omenti

forty three years

The amount of time between Lindbergh's flight and Neil Armstrong's small step a bit further away...   Forty three years ...   For whatever reason I found myself thinking about Earth Day, a golden duck, and lightning in a bottle.

 

Forty three years and two days ago I was in high school in Great Falls, Montana.  The town is known for strong winds that keep the air very clean these days, but back then it was also known for the stack...

 

North of town, across the Missouri, was a large smelter owned by the Anaconda Company.  Montana was pretty much a company state and few commented on the pollution that came from the 500 and something foot stack on the property.  You didn't notice it unless the wind was light and from the right - er - wrong direction.  The surrounding land is mostly wheat farm claimed from the prairie and the stack was visible from a long distance.  People didn't think in terms of pollution, but that was beginning to change.

 

In the Fall of 1969 when I read Senator Gaylord Nelson's suggestion that a national teach-in take place to raise environmental awareness and perhaps create some political support at the grass-root level.  Shortly there-after the proposed was called Earth Day and April 22, 1970 was the selected.  Two of us, Doug Safely was the other partner in crime, were taken with this and started a little club "cleverly" called Students to Oppose Pollution.  We found a faculty sponsor and I think about six people showed up for the first meeting in September of 1969.

 

I'm not terribly sociable and both of us expected the effort to fold, but the next meeting filled one of the science classrooms.  It kept growing to the point where we had to use the auditorium by April and there was some media attention - the effort was on local TV and radio and we had our 30 seconds of fame on the Today Show.

 

It was a heady experience and gave me the false impression that we knew what we were doing.  We didn't.  Rather the time was right.  There was an enormous amount wrong in the country, but there was also a strong sense from a variety of movements that people could make a difference.  When I think about it these days I am reminded of what Douglas had to say:

 

...

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

...

 

 

Since then I've spent a considerable amount of time on a few causes I feel are important.  In the past decade I've spent several thousand hours trying to understand and communicate global warming information - I've been trying to move the needle just a bit.  And I've mostly failed to do that, but I've managed to learn quite a bit.  

 

This came into focus this morning as I was listening to a KERA Think podcast - an interview with Adam Rome about his new book The Genius of Earth Day.  As far as I know this is the only history on the period and I've just put it on my reading list.

 

It did give me a sense of how powerful empirical information could be.  I found a chemist at another company - the local oil refinery - and asked him about techniques to measure arsenic, cadmium, lead and a few other nasties.  Industrial scientists and technicians are rarely asked about their work and they love to talk about it.  Extra points to talk with an interested kid and I was very interested.  I went over to Smelter Avenue and dug up a dozen soil samples.  He showed me how to do the analysis and the results were rather frightening.  We did something about it our combined with our organizing Doug and I found ourselves honored with about three dozen other Americans - including one Richard Milhouse Nixon - with Field and Stream's highest conservation honor - The Golden Duck.¹  At some level I have more pride about that than my degrees.

 

In retrospect we could have done things differently.  Doug was much more outgoing, but both of us were probably below average.  It would have been brilliant to team up with Jeri - someone who reads the blog.  She was savvy and a communicator and much more would have been possible.  To say we were clueless would be understatement.

 

But something did happen and it changed my life.  This type of activity was almost completely grass roots and it seized the attention of the politicians.  Nixon probably did more for the environment in terms of absolute change than any President.  There was no real political divide at the time on the issue.  Laws were changed by the thousands and life is much better now than it had been.  It can be better - it needs to be better - but the amount of social change was dramatic.

 

The time was right and thousands of us caught lightning in a bottle.  Even with the Internet we have today no social movement has come close in the US.  I only hope something as strong happens again during my lifetime.

 

Oh - the smokestack?  It is gone now - taken down around 1980 for safety reasons.  The Company sold the property and now the land is a superfund site.  Great Falls now has some of the cleanest air in the nation - thanks to some of the strongest average winds in the nation, not that many pollution sources and change brought by thousands of Montanans and millions of Americans.

 

I was originally going to continue writing about the use of time - focusing on the places where time is spent.  That will have to wait, but I note that a friend in the physics department of a really well-known school noted the professors are pushing for offices that have CO₂ levels that are less than 150 ppm over outdoor readings.  CO2 levels are considered important as they are easy to measure and are a proxy for other serious issues, but there is new evidence that some cognitive impairment may begin around 700 ppm and is very evident at 1,000 ppm.  Outdoor background is about 400 ppm now - so they're pushing for 550 or below.²  

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¹ Pretty frightening for a vegetarian pacifist, eh?  That was a different time.  Sportmen were mostly interested in conservation and party divides on environmental issues weren't deep.  Nixon was probably the most environmental modern day President.

² Get in touch if you are interested in measurement and abatement techniques.

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Recipe Corner

 

I came across some sprouting broccoli and grilled it.  The taste is distinctive, but it is hard to find and regular broccoli would probably be fine, but the sprouting version is really special.

 

 

Grilled Broccoli

 

Ingredients

 

° 500 g sprouted broccoli (something over a pound)

° 1 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° salt and freshly ground black pepper

° tahini sauce (recipe follows)

° 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds

 

Technique

 

° cut off the leaves and the woody part of the stems.  Blanche for a few minutes in boiling lightly salted water, rise in cold water (or dump in ice water), and allow it to dry.

° toss the broccoli with the oil, salt and pepper

° broil or grill for a few minutes on each side until charring begins.  Set aside to cool

° plate, drizzle the tahini sauce over the broccoli and top with scattered sesame seeds

 

A quick tahini sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 50 g tahini paste

° 1/2 tbl honey

° 2 tsp lemon juice 

° small garlic clove peeled and smashed

 

Technique

 

° whisk the tahini, lemon juice, honey, a bit of salt and garlic.  Add a bit of water at a time until it gets to the consistency of warm honey

 

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

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

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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

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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:-)

 

 

triggers

Let's do a bit of dot connecting...

 

About 35 to 40 million years ago something rather cool happened.  The branch of primates we're from, now the apes and old world monkeys (Catarrhini) went from two to three cones in our eyes.  

 

Cones are the specialized cells that allow us to discriminate differences in something we call color.¹  We're pretty good at sorting out color - at least women are as many women know when they see men attempt to match colors when they dress.²  The extra type of cone that was added gives us the ability to tell the difference between red and green - an impossible task for your dog or cat - or most mammals for that matter.  But why?

 

Curiously there may be a trigger.  It turns out trees that produce fruit started to take off about the same time 40 million years ago.  Specifically trees that produced a fruit that changed in color from green to red when it was ripe.  And there appears to have been a trigger that produced the colored fruit.   

 

Around 40 million years ago the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dramatically decreased.  Our planet depends on having some carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas.  As atmospheric CO₂ levels dropped the planet chilled.  The fruit bearing trees may have been a response to the changing climate.  

 

It may be that a drop in greenhouse gases let triggers for two evolutionary paths -  trees that produced fruit that turned red when it ripened and our ancestors who got a third cone to quickly detect "redness" in ripe fruit.  Something that could be rather useful.

 

40 to 55 million years ago the Tibetan Plateau rose dramatically.  It altered wind flows as well creating a lot of weathering of the rock - a process that absorbed enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lowered the Earth's temperature as a result.³

 

A curious hypothesis with individual steps - triggering events - that are reasonably certain can be assembled connecting the dots from several fields.  It is not proven science, but gives an interesting chain of events that spin off other significant questions.  Who would have guessed that our ability to tell green from red may have roots in the rise of the Tibetan Plateau?

 

I used this as an example of connecting the dots and finding some interesting places to ask some interesting questions along the way at a talk to some computer artists six months ago.  The talk was about forty minutes and the question and answer portion was great going about an hour and a half until we needed to leave the auditorium as someone else needed it.  These folks were very tuned to ways they could play tricks with our vision to aid their storytelling and I probably learned at least as much as they did.

 

To pass the time rowing this morning I listened to an OnPoint podcast (WBUR) on education in Finland and South Korea.  (The program is archived here with the audio at the top of the page.  There is a linked video on the Finnish system that is worth watching at least a bit.)


I am concerned about the direction of education here - or at least what I've observed in the local schools - with the focus on STEM and testing, seemingly at the expense of nearly everything else.  Ours is a wealthy district and the kids are pushed fairly hard to make certain SAT and various other scores and this is reflected in relative property values.

If I had been in such as system I don't think I would survive - at least I wouldn't thrive.  It was very important for me to get the basics as a kid, but I had the luxury of a lot of free time  - sort of necessary as everyone was from an agricultural community.  There wasn't a lot of homework and it was possible to focus on that and use the spare time for other things - in my case being curious about nature.

I learned to ask questions and have them rewarded with new questions rather than answers and I learned subjects like math were thinly disguised tools that would allow me to sharpen the questions.  Even though I didn't have a lot of art I learned that it was very useful in visualizing more abstract concepts. Eighth grade art class turned out to be very important in the scheme of things.

In grad school we had several Korean students with perfect GRE scores but none made it past the master's degree level.⁴  The problem was that the first five or so years of a physical science is spent learning technique.  You are just barely to the point where you can go out on the two wheeler with training wheels and then you can start doing real science.  That required a very different skill than just memorizing factoids and manipulating some simple formula.  At this point you sound like a scientist, but you don't really know what you are doing.  The next three or four years after that is required to get to the point where the training wheels can come off.  The Korean guys never managed that leap.  They simply had no background in creative thinking. I "cheated" by starting when I was 12 and many of my successful classmates had similar stories.  At the time about a third of the new Ph.D.s in physics and astrophysics came from a rural community and half lived within a 50 miles of a good natural history museum.

I don't know what is optimal, but I suspect the Finish system is much closer than the South Korean.  But in any case I'd love to see a professionalization of teaching along with a wide range of offered subjects and a focus on connecting the dots among them. Becoming a nation of good test takers is probably close to being optimally wrong.

 

__________

¹  We take in some photons - the particles of electromagnetic radiation - through these two little dots in the front of our heads called pupils.  These are focused on a photoreceptor called the retina that, with the help of a chemical reaction, creates signals that are processed in the brain to give is a color movie in three dimensions that gives us a pretty good "visual" sense of the world around us.

"Color" is a an abstraction created in our mind.  It loosely corresponds to the wavelength of light, but not strictly

Way to simplistic, but I've written a bit more in earlier posts - particularly this one.

² In the "green-blue" region we're sensitivity to wavelength differences of about a billionth of a meter. In the "red" range about ten billionths of a meter - at least for women.  Men are much worse.  Color discrimination is one of the more interesting sexual dimorphisms.

³ A small article here.  Evidence has become stronger since then.

⁴ The Graduate Record Exam - at least the physics test - was multiple choice and covered a wide range of topics.  Some foreign schools focused on the test as a measure and taught lots of factoids and manipulation.  Measuring how much real science a person could do at this point would be much trickier and not something a test could manage, but an advisor would have a good sense.  Something much closer to the Finnish system.

 

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Sukie is allergic to chocolate.  While this might be seen as a tragedy, it does me that I get all of the chocolate that comes into the house.  But for special treats I've had to learn how to work with carob and certain types of white "chocolate" (like almond bark).  Here is a cookie that works for Valentine's Day.

 

White and Red "Chocolate" Chip Cookies

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 stick (about 115g) unsalted butter softened

° 125g white cane sugar

° 100g light brown sugar

° 1 large egg (pasteurized if you sample the dough:-)

° 1 tbl whole milk (I've used cream too)

° 1-1/2 tsp vanilla extract

° 125g bread flour (you can use all purpose flower, but the cookies won't be as chewy)

° 95g all purpose flour (add a bit if you are only using AP flour to get to a 250g total for flour. You can also add some if you like fluffier cookies or if you live in high humidity)

° 1 tsp baking soda 

° a bit of salt to taste (1/4 tsp for me)

° 15 to 20 maraschino cherries diced and patted dry with a paper towel

° a small bag (6oz) white chocolate chips (the cheap ones are almond bark)

° 100g broken walnuts or pecans

 

 

Technique

 

° Beat the butter on low speed for a minute or two at a low speed  until smooth and creamy and add the sugars and beat at a medium speed until combined and smooth - another two minutes or so.  Add the egg, milk and vanilla  and beat on medium high for a couple of minutes until light and fluffy.

° Slowly add the flours, baking soda and salt and mix at a lower speed until they are just combined - maybe a minute.  Don't over-mix!  Now stir in the chips, cherries and nuts by hand.

° Divide into about 16 bits of dough and refrigerate for at least 6 hours (very important!)

° Bake for about 8 to 10 minutes at 350°F on the middle oven rack.  The goal is a bit undercooked in the center as cooking will continue as they cool.  Add a minute or two if you like them crunchy.  Cool on a rack

 

 

beyond 3d printing

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Highly recommended!

 

__________

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

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

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

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

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

__________

Recipe Corner

 

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

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

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

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

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

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

 

_____

 

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

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

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

That's it!

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

 

 

your own private air force and a bit on creativity

I'm in the middle of my annual mini-sabbatical, but I spend the evenings and part of the weekends letting my mind wander as well as keeping things running.  That seems to work better than total immersion. I was part of a discussion on great projects for a 10^th grader who wants to impress engineering schools.  UAVs strike me as something potentially fascinating and there are more than a few unexplored areas where a smart teen could do impressive work - the field is very open ended.  

 

Lightweight video cameras and small flying platforms - unmanned ariel vehicles - can be mixed in a variety of ways.  You can put a camera on a RC airplane, fly it around, and watch the video later.  A more advanced flavor is called first person video - you put a camera in the aircraft, stream the video back and use it to control the flight - often watching the view with video goggles.¹  And you can let the aircraft fly autonomously to a pre-planned flight path and either store or transmit the video.  

 

Lots of fun, but there are any number of social implications.  It is still very difficult to fly autonomously in the US and commercial use of these flying cameras is still largely barred by the FAA (although they are working towards allowing it).  There is an experimenter/hobbyist space with certain weight and distance limitations along with a rule that flying must be within line of sight. Thousands participate and a cottage industry has sprung up making the bits and pieces that make this work.  Much of the software comes from research projects at Universities and some of it is fairly sophisticated.

 

a few videos have become popular 

 

 

One has to wonder what was running through the moose's mind - perhaps some lines from the Bullwinkle show are appropriate.  

 

Eirik Solheim -the Norwegian guy who created the video - has a site that is rich in content for advanced hobbyists.²  While there are very small toy class platforms, most of the serious  experimenting is taking place using kits that require something in the neighborhood $500 to $1,000 to build and fly.  Stability and control can be very impressive and the police who were involved in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations became very nervous when one of these appeared.

 

A number of turn-key autonomous commercial class drones used for police, military, construction, scientific and other work ...  the people who make the toy class AR.Drones (still very impressive technology) are involved in an autonomous UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) product called the senseFly.  Starting at about $9,000, but currently illegal in the US, you get an autonomous mapper.³  These would have been very useful in the wake of the recent  Sandy superstorm.  There is a lot of competition in this area with large increases in capabilities and reductions in prices likely.

 

 UAVs bristle with society and technology issues, but can be a great platform for engineering students.  I suspect hundreds of organizations in the US probably have someone playing with them on salary or as a hobbyist and suspect a lot of activity if the FAA announces regulations with few restrictions (which is expected). Think about any task that uses a helicopter for observation and lower the operating cost by a factor of 100.  And that is just a starting point.

 

This is very much a technology that an amateur can sink his or her teeth into - we're at a period that is similar to PCs in the late 1970s as far as required sophistication goes. Many reasons to get involved and learn if you have the time and inclination and a great activity for kids who are interested in engineering.   I'm a big believer in getting your hands dirty if you intend to learn about anything in depth.

 

Clearly one of those technologies that, while neutral by itself, can easily be used for good or evil...  And all the better reason for learning about it.  Not to mention that immersing yourself in something like this can encourage creative thought - perhaps in areas you may not have expected.

 

 

 

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There is growing evidence that multitasking limits creative thinking.  There is an increasing amount of social research in the field - some of it strikes me as flawed and experimental design can be tricky ... even basic definitions are fluffy ..  but this paper in PLoS is interesting and worth reading.  It has some issues, but the notion of using nature to promote creative thought is an old one that works for many people.  Recommended reading and I'm sure it is far from the final word on the subject.

 

I've been lucky enough to have advised a couple of exceptionally creative companies on increasing their creative level.  There have been some experiments, some failure and a few major victories.  The common thread among the best strategies to date has been allowing people to have the freedom to single task and convincing them to try.  There are a lot of basic components necessary in the first place - great hiring, great problems, certain communication patterns (very open communication paths are not universally healthy!), and a half dozen other things.  But once you have most of these the trick is keeping the gears meshing and tuning the system.   Fascinating stuff - but that's all for the time being.

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¹ There is quite a bit of hobbyist FPV these days as evidenced by sites like this

² Notes on his moose video

³ This marketing video from senseFLY gives an idea of their capabilities

 

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Recipe Corner

 

This is really great - parsnips are still good and you can find Granny Smith and similar apples that are ok.  A homemade vegetable stock is, as always, a central component.  I've never come across a good ready-made stock.  You can make it a bit safer by using substituing skim milk and using olive oil rather than butter. It would still probably be excellent.

 

Parsnip and Apple Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 28g butter

° 1 tbl olive oil

° 2 medium yellow onions, peeled, chopped and diced

° 600g parsnips, cut into inchish pieces

° 2 garlic cloves, crushed

° 600g pie class apples peeledand cut into chunks

° 1/2 liter (500g) vegetable stock

° 150g whole  milk

° kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

 

Technique

 

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

° Add garlic and apples and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring regularly.

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

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

° Blend the mixture with a blender stick or use a blender.  Season to taste

° Cool and serve

 

probing your "failures" a bit more deeply

It is wonderful watching a little kid play with a magnet for the first time.  They have become so used to pushing or pulling something directly to get it to move that this motion at a distance breaks the model they have of the world and brings delight.

 

When people started to ask questions about what was happening, the answers brought fundamental changes to society.

 

You've probably done the experiment in grade school where you can change the direction a compass indicates by placing a current carrying wire next to it.  The other part of the experiment is equally beautiful.  You move a magnet next to a wire and cause a current to flow in the wire.  What is going on?

 

Before going a bit into that, take a look at Richard Feynman's high level comments on electricity.  He has a beautiful and delightful way of expressing himself

 

 

He mentioned Maxwell's equations as one of the most impactful discoveries anyone has made.  About the time the American Civil War started, Scottsman James Clerk Maxwell published a four part work called On Physical Lines of Force.¹ A few additional works were published and the summary of the work did not arrive right away, but we are left with four beautiful equations that are part of the foundation of our society....   If you did any technical work in college you are intimately familiar with them, but even if you didn't you may have seen them on a T-shirt.²

 

For those who aren't familiar with what they're saying, here is a summary in English²

 

° a magnet always has north and south poles

° the strength of an electric field depends on how much charge is in the vicinity

° an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field

° a magnetic field is created by either a current or a changing electric field

 

These are terrifically powerful and much of modern technology rests on electricity and magnetism.  The calculations for real world problems can be non-trivial, but it is all there - all that is required is a bit of curiosity and tenacity.

 

Consider the last two equations.  If you remove any charge you get an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field and a magnetic field is created by a changing electric field.  You can solve these together with a bit of math and the result is astonishing - you get a mutually sustaining electromagnetic field.  The changing electric field gives rise to an electric field which, in turn creates an electric field.  The energy oscillates between these two forms, which turn out to be at right angles to each other, as the wave merrily propagates through space perpendicular to both the electric and magnetic fields.  What is special is the speed of this wave is constant and just happens to be the speed of light.

About 25 years after the papers were published Heinrich Hertz showed that a spark could create such a wave.  Hertz didn't realize it at the time, but others showed that what he created was really a form of electromagnetic radiation - a certain frequency band of which we sense as visible light.  A major revolution in physics was underway, but none of the original people thought it would have practical value - little things like electric generators, motors, radio, television, computing and so on...

 

With this fundamental change came a major problem.  How was this electromagnetic wave propagating?  Waves traditionally required some medium to propagate though.  A material called the luminiferous aether was proposed.  A bizarre substance that filled the universe and had the property of being hugely stiffer than any known substance and very ephemeral - any normal substance could easily pass through it unimpeded.³

 

The whole notion of the aether seems silly today, but a fundamental change in how we thought about physics was required.  Somehow this bizarre substance was not as bizarre as what followed.  It turns out one of the puzzles it seemed to solve was how could light always travel at a fixed velocity.  It allowed the light to travel at a fixed velocity in it rather than worrying about the relative velocities of bodies that were moving at different rates.

 

One of Feynman's better observations was

First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.

 

Albert Michelson and Edward Morley did the experiment with something called an interferometer - a device that is very sensitive to movement as well as changes in the speed of light in different directions.   They showed that the speed of light was constant in any direction relative to the moving Earth.⁴  

 

This was such a startling result they spent years working on improvements to the experiment to find any error on their part.  The results got better and better and with it the case for the luminiferous aether vanished and it became clear that electromagnetic waves could propagate though a vacuum^.5  It also gave a certain Swiss patent clerk who was doing amazing physics on the side reason for coming up with something he coined Special Relativity.

 

The Michelson-Morley experiment is one of the fundamental experiments in all of physics.  Its results were so unexpected that it was assumed to have been a failure, but careful probing of it by them and others as well as careful thought about what it really meant changed our concept of the universe on the scale that Galileo or Copernicus did.

 

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

 

This is the time of the year when I think of a few things I've done - some of them are predictions.  In retrospect our memory tends to paint a pretty picture of how we predicted the future.  I have been very lucky and have been in on some discoveries as well as inventions.  We had what appears to be a good track record, but a more careful examination reveals more than a few failures.

 

In the past decade I try to spend some serious time thinking about failed - or what appear to be failed - predictions mean.  I've come to place a huge value on my "failures" -what is really going on and what additional information did I need to discover there was a flaw.  

 

This process of learning has given me tools and methods to work on unexpected areas.  This generates serendipity and it exposes ignorance in a way that I can learn from many people and results including the failures of myself and others.

 

Aa observation - this process is similar to weather and climate.  Weather is a short term projection and is extremely difficult to get right.  The particulars are incurably difficult to understand.  Climate is a longer term feature  It is often much easier to predict the climate a decade out than the weather in two weeks.  The same is true for projecting technologies.  Rough directions are much easier than exact particulars.

 

Over the years I've been learning huge amounts from my failures.  The amount seems to increase with time, which seems like the proper direction.  

 

My New Year's wish to you is may you be as lucky with failure!

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¹ It is interesting to note that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in late 1859.  It is difficult to think of any other discoveries in the last few hundred years that have brought more profound change to civilization than these two...

² Not as precise as it should be, but close enough.  It also turns out there are several equivalent ways to write down Maxwell's equations, so the T-shirts may look a bit different.

³ Upper limits to its mass were calculated - the density was smaller than a hundred trillion times lower than that of air.

⁴ More precisely they sent a limit - the Earth's velocity relative to the aether had to be less than a sixth the Earth's measured orbital velocity.

⁵ luminiferous aether would make a great song title or band name

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before the recipe, an image to fire your imagination

Allegory of Winter

Ambrogio Lorenzetti  c.1338-1340

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

A lassi as delicious as it is inauthentic

 

A Rich Seasonal Mango "Lassi"

 

Ingredients 

 

° a drinking cup 70% filled with a high quality eggnog at just above freezing (I like Ronnybrook Farms eggnog)

° a canned mango pulp at just a bit above freezing (I like Rellure Kesar Mango Pulp)

 

Technique

 

° lightly stir the mango pulp into the eggnog. Finally add a blob and artistically swirl it.

° top with toasted pistachios or sliced almonds (optional)