quantification.  The problem is the information and/or the models we have built are sometimes faulty.  With careful thinking one can be find far more parsimonious.  

 

In the mid 90s a few of us were involved trying to measure the human form to fit clothing.  We came up with a scanner that could digitize the body with about a half million data points.  A few years later I realized it was much easier to employ a good tailor who would take about 30 measurements.  Furthermore, the experienced tailor, could communicate information to the pattern maker and cutters that was much richer than our big and somewhat noisy datafile.  

 

It is possible to find examples of this everywhere.  Currently the "big data" approach often misuses information.  There is a notion that if you have enough "data" with the right sort of connections that you can mine that.  To some extent you can, but it is not an easy task.  There needs to be a deep understanding first and many lack that.  I've seen a few brilliant solutions and many more expensive and troublesome toys that offer misleading information.  

 

People have been doing smart and dumb things with data for hundreds of years.  Computers allow us to do even smarter and more stupid things.

 

Imagination, day dreaming and play are central to getting the core understanding right.

___________

¹ Some dealers update the flash memory of some your car's computers during regular service intervals, but this is rare and is often avoided even when the manufacturer recommends updates.

² All American cars since 1996 have these ports - there is a lot of error code information as well as real time performance information.

³ Check out the second half of this post for details on the brilliant ad copy by Jordan.

⁴ A smart high school student can grock special relativity with no more than a bit of algebra and trigonometry and a bit of careful reasoning.

___________

Recipe Corner

 

A few weeks ago Om posted something on Holi which brought back a flood of memories when I lived with a group of Indian graduate students at Stony Brook.  One of the foods I remember from Holi was a spiced milk - I think it was called Thandai.

I've had it with whole milk, but imagine it would be interesting with coconut milk and would probably also work, but be different and more healthy, with almond milk.   

 

Thandai for Holi

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 cups whole milk

° 5 tbl white cane sugar

° 1/2 tbl fennel seeds

° 1/2 tsp black peppercorns

° 12 green cardamom pods

° 3/4 cup raw almonds, peeled and slivered

° an inch of cinnamon stick

° 2 tbl rosewater

° crushed pistachios

 

Technique

 

° roast the seeds, cinnamon and spices in a small pan without oil over a low heat until they become fragrant.  Let them cool

° remove the cardamom seeds and discard the pods

° put the almonds, spices, seeds, sugar, cinnamon and rose water in a bowl and cover slightly with water.  Let it sit for about 2 hours.

° pop it in a blender and grind until you get a paste

° add the past to the milk and mix

° filter through a cheesecloth into a bowl. (Rohini had a very fine mesh)

° chill it in the 'fridge, serve in chilled glasses and top with pistachios

 

Recipe corner

hunting for simplicity with gun and camera

 

All the morning at home, and Mr. Berkenshaw (whom I have not seen a great while, came to see me), who staid with me a great while talking of musique, and I am resolved to begin to learn of him to compose, and to begin to-morrow, he giving of me so great hopes that I shall soon do it. Before twelve o’clock comes, by appointment, Mr. Peter and the Dean, and Collonel Honiwood, brothers, to dine with me; but so soon that I was troubled at it. But, however, I entertained them with talk and oyster till one o’clock, and then we sat down to dinner, not staying for my uncle and aunt Wight, at which I was troubled, but they came by and by, and so we dined very merry, at least I seemed so, but the dinner does not please me, and less the Dean and Collonel, whom I found to be pitiful sorry gentlemen, though good-natured, but Mr. Peter above them both, who after dinner did show us the experiment (which I had heard talk of) of the chymicall glasses, which break all to dust by breaking off a little small end; which is a great mystery to me. They being gone, my aunt Wight and my wife and I to cards, she teaching of us how to play at gleeke, which is a pretty game; but I have not my head so free as to be troubled with it. By and by comes my uncle Wight back, and so to supper and talk, and then again to cards, when my wife and I beat them two games and they us one, and so good night and to bed.

 

A curious entry on the blackboard and not what you might expect in a physics class.  It turns out this wasn't a standard class - an applied physics class that looked at failure modes in materials and structures.  Sort of a physical analysis of how things break...  The professor was very well read and a big fan of history - England and Scotland during the early years of the Industrial Revolution.

 

He walked in and gave us a few minutes to ponder the words and particularly those that were written in with red chalk.  It seemed a bit familiar and turned out to be an entry from The Diary of Samuel Pepys.¹  Smiling he took out a curious looking blog of glass with a tail and proceeded to strike it with a hammer.  Not terribly hard, but hard enough that a glob of glass should have shattered.  

 

    Now watch this carefully..

 

He flicked the end of the very thin tail with his thumb nail and the entire blog exploded in a shower of tiny pieces of glass.  He has us come up and look at the remains - it had mostly turned into powder.  

 

As we walked back to our desks another blackboard came down and he launched into a discussion of how these globs - he called them Rupert's Balls, but they are also known as Prince Rupert's Drops - were made.  A couple of stresses are involved and a lot of potential energy is stored in the glass.  Breaking the thin tail starts a shock front that moves through the glass at something over Mach 5.  Not much of the structure survives. Then it was time to begin to sketch out a model of the physics and the board quickly filled with drawings and equations while a discussion with the class was guided towards something that made sense.    

 

It was an entertaining moment in a great class.  I won't go into any detail of the physics as this video gives a nice discussion. 

 

The video points out some important things.  First you get some insight into how the blog is made. Then comes some high speed photography which adds some information on the dynamics of the failure mode.  And finally, taking advantage of the fact that glass is transparent, a look at the structure in polarized light.  Just the information you need to solve the puzzle.

 

Although it is physics, this is how many problems can be approached.  You observe carefully and in enough ways to sort out missteps that might lead you to the wrong model (it is very easy to build sort of descriptive, but wrong models).  And you try to make the problem as simple as possible focusing on the important points and describing just enough.

 

Last week I was doing a bit of work for someone who wanted me to look at a "big data" problem they intended to solve.²  I saw a different way that could be done with a bit of thinking and some simple math giving an answer to more than enough accuracy for his decision.  Dealing with the data would have taken quite a bit of time and may have been too noisy to have found a clear signal.  There are domains where hunting through boatloads of information works well and domains where it is inappropriate as well as those where you really need both.   For the record I'm as impressed by the big data free analysis that goes on in Trader Joe's as I am by some of the very sophisticated techniques that places like Google users.  I suspect the Trader Joe's analysis is often more applicable to their well constrained problem.

 

I end with a beautiful triumph of 19th century physics.  How do you describe the motions of the air molecules in the room you are in?  It turns out the study of thermodynamics - a field that became hot (sic) as people were working out how to make better  steam engines - led to a statistical description of what was going on at a molecular level.  An average room has several orders of magnitude more information in the motion of its air molecules as all of the information we and our machines have produced throughout history.  It turns out the description is simple and elegant and a nice proxy for the average kinetic energy of a molecule is easily measured.³  All you have to do is measure the temperature.  

 

__________

¹ Specifically January 13 1662.  I had read the diary as part of a history class in high school, but detail like this sailed over my head at the time.  I've re-read the book since and strongly recommend it is you are unfamiliar.  He lived during an interesting period, knew everyone who was anyone and had a good eye for detail - plus he kept that dairy.

² Big data is such an awful phrase.  "Data" is a terribly loaded and misused word and big is approximately meaningless. 

³ At least a good approximation, but I don't wish to get into the deeper physics.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

A short recipe shard and a bit of hacking around I'm doing these days.  First the hacking around.  

 

Egg Substitutes

 

I'm a vegetarian, but will get implicit eggs although I usually avoid it.  Finding a good substitute is difficult and I'm off on a different direction.  An egg gives some fat, protein and liquid, adds structure, helps with emulsifying and has flavor - and probably some other things I'm missing.  Flaxseeds are really great at providing viscosity and that might give structure.  In baking they have little taste and some baked goods effectively mask the eggs.  I boiled 50 grams of flaxseed in about 500 grams of water.  When it got thick I strained it a few times through cheesecloth (somewhat messy) and, not knowing what I was doing, make a batch of chocolate chip cookies using vegetable shortening for the fat and a one to one substitute of glop 'o flax for eggs.  They came out reasonably well and were tasty (I give away most of what I bake if sugar is involved so I don't OD)  I didn't detect a strange taste.  There are other directions this can go, but it is an interesting start.

 

The recipe is really just a quick throw together inspired by a pound of dry roasted cashews from Trader Joe's.  These are really addictive!

 

Turmeric Cashews

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl extra-virgin olive oil

° 1-1/2 tablespoons ground turmeric

° 1 tsp Kosher salt (you may want more if you are a salt fiend)

° 1 pound unsalted, dry-roasted cashews (omit the salt if the cashews are presalted)

Technique

 

° Heat a wok large pan over medium-high heat. 

° Add the oil, turmeric and salt and quickly stir to make a past. 

° Add the cashews and stir-fry for a minute.  Turn the cashews in the pan to coat with the spices and don't let them

° Pour into a colander and shake shake shake it to get rid of the extra spices.  I had to brush off very dense regions of turmeric.  

 

 

 

in search of a line and a circle

Those of you who know me know I've spent quite a bit of time in the past fifteen years worried about climate change - it is one of the few high impact high probability events I know of that can be mitigated, so focus seems appropriate.

 

I've tried a variety of approaches and have largely failed to make any impact.  At first education seemed right as it is something I believe in, but you need a stable and sufficient base on which to build and I was assuming that the scientific literacy of the American public was much higher than it was.  I still work at it and have tried several approaches, but the overall response ranges from crickets to a negative reaction.  Of course this is giving me a strong signal on my abilities relative to the challenge and others who are much better communicators have had also had little or no impact.  

 

I sometimes use this qualitative chart in my talks.  If anything the think tank bump should be much smaller, but you get the idea.  The media does not cover the dominant scientific view and tries to balance opinion - the issue is there isn't any opinion in largely settled science.  Science is about confidence levels and for the likelihood that climate change is taking place,  being influenced by us, and will have a large impact, the confidence levels are high.¹

 

Storytelling is another mechanism that might work.  Several people are trying to exploit that path and some are trying a combination of education and storytelling.  That seems like it might be a viable approach, but one is up against pseudoscience, a natural bias in the media and a very well funded anti-science campaign.  I'm not a good speaker or storyteller, but I've been working a bit to support those who are.

 

The result is my views on what to do are shifting from worrying primarily about mitigation and moving more towards adaptation.  It is ultimately much less efficient and much more expensive than mitigation, but there is a lot of potential optimization and it seems like a rich area to study.  I'll still be thinking about mitigation a lot - particularly conservation and efficiency, but staying focused there may be a fool's errand.

 

Even though the state of the American response to climate change is on the depressing side it is fascinating and poses several interesting questions about everything from our social systems to how our minds work.  In thinking about these sometimes it is useful to step back and think about other historical challenges.  

 

And that brings us to a line and a circle...

 

Take a look at any modern ship.  Down near the waterline you'll see a circle with a line through it.  The line where where the hull of a ship meets the water is the Plimsoll Line and the little circle-line is technically called the International Load Line and indicated the legal limit to which a ship can be loaded.²   An extremely useful graphic - getting on a ship with water above the load line strikes you as something not entirely sane.

 

When you see a name as unusual as Plimsoll, you suspect a story.³

 

In the 19th century transatlantic shipping had become common.  Shipping disasters happened, but the introduction of insurance made them much more likely.  A shipper could load his vessels past their design limits and make quite a bit of extra coin on the voyage.  Should the ship be lost it and its contents were insured - often at more than 100% - and he would also come out ahead as ship building meant he could quickly replace his loss.  The only real loss was one many shippers chose to ignore - perhaps a hundred or so crewmen.  The practice was so common - nearly a thousand were dying each year - that merchant seamen called this overloaded and insured ships "coffin ships".

 

Samuel Plimsoll was a MP who crusaded for the rights of the seamen- often against great odds as the ship owners enjoyed a tight relationship with the government.  He is vilified in the House of Commons, but he became something of a folk hero with popular plays and songs written about him and the coffin ships.⁴  This grass-root support grew to a point where it nearly brought down the Disraeli government.  Finally there were sweeping reforms that probably saved tens of thousands of lives.  One of them - in my mind the most dramatic - was a simple little graphic that allowed you to understand if the ship's load made it unseaworthy.

 

I want - I think we need - a Plimsoll Line for climate change.

__________

¹ There is a lot of normal scientific dispute on the details of how great the impact will be and how this will play out, but that is like people going over a cliff in a car wondering how many times the car will bounce on the way down and if it will burn when it finally hits.  People tend to confuse the normal debate that takes place in science with the fact that some of the results are extremely likely ... it's just the details we're hazy on.

² There are a few other markings that account for the different water densities.  Sea water density depends on salinity and temperature.

³ I first heard about it in college during a visit to a large ship visiting Manhattan.  Much later I ran into a book on the subject and recommend it - The Plimsoll Sensation by Nicolette Jones.

⁴ John Storey sings a modern version based on some of the ballads

__________

Recipe Corner

 

This one is very easy to experiment with and surprisingly good.  A really good yogurt and olive oil are key.

 

Quinoa, yogurt, fruit and nuts

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl cleaned dry quinoa - red quinoa is particularly good

° a dozen shelled and chopped pistachios  (raw or salted and raw)

° a dozen chopped almonds (I used unblanched, but blanched would probably work)

° 350 - 400 grams of whole plain Greek yogurt (I use Fage)

° 4 medjool dates, chopped and pitted.  I've also tried other dried fruit, so experiment.

° some lemon zest

° uniodized sea salt - a finishing salt like Maldon is best

° a tbl or more of your best extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° Start the oven heating to 350°F

° Put the quinoa in a small pan over medium heat and toast it until it starts to pop.  Then pour it into a bowl and cool.

° Spread the pistachio and almond chunks onto a baking pan and toast for five minutes in the oven.  Then remove and cool.  Alternatively you can do this in a pan over  burner, but you need to be *very* careful to not burn them. 

° Spread equal amounts of yogurt onto two plates and sprinkle on the dates, nuts, and quinoa.  Sprinkle on a bit of lemon zest and salt and finally drizzle on a bit of olive oil

 

yumm!!

mooning austin

° Some of you have asked why I'm not at SXSW: as a person with cancer, have I not suffered enough already?

 ---- tweet from Xeni yesterday

° I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

                ---- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt 

° looking for a light bulb for a difficult to reach area - possibly an LED for the first time

 

Three shards came together to spark an hour of writing.  Believe it or not they are connected, so grab your towel and a cup of tea.  We'll need to travel to 19^th century London to start the connection game.

 

It was 1810 give or take a few years and demonstrations of all things electricity were the rage in the Royal Society.  Sir Humphrey Davy had filled the audience with rumor of his discovery and connected the final wire to one end one end of a battery developed only a decade earlier by Alessandro Volta.  The wire from the battery was connected to a carbon rod with a pointy tip separated by a short distance from a similar carbon rod pointed at it and connected with a wire to the other end of the battery.  

 

The crowd gasped as the current jumped the distance between the points creating a bright glowing arch.  Everyone had seen bright sparks jump before, but this one was different.  The arch was brilliant and kept going.  As it burned away applause filled the hall and then an ovation.  The first electric light had been demonstrated.¹  Within a couple of years he invented a second technique passing a strong current through a platinum wire causing it to glow through incandescence.  Davy had invented both the arc and the incandescent lamp.

 

Candles had fallen in price to the point where many families could afford a few, but outside of cites where a bit of gas lighting had come into use, night brought darkness.  I can sympathize - with the help of three major storms in the past two years we've been without metered electric power for a total of nearly three weeks.  We resorted to candles and a flashlights, but one comes to appreciate the old French saying 

A la chandelle, la chèvre ressemble à une demoiselle ²

In the early part of the 1800s a lot of experimentation with gas lighting was going on.  At first demonstration projects like the lighting of Westminster Bridge in 1813, but lighting was so desirable that despite toxic and corrosive fumes from incomplete combustion and a serious fire hazard, the technology rapidly spread to a businesses and the homes of the wealthy in cities.³   People wanted something that was safer and it was assumed that electric lighting was the answer, so inventors slaved away on the problem.

 

I have to skip over a very rich account of the sausage making of a series of technologies, but it took seven decades from Davy's arc to Edison's light.  Along the way there were newspaper reports and articles in magazines like Scientific American and Popular Science on new breakthroughs that would bring inexpensive and safe electric lighting to everyone "real soon now.."

 

Cracking the problem required a series of technologies to come together.  Electric generators had to be developed, a cheap way to create a long lived vacuum, the right materials and so on.  Edison gets the credit, but hundreds of people had been involved over the decades.

 

Edison was involved in an early practical use of electricity - telegraphy.  In his 20s he had a few patents that gave him enough funding to become a full time inventor.  A curious type he came up with the phonograph.  No one knew what it would be useful for, but it seemed brilliant and he was elevated to the status of wizard.

 

Edison's most important innovation was probably the industrial laboratory.  He put together a team of scientists, engineers, and what we would call makers and focused on a few problems.  He sensed the practical electric light was close - a number of almost practical approaches had been patented when he announced to a few wealthy investors that he was on the problem.

 

He took too long for their taste, but when he finally made his demonstrations in 1880 he had delivered the whole ecosystem - generators, wiring, the light bulbs, manufacturing techniques and the ability to train technicians to install and maintain the system.  Other people had delivered bits and pieces of the puzzle.  Arguably some of these other inventions were superior to bits and pieces of Edison's system, but no one else had the whole ball of wax and Edison's ball of wax worked.

 

Electric lighting had a dramatic society and technology impact. People started reading in bed and bookstores did very well in communities with lighting.  Children could play at dusk and in the evening unattended.  Many businesses, like restaurants, expanded evening hours and other inventions involving the electric motor erupted.  

 

For about thirty years there was an unsettled period before real standardization and much lower pricing came about.  A serious have and have not divide existed in America and you could see it every night.  

 

But enough of the history other than one bit.  Early on it was expensive and one scheme was to put brilliant arc lamps on towers spread through a town or city to provide artful light at night.  These "moonlights" were intended to provide enough illumination to read a watch at about a thousand feet.  They were erected in a few dozen cities and mostly failed - except in Austin where they still exist.

 

A few years ago I was at the technical session of a SXSW and became a bit bored by the level of work.  To be sure a few interesting things popped up.  One was Twitter.  I'm not a regular user, but make a quick scan once or twice a day.  Yesterday Xeni tweeted the SXSW comment that was one of my triggers.  I won't go into my issues with the conference, but note the past decade with Internet 2.0 has been somewhat chaotic.  There are certain good explanations, but much of it leaves me cold.  There are so many more interesting things to do...

 

I wandered away from the conference and found one of the old moonlights.  I had no idea what it was and was delighted to learn a bit about their history.  It illuminated a time we mostly forget but one has to remember the quote attributed to Mark Twain:

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme

I would add this is doubly true for the history of technical innovation.

 

Xeni made me think of Marvin the Robot

 

Douglas' birthday is today. He was famous for missing his book deadlines and had to be forced to complete his books.  Much of his time was spent playing with friends.  He was one of those who connected a lot of dots and seemed more at home with others who did the same, but were in very different fields.  One of his hangouts when he was avoiding what he regarded as work was Bell Labs and I was lucky enough to have spent time with him.  He delighted in the jumps that occurred when different ideas came together and had a keen ear for the history of technology.  He would have been delighted by the moonlights.  It was so sad seeing him leave so soon, but today celebrates his birth and that was such a positive thing.  I was delighted to learn Brynne - one of the readers of this blog - shares his birthday.  Fantastic!

 

Yesterday I found myself thinking about a new form of lighting that is still very much in development.  It has been in development for a few decades with people saying "real soon now" for about a decade.  Finally there are acceptable bulbs for a few of my applications.  The shape of the adoption curve for this technology is very similar to other technologies. The slopes can be very different, but other than software innovations these things tend to take much longer than people expect.

 

Two hundred years since Davy and we're still not there...  but in the meantime electric light has been one of the most important society and technology innovations of all times. 

 

I'll stop here - I really wanted to get into intensity - but fodder for a future post.

 

And thanks to you Douglas for giving the advice on how to fly.   Such a fantastic machine he was  - fill him with tea and wonderful connections of the mind came out.

__________

¹ The arch was somehow shorted to arc and thus the name - arc lamp - came into use.

² try this post for a translation and explanation

__________

Recipe corner

 

Just a brief note rather than a recipe, but it clearly has to involve goat cheese.  Warm weather isn't far off and many of you will probably fire up the barbecue.  Two things:

Grilled goat cheese sandwiches

Grilled figs stuff with goat cheese

 

those da*n glassholes are on my lawn! and cum hoc non propter hoc

As the year 2000 approached human computer interface labs all over the world were hot onto studying what comes after the desktop and handheld computer.  Some were doing tablets, but others were wondering what happens if you combine a phone that happens to talk to the Internet with a camera, what happens if you have a radio equipped watch with a display on it, what if a fairly powerful computer can be shoehorned into something handheld with a wireless Internet connection, what if that little powerful wireless computer knows where it is ....  My lab was involved in several of these as well as what happens as computing becomes more invisible and ubiquitous. 

 

A few like Steve Mann were doing leading edge work to sort out how a person may integrate with sensors and networks.  The stuff that excites technologists and science fiction writers.

 

You could make reasonable predictions based on Moore's Law and some educated guesses on mobile phone technology.  Designing interfaces was extremely difficult, but just as important was how acceptable to the public would it be.  Some of these devices would be worn.  What had good design and was fashionable?  Could the design be so good so as to be aspirational?

 

The social dimensions of the problem were, and still are, enormous.  We were making all kinds of observations and performing simple tests.  It wasn't science by any means even though some called it that.  People were learning bits and pieces of a larger problems.  We were learning more about the problems so as not to appear totally stupid.¹

 

Some of the trials produced location dependent results.  A lab in Cambridge using a located ID badge found its employees building any number of useful applications for themselves.  A sister lab in Palo Alto had a near revolt with the same devices even though they had similar backgrounds.  The culture of the two different labs rendered the badges aspirational in one location and a pox in the other.  Sorting out why was non-trivial.

 

There were a lot of crazy leaps being made based on small amounts of work.  It was a real disease in labs that did not have a diverse range of skills.

 

Oh yeah - the post's title?  That's Latin for "with this, not because of this" and is found in statistics to emphasize that correlation does not imply causation.  It is one of the first things taught in any statistics class to warn about jumping to conclusions.  You run into nearly everywhere these days - except in science.  It turns out to be a phrase that almost guarantees the speaker isn't a scientist.

 

An explanation is one of degree.  People without a statistical background jump to conclusions - we're pattern recognition machines and historically have come to some very wrong conclusions.  Not only that, we're still doing it.  A good statistical background gives you some tools to calculate correlations, but caution is advised.  A scientist subjects their work to very elaborate testing measuring and taking into account errors along the way and producing a result in terms of how likely it is.  If they don't their competitors will do it for them and there is little tolerance for mistakes.

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

To a scientist correlation suggests causation.  It is an early clue that there is something worth pursuing.  You might quickly rule the linkage out or perhaps there is something wonderful to be learned that generates a shower of new questions.  You don't want to eliminate possibilities early out of hand..  Much of science is playing with any number of ideas seeing if they are worth going deeper.  As in many other fields you develop a talent for it.  

 

Too frequently it is invoked to dismiss something out of hand even though the person who uses it often has no sense of the depth of the statement they are dismissing.

 

All of that the device and interface/interaction exploration in the late 90s was probably good as it was creating a space of interesting questions.  Except for a few technologies like camera-phones, smartphones and high capacity mp3 players it wasn't essential that anyone understand them deeply right away.  Some of those who worked on the near horizon problems were richly rewarded. But now it is time to begin to understand issues associated with wearables. 

 

It seems daunting as we haven't yet worked out social conventions for the use of smartphones.  Technology often outruns the understanding of its consequences.

 

In the past few weeks at least a half dozen have been in touch to ask for my opinion on Google Glass.  A fascinating area, but they're well over their heads.  Not only does the user interaction model need considerable work, but the design and social issues are daunting.²  They aren't going to pull it off by having a designer put together a frame for them.

 

People may develop appropriate interaction and social conventions - that seems to be what Google is counting on - but the company that introduces a new social technology rarely has a change to ride the wave very long. Deeper thinking is required and it will be  more demanding than ever before as we're going well beyond conventional engineering and technology.  I suspect something approaching real science will need to be done and people from a wide range of fields will need to be involved.

 

A few years ago I tried to put together some one line descriptions for each component of STEM ..  it is far from perfect, but here's what I said:

 

° Science is the study of nature.  Some useful insight becomes available as a result, but that is not the driver

° Math is language of science and also of engineering.  It is beautiful by itself.  

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

These four fields are now insufficient.  Social clue is necessary..

 

We need to understand fashion, design and aspirational design, human nature, local and global cultures, and several other areas. I've been trying to become a student of design and fashion and have been reaching out to people in these and several other areas, but am only getting to the point where my questions aren't completely foolish.  Hopefully one can get to the point where they can have useful connections with enough diverse people to make a dent in the problem.  I'll probably be writing much more on the subject as time goes on.   In the meantime I wish Google luck, but this is a really deep people and the Silicon Valley engineering notion of solving everything with technologies is insufficient and broken.

__________

¹ I look at my own record and find it mixed after 15 years.  There were some solid hits - particularly with location aware services and a large number of misses.  One tends to remember the hits and forget the misses. 

² from an email I sent last week

Google has a habit of asking designers to come in at the end of the process …  they have a reputation for driving HCI types and designers crazy ..  they like to just bolt it on at the end.  So this isn't surprising.  It will be essential to make the things look presentable.

Their approach appears to be taking a vocal command with a specific interrupt, but such approaches have failed in the research world (not for technical reasons). What is needed is a nice set of orthogonal out of channel communication commands - what linguists call phatic interactions (the communications we all use not to carry core information, but rather are meta commands that kept the channel open. If I say "you're breaking up" on a cellphone call, I'm giving a phatic vocalization. There are any number of phatic signalings that are non-verbal - your phone vibrating to let you know there is a text message for example)

They use verbal phatics like "ok glass", but that can be socially awkward and is fairly unnatural.They really need to crack that one - or find some work that has.They may be interested in having the public solve it for them. Just like hashtags on twitter.

__________

 

Recipe Corner 

 

Waldorf salads are delicious, but hardly healthy.  I threw together this one that was delicious and healthy.  I like to add some dried fruit like cranberries or cherrys

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, quartered, and thinly sliced

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

° 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, leaves for garnish if you like

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

° whisk together the vinegar, oil, some salt and pepper to taste

° add celery, grapes, apple, and nut to the bowl, and toss to coat with dressing.

 

partial stories and the color purple

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

__________

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

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

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

² I've removed all names and other identifying information

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

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

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

with best wishes

<name removed>

student and developer in first road 

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

 

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

__________

 

Recipe Corner

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

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

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

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

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

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