omenti

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

 

 

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.

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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!!

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.

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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.

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

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

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

² I've removed all names and other identifying information

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

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

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

with best wishes

<name removed>

student and developer in first road 

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

 

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

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Recipe Corner

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

taping-out in a material world

I was sitting in a restaurant in New Hope on a bright Winter day chatting about some technologies that have evolved dramatically in the past several decades and was asked about the term tape-out.

 

New Hope, Pennsylvania is one of those places that has become something of a tourist trap on nice weekends.  Stores come and go with a few enduring to give the place a bit of flavor, but you get the impression this place is hiding something.  

 

Walk around the back streets for awhile.  A bit of poking around reveals more than a few surprises in architecture, art, crafts and fine instruments.

 

I've found glass blowers, sculptors, a variety of painters, a precision telescope builder, steam engine restoration experts, musicians, lyricists, dress designers, architects and an truly amazing workshop...

 

If you have the time, arrange to visit George Nakashima's workshop.  George was one of the leaders of 20th century furniture design and, although he died in 1990, his family keeps the workshop going and it continues to turn out furniture as fine art.  This is where Steve Jobs finally decided to buy his chairs and tables after years of contemplation.  

 

There are several artisan woodworkers at work and the setting is decidedly old world. But you are struck by the care and thoughtfulness that permeates the place.  Selection of the wood is a borderline religious experience for the people I met.  They will tell you about a specific piece of wood, where it came from and how they intend to honor it.  

 

Seriously elegant pieces.

 

I am often struck by the importance and complexity of material in design.  Function, form and beauty all strongly depend on the proper choice.  Dave and I "know" that carbon fiber is wrong for any bike we would ride - the "feel" of a proper lugged steel frame is entirely different and wonderful for the types of riding we do.  

 

 A fundamental principle of design is that it is the art of compromise and the choice of materials is an important part of that.  There are hundreds of materials that can a used for building a working bike ranging from cardboard, bamboo, and several different hardwoods.  More commonly steel, stainless steel, aluminum alloys, titanium, or any one of a large number of carbon/resin combinations are used.

 

So even if you choose a steel frame it turns out there are several dozen types of steel, each with its own distinctive characteristics.  The special frame that was built for Colleen required a very exotic stainless steel - Reynolds 953 - one that costs considerably more than carbon fiber and is difficult to fabricate, but just the ticket to solve some frame resonance problems that didn't show up in the CAD modeling tools.¹

 

Once material selections have been made construction techniques are important.  Some techniques, like those used a table from George Nakashima's workshop or a making a fine cello, are celebrated as serious art, but even common household objects represent complex choices and construction techniques.

 

Back to the lunch in New Hope...  The conversation had focused on 3D printing

 

My normal observation about 3D printing is that the material selection is terrible compared to those conventional builders have at their disposal - the situation is not unlike a chef being limited to white flour, water, and mustard. She can make lovely prototypes and create designs that would be impossible with normal techniques, but the final result isn't exactly appetizing.  I'm bullish on the technique for certain applications, but not for general use anytime in the near future.

 

But it struck me I had been ignoring a very important form of 3D printing - one that  has already changed the world.  Integrated circuit fabrication.

 

When thinking of the development of technology over the centuries I tend to consider major themes and drivers.  Things like transportation, improvements in power densities and energy conversion efficiencies, and the ability to write fine lines and spaces.

 

Lithography is an important subset of writing lines and spaces and I was lucky enough to have become deeply invovled some of the R&D associated with it when I joined Bell Laboratories.  While IC fabrication is a very technical process, it is conceptually simple.  You shine light at a silicon wafer through a patterned mask.  The silicon is coated with a material that exposes where light strikes it and a chemical process transfers the pattern to the silicon. While this is subtractive, a series of layers are built up forming a thin three dimensional structure.²  Although usually not considered 3D printing, it should qualify. 

 

Many layers are used with very specific material choices.  Up to thirty masks may be required for an advanced processing technique. Large sums are spent on material science, applied physics and several other areas with the progress is recognized as Moore's Law.  

 

This ability to write fine lines and spaces had progressed for centuries driving our capability to increase the precession of mechanical objects and dramatically improve the reproduction of text and images on paper and electronic screens.  Photolithography is merely one branch of a much larger trend.

 

My first involvement with photolithography came when 2.25 micron technologies were used in production chips and 1.5 in development.³  I was interested in the part of the process where information became physical - mask making.

 

The process has strict rules, as do most fabrication processes, but there is enormous flexibility in the capabilities of the circuits that can be produced.  The number of possible combinations of simple logic gates is, for all intents and purposes, practically infinite.⁴

 

And that brings us back to tape-out.

 

When I first heard the term I though it meant writing a digital representation of the design to digital tape which would be used to tell the mask making machines exactly what to write.  It turned out the term had been in use for some time.  At Bell Labs and other places it described the process of making a photomask.   A huge enlargement of each mask level would be from black line tape or cutting rubylith on a table or wall.  These were photographed and reduced in the form of a photomask. Somehow the term tape stuck and has found its way down to us over the years.

 

These early circuits only had a small number of gates.  Well before my time came the first really successful microprocessor - the Intel 4004 with its 2,300 transistors and 10 micron half pitches.  Now we call carry billions of transistors around in our pockets embedded in these rather serious networked computers we call smartphones.⁵

 

Some say tape-out came well before early ICs - that it was used to describe the photolithographic process to make printed circuit boards.  

 

This 3D printing technique based on photolithography has changed our world beyond what seemed possible in the 60s when it was first tried. What we call 3D printing simultaneously solves some hard prototyping problems, but falls short in many others.⁶ This tends to be the rule of many technologies - they find their niches and new ones that we hadn't envisioned while falling short of our original dreams.  We are selective creatures who tend to search for patterns.  The technologies we remember are those that open entirely new areas.  Making bets is a tricky matter.

 

One of the tasks I'm asked to do as part of my work is assist in making these bets.  Everyone has their own approaches.  I find having a deep grounding in some areas through experience creating the technologies or in the fundamentals behind them is important, but not enough.  Increasingly it is important to understand the social element.  

 

These developments seem obvious in retrospect, but are very difficult to create or predict.  They are fundamentally multi-disciplinary - something our education system seems to be moving away from and something that only a few companies have internalized.  I've seen it in the most peculiar places ranging from a workshop that builds tables to a storyteller that makes movies that take years to create.  From a curious consumer electronics company to a massive program that put a human on the moon.  It even exists in workgroups in and outside of companies as well as a few very rare individuals.  A commonality is it is often difficult to easily categorize these organizations as they connect many dots and, as a result,  find interesting new patterns. Much more to say, but this is the theme of this blog so more will be said...

 

Oh - and tape-out again.  I've heard the term applied to what is considered 3D printing in the past week.  Chalk it up to the inertia of language.

 

__________

¹ This is an important point.  Although computer aided design tools have become very sophisticated, they can't handle the variety of compromise in design that is given them.  In bicycles handling characteristics are important and current CAD tools can't perform the level of analysis to understand the dynamics of a bicycle with a specific rider and road.  There needs to be some grounding with reality and test "mules" - sometimes instrumented - are constructed, wind tunnel tests conducted, and so on.   This process can be expensive and time consuming, but it is sometimes essential to produce something that is great.

² The thickness is generally under a half micron at the silicon level and perhaps five to ten microns when the interconnect layers are added.

You can get a sense of the additive nature of the layers created by the successive masks by considering this simple device - a simple CMOS op-amp.  The layers are polysilicon (red), a metal layer (blue), N-doped silicon (green), P-doped silicon (brown) and the X's are connections that cross layers. (The design is from a public domain digital design course.)

³ Design technologies usually refer to the half pitch distance between two identical features in a repeating array.  The dominant production technologies are based on CMOS processing and a series of generations has been identified.  Current leading edge production is at about 0.22 microns (Intel's Ivy Bridge processor line for example) and the next generation will be about 0.14 microns.

The cost of fabrication lines has risen dramatically with each succeeding generation.  When I started in the early 80s a small fab line could be constructed for $10 to $15 million and a leading edge facility perhaps three times as much.  The "steppers" that expose the silicon (they step from chip to chip in a large array on a wafer) cost about $1 million then.  Steppers for 0.13 microns probably cost $100M each and the fab lines probably will cost more than $5B a pop.  The number of companies that can participate has dropped dramatically over the years and the scale of produced has increased even more dramatically to match an enormous demand.

⁴ In addition to the functionality of a fixed chip there are FPGAs - field programmable gate arrays - where chips can be customized by engineers after manufacture for specific applications.

⁵ I remember bringing the first transistor into our house.  I was seven years old and had used some Christmas money and my savings to buy a five transistor AM radio.  I stopped counting after I got my first calculator - a HP-35.  Now there are over a half trillion transistors under our roof.  The mind wobbles.

⁶ Sometimes it is important to consider the "job we have hired something to do" .. in the case of 3D printing it is usually assumed to be extreme customization and/or local fabrication.  These need to be very carefully considered in their own context and the context of the technology.  If the goal is mass customization there are other segments of the economy that will be impacted in large ways well before 3D printing becomes a mass market reality. Included in these are custom specification and fabrication of clothing.  Way too demanding for 3D printing, but addressable using other techniques.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

This used some "wheat berries" - whole grains of wheat.  We have a lot of Kamut berries (I recommend Bob's Red Mill as a source).  The instructions all tell you to soak them overnight, but I find you can get away with simmering them in water or stock for about 45 minutes.  It leaves you with a grain with a very nice texture.  Experiment and find what you like.

 

Kamut and Brussels Sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° 180g Kamut or other wheat berries

° 700g vegetable broth

° 450g trimmed and quartered brussels sprouts

° 1 large shallot, chopped

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 50 g walnut pieces

° 1 tbl lemon juice from a fresh lemon

° zest from the lemon

° salt and pepper to taste

 

Technique 

 

° Add the both and wheat berries to a pan, bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 50 minutes, drain and set aside

° Heat the over to 425°F

° Toss the brussels sprouts with the shallots and 1 tbl of olive oil in a big bowl.  Transfer to a baking sheet and bake about 20 or 25 minutes until browned.   Turn them over at about 15 minutes.

° Remove from the oven and add the walnut pieces  (you can throw them on a couple of minutes before you take out the sprouts if you like them toasty)

° Whisk the lemon juice, zest, 1 tbl olive oil, and salt and pepper in a big bowl.  Add the sprouts and wheat berries and toss them to combine.  

° yumm!

 

into the wind

You know it is really windy when you see pieces of tree flying overhead during the daily walk.  It wasn't easy keeping the normal pace going into the wind, but the trip back was easy.  Going back to sports it makes you think about the impact of wind on running and what the right strategy might be.  

 

A bit of physics will sort this out.  Consider a thought experiment where a runner starts off on a square course from leg 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 4 that she runs at a constant speed s.  There is wind of velocity w that parallels two sides of the course and is perpendicular to the remaining two sides.  The amount of effort she has to spend to overcome wind resistance is proportional to the amount of power she must develop on each leg of the course.  I'll leave the physics to a footnote, but it turns out the power per lap is proportional to 4s( s² + w²).¹  Since w² is never negative, having any wind always forces her to deliver more power.  Her time in a single person race will always be slower if she is running at a maximum power level.

 

 

Now her strategy is clear.  When running with the wind at her back she should make sure she is running in clear air - that none of her trailing competitors can take advantage of her breaking the wind.  When she is running into the wind, she should be drafting faster runners to lower her apparently airspeed.

 

The reason we don't see dramatic difference in races with and without wind is that, at the speeds a human generates in a marathon, the power necessary to overcome air resistance is small - only a few percent that necessary to run.  It can make a difference comparing race times, but the disadvantage isn't enormous in most running events. 

 

Cycling is a different beast.  Since the power needed to overcome air resistance goes as the cube of your speed and cyclists are approximately not wind-cheating, racing benefits from any aerodynamic improvements.²  Improvements occurred over the years, but dramatic improvements came when experts in fluid dynamics began to study the problem.³

 

One area where you see an improvement large enough to make a difference in a race is in the design of the wheels.  Here is a high level paper from a state of the art wheel maker discussing why a racer would want to do this along with details of their design.  It isn't very technical, but it does give a sense of the amount of work that is done combining computer models and real world testing in low speed wind tunnels.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that such wheels can be very expensive. A few thousand dollars a pair is common and some will shrink the bank account by over six thousand dollars.

 

An important point is the computer tools are available.  Getting time in a wind tunnel is a different matter, but computer modeling has become important.  The important thing is you need engineers who are knowledgeable and can build accurate models.  Tools like this can give a false sense that you know what you are doing and it is possible to do more harm than good.  

 

Education and experience are critically important

 

Which brings us to the "Industrial Internet"

 

Recently several people asked me to comment on GE's announcement of their new initiative.  Here is the note I sent:

 

A few people have asked me about this since it was announced.  It turns out I have some deep experience as one of the designers of the mask lab information system project at Bell Labs in the late 1980s.  This is really hard to get right and hinges on success in several key areas.  It has and is being done by a few companies and requires a non-trivial effort (I've seen estimates that it consumes about 25-35% of the cost of building an IC fab line these days - of course they require it to make their process work as so much is at the leading edge of what the tools and process can do).

a bit of commentary...

GE has made a big deal about the "industrial internet".   I don't have deep knowledge of their specific program other than their PR documents (which are too high level and shallow) and high level articles like this one from  Technology Review 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509331/an-internet-for-manufacturing/

This sort of monitoring and analysis is not new.  Science has been doing it for a long time as fundamental part of understanding experiments.  Starting in the 60s this began to become computerized and it was common in particle physics from the mid 1970s.  I was involved with its adoption in integrated circuit manufacture in the mid to late 1980s.  Places like Intel, Bell Labs and IBM were trying to capture rich information from silicon processing.  It turned out to be an expensive task (the Bell Labs effort, which impacted mask making at two locations, involved a dozen people full time and probably $3-$4M a year for a five year period - the efforts at Intel and IBM were at least ten times that size, but one that was cost justified.  Many components were required to make it work: lots of sensors, a flexible database, good programmers, experimental scientists (physicists and chemists), mechanical and electrical engineers, and *really* good process engineers.  

Figuring out what was noise, understanding the sensors and finding good process engineers were the most difficult parts - along with finding people who were actually willing to change the process.  Even then there were many elements that couldn't be captured and leading edge places like Intel create carbon copies of fabrication lines to minimize variation in process.  

Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Intel and others attempted to understand how to do this more generally to create a product that could be sold to manufacturers.  There were some large problems - many of which trace to understanding the process at a deep level. I'm aware of at least two approaches that involved anthropologists along with the physical scientists.

It was very clear you don't mix a network (of any kind), database and sensors and expect magic.

I hope GE does well, but there are a lot of issues genericizing this that range from computer science to mechanical and electrical engineering to process control and sociology and anthropology.  It is very easy to build a money sink if you don't get all of this right.

Experience has taught me there is a lot of experience that lives in the production lines that is largely untapped by the engineers and managers who created the processes in the first place. It needs to be underscored that sensors need to be understood deeply - I'm continually impressed with the lack of education in this area in most computer science courses.  The people who traditionally do these things are production engineers, but outside of a few areas the field is almost dead in the US.⁴  I find it exciting that GE is working in the area, but producing anything that is reasonably generic is will be a hard multidisciplinary problem.  Any organization that wants to tap the potential benefit needs to understand their process and measurement deeply - and that may not be a bad thing.

 

I'm at the end of my allotted time, but need to mention a wonderful development.  

The maker movement where people are building things that tend to lace computation with the real world is growing.  People are learning how to use sensors and microcontrollers and cheap computers such as the Raspberry Pi are accessible to kids in middle school.  

At the same time about a half dozen people have told me they intend to get their amateur radio license this year.  Understanding radio at a practical level is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to know a bit more about how the modern world works.  I'm going to hazard a guess that the average ham radio operator knows more about the fundamentals of radio than the average wireless executive.  

Perhaps we are at the beginning of something great. Maybe there is a natural hobby for many who can make contributions to the "Industrial Internet" and beyond as we move closer to the real world with sensors and computers.  And perhaps a few will even be instrumenting their sports and mixing that with a bit of critical thinking for a deeper undersanding.  It gives me a lot of hope - much more than using computer science and networking for selling things.

 

__________

¹ OK - a bit of physics.  First note that speed does not have a direction - velocity has a direction and magnitude, speed just a magnitude.  First consider an earlier post where I show the power needed to overcome air resistance is proportional to the the cube of the head wind.  The force of the wind goes as the square of its velocity, so power for the runner to overcome wind resistances goes as s * w² , where v and w are both vectors. In this case the wind direction has been chosen so we can ingore the vector nature, so s and w will just be the scalar components.

So running with the wind at her back, our runner needs to develop power proportional to s (s - w)²  and going into the wind her power needs to be s (s + w)². 

The crosswind case is a bit trickier.  The wind now comes in at an angle and the magnitude of the the resultant vector is  (s² + w²)^.5.  The magnitude of the force is the square so the power on each crosswind leg is s(s² + w²).  

Now we can add up the total power per lap.  It is proportional to s(2s² + 2w² + s² + w² + 2sw + s² + w² - 2sw) = 4s(s² + w²).  

 ² Cycling at commuting speeds has a cost, but it isn't significant until you face a headwind that exceeds 15 mph.  Commuters can comfortably pedal away in an upright position that would be impossible at 25 mph.  It is possible to dramatically improve the aerodynamics of a human powered vehicle by enclosing it in a shell.  These velomobiles can be pedaled by normal humans at 25 to 30 mph for long distances that would tax an Olympic cyclist on a conventional racing bicycle. 

³ The same can be said for swimming - remarkably the equations are similar.  Water is a fluid that is about 800 time denser than air.  

⁴ Production engineering is alive and well in Northern Europe, Japan and China.

 

__________

Reicpe Corner

 

The Super Bowl is in a few days.  Try to make some healthy snacks.  These are too simple.  You can roast almost any root vegetable like the first recipe and try other produce like sweet potatoes and even cauliflower (which is great when roasted with the same hot sauce you use for buffalo chicken wings -- something like Fred's hot sauce)

 

Roasted Carrots

 

° slice carrots into thin - say 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick slices and toss in olive oil and a bit of salt.  

° roast for 20 to 25 minutes at 400°F

 

 

Roasted Chickpeas

 

Ingredients

 

° 15 oz can of chickpeas

° 1 tbl olive oil

° 1 tbl curry powder

° 2 tsp cumin

° 1 tsp chilli powder

° 1 tsp coriander

° 1 tsp non-iodized sea salt

 

Technique

 

° Wash the chickpeas and dry off on a paper towel

° toss them with the oil and half of the salt

° roast at 400° F for 35 to 45 minutes until golden and borderline crunchy. Don't burn!

° let them cool to room temperature

° combine all of the spices in a large bowl and toss the chickpeas in with the spices

 

 

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

 

warming up the crystal ball

Regular flight in heavier than air machine, much of medical science and making use of the strong interaction; but certainly not the Internet, television or the car...

 

A few of us were sitting around a lunch table at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey in the early 1990s playing the game where you can transport someone 100 years ahead in time and asking what would surprise them.  For fun we were trying to come up with notions that would really surprise the anyone.

 

We came to the conclusion that communications networks wouldn't be a complete surprise as telephone networks were expanding rapidly.  Science fiction in the early 1890s was full of references to forms of communication that look like radio and communication. Novel as the Internet might seem, it wouldn't be a complete surprise.

 

We debated computers.  The ways computers are used would come as a shock - in fact modern use would come as a shock to most as late as the 1940s before people like Vannevar Bush began to connect the dots of what was happening in research facilities.¹  But the work of Charles Babbage on the difference engine and Ada Lovelace on programming came a full century before Bush's insight.  Digital computation and its use may have well been a shock, but computational engines not.

 

We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate what ever aroused curiosity. - Orville Wright

 

Today marks the 109th anniversary of controlled heavier than air flight.  By the late 1800s people were beginning to advance past semi-controlled flight in gliders, but with no real success. A real stagnation in design combined with desire and over-funding to kill several would-be innovators and strengthen the notion that even with the advances of the Industrial Revolution, flight was only for the birds and lighter than air machines.

 

An airplane, or a bird for that matter, has to properly balance four forces to fly - lift, drag, gravity and thrust.2  It must also have a viable control system.  

 

The early aircraft designs were ok on gravity, but lift, thrust and drag were all problematic and viable control systems were nonexistent.  

 

A huge problem that required advances on multiple fronts.

 

The best way to approach such problems is to address each issue empirically scientifically.  The Wright brothers spent years learning how to build and fly kites, understand aerodynamics and simple fluid mechanics to built good-enough airfoils, to lower the drag on their machines,  to use a good-enough engine, and to build a control system and learn to fly with it. 

 

The investigations took several years and a careful methodical approach.  They built their own airfoils and had the revelation that a propeller could be made much more efficient using a proper airfoil.  Air-cooled gasoline engines could have a very high power to weight ratio for the day. Wing warping could control roll and elevators and rudders, pitch and yaw.

 

By early December 1903 they had enough of the pieces to make the first real flight.  The pieces were far from optimal and several of them had been discovered before by others - but no one else had put together all of the pieces.³ What makes this interesting was their funding was modest.  Some competitors had enormous funding, but were using designs that were simple extrapolations of earlier non-functioning designs.  

 

One can go on and on about the brilliance of the approach used by the Wrights, but it also needs to be underscored that their design, while good enough, was very primitive.  They patented it and proceeded to prove they were as bad at business as they were at fundamental revolution.  A problem was their patents and business model were very restrictive and others, once the fundamental problem had been cracked, made new discoveries that made dramatic improvements.⁴

 

Last year I was part of a panel charged with making projections for technologies five, ten and twenty years out.  While such events are fun (even more fun when someone is paying and the others in the group are smart), they rarely are useful as predicting the future is a hazard at best.  But at the same time it is possible to get a lot of useful information from a well run process.

 

When I look back on some of the things I have done it is possible to say I saw and even invented bits and pieces of the future.  But saying that turns out to be a combination of selective filtering and hubris.  In reality many of us saw and created many pathways to potential futures.  That was the job of pure research at Bell Labs where the rubber met the sky.  Of course innovation is the useful application of these ideas and making the rubber meet the road is much more difficult.⁵

 

I think it is fair to say almost all of the technologies we'll be using in 2022 are up and running in pure and applied research labs around the world.  The combinatorics of factors that come to bear on which will survive are an extremely difficult problem to solve and there is truth to Alan Kay's famous quote - "Look, the best way to predict the future is to invent it..."

 

Many of the discoveries are impacted by something outside of what is considered to be their normal domain.  Television was originally seen as a point to point communication, portable atomic clocks combining with several technologies to create a new class of navigation - the list goes on and on.  Ideally you can gather a group of people with an understanding of the technology being studied, wide ranging interests, delight in connecting the dots and an inquisitive nature.  From that a variety of useful scenarios can be invented that can form a guide for those who must plan for the future.

 

Some are expert at understanding the human side of technology along with the rate of sophistication of component technologies and can create new products and even product categories - Steve Jobs and his team being an example on several occasions. 

 

Rarely something is created where its basic design survives for a long time.  The invention of the safety bicycle is a great example.   In the early and mid 1880s many inventors tried to come up with a light, easy to ride and safe bicycle.  There were multiple failures until John Kemp Starley of Coventry, England put the dots together and came up with the Rover in about 1888.  He had come up with a design and geometry that is basically unchanged to this day... a design that happens to be the most efficient way for a single human to move around on the ground ...  a design that is nearly four times as efficient as walking.

 

On this day it is sweet to note the connection between bicycles and early flight.  The skills required to build reliable safety bikes proved to be one of the dots the Wrights used in their arsenal of ideas.

 

I should probably quit now as I'm nearly out of time, but it is also very important to note the adoption rates of new technologies.  This the percentage of the population using a technology from in years from the first product - a very different number from the first invention!

 

The first chart is from a now defunct visualization site.  The point that is problem important is the ten percent mark as well as the slope from there through fifty percent adoption.  Some technologies compete with seriously mature technologies and require enough further evolution so as to have very gentle slopes, even though they eventually come to become important.  Some forms of alternate energy power production and electric cars are good examples.6

 

The second chart involves consumer "gadget" technologies compiled by Alexis Madrigal - areas that are generally expected to explode rapidly and quickly generate enormous competition. Note the leading examples are all for media consumption rather than communication or creation. There are a variety of interesting reasons why this is so, but there is not enough time to probe that here.  Gadget spaces where first moves often are not those making money as the technologies mature.  Ideally companies in this space have a deep understanding of how and why people use these things.  If they can add this information to the other dots they're connecting they can create more serious contenders.  Apple is a prime example as were Polaroid and Sony back in the day.

 

So while an accurate prediction of winners a decade out is nearly impossible, it is easier to eliminate losers and the process, properly done, can offer a good deal of illumination into just how you think about the future.  On the other hand surrounding yourself with narrow subject matter experts frequently leads to noisy blindsidings. ⁷

 

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¹ Vannevar Bush was an amazing mind - inventor, scientist, engineer and brilliant administrator.  A real renaissance person.  He was one of the people who started the Manhattan Project, ran NACA, CMU, the MIT school of engineering, the NDRC, the OSRD and was a core force behind the creation of the National Science Foundation. His article As We May Think article that appeared in The Atlantic on information indexing and processing was a brilliant piece you should read if you are unfamiliar with it.

² Gliding only requires three - thrust isn't used.

³ This is a critical point. Some of the tricks had been uncovered at places like MIT and Stevens, but were only known to ship designers.  Very little of this was known in the aviation community.  Orville and Wilbur, with their experiments, created a problem relevant body of information that was revolutionary in their field.  

⁴ Ailerons are a prime example.  There was considerable prior art, but the other pieces of powered flight had not come together.  They proved to be superior to wing warping, but accomplished the same basic task - roll control.  The Wrights fought this tooth and nail in the courts.  They won in the US and demanded very heavy fees fundamentally crippling aircraft development in the US for about a decade as the Europeans quickly caught up and moved forward.

⁵ Bell Labs had a good mechanism for that -  linkages between pure and applied research and applied research and manufacturing.  The problem was the last link became weak through a series of consent decrees and the value of the place was diluted.

⁶ These are rich connect-the-dot regions and I spend some time worrying about them.  Get in touch if you have an interest

⁷ There are a few individual subject matter experts who have enough outside areas of interest and their own forest of dots to connect that they can not only be useful in these investigations, but often central.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

With the holidays nearly on us I've been experimenting with gingerbreads.  The one I offer here is a recipe in progress - I'm on the third version, but this one appears to be a keeper.  Unlike many gingerbreads it isn't great warm, but shines after chilled in the refrigerator for at least eight hours.  Sukie thinks it is even better with eggnog poured over it or with peppermint ice cream on the side (yes - I've made a batch of peppermint ice cream).

 

There is an issue of what to do with the holiday experiments as we can't eat all of them ourselves.  The trick is a group of always happy-to-try-it-out neighbors. 

 

This one makes a lot.  A nine inch round pan is marginal, a nine or ten inch square pan probably works and making it in a two piece angel food cake pan may be best.  Be sure and put a sheet pan under the cake pan!

 

I've begun to measure cake temperature with a thermocouple.  The cake is done went the core temperature is about 88° C - don't let it get as high as 90° for any prolonged period.

 

Ginger-Ginger Refrigerator Cake

 

Ingredients

 

Cake 

° 85g (3 oz) peeled an sliced fresh ginger

° 200g (1 cup) white cane sugar

° 3/4 tsp fine un-iodized sea salt

° 1/2 tsp ground ginger

° 1 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1/4 tsp ground mace

° 225g (1 cup) water

° 2 tsp baking soda

° 340g (1 cup) dark molasses

° 2 large eggs

° 225g (2 sticks) melted unsalted butter

° 275g (about 2-1/2 cups) all purpose flour

Glaze:

° 125g (1 cup) powered sugar

° a pinch of fine salt

° a splash of milk

° a bit of vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

Cake

° Preheat the oven to 350°F and butter or pam a cake pan

° Put the fresh ginger, sugar, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon and mace into a food processor and pulse until the ginger is ground into the sugar

° Microwave the water for about a minute, stir in the basking soda until dissolved and then the molasses until well blended. Set it aside

° Add the eggs to the food processor one at a time pulsing it a bit to blend them in.  

° Turn on the food processor and stream in the melted butter.

° Stop the food processor, add the flour and then pulse until just blended - don't overdo it!

° Turn on the food processor and stream in the water and molasses stopping when it is just absorbed.  Again don't overdo it.  

° Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake until a toothpick comes clean - about 50 minutes to an hour for me depending on the pan.

Glaze

° Pour the sugar into a big enough bowl, add the salt and whisk in some milk until it is on the verge of being a liquid.  Add a bit of vanilla and whisk to blend.

° Drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake and put it in a refrigerator for at least a few hours.

 

 

sorting out sensors

Expectations were high for the Mars Climate Orbiter as it approached Mars in September of 1999.  It was one of NASA's low cost missions that came out of the failure of the billion dollar plus Mars Observer earlier in the decade along with the spiraling costs and lack of mission of the International Space Station.  The new mantra was simple, fast and cheap.

 

Cheap is a relative thing.  The MCO mission was still spendy at a third of a billion dollars, but the mission had gone smoothly and soon it would near Mars at a low enough altitude to use a bit of the Martin atmosphere to slow it down into a proper orbit with minimal fuel use.  But it turns out there was an issue.

 

A space probes trajectory is never perfect and mid course corrections are executed along the way.  Tiny thrusters are fired at a known thrust for a measured amount of time to determine what the effect of the little force will be.  Since the distances traveled are so great small corrections can be made burning very little fuel and still have a significant impact.  But there was this problem.

 

In high school physics you may have puzzled through the difference between mass and weight as well as different measurement systems.  Pounds are an English unit and measure force. Kilograms are metric and measure mass.  To figure out the weight in metric units (weight is a force), you need to include the acceleration of gravity and the appropriate units are newtons.¹  It would be nice if everyone used the same system, and if the convention used was actually correct, but the history of technological development and adoption is neither linear or clean.

 

The MCO's software expected metric units.  Specifically a force times the time the force was applied by the thruster - newton seconds.  The commands were sent to the spacecraft in the English pound-seconds.  The result of this mismatch was an approach about 170 kilometers lower than anticipated and the spacecraft broke up in the Martian atmosphere.

 

Subsequent analysis showed assumptions were made by different software teams and full integration tests weren't performed for a variety of reasons - including the time and cost required.

 

It would be nice if the software compiler was "smart" enough to include units and flag likely errors.  To my knowledge no mainstream language supports units, but they all allow the programmer to enter a {quantity, unit} pair.  If you do this it isn't a big deal to build in a unit detection capability, but for a variety of social and technical reasons no one does it.  If you are lucky you'll see a reference to the expected units in a comment

 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg when you are trying to build reliable and efficient software that interfaces with machines.  It turns out the goals are very different from those of the Internet application and server world.  Rather than making the programmer more efficient by throwing computational horsepower courtesy of Moore's Law at the task, it makes sense to have very efficient systems (particularly for systems with sensors with power constraints) and very robust compile time checks.  It turns out that new tools and programmers with different education backgrounds are likely to be required.  The objectives are fundamentally different from current programming.

 

But it gets worse.  We're trying to deal with sensors - devices which make measurements, but have accuracy and reliability issues that may be hidden to the programmer tasked with writing code that supports them. The programmer may be completely unfamiliar with the quirks of the sensor and it is very easy to trust questionable information streams.

 

GE is talking about an "Industrial Internet" -- it is really machine to machine communication making use of some of the information produced and processed by a system that allows people or other machines to make informed decisions that would be very difficult to come by using more spartan information streams.  It is a grand idea, but the devil is into details.  

 

There need to be specialized tools to deal with the different notion of software design, a deep understanding of the system being built, people who have deep and rich experience with high reliability systems of sensors.  Conventional system designers and coders aren't enough, although historically this has been done.²  This is the sort of thing at which JPL, the experimental particle physics community, and a few other science based organization excel - consider the effort required to sort out the experimental design and data analysis from a CERN experiment.³

 

For the GE approach to work, and ultimately the world will need a lot of this class of programming, computation and analysis, they are going to have to create multidisciplinary teams who fundamentally understand as many of the issues involved as necessary.  My guess is they aren't poking around the right areas to find some of the people - you aren't going to do this without a lot of help from the physical science community.  I'm pretty sure the old Bell Labs could have made a major impact, but we don't have one of those collaborative, multi-disciplinary organizations in industry anymore....  My suspicion is something not as robust will be produced and then one has to ask the question of what is good enough.⁴   It will be essential to be able to accurately calculate confidence levels for any critical application!  

 

(I have some other worries about the GE's effort  that I won't detail here as I just wanted to talk about the need for a need for a different class of system design...  there are other issues.  I also recognize their press releases and other documents I've seen are very high level for public consumption and they have a deep appreciation for the critical issues involved.)

 

Let me make it clear - software reliability is improving, which is a good thing as human society has become dependent on our computational systems.  But the complexity of system - particularly those festooned with sensors - is increasing at a rapid rate and our ability to comprehend them is not.  The development of the m2m Internet may well be the beginning of a very different branch of programming and systems analysis.  One that is not only required, but in some sense is back to the future.

 

Ugh - three hours!  

 

This is is the third time I have approached this piece and the only omenti posting that has required more than one pass (but I didn't proof this one).  The first pass included a few pages of pseudocode examples of why conventional programming techniques won't work and the second pass was way too technical.  I'm happy to discuss at greater detail, but hope this gives a sense of the issues you have to consider to do an adequate job.  

 

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¹ I weigh about 156.5 pounds.  My mass is about 71 kilograms. Technically my mass is not a weight, but since most of us walk around on the surface of the Earth and don't worry too much about slight changes in the acceleration of gravity, it is common to call a kilogram a unit of weight.   My metric weight is measured in newtons ...  in my case I weight about 696 newtons ...  1 pound of force is about 4.45 newtons.  So your average supermodel weighs well over 500 newtons.

² The same could be said for AT&T during the old days when switches in the phone network were to have no more than two hours of downtime in forty years of service including time down from natural disasters.  It was impossible to move the design at a rapid pace given this requirement and ultimately the needs of the end user proved to be less demanding, but it did work.  It would be overkill to do this for conventional business computing, human interfaces and Internet coding and it has largely vanished.

³ Consider tracking down the loose fiber optic cable issue in the OPERA collaboration that created the impression that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light and then note that it is unusual for a major error of this type to stand at the time of preprint.

⁴ There are many areas where noisy answers are probably fine, but some that will have major financial or even life an death impacts.  

 

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Recipe corner

 

I'm starting to work out Christmas main courses and desserts.  Jheri sent a really interesting looking spice cake recipe from a dinner party she was at in Copenhagen and I modified it a bit.  Use whatever topping you like - I threw together a cream cheese frosting because there was extra cream cheese in the 'fridge.  The cake is very good at room temperature and also great after chilling in a refrigerator.

The cardamom is very Scandinavian and reminds me of the birthday cakes our Swedish neighbor made for her Danish husband (yes - a mixed marriage)

A note on cookies and cakes - really fresh ingredients make a lot of difference.  If your flour and sugar packages have been opened and are more than a month old, I would use something fresher.  I grind most of my spices.

 

Christmas Spice Cake

 

Ingredients

° 240 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour

° 170 g (heaping 3/4 cup) sugar

° 100 g (1/2 cup) brown sugar

° 1 tbl baking powder

° 1/2 tsp non-iodized salt

° 1-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1 tsp ground ginger

° 1/2 tsp ground cardamom

° 1/2 tsp of ground cloves

° 2 large eggs

° 160 g (scant 2/3 cup) whole milk

° 115 g (8 tbl) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 350°F. 

° In a large bowl, mix together all dry ingredients. In another bowl, mix together eggs and milk. Add wet mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the melted butter gradually. The batter should be smooth.

° Transfer the batter into a buttered and floured round 9" cake pan (or in a fancy heart-shaped mold:-). Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

° Let cool for about half an hour then de-pan and transfer to a cake rack.   Frost it, spread with whipped cream, top with jam or whatever you like.

 

Cream Cheese Frosting

 

The amounts shown are very approximate - you can't go wrong.  I like to sprinkle a coating of coarsely chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans on top - but didn't on the pictured cake.

 

Ingredients

 

° 60 g unsalted butter softened

° 110 g cream cheese softened (don't use the low fat here - go for it)

° 220 g confectioner's sugar

° a bit of milk

° 1/2 tbl vanilla extract

° a pinch of salt

 

Technique

 

° mix all ingredients and whip up by hand or in a mixer

° spread over the top of the cake with a spatula and let a bit flow over the sides