omenti

from communication modalities to the higgs boson

About a year ago I was walking with with a dear friend in Manhattan completely engaged in idea building together.  Fore me intensely delightful activities like this make the leap to Csikszentmihályian flow and I tend not to notice the time and space I'm embedded in as carefully as I should...  Fortunately she is far more perceptive of these things and carefully guided me through the human and vehicular traffic without indicent.   I've been told I can be engaging and perhaps even interesting during times like this if the subject is something we both love.  But there is this problem - I'm not very good in other communication modalities.

 

Recently I've been asked to give several talks to general audiences.  I don't mind public speaking, but I also tend not be be very good at it (my TED^x talk is a bit painful to watch - fortunately food was not allowed in the auditorium).  I'm ok if there is a subject of mutual interest and have an idea of the appropriate level.  And feedback from the audience is extremely important - especially visual feedback.  But if the feedback goes away I'm toast and the performance - and value of the communication - leaves something to be desired.  

 

Writing has similar issues.  One of the reasons why these posts and my personal emails are full of typos and spelling errors is in an attempt to keep a conversational flavor I don't go back and edit.  The temptation to wordsmith and tighten up on precision is too strong and the note begin to take on the smell of a textbook.  A few years ago I rediscovered this tendency as I was toying with writing a different sort of energy book.¹  I found myself tripping badly in my attempts to describ the underlying concepts. I couldn't get a handle on who would understand this without explanation and who would need four other concepts under their belt before the concept could be explained clearly. Who would want explanations and who would find them boring.  None of the compromises seemed to work well as story telling.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - finding the right level and words for this sort of thing is not easy work.

 

The strange thing is I can usually explain this type of physics to most sharp people even if they have very non-technical backgrounds, but often only if we are talking to each other face to face.   The telephone removes too much of the presence required for the explanations to work well and face to face is better than a video link.   Many people are much better than me.  Feynman was an expert explainer, but most of his filmed pieces were responses to questions posed by an interviewer - one on one was his natural high information bandwidth channel. He was also a brilliant lecturer, but the nature of his communications changed to something a bit different and focused on a less general audience.  Carl Sagan was and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and E.O. Wilson are fantastic public communicators - a very rare quality among scientists.  These skills require real work to perfect.  Neil told me he will spend dozens of hours preparing for a five or seven minute interview on the Colbert Report.  It is not natural or easy, but he is so good it looks that way.  

 

The issues I have with different communication modalities and the need for direct feedback from what are sometimes called "out of band" channels² and undoubtedly exist in people from many other fields, but I think they are especially important for science as only a small portion of the public have a notion about how science works and what reported results mean.  At the same time science policy is of enormous importance - witness issues like global warming, nuclear proliferation, healthcare, nutrition, and a thousand other things.  The tobacco industry and a few others on the political left and right discovered that the nature of scientific communication makes it possible to easily manipulate public opinion and leave most scientists almost without defense.³  My book project was a reaction to this.  I naïvely thought that better education would make a big difference, but now I'm not certain this is the best way to spend my time.

 

None of this will settle itself soon. I've been having some second thoughts on the book and alternate ways to get some of the more important bits across.  If I think it could make a modest different I will go ahead and find the time somewhere.  

 

In the meantime I look forward to those wonderful times when I can engage with some of you one on one in playful ideas - but, and this is an important safety tip,  be warned if we are walking that you shouldn't take traffic safety cues from me:-)

 

I leave you with a delightful layman's discussion of the Higgs boson that nicely skates through the jargon.  When I'm one on one with a smart non-physicist this is pretty much how I would approach it, but everything tends to fall apart when I shift communication modalities and lose my way.⁴ Synchronous out-of-band communication channels are the headlights that cut through the darkness for me.

 

____

¹ In talking to industry groups about energy and global warming I found most people lacked a basic understanding of the physics to make informed decisions.  The notion of the book was to concentrate on removing much of the jargon and getting the physics of energy and power on the human scale.  The goal was not to have the reader understand the basic physics or how to solve equations, but rather a good qualitative sense of what is going on.  How do you ask questions like a physicist before moving to the calculations?...

² An enormous amount of information is subtly communicated through prosody, gestures, facial expressions, body positioning and more.  Voice channels can pick up some of this, video a bit more - but face to face is almost always best.  Asynchronous and one-way discussions can miss a lot and a good deal of confusion is possible with neither party recognizing that at the time.

³ A few great reference books:

Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson ...  I don't agree with everything he says, but his book pointed out major problems I was unaware of and has allowed me to repair a few (unfortunately not all) of them.

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway  A well researched and incredibly important book to anyone who worries about science policy and the issues of science and the public.

⁴ When I try to explain the Higgs field I use an analogy of a "fame" field and actors walking through a room of people vs the rest of us to explain the concept of a coupling constant.

leading horses as well as choosing them

Earlier today I received a note from Jheri about her grades for thetwo remote courses she recently finished.  I had offered to help her with differential equations if she had any problems with the course, but other than suggest and grade some interesting practice problems I didn't do anything.  She is exceptionally motivated and breezed through this and a biology course. It must have been challenging as she has a career that involves a boatload (well - planeload) of international travel.  

 

So three cheers for Jheri!  I am toasting her with some proper homemade ice cream tonight.

 

Jheri is now in her mid 20s and was a poor student in high school.  There were some reasons for this, but the bottom line is that she wasn't ready to learn.  We have an education system that assumes a readiness on the part of the student across many subjects that is probably optimal for a small minority.  But now she wants it and is focused on learning biology and has been finding math and science come easil to her.  I'm not surprised - she has a sparkling curious mind and has discovered the wonderful ignorance that science provides..  She has a career, but is getting a bit of schooling in her spare time and will soon quit and go full time.  I wouldn't be surprised to see her go on for an advanced degree.

 

I'm finding something similar about myself.  I was extremely interested in math and science as a kid and far to focused. (another Jeri knew me a bit then and will probably vouch for that)  Then I found myself as an undergrad in a school that was really a glorified trade school.  I tested out of many of the "non important" subjects and continued my singular focus.  Grad school was a mentor relation that focused almost entirely on physics.  As a result I'm extremely narrow - something that has been bothering me a lot. I have been developing interests in history, art and music playing with these a bit as a curious amateur. Perhaps one day I'll go to a real university and learn how to ask a few questions in these areas in much greater detail.  At least I am identifying my ignorance and am curious enough to learn.  It doesn't matter that I don't know much - at least not to me.  

 

Being ready to learn happens in areas you may not immediately suspect.  The men's volleyball team at UC Irvine took the NCAA Division 1 championship this past weekend.  Except for volleyball they have an unremarkable athletic department, but head coach John Speraw is one of those remarkable characters who is both cerebral and humble.  He knows that he doesn't know and seems to delight in learning.

 

Speraw hasn't been with Irvine that long, but has managed to put together three national championships.  During the last season he raised eyebrows when he hired a female psychologist with no volleyball experience as one of his assistant coaches - even though the program is too small to support full time assistant coaches.  This weekend he praised her noting she gave him and the team the right tools to do the remarkable.  Of course they, as an organization, had to be radically different from the standard men's volleyball team in order to understand, modify and implement what she was telling them.  Speraw observes, experiments and learns from his successes and failures.  He has turned his staff onto his techniques and the players are doing the same.  UC Irvine now has a learning organization that is crushing organizations with rich histories and much larger financial resources.  My guess is more than a few men's programs will hire psychologists and most (all?) of them will be too inflexible to learn and adapt.  In the meantime John will find other tools.

 

One wonders about the parallels with other organizations - corporations for example.  

 

When are companies ready to learn and can you identify them by the questions they are asking?  Does their thinking become calcified over time and do they see a need to learn and adapt?  Where do they find the questions to learn from and what are their mechanisms for dealing with the questions? Do they have an institutional learning process and an institutional memory to take advantage of their learnings?  Do they recognize the value of failure?  Do they recognize the value of play?  Are those charged with running the company curious enough to ask questions or have they followed a path that has given them success to date giving them an artificial sense of confidence?   How do they select and promote employees at all levels and is the ability and readiness to learn part of the process?

 

My guess is learning organizations are probably rare.  I'm reasonably familiar with Apple and Pixar and both are great examples where learning is central. I'm also familiar with many others that are mostly unable - or at least unready - to learn. 

 

Is your organization curious enough?  Does it actively identify, cultivate and celebrate its ignorance?  Is it diverse enough to connect dots and identify potentially new areas of ignorance  - areas that, when explored by the right people will illuminate opportunity that others hadn't considered.

 

Think about the last paragraph and imagine Apple and Pixar. Try it again with average organizations you know.

 

 It makes me think of how new ideas and techniques are identified and, if useful, implemented.   Many companies follow bandwagons - some companies sort out the world by asking the right questions and blaze their own paths, but many become little more than buzzword compliant with a considerable amount of time, talent and money in the process.

 

I think data mining and "big data" (I dislike both terms for a variety of reasons - sit me down with some cold milk and fresh cookies and I'll go into detail) are a great example of the potential success and failure of institutional learning.  A few organizations will understand what they are doing deeply enough to be able to play in this area effectively, but many are probably going to fail as has been true with many "next big things" over time.

 

You really need to understand something deeply enough to know if there is a there there.  I was drawn to physics as, in principal, it is so simple.  Simple enough that you have some hope of asking fundamental questions in a productive fashion.  But add a bit of complexity and the world rapidly becomes far too complex to understand at a fundamental level.  There may be levels of possible understanding that describe it that, if you are sufficiently clever, allow you identify those techniques that will work for your organization.

 

The term "data" is highly contextual - so much that I try not to use it.  It isn't a fundamental piece of information, but rather is a cloud of information surrounding the core of what you think it is.  Some of this cloud may be obvious and some may be hidden.  As an example consider this well-known description of an email problem.  The system is relatively simple (I've written successful email gateways so they must be simple), but the description assumes you have a bit of familiarity with the subject.  Feel free to skip over it if your eyes glaze over - the point is there was an obscure condition that eluded detection resulting in some puzzling behavior.

 

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible
    task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.  "A
little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn't display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics.  "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500
miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily.  "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email.  Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that.  But why didn't you
call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now."  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands.  "When did this start?  A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that
time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along.  It wasn't April Fool's Day.  I tried
to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.  This
was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own
account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond,
and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed.
Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of
the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
down in tears.

Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly
normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn't been
altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.  At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most
of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long
configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the
sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding
no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the
remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
        * 558.84719
        / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

 

 

This example is really easy - it involved a well-defined system built around logical constructs.¹  Understanding humans and human behavior is much more difficult and anyone who says they can is naïve and/or lying.  Data mining may give candidate shards of information, but they are highly contextual and you must know the steps used to gather, filter and process the information and how reliable they are.  You had damn well know the errors and error propagation.  And even then the resulting information may not be terribly useful as human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system.

 

It is more important to develop a deep understanding of what you need to know.  You must learn what it is you need to know and how to get a "good enough" approximation.  For companies like Apple, Pixar, Trader Joe's, and Lululemon success doesn't rest on data mining, but on other techniques.  It is likely data mining techniques wouldn't be terrible useful to these companies for their current products.  It may be that Apple finds some great uses as Siri builds out, but for now great design doesn't rest on it.

 

I suspect the companies successful with data mining will be vendors who sell to the masses and don't really care about the results as long as the money keeps coming in along with a few companies who have learned there is a solid niche for them and can ask the right questions to know the information produced is robust enough to make a material difference in their bottom line.  I suspect the later group will be made up with companies who are indeed ready to learn.

_________

I'm very proud of Jheri!  Here is the ice cream I'll make in her honor defrosting some wild blueberries that were picked last Summer at peak season.  I'll follow it with a quick recipe for something really simple.

The photo is of Colleen enjoying the same recipe on one of her visits.  You always give the dasher to the honored guest.

There are many ways to make ice cream - I use a simple refrigerated freezer that gets reasonably cold.  Liquid nitrogren techniques are even better if you have access.  Drop me a note if you are interested.  Also I have more than a few great ice cream recipes from years of experimentation starting with Steve in the dorm basement at Stony Brook.  We literally wore out three freezers during our experiments.

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

       Ingredients

           

        (all ingredients should be very fresh)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs 

° 1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

Technique

• toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

• wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

• mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

• churn freeze and season if you can stand the wait - I usually just eat it immediately!

 

^{OK now the simple recipe.}

The Un-Egg Cream

Too simple to talk about ingredients or technique.  I like the idea of an egg cream and this is a simple variation.  Get some seltzer or, better yet, Cherry 7-Up chilled to near freezing.  Pour some milk based drink, properly chilled into the glass - perhaps 50 grams or so (about two ounces).  Pour about five or six times as much of the bubbly fluid on top and rapidly stir with a long thin spoon.  

Very refreshing.  My favorite combination is Sunkist Naturals Pina Colada Protein Smoothie and Cherry 7-Up (diet or regular ... diet is probably somewhat healthier)

^_______

¹ There is a class of computer "failures" that are, at their hearts, insufficiently understood systems.  Often "data" is the issue

the equal sign

=

 

Equations are profoundly simple in concept - two calculations (one of them may reduce to something trivial like a statement) that may seem quite unrelated that have the same meaning. The "=" sign makes the connection.  Oddly enough, even though mathematics is very old, the symbol has been around for less than 500 years.  

To avoide the deiouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or gemowe lines of one lengthe: =, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle. 

Robert Recorde coined it as a shorthand for "is equal to" when he wrote The Whetstone of Witte in 1557.  The OED says gemowe means something like twin.  It proved useful and stuck.

 

In math the meaning of the equal sign is usually rigorous.  In science and many other disciplines it is often more nuanced whether we appreciate it or not.

 

One of the profoundly curious things about Nature is that so much of her can be approximately described using the language of mathematics.  A theory is often stated as a formula and extensions are sometimes made using rigorous mathematical extensions that turn out to describe something previously unseen.  At the very least these formulae give a powerful mechanism for playing with Nature and trying to understand a bit more deeply.  

 

It is dangerous to become too enamored with these relationships as they can fall apart when you are in new territory or if you are in a bit past your own understanding.  In fact this can be precisely where life gets interesting.  You think your measurement of something will give a certain result, but a careful experiment gives a slightly different result. No one has ever made a measurement quite this carefully.  You suspect something is wrong with your experimental apparatus or the steps you used to process the calculation and painstakingly eliminate any potential mistake.  At some point you become convinced that your result is correct and submit your result for peer review.  Ultimately the piece is published and the world takes notice and attempts to replicate your result. When they do it is time to recognize we need a richer description. Theorists may have constructions that immediately work or there may be nothing for years.  You have learned something about Nature at a more fundamental level than anyone else.  It can be an electric moment - the profound discoveries in science are not "aha!" moments, but rather usually begin with "that's odd..."

 

Imagine the discoveries you would make if your measurement tool had been a black and white camera and you suddenly were able to see the world in color.

 

This is why  improved tools that allow you to measure Nature in previously unexplored areas and at better accuracy are important.  Our senses, which turn out to be much more powerful than those of most animals, turn out to have dramatic limits.  Hearing only gives access to a tiny portion of the world of acoustic sound, our vision only explores a tiny section of the electromagnetic spectrum 

 

But the old equation still works for any measurement less accurate than yours and it still may be very useful to people.  You may only be thinking at the leading edge preferring the delightful ignorance you have just uncovered, but most of the rest of the world may be built on the earlier theory.  

 

Many of us build models of one type or another.  It is centrally important to construct an appropriate model.  It may be simple or complex, but it should be appropriate.  There are times when what you are interested in may be too difficult to measure, but a simple model may allow you to easily set an upper and/or lower limit that gives you insight.  And you have to avoid bias and not wed yourself to a model or the conclusion that an inappropriate model or calculation might give.¹  Unless you are doing math it is critical to remember that the sweet little notation that Mr Recorde gave us may only give an approximation and you really need to calculate a confidence level to make your result strictly accurate.

 

Our models usually don't need to be perfect, but they are an important mechanism to find answers and sometimes a bit of insight.  But remember that a they are never perfect representations and learn where they break down.  So much of what we do is really grey rather than black and white.

 

A Danish friend who happens to be a great Lego fan pointed out this fascinating Marvin Minsky interview where he speculates that mechanical engineers who grew up with legos may be more limited than those who grew up with Tinker Toys. 

 

But Minsky's point is valid even if he said it in jest.  Some models provide a richer insight into how the world works than others.  Playing with a diverse set of models can be enormously important.

_______

¹ Biases are very common.  Recently there was a lot of speculation on the cause for a decrease in miles driven in the US.  Many suggested it was caused by a change in how people between the ages of 18 and 30 relate to cars.  It turns out a more careful analysis shows this is only a small component, but so many people wanted to believe that youth are falling out of love with the automobile that they seized upon it.  In science there have been dramatic examples like the cold fusion debacle.  People wanted to believe it - so they did for awhile.  Some still cling to the belief more than twenty years later.

________

The photo is an Instagram photo by silverstar22b

probing ignorance a bit more deeply...

I'm not happy with the way science is usually taught in secondary school.  It is rendered boring - memorize a number of "facts" and either replay them on a test or use some recalled formulae to plug in a few numbers to find an answer.  It completely misses the fun of science and also something rather fundamental about how new knowledge is found and why, at least to a scientist, answers and fact aren't the real product - even though they may be useful and advance knowledge.  It also creates a view of science that has opened a divide between scientists and non-scientists - something that in a society that depends so much on science and technology is a serious disconnect and perhaps a danger.

 

As it happens a beautifully cultivated ignorance and questions is more fundamental to the forward motion of science. I suspect applying some of the techniques may be very important to other fields where "out of the box" creative thinking is required and I sometimes rely on it in my consulting practice. The recent post on ignorance brought some email reaction, so it makes sense to wade in a bit deeper..

 

The general notion of what a scientist does is to collect data (information is a better term) by observing and manipulating bits of the natural world by doing something called experiment.  There is a methodology - the scientific method - which is based on observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation , a new hypothesis and so on...  There is a sense of order, but that turns out to be far from the truth.  You experiment to learn something - ideally to discover something.

 

Discover, dis - cover, is the act of revealing.  What is revealed can be very beautiful and it often becomes a "fact" in text books and teaching, but what many consider the end product of science are known to be unreliable to the scientist.  Nothing is safe - nothing is above question.  Not even something like the absolute speed limit of the speed of light.¹  Scientists don't know things absolutely, but rather report how well it is known.  Newtonian mechanics turn out to be incorrect - but at the scale where humans live and observe everyday things it is more than accurate enough that we still routinely use it as a "good enough" descriptive model.  We know where it begins to fall apart and have made other discoveries to more accurately describe those areas - special and general relativity for example.  

 

In the 19th century it was believed the universe was permeated with with a luminiferous ether to allow a substance through which light could propagate.  It was the wrong path and, in 1907, Albert Michelson became the first American physicist to be splashed with the Swedish holy water for failing to observe the ether in his extremely clever measurements of the speed of light. 

 

Think about it for awhile - Michelson got the Nobel Prize for an experiment that didn't work.

 

Some would later describe the ether as the black cat physicists had been theorizing about, experimenting and trying to measure in a pitch black room for decade.  Literally hundreds of approaches and many many scientist years of effort.  Michelson somehow found the light switch and it became clear the ether didn't exist to a rather high degree of accuracy.  The confusion that resulted led to an entirely new line of questioning - several doors to new rooms, all pitch black with their own black cats, appeared with the light provided by Michelson.  A patent clerk who went by the name of Albert was pushed to a line of novel questions that gave us a fundamentally new understanding of the universe.  And even better he opened the way for many rich new questions - questions that were beyond our imagination until we saw a bit of the nature of his black cat.  

 

Sure we had learned something, but  it gave us a new appreciation for how much more ignorant of the universe we really were.  

 

We keep discovering and adding to this area we call knowledge and people often make practical use of these discoveries, but the meaningful product of science is not facts or knowledge, but rather the expansion of an informed and cultivated ignorance.²  

 

One of my mathematical heroes is Kurt Gödel.  Mathematicians had a sense that everything - at least everything in mathematics - was comprehensible and could be explained with math itself.  Gottfried Leibniz, one of the inventors of the calculus, tried to construct an alphabet of human thoughts that would allow you to take combinations of thoughts and form any idea just as letters can make words and words can make sentences.  A few hundred years later David Hilbert made an attempt to similarly code knowledge. 

 

The impressive achievement of Gödel was to show that all of this was impossible.  Gödel was a shy and quirky person - hardly anyone's candidate for a revolutionary - but he is incompleteness theorems rocked mathematics and physics.  I can't give a rich general level discussion of what he did, but at its core he showed an consistent system in math (like the whole numbers and the operations - like addition, multiplication and so on) can't be complete and consistent.³ This may seem to be a depressing notion - finding a fundamental limit in mathematics, but rather it opened an incredibly rich source of new questions to Gödel and others.  It is fair to say that unknowability and incompleteness led to questions, reasoning and discoveries that have impressively benefited computer science - and to think that computer science is fundamentally based on absolute and complete logic:-)

 

This ignorance - the recognition that we really don't know something as deeply as we thought we did - is a fundamental driver of science.    The problem of the unknoweable isn't a real obstacle, but is really just a serious of paths to deeper understanding.  Also, to a scientist, the explosion of information isn't terribly important either - at least not at a fundamental level.  The rich sources of discovery are more dependent on new questions that arise from cultivated ignorance.  Questions are the goal of science - it just happens to generate results (with attached confidence levels!) that have historically advanced civilization and cultivated ignorance is a necessary component of making the process move.  

 

It is ignorance rather than data that moves science along.

 

A very import and somewhat subtle point of doing science is that scientists use ignorance to work and the management of this ignorance is incredibly important.  Sometimes it is called the taste in picking and progressing with problems.  It is often chaotic with communication and collaboration often being extremely important.  At the leading edge it is often cross disciplinary.  I have a tendency to not be able to describe exactly what I do.  This is really common among scientists and the area they are currently working in is often shifting dynamically.  It is messy and may even seem inefficient, but it is a proven path to real discovery.

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¹ Which is why the recent neutrino experiment got so much attention.  People have been testing the limit for over a century and so far all of the results that suggest it can be violated, including the most recent, have turned out to be so flawed as to be invalid.  A good deal of pseudo-science is based on experimental "results" that are incorrect - they are often trivial, but sold to non-scientists as something absolute.

² The time gap between discovery and practical use can be very long.  Faraday thought his early work with electricity and magnetism would have no practical use. A practical use for general relativity seemed a crazy notion for fifty years, but it turns out to be a critical component of making the global positioning system work as accurately as it does.

³ Consistency is the characteristic that a system's rules will not  result in self contradictory statements.  Think of science fiction as a rich source of counter examples - when Captain Kirk defeats machine logic with simple logic puzzles.  Take a card and write "the other side of this card is true" on one side and "the statement on the other side of this card is false" and think about it for awhile:-)

At least two readers of this blog are mathematicians and my appologizes for the very rough high-level treatment of something that is very rich and deep.  If you are a student just study the work!  If you aren't technical I strongly recommend Rebecca Goldstein's book on the subject.

 

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Maple pecan pie - really good with vanilla ice cream or gelato!

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

° 240 grams/1 cup grade B maple syrup. Grade A or "fancy" may not be strong enough

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

° Place the chopped pecans in the unbaked pie shell. Whisk together the sugar, tapioca starch and salt in a medium sized bowl. Whisk in the maple syrup, cream and vanilla. Whisk in the eggs. Pour over the pecans.

°  Bake for 20 minutes and then turn the heat down to 350°F without opening the oven. Bake for an additional 30 minutes. Let pie cool at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving.

 

 

the delight of inflationary ignorance

Some night when it is clear enough to see a lot of stars look up and let your imagination wander.  Even if you don't know the constellations - perhaps especially if you don't know them - your mind starts assembling patterns.   Even though the background image is close to being random for this purpose, you find patterns.  For good and for bad this apophenia is deeply wired into our species.  It takes a lot of work to logically confront it and know when it can get us into trouble.  Often it is something to ignore.   Of course there are many types of information we shouldn't be ignorant of.

 

As I age one of the more delightful realizations is that my state of ignorance is not only intact, but is becoming sharper and more refined ..  it is slowly becoming something of a wisdom.

 

Most people think of ignorance as being unaware and unschooled, but there may be another way to look at it.  With the explosion of information that continues to accelerate, we have to be mindfully ignorant of most of it - even in areas we specialize in.  We can be conscious of our ignorance and use it to guide us.  

 

 Thoroughly conscious ignorance is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge

                               - James Clerk Maxwell

 

The richest questions I ask are not those that directly produce an answer, but rather a deeper set of questions and puzzles.  If science is asking an increasing number of questions and getting some results along the way a much larger product of the sport is a set of questions that is growing at an even faster rate.   We have to be ignorant of most of it, but this ignorance can be finely developed.   With practice one gets a sense of what are the new questions that are most ripe for asking.  This new level of questioning often involved connecting some dots and discovering new patterns that are newly emergent.  If we are deep enough with our questioning and are working in a rich set of questions there are times when our own questions can be perfectly unborrowed.  There are few delights that beautiful other than solving that original question and finding where it leads.

 

This creative form of selective ignorance and curiosity is a fantastic way to deal with our natural apophenia.  There are a lot of useful tools - curiosity, an open skepticism, a bit of statistics and logic and an education of what others have learned in your field and how they have come to learn it.  At some point you learn how to learn and the training wheels come off.  At that point you begin to realize how ignorant of the universse you are, but you see a pathway to find local areas that can be illuminated.

 

When I was a teenager I was under the impression that learning science involved learning facts to be recited on a test or used to calculate something.  At the same time two of my mentors were patiently helping me build tools that would get me to a place where I would realize that view is completely wrong and there was great sport in recognizing what you didn't know.

 

About the time I got my Ph.D. I began to realize the way to solve a problem was not to tally up what I knew about it, but rather to think about areas where I had no idea what was going on.  It lead to a delightful state of confusion for awhile, but when you get good at picking your problems you can often find challenges that have a shot at being answered.  These are the areas that produce the new and often richer questions that you - and perhaps no one else - has imagined.  

 

In the meantime the answers that come along the way can be terrifically useful.  They may not be what drives the person who originally discovered them, but they have done much to support and advance civilization.  Not a bad by product.

 

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

                                                 - Richard Feynman

 

This sort of approach works in many disciplines for uncovering fundamental problems that may have been elusive or unkown.  There are some similarities to how Jobs et. al. worked at Apple on clarifying the major issues.  It gets you beyond the textbooks and conventional knowledge.

 

But back to physics for a little fun...  these insights and new questions rose from many chains of questions taht led to new unimagined questions ... only by using a refined selective ignorance and relentless curiosity combined with connecting dots here and there is progress made.  (this, by the way, is how real science works - it is nothing like the Hollywood version)

 

tools for the mind

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

studying other weather systems...

If you want to learn more about how weather works on Earth, it is useful to study it on other planets ...

 

With a few others I've been spending a bit of time thinking about how to motivate people to respond to global warming and to "do the right thing" (whatever that is).   I've visited the problem before and can list some bad approaches, so some of time has been spent looking at how people deal with other issues.

 

One of them is obesity.  I'm familiar with some of the issues and have been interested in the energy flow of food and exercise, but the societal problem is significant and most top down public efforts to deal with it have been failures.   Most of the approaches are far too simplistic and seem to rely on trying to scare people.  Diets are difficult and mostly are failures if you look at results a year after the diet began.¹  Combine scare tactics with non-workable approaches and you have a bad recipe for change.  Thanks in large part to several friends who read this - Colleen, Jheri, Juliette and Sukie - I found an approach that works for one person.  It has left me with the sense that more global solutions will be very difficult demanding top down and grass root approaches.

 

It is understandable why people use the sensationalist approach, but there are a class of problems that don't respond.  Our wiring simply isn't well suited to long term efforts where change is subtle.  During this morning's rowing session I was going through some podcasts on the subject and came across a Yale Rudd Center interview of Samantha Thomas of Monash University. (mp3 - about 24 minutes - highly recommended if you are interested in this sort of thing).  She notes approaches need to be more positive in nature and current approaches are not just unworkable, but are often counterproductive. 

 

One of the learnings I've had over the past several years is people don't respond to number and the use of logic.  Such an approach may work with some and it is natural for anyone with a scientific background, but it won't sway most people and can be counterproductive.   It is also open to attack by pseudoscience and the ensuing argument can create a numbing cloud of confusion.  The pseudoscience tactic worked very well for the tobacco industry and it seems to be working well now.

 

A few years ago I gave a series of talks on the subject that mostly failed.  I think I could do a better job now, but probably not a great job.  A very useful book (although I'm not in complete agreement) is Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson.  Randy has a Ph.D. and had a tenured position in marine biology at UNH.  His midlife crises was to quit and become a Hollywood filmmaker.  His approach is to concentrate on messages that might communicate.  A fascinating book and very different from the standard sciencey approach.  A few others practice other interesting approaches - Neil deGrasse Tyson and E.O. Wilson for example.

 

For the time being I'm still looking around. A friend, Belinda Nnoka,  has just written a book on bullying - another interesting problem that certainly occurs with heavy people.  I've seen a draft and found it interesting how she breaks down a very complex problem and looks at grass root approaches to solving the problem - at least locally.  There are some similarities in some approaches used in weight loss and bullying.

 

Some of you have serious marketing chops.  If anyone has any interesting ideas, I'd love to listen ...  let's have a conversation.

 

But all of this is just mechanics - figuring out a way to begin to motivate people to do something about global warming or having a society become less obese.  The point of this note is the importance of studying other systems - those other worlds that happen to have weather systems that might spark a bit of insight.  It turns out you meet some interesting and passionate people and perhaps both of you gain something as a result.  It can be enormous fun.

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¹ Much has been written on this, but a great introduction is Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - the Myths and Realities of Weight Loss by Gina Kolata (one of the better science writers out there).  Most of the studies are too short term to see if approaches fail or not and most are funded by companies who are pushing a product.  This amounts to really bad science - failing for decades and still trying the same approach over and over.

 

from the big bang theory to how to teach understanding

I’m afraid I don’t follow television very much and only saw “The Big Bang Theory” recently at the insistence of a friend.  For those who are as unaware as I was it is largely about issues of social interaction with a mostly geekish and socially maladroit cast of characters who mostly work at Caltech.¹

 

The reason I was asked to watch was to comment on the jokes and equations on the whiteboards.   They are real - although there are some pretty funny parodies on the boards at times.  The jargon is pretty good - they must have a physicist as a consultant. You can pretty much tell the subfield of physics or astronomy by looking at someone’s blackboard (note - slate blackboards are still common in physics departments) - it is sort of like a Rorschach test.

 

There are certainly people like that, but it isn’t common among the scientists I know.  You can find characters like that among the undergrads at a place like Caltech, but undergrads everywhere tend to be immature.  This isn’t what you would find among professors.

 

So even though the show is supposedly about an older crowd, it got me thinking about physics undergrads and that lead to thinking about education again.

 

The lecture as a mechanism for teaching is broken.  It goes back to the days when books were scarce and often is little more than a mechanical transcription from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notebook.  But it can be seductive for the lecturer and I’ve fallen into that trap.  The students often seem to be paying attention and very few complain - after all - you are grading them. 

 

But lecturing isn’t very good at teaching deep concepts.

 

A few years ago I gave a large public lecture on global warming to a few mixed audiences.  Although not as polished, most of it was similar to Al Gore’s style - a superficial deluge of facts and figures.  There were some great Q&A sessions afterwards, but they were mostly unconnected with the talk.  They did seem to center on a short two minute section where I managed to engage people’s minds - in my mind almost a throwaway piece of filler that was self obvious.

 

What I realize in retrospect is that piece was self-obvious -- to a physicist who has been thinking about the subject for much of his life.  It caused me to wonder how much non-majors had learned about math or physics - even at the good Ivy League schools.  Worse - it made me wonder how much I had learned in courses outside my major and passion.

 

I tried a little experiment.  As past of my consulting I found myself talking with many CTOs.  Most of them had backgrounds in computer science, although there were some from biology and the physical sciences.  In talking with them I would subtly check to see if they knew the difference between energy and power.  Out of nine CTOs only two seemed to and both had science Ph.D.s.

 

At the time I was trying to learn a bit about the physics of volleyball to better appreciate the passion of a friend who was a professional beach volleyball player at the time.  In the process I found a nice metaphor to talk about energy and power and she quickly mastered enough of it that she understood more than most of the CTOs.  

 

By then I recognized the problem of knowing too much physics to engage an audience of more than one person who was interesting in learning about energy.  To really learn something you have to play around with and even struggle with ideas.  You test them, throw out some, modify others and - well - understand it.  I talked my athlete friend into co-authoring a book on how we use energy.

 

The project produced a few drafts in our copious spare time, but I’m not a writer and it is now on hold.  She did manage to come up with some great insight in how people think about some of these things and, in turn, that led me to bits of insight.  

 

Physics is a lovely area to consider this question of rote and shallow learning vs understanding and most of us have a view of the how the world works that we have acquired by simply living.  Many of these mental models are good enough to get by with, but turn out to be incorrect under close examination.  You can sort out what is understood and what isn’t. 

 

Others have realized this and have done great work.  My favorite is Eric Mazur of Harvard.  He discovered that his classes were getting good grades and enjoying his lectures, but they were failing to understand the concept.  He experimented and introduced some remarkable changes.  

 

A few days ago I sent a link to a video of Eric talking about his learnings to a few friends who are interesting in the process of education.  Kelly noted her favorite part was when he said “You can forget facts, but you cannot forget understanding”

 

This is great stuff and, even though it isn’t short anyone who is interested in education should watch it. 

 

I'm still puzzled,worried and curious about this at several levels and am very interested in discussions.

 

Hopefully my talks are a bit better now and perhaps there will be enough inspiration to finish the energy book at some point - at the moment I lack the understanding of how to make it good enough that people will actually understand what is being said.  That is a very difficult challenge.  

 

I'm left with a huge hole in my education - areas where my understanding is very shallow.   But I've learned how to learn and understand, so I have the tools to tackle these areas as I have the time, need and curiosity to do so.  

 

At the moment I'm taking a break from such an attack.  I give myself the gift of two weeks of time at the beginning of the year to look into something without interruptions. These tend to be new areas for me and it is great fun.  You can't do much in a hundred hours or so, but at least you get to the point where you can form some intelligent questions and that is a proper beginning.

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¹ Caltech is a reasonably intense place.  MIT is sometimes referred to as "that place where they do humanities..."

 

 

 

images that speak

Ten days ago I was talking with Dave and the subject of amateur astronomy and telescopes came up.  This happens to be something I know a bit about as I built my first ‘scope as a teenager and have been fascinated by astronomy for most of my life.  I promised to put together some notes and will probably post them here as this isn’t the first time I’ve been been asked for recommendations 

 

On the train ride back from seeing him I started thinking about the two types of serious amateur astronomers I know - those who love the telescopes and those who love the sky.  Of course these mix, but for some the end passion is the hardware and they tend to build or buy the best they can afford.

 

When it comes to nature I’m mostly in the other camp. I love to observe.  There are times when what you want to look at is difficult to see without some sort of aid and then I take an interest in the tool and there is the serendipity of using a tool to see the world in new way, but observation comes first.

 

About a week later Om posted a note on his blog asking for advice on photography.  His blog is popular and several people offered comments ranging from mechanical to how to “see” images.  It took me back a dozen or so years...

 

I was in a four floor studio in Manhattan’s Little Italy directing a fashion shoot.¹   The photographer was a well-know fashion photographer - I was more than a bit intimidated by his reputation.  He wanted to see my “book” - some samples of my editorial work.  This was all Photoshop work - image manipulation had been a hobby of mine dating to pre-Photoshop days.   To my surprise he approved and accepted me as a peer. Walking to a bookshelf he pulled down one of his “books”..  As I paged through I was struck by how many of the images I knew.  Iconic fashion photos that I recognized even though fashion was far from a core interest.

 

I was tempted to pull out my camera and photograph him at work.  Fortunately he said something that prevented me from doing that.

 

He was testing the lighting with an old Polaroid camera.  He had the model stand for a few test images and shot in black and white.   After a half dozen images, each with some lighting changes, he pronounced he was ready and his assistant handed him a loaded Pentax 6 by 7cm medium format camera.

 

Even with the change from film to digital images medium format cameras are the standard used in commercial and editorial fashion.   They aren’t as small or flexible as a 35mm camera (or an equivalent DSLR these days), but they can still be handheld and the resolution can be excellent.

 

He and the model stumbled around for about fifteen minutes until they were both comfortable and understood each other.  She needed to have a sense of what to do and what she would look like.  She needed to understand the light as well as present him with a series of potential poses. His job was capturing the moments when she moved her body through the amazing.  It was dramatic when both of them synchronized with each other’s needs.  The shutter fired at a regular rhythm - they had both achieved a flow of sorts.

 

During the first wardrobe change I had some questions about his gear as most of it was exotic to me.  He told me a little story to move me towards something a bit more productive.

 

It seems years before he was on assignment for an important shoot for Vogue.  He had been flown to Fiji along with an art director and a few excellent models.  To his horror the trunks with his camera gear were lost.  There was little choice but to improvise.  He went to a store in the hotel and purchased a dozen or so Instamatic cameras and all the film the hotel store had and directed the models and his assistant to get as much film as they could find.  

 

The Kodak Instamatic was the ubiquitous cheap camera of the 60s and 70s - the camera you might give to a kid on his tenth birthday.  Fixed focus, a cheap lens and most had no settings.  Your choice was usually limited to the film cartridge - black and white or color.

 

But it was a camera and he was a photographer.

 

They spent two days shooting and went through about one hundred film cartridges.  He experimented a bit putting vaseline on some of the lenses to soften the image even more.  The strong constraints were a fantastic experience and focused him very strongly on rediscovering the subject and the story that was unfolding.

 

He showed me the photos that were published in Vogue - I instantly recognized them.  They were and are iconic images.

 

His epiphany - and what he wanted to share with me - was the camera is not as important as many people think.  

 

I had been prepared to bring out my camera and photograph him.  It was a then new Nikon N90S with some fancy zoom lenses and a lot of settings.  He was working with heavily worn and very manual cameras and only three fixed focus lenses.  He knew his tools - cameras, lighting, lenses and film - well enough that he wasn’t even using a light meter.  It struck me that bringing out my camera was silly so I focused on the work and hand and tried to observe and learn a bit.

 

We were looking for eight, maybe twelve, usable images for each of five clothing outfits to give me enough choice to tell a story. He and the model knew what they were doing and over 900 frames were exposed in the twelve hour session.  He would make a verbal comment when he thought something was great - mostly as part of working with the model. I marked those comments and all of the usable photos came from that subset.

 

The constraints of the shoot were strong, but he was used to working with constraints of many types and, with the help of a good model, some art was created.  

 

I’m not a great photographer by any means, but he and others who are offered some advice.  After awhile you realize the good ones are telling you the same thing.

 

° Learning is worth more than expensive gear. Once you have a basic camera you can learn how to see images.  Several hundred dollars budgeted towards a new lens might be better spent on a photography course or perhaps a ticket to some location that might inspire you.  

 

Part of this may be travel.  I was lucky enough to have grown up in a place is amazing physical beauty - that is if you went out and looked around a bit.  Jeri is also from that area and has shown me a few of her photos.  It is clear she has developed a good "eye" and sense of photography.  You can discover scenes around you wherever you are, but sometimes a trip gives you a bit of insight.

 

°  Don’t discount cheap point and shoots or the current crop of good smartphone cameras.  They allow you to take photos quickly without your being noticed. You can blend into the background and take shots that would be impossible with an expensive and physically large camera.  You can carry the point and shoot everywhere you go in case you notice something interesting.  The best camera in the world is the one you are carrying when an image presents itself.

 

° Constraints are important.  Very flexible and automatic cameras can make you lazy.  Giving yourself constraints to move yourself to a state where you have to think about the shot and try something new.  Using a fixed focus lens - otherwise called a “prime” - is a wonderful way to force creativity. Forcing yourself to a single aperture or shutter speed is also a great way to learn.

 

° Images are part of a story.  Observe, shoot and write.  When you can see a story the right sort of images will appear.  If you are shooting people try to see their story and have them tell it.  This is particularly important when you are working with people.

 

° I’m terrible at it, but shooting video - capturing audio, video and creating a story - is a powerful way to learn.  It is an area I need to spend more time with. Some of you (hi Juliette and Jheri) are very good still and video story tellers.  You certainly don’t need fancy gear to do this - perhaps a better microphone.  The video capability of your point and shoot is probably just fine.

 

° Learn how to edit.  Be critical and throw away the bad learning what has worked.  Shooting digital is very inexpensive.  Even the pros rarely get one good image for every hundred they shoot.  One National Geographic photographer told me he is happen for one great image in a thousand.

 

° Know when to just watch.  Years ago I traveled to a total solar eclipse.  There were a few hundred people, dozens of specially prepared telescopes and nearly everyone had a camera.  During the two or so minutes of totality most people were trying to get photos.  It was such a waste.  I’ve never seen a photo that captures the feeling of totality and there are thousands of photographers who are much better than me.  My learning was any time spent fooling around with a camera when nature is offering real drama is time wasted.  It is much better to just observe and be astounded by what you are seeing.  

 

Let the pros do their thing and look at their work later.  You need to observe a lot before you know anything about the story that is unfolding and some events are ephemeral and so well captured that experiencing the event directly is more powerful and teaches you more deeply.

 

° Give yourself some interesting challenges.²  Find a muse using your passions as a guide.  Spend a lot of time doing what you love.  Sometimes it makes sense to extend yourself and to shoot something that from a different point of view.  Learn what the world looks like with a from a different point of view in time or space or even the wavelength of light you are exposing.  Serendipity and discovery can happen.  

 

° Save the crutches for the end.  My sister and I both enjoy the digital editing phase - trying to add a bit to the photos we take to make art.  She’s much better at it than me, but it is a fantastic learning experience and gives me a better sense of images to take in the first place.  

 

There are some easy to use digital editing tools to spice up images.  They are a cheap way to get to the unusual and become old very quickly - in the end they are toys. Use them, but only after you have taken good images in the first place.  I would stick with more serious tools and learn the basics.³

 

In a nutshell I would say just learn how to observe.  Don’t be lazy and let your camera make it easy for you - give yourself constraints and you will learn how to observe.  Focus on trying to tell a story.  Don’t spend a lot on gear.  If you have a cheap point and shoot, you have enough to learn on and - if you are great - you could even publish iconic images in Vogue.  Critique your own work and learn from it.

 

If you have kids or young relatives encourage them to observe the world.  Even a 14 year old kid using a camera primative by the standards of today's point and shoots can take credible photos and learning how to do it can sharpen his or her observational skills.⁴

 

I’ll put together a telescope and microsope note soon for Dave and post it here for anyone else who may be interested.  Perhaps I can suggest a few directions and save some money.

 

 

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¹ Why I was doing this is a story a bit too long for here, but I go into it a bit in my TED^x talk.  It is remarkable what you can do if you just try things - people just sort of grant permission.

² This was taken about a decade ago from a very different point of view taken with a disposable Barbie's First Camera.  Some details are in the TED^x talk...

³ Pixelmator is an inexpensive starting point as is Photoshop Express.  Photoshop has a serious learning curve and is spendy, but can be wonderful if digital manipulation is your thing.

⁴ A rainbow in early June taken near my home in Montana when I was 14 with an extremely simple camera and scanned from a fading print.  I was only intent in capturing the double rainbow, but it appears I had learned a bit about composition by then.  If I had a smart camera that wasn't forcing me to be clever, perhaps I would have never learned these things.

 

 

change comes to cookbooks

This past week I found myself struggling with a technology that people have predicted is “just around the corner” for the past fifteen years.¹  While it has some limited usefulness, it will probably remain out of reach despite the wishes of its enthusiasts.  

 

At the same time it struck me that the cookbook is something that is undergoing enormous change.  A few widely available technologies - iPads and apps - have created a platform for a very inexpensive and useful sort of amateur education.

 

We probably have several hundred cookbooks. In the past year I’ve been buying some cooking applications for my iPhone and Sukie’s iPad.  The genre is still developing.  Mark Bittman has three applications that are not much more than conversions of his excellent existing books into searchable format that fits well on the iPhone’s screen.  They are extremely useful when I’m walking through the market and see some outstanding produce that is in need of inspiration.  I can quickly find recipes and pick up other ingredients while I’m at the store.  They are also cheap at about a quarter the price of his physical books.  More useful and less expensive is a good combination. Others have discovered this and his apps are in the million sales range.  Not bad for repurposing existing content.  It is a shame he doesn’t own the rights to his excellent The Minimalist series.  He created dozens of excellent videos that would be fantastic in the kitchen on an iPad.  The New York Times is missing an opportunity by not creating an app that would put this series where it is useful.  I'm hoping Mark is creating new video content on his own as he is a great teacher.

 

Mario Batali's app goes a bit further ...  He has a few recipes and the scope is much more limited than Mark Bittman's apps, but he has some polished videos showing technique.  It is aimed at the beginning cook, but is better than any television cooking show I’ve seen as it is usable in the kitchen and searchable - plus, like Bittman’s, you can use it for inspiration.

 

Other celebrity chefs have jumped on the bandwagon.  Jamie Oliver has an app for quick meals and Dorie Greenspan has a great baking techniques app.

 

The genre is still developing and cooking schools are filling a need - The Culinary Institute of America has a fine $50 app called the Professional Chef  that teaches some series technique with well produced videos.  It and an iPad may teach you much more than cooking lessons for the same price. You can also buy it in smaller bits - something useful to me as I don't eat meat.  

 

I’m aware of several very interesting app projects underway - connections to other cooks and authors are being investigated and applications along with applications that learn your interests and abilities.  Some have built in timers and recipe conversion calculators.  You can dream up a lot of other possibilities and many experiments are underway.  I expect dramatic change in the next year.

 

This is a type of book that just works better on a tablet or phone.  Some are going to be better for carrying around in the store and others - particularly those with video instruction - are going to be better in the kitchen.

 

A seriously good personal chef told me she has converted a few hundred of her recipes to pdf and has them, along with photos of many, on her iPad.  She also can easily calculate nutrition labels for what she makes using an inkjet printer in her truck for the final label.  She said it has fundamentally changed how she interacts with clients and has improved her business.  She's telling home cooks the two most important tools they should buy are a good chef's knife and an iPad.

 

Several do-it-yourself activities are more practical on an iPad than in printed form.  Some applications are appearing for home repair, dress making, crafts, photography, and probably much more.  For a modest amount of money any expert in some DIY field can contract with an app writer and a videographer and have a product.  There will probably be explosive growth.

 

At this point in time apps on tablets make more sense than direct Internet connections due to connectivity issues - plus there is a well established market.  This is a great example of a major change in education.  

 

Inexpensive and effective ongoing education for the motivated amateur.  How great is that?

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¹ 3d printing...  grrrr