omenti

a solar puzzle, 16 inch guns, and home repair

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ray was very patient and very careful

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Recipe corner

 

A simple avocado salad based on a recipe by Mark Bittman

 

Avocado Salad with Ginger Dressing.

Ingredients

 

° 85g rice vinegar

° 50g white granulated sugar

° 2 tbl minced peeled fresh ginger

° 2 avocados pitted peeled and seeded

° 75g chopped roaseted peanuts

° cilantro sprigs

 

Technique

 

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

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

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

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

 

forty three years

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

...

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

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

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

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

...

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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Recipe Corner

 

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

 

 

Grilled Broccoli

 

Ingredients

 

° 500 g sprouted broccoli (something over a pound)

° 1 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° salt and freshly ground black pepper

° tahini sauce (recipe follows)

° 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds

 

Technique

 

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

° toss the broccoli with the oil, salt and pepper

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

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

 

A quick tahini sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 50 g tahini paste

° 1/2 tbl honey

° 2 tsp lemon juice 

° small garlic clove peeled and smashed

 

Technique

 

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

 

mooning austin

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

 ---- tweet from Xeni yesterday

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

                ---- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

A la chandelle, la chèvre ressemble à une demoiselle ²

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme

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

 

Xeni made me think of Marvin the Robot

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

__________

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

² try this post for a translation and explanation

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Recipe corner

 

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

Grilled goat cheese sandwiches

Grilled figs stuff with goat cheese

 

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.

 

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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

 

 

why do some models endure even though they're wrong?

π = 3.14

room temperature = 72° F

an adult male needs 2,500 calories a day

an adult weighs 70 kilograms 

...

We live with approximations, but all to often we don't worry about when we require better precision.  3.14 for π works for simple tasks around the home - after all - it offers better than one percent accuracy, but 2,500 calories for an adult male is very crude and can cause havoc with dieting. The 70 kilogram rule of thumb for adult weight is equally crude, but many medications are dosed based on that approximation.  

 

Some nutrition experts argue that a calorie isn't a calorie confusing many who listen and often themselves.  Strictly defined a calorie is a calorie.  Physics works and energy is conserved any time it converts from one form to another, but you have to pay careful attention to the accounting.  More than a century ago it was recognized our bodies weren't completely efficient metabolizing food and careful measurement, by the standards of the day, were made.  It turned out that metabolism could liberate about four nutritional calories of energy from a gram of a carbohydrate or protein and about nine calories from a gram of fat.  This roughly accounted for the energy that was lost to us in the process, but roughly held across food types and people.  The problem of knowing how much usable energy was in a slice of bread or a bowl of ice cream was reduced to tallying up how many grams of carbohydrates, fats and proteins were present .¹

 

piece of cake...

 

It turns out there are several serious problems with this model.  The energy assignments for each main component are crude averages.  Additionally individual people absorb and metabolize food with different efficiencies and metabolic efficiency changes for a single person occur throughout life.²  When you look into the model a bit, you begin to wonder if it has any utility.

 

The trigger for this post was an article a reader sent.  From the Times of London:

 

Being short has always had its drawbacks. There’s the problem of the top shelf in the supermarket, the unflattering “short man” stereotype and the perils of running for the bus in heels. But things just got worse for Lilliputians — more precisely, they just got fatter.

According to a professor of numerical analysis at the University of Oxford, the formula used to calculate body mass index, is flawed in such a way that it makes tall people too fat and small people too thin.

...

 

Body Mass Index again... 

 

Like the assignment of caloric values to food types it has been around for more than a century and is know to be problematic.  Usually you see caveats like "athletes tend to have artificially high BMIs", but you rarely see a discussion of what went into the model.  That turns out to be interesting.

 

If you were to make a simple model that would address how people deviate from what might be an average weight you might start by noticing that people come in different heights, body shapes and weights.  For adults height doesn't change very much, but body shape and weight does.  A good place to start might be to notice that if you just scale up an object, its volume increases by the cube of any length you might measure on the original object.  If you have a cube that is a foot on each side and scale it up by a factor of two, you now have a larger cube that is two feet on a side.  The new cube can contain eight of the originals so its volume has increased from one to eight cubic feet.

 

Now assume you have a tall cylinder.  The same rule holds.  Scale it up by a factor of two and its height doubles as does its diameter.  Its new volume is eight times that of the original. You can pick any measure of length to compare scaled objects so long as their basic shape doesn't change.

 

People have very complicated shapes, but for an individual their height doesn't change so it makes sense to use it as the measurement that is cubed to calculate changes in volume.  

 

Given her height, Colleen is a good example.  She's about 23% taller than the average American woman.  If her shape was the same as someone who was of average height you might expect her to weight about 86% more. She doesn't and the fly in the ointment is her body shape is different.  This isn't terribly unexpected, but how do you account for different body shapes?

 

A quick and very simple approximation is to remember a person's height is fixed, but the shape can change.  If you divide their weight by the cube of their height the number will be larger if they are heavier and smaller if they are lighter.  It is a nice trick to quantify something about your change in shape without going and carefully measuring the volume.  

 

This is the rough idea behind BMI (also called the Quetelet Index) ...  divide a person's weight by a proxy for their volume.  The formula is 

BMI = mass/height²

where mass is measured in kilograms and height in meters.  Converting to English units the relation is 

BMI = 703 * weight/height²

with weight measured in pounds and height in inches...

 

But wait!  Didn't I just say you need to cube the length to get volume?

 

I visited the professor's site and noted his new BMI formula assumed the height was not squared or cubed, but raised to the 2.5 power and adjusted the final result by multiplying by a constant to make the new and old BMIs match for an adult of average height.     for mass in kilograms and height in meters....

new BMI = 1.3 * mass/height^2.5

He didn't have any measurements to go from and noted, while he was far from an expert, he felt this was a better estimate. It was not published as a formal result and he didn't claim it was a piece of serious analysis.

 

Plotting the new and old BMIs over a range of heights for a weight of 175 pounds you notice that the new BMI is lower than the old one for tall adults and higher for short adults.  I picked the weight because if I weighed that I would be average under the new model and overweight with the old one - the difference is nearly a one point change.  

 

The professor did note new BMIs would change for short and tall people.   Somehow a reporter saw the piece and believed it was a serious replacement for BMI.   There must have been no little or no fact checking as it led to the dramatic headline and a bad model became widely reported.  Too many people in the chain had no idea what BMI was...

 

It turns out analyses based on real data from large distributions of people suggest a good approximation to use in the model for adults is the square of the height.  For young children the exponent is between 2.5 and 2.8.  

 

The BMI model is ugly - a person with a technical background looks at it, sees the square, and thinks "area" until they look a bit more deeply and understand what the model really is.³  

 

It almost seems too messy to use, but if you are comparing one population to a similar population it can be a useful tool.  More accurate tools exist, but they are expensive and time consuming.  It would be too impractical to use the better estimates, but gathering BMIs is trivial- just weigh and measure people.  Armed with those numbers you can look at serious health issues like changes in obesity levels in a country. 

 

The connection with BMI and health problems is well established at very high BMIs, but less so in the overweight range and that presents a major problem for specialists and family physicians.  While the measurement has considerable utility, rigid predictions may not apply in your case.  A clear case where understanding what the measurement is and the domain where it is useful.

 

The same is true with nutritional calories (or ANUs).  Going by the textbook may result in dietary guidance that doesn't work for you, but if you establish a baseline and recognizing the thing you might call a calorie really isn't a proper unit of energy, you can create guidance for yourself that can be very robust.

 

There are two messages.  

 

° Models and approximations have their limits!  It is best to understand them in detail before using them for anything important.  In both of these cases the models and approximations are too simplistic and are very domain dependent.  

It is very easy to get cut by Occam's razor:-)

 

° Be very skeptical of science reporting in the popular press.  From climate change to BMI it is best to look at what the experts say.  

__________

¹ This is a simplification of the approximation.  Alcohols and a few other components appear in the model.  Here is an earlier post on the subject.

² When Colleen and I were sorting out how to communicate with this our working term was to reliable the nutritional calorie as an approximate nutritional unit or ANU. We never came up with a clever name, so if there are any suggestions.

If you have been heavy and lose weight, your metabolism compensates by becoming more efficient.  It doesn't seem fair, but it is common that someone who was one heavy must eat less food than if they had never been overweight if they want to avoid weight gain.  This feature of humans prevents keeps many dieters from long term success and help to fuel the diet industry.

³ The model is far from perfect and your composition also changes as you gain or lose weight.  Athletes have a much higher percentage of muscle, which tends to be dense.  Different ethnic groups have different exponents.  The exponent changes a bit with height, and so on... 

⁴ Other methods of measuring things like body fat percentages are expensive and time consuming at the required levels of accuracy

__________

Recipe corner

 

It is Winter in the Northern Hemisphere and many of us have had, or will soon get snow.  Assuming it is under 20° F and your snow is new-fallen and very clean, why not snow ice cream?   I've made this several times - you have to adjust the recipe to the temperature and moisture in the snow, but kids can have fun with it.  It is usually a bit slushy, but fun to make.    I offer two recipes - both depend on the type of snow you're having so you may want to try half batches until you get the hang of it.

 

Fresh Snow Ice Cream

Ingredients

 

° 6 to 10 cups of new fallen snow (depending on moisture content)

° 1 can (14 oz) of sweetened condensed milk chilled to near freezing

° 1 - 2 tbl maple syrup and/or 1 tsp vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° Put the snow in a large bowl that has been left outside to chill below freezing

° and the condensed milk and flavorings, mix with a big spoon

° serve in chilled bowls and eat immediately!

 

 

Rich Snow Ice Cream

Ingredients

 

° new fallen snow (depending on moisture content)

° 2 pasteurized eggs

° 2 cups of heavy cream or a half and half mixture of cream and whole milk or just whole milk - I've done all three, so it is between you and your cardiologist.

° 1-1/2 cups white sugar

° 3 tbl vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° Beat the eggs in a large bowl, mix in cream, sugar and vanilla  (it helps of the milk and sugar are pre-chilled to nearly freezing)

° add enough fresh snow for a good consistency and mix with a really big spoon

° serve in chilled bowls and eat immediately!

 

 

probing your "failures" a bit more deeply

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

° a magnet always has north and south poles

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

° an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

One of Feynman's better observations was

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

__________

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

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

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

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

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

__________

before the recipe, an image to fire your imagination

Allegory of Winter

Ambrogio Lorenzetti  c.1338-1340

 

__________

 

Recipe Corner 

 

A lassi as delicious as it is inauthentic

 

A Rich Seasonal Mango "Lassi"

 

Ingredients 

 

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

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

 

Technique

 

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

° top with toasted pistachios or sliced almonds (optional)

 

 

books and challenges

With this time of year there is a bit of reflection.  A few readers asked for my current book list and I sent out a note to several regular readers who tend to be interested in such things.  Now that many of the holidays have come some of you may be in a position where you are looking for a gift for yourself...

 

A few readers asked what I've been reading.  I read a lot, but my preference is to work on projects with friends.  Sadly this has been mostly a readying year.  But some of the books have been good.  And as the year winds down a jewel emerged that - at least for me - was above the rest.

A few weeks ago I was sent a preprint of The Lost Carving by David Esterly  - a really fine piece of work on making and doing it well.  He is a gifted writer - a real pleasure to read prose like this.  Up until then I would have recommended Sean Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe to non-physicists as a nice current view of the standard model. There are richer books on the subject, but this one is up to date and, with the discoveries at CERN this past year, being up to date makes all the difference.  

It isn't new, but for those who are trying to get a better handle on energy and how humanity relates to it I think the best non-technical book on the subject is David MacKay's Sustainable Energy.  An area that is extremely difficult to summarize at a good enough popular level, he comes closest.  It also may be our most pressing fundamental problem, so a deeper background for the general public is useful.

My favorite book that aids creativity isn't a book, but rather an iPad program - the application Paper.  Completely delightful, but i recommend getting all of the brushes.  The caveat is you have to like - or at least be open to sketching.  This may have one of the best computational user experiences I've seen - but these still are lacking compared to a good set of pencils and a high quality pad of paper. There has been some excellent progress on an iPad program that helps inspire musical thinking.  I'm poorly grounded here, but am spending some time with those who are deeply immersed thinking about, and experimenting with, what it takes to help people think in this space by routing around the conventional education path.

And on education I keep getting asked what computer language should my kid be learning.  Usually - "what book or online course should they use" ...  I have to note that although I've spent a good deal of my life programming, it is a tool rather than a passion and I prefer not to do it.  I have worked with some people who are amazing at the art. Like the fine art and writing there are individuals who are simply so much better at it than anyone else that their work can bring change.  I was lucky enough to have worked with four people at this level and count one as a very close friend.  With that in mind, the "wisdom" I offer is the language isn't important.  Logic and clear thinking is.  I would recommend kids at the high school level study some formal logic first and ideally pick up a bit of a human language that has a similar, but different structure than English - Latin would be ideal. Alternatively play a musical instrument - musicians seem to take to programming naturally.    I see people entering college with backgrounds in Java, Ruby, Basic (yikes!) and so on … but they also picked up a large number of bad habits that need to be unlearned.  When the time comes to learn a language I recommend something that gets you into what programming is rather than the language.  One of the best books on the subject is by a friend (I have to note this as it is a source of bias) - Bjarne Stroustrup's Programming Principles and Practice Using C++.  I've seen 10th graders who *really* want to learn use this successfully and note that people coming at the subject freshly, end up as better programmers than those who come at it with a lot of middle and high school programming experience.  This book does demand serious study - anything less will lead to failure.

Over the holidays I plan to make a tiny dent in some papers I've been meaning to read that are outside my field(s).  Then, on the 29^th, I make the decision on what I'll spend a couple of weeks of study on to get a better sense of the problem space.  That fortnight of study is my gift to myself every year - one that my first director at Bell Labs suggested as a way to become a bit more open to creative thought.  It doesn't generate the serendipity that crazy projects with friends does, but helps with a better grounding on what is happening.

happy holidays to you!

 

There is this issue of why should we be doing something - what is important to us at some deeper level?  What should we be doing as individuals?  Here is a nice piece by Neil deGrasse Tyson 

 

I have an enormous respect for Neil and the work he does as the best cheerleader for science.  I do have some issues with bits of his message, but understand were he is coming from.  It is great to have an environment, unlike the current state of American politics, where you can have great admiration for someone and simultaneously agree and disagree with them.

 

We agree on the need for grand challenges and much better science education.  Exploration has been a huge driver, but so are other challenges.  We need to better understand our relationship with Nature as well as our use of resources.  It is easy to draft a list of a dozen worthy grand challenges, but there is little will.  

 

Neil believes the best challenge is manned spaceflight and, although I think that is an interesting area, I have to disagree.  There are any number of deep challenges facing society that not only need to be attacked, but are large enough that serendipity is likely.  Neil believes that manned spaceflight - something like a mission to Mars - would ignite the imaginations of kids in America and inspire them into STEM career tracks.  I'd be delighted if he is right, but I just don't see it and there would be real problems mustering the political will.

 

I'm frustrated to see so much human energy and creativity go into making it easier for people to consume and to be entertained.  There is much larger game that isn't receiving enough attention.  And it is also frustrating to look at the state of education in America - a country with an enormous gap between those who are numerate and have a basic literacy in science and those who don't.¹  Not to mention there are some extremely serious problems facing us including some that may lead to change that is almost certainly terrible for our children and grandchildren (and us if we are under 40 or so)...

 

I certainly don't have any answers ...  a lot of untested speculation, but nothing concrete

 

Consider this a challenge for you to ponder during your spare time this holiday season.  What are the challenges that can inspire society enough to change everything and are possible and achievable?  What are the challenges that would fundamentally change education?  What would make people welcome such a challenge?

__________

¹ American STEM focused education is far too narrow.  To get at creativity we need to add the arts and change the approach.  Way to much to talk about.  Currently I think Finland has the best model, but I don't see an easy path to make real improvements here.  Some of you are experts in the area and are doing great work.  Such an important area for focus...

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Since many of us are in a sugar induced stupor from the holidays, here is a delicious and simple soup that takes advantage of produce that is seasonal.  As with most soups the amounts shown are just a starting point.

 

Apple Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 25g butter

° 1 tablespoon olive oil

° 2 medium onions, peeled and diced

° 600g parsnips, cut into inchish pieces

° 2 garlic cloves, crushed

° 600g tart cooking apples peeled, cored, and cut into chunks (I like Bramleys if I can find them)

° 450g vegetable stock

° 150g milk  (it works ok with fat free, but is *really* good with whole milk)

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

 

Technique

 

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

° Add the garlic and apples and cook for 3 minutes more, stirring constantly

° Add the stock and bring to the boil. Now reduce the heat and simmer 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 until smooth.  I like to use an immersion blending stick, but regular blenders work too

 

 

Stir in the milk, adding a little extra if required. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

 

_____

I'm a vegetarian and generally don't miss meat - I'm not attracted to the "fake" meats as too many vegetarian and vegan dishes are wonderful by themselves.  But there are a few flavors I do miss.  Here is one with fake bacon strips.  The amounts aren't critical, so I just used measuring cups rather than weighing

 

Maple Roasted Sweet Potatoes

 

Ingredients

 

° 4 average sized sweet potatoes peeled and diced

° 1/4 c olive oil

° 1/4 tsp non-iodized sea salt 

° a box of Morningstar Farms "bacon" strips

° 1 medium onion, chopped

° 2 large Gayla apples, diced

° 1/4 c Grade B Maple Syrup (you'll want something robust)

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 425 ºF

° Toss sweet potatoes with olive oil and salt, put in a roasting pan and bake for 20 minutes.

° Sauté bacon over medium heat and add onions once the bacon has begun to render its fat.  Continue cooking until bacon begins to become crisp and onions are translucent.

° Throw in the apples and continue to cook for a couple of minutes.

° Add roasted sweet potatoes cook away until potatoes begin to become soft - about five minutes for me.

° Almost there! - toss with maple syrup and serve.

 

feeding your phone m&ms

Many of us who had long term (over a week) power outages during superstorm Sandy and the Nor'easter that followed ran out of batteries, candles, lacked electricity to run natural gas furnace fans, had problems charging phones and laptops, lost refrigerated food and ate cold food.   Having some sort of locally generated power would be nice, but gasoline fueled generators are loud, inefficient and handling gasoline causes more than a few fires.

 

Some of the items mentioned have very small power requirements - often just a few watts.  Since a person can easily produce 30 to 100 watts of power, the thought of using a small generator comes to mind.  

 

In the early 90s a friend and her husband set up a small DC generator on a bike for their kids so they could watch the Olympics on a small black and white TV.  It was crude, but seemed to capture the imagination of everyone who heard about it.  People would then ask about how much it would cost to build one and gave up on the idea.  These days you can buy small units for a few hundred to about a thousand dollars.  Anyone who is in reasonable shape should be able to produce about 100 watts for hour long periods.  You could easily charge several cellphones along with a laptop, but running your furnace fan would be a bit beyond what your muscles could provide.   Of course electricity is an ephemeral form of energy and you need a battery to store it unless you are directly powering something.

 

On the smaller scale where you are looking to replace C and D cells, people sometimes have hand powered mechanical units.  Some of these store energy in springs, but that turns out to be extremely inefficient. I haven't played with this unit, but it has a usb port to charge your phone and a small 200mAH battery pack so you can crank away and store a charge.  

The power from the generator is very small - probably under a half watt as the specs say you can get about 30 seconds of phone use with a minute of cranking.  Filling the battery (about 10 watt hours) would take quit a bit of work and wouldn't be fun.  Our legs are much stronger than our hands and don't tire as quickly, plus turning energy released from you metabolism into mechanical work is usually a bit under 20% efficient - which is why you get hot during physical labor...

 

But a single M&M has about 3.4 watt-hours of energy.¹  Hydrocarbon based fuels - and much of our food is just that - have energy densities on the order of a hundred times greater than batteries.²  Wouldn't it be great if we could just stuff a few M&Ms in our phones or laptops and be done with it?  Our bodies are fuel cells that convert food into mechanical energy, a bit of electrical energy, heat and other forms of chemical energy. It is possible to build fuel cells that convert hydrocarbons into electricity, but so far they are too large and expensive to find use in phones or laptops.  But someday ...

 

But what to do during a power outage?

 

My experience is that a furnace fan to move the heat from our natural gas furnace into the house would be awfully nice, but ours averages about 100 watts on a cold Winter day and my rowing only gives 6 to 8 watts.³  Since most of our energy is turned into heat a nice approach would be to invite a large number of people over for a party.  Each person gives off about 100 watts and if you could have them dance or commit some other form of exercise you might be able to raise the room temperature to a comfortable level.

 

The alternative you use is local heat and insulation.  During the day you sit in the sunlight and wear a sweater.  When it is darker you wear several sweaters or a down coat. You cover all of the windows to keep whatever heat you have. And you suffer a bit.  The Summer is worse as cooling takes more energy than heating for a similar size temperature change.

 

Rethinking the electrical grid would be nice.  We have underground power in our part of town, but it is fed by higher voltage lines that run through a wooded area.  The infrastructure is over 50 years old and tends to be problematic.  In the past two years we've only had electricity 97% of the time and only a bit over 98% over the past five^.4  Electricity is something you really want with yearly up-times minimally at 99.9% and downtimes no longer than a half hour at a time.⁵

 

But assuming you can deal with the heat and lack of refrigeration, the next items are lighting and communication. For some communication is more important than heating.  This last outage destroyed cellphone use for nearly twelve hours.  It turns out our cable modem based phone was dead too - we had thought of that as a lifeline and need to re-think.⁶  A bike generator could supply some efficient lighting or rechargeable lamps, charge your laptop and keep your Internet modem running.

 

While it might seem nice to have a "smart grid", that isn't coming any time soon and it probably doesn't make sense to push it immediately.⁷  What needs to be pushed in the short term, and something that broke badly was the cellphone infrastructure.  These should have the ability to run for extended periods by themselves.  In areas like ours a week isn't unthinkable (you would want battery and a fuel powered generator).

 

I would tend to stay away from the little hand generators as they only do a limited job.  You can't supply a lot of power over a long time with your hand and these devices tend to be very inefficient to boot.  Apart from a serious stationary bike based generator and storage battery I would recommend batteries  Get lanterns and flashlights that use the largest cells normally available - usually alkaline D cells.  Another option is to use disposable lithium batteries as they have greater energy densities than alkalines and have much better power densities.   While expensive, they often can be stored for a decade and still provide good performance. You can get a cheap battery case and wire an old usb cable to charge your phone for a visit to Radio Shack and a couple of bucks.  Commercial disposable battery chargers for phones run $10 to $25.  These are going to be much better than $75 to $100 rechargeable external battery packs over the long haul!

 

If you only see outages up to a few hours get an uninterruptible power supply for your computer and modem (one unit can easily power both).  There are a lot of cheap units that don't work very well (their batteries need to be replaced once every two years), so I'd spend a bit of money if connectivity is important.  Any rechargeable solution needs to be tested at least twice a year.  

 

In any event it makes sense for many of us to prepare.  The frequency of large storms - even what used to be 100 or even 1,000 year events - will increase with climate change and our infrastructure isn't exactly robust.  One of those external costs associated with burning an excessive amount of fossil fuel...

 

And finally I should stress the experience wasn't entirely negative.  While sub 50° house temperatures towards the end were not comfortable, there was a lot of human good will everywhere - from the restaurants that gave away food or would deal with IOUs, to neighbors sharing rides and food, to the story telling with friends and family and a few beautifully clear dark nights that you rarely see in a densely populated area.  I also was able to spend a lot of time away from regular communication just thinking and reading. That was a real treat.  As a result we've instituted a couple of hours of zero electronic communication every night. So far it is great.

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¹ Guess how I found out?  A serving of plain chocolate M&M's weighs 42 grams and has 210 Calories.  I counted 122 in a 420g pile - about 3.44 Calories per M&M.

² An M&M has an energy density of 5 nutritional Calories per gram - about 5.8 kW-hours per kilogram or 20.9 megajoules per kilogram.  (Calories, watts and joules are all just units of energy and one can easily convert to whatever is most appropriate for a calculation).  Carbohydrates (sugars) average about 17 MJ/kg, fat about 37, protein about 16.8, an average Li-ion battery is about 0.7, a lead acid battery about 0.1, gasoline is about 46. 

³ We have a 560 watt electric motor running the blower.  Our house is only 1100 sq ft and we average about 2 kW-hr of fan use per day in January.  There is no way I could supply enough power to run the motor directly, but I could if I used a battery.  I can supply about 150 to 200 watt-hours during my exercise sessions, but that leaves me spent. A small generator and mechanical transmission is probably 80% efficient.  Assuming charging is nearly 100% efficient I would need 2500 watt-hours of rowing a day.  That is more than an order of magnitude more than I can supply.  

⁴ In the past 24 months we were without power for 22 days spread over three major storms in roughly equal amounts.  Two times in cold weather, once in very hot weather. In the past 5 years we've been down 29 days for 98.4% uptime.  

⁵ A 99.9% uptime gives the utility 525 minutes of outage a year - a bit under 9 hours ...  99.99% is a bit less than 53 minutes.

⁶ When IP telephony was proposed for cable modems it was assumed that phone ready modems would have backup batteries.  The requirement was dropped by the FCC, but units have optional batteries.  We assumed ours had a battery, but of course it didn't so all of our lines were dead until we got a bit of cell service.

⁷ Smart grid is a somewhat nebulous term with too many meanings.  The general concept gives something that should be much more robust in immediate storm recovery, but the standards to get there aren't solid yet and this is very expensive infrastructure.  There are some areas where it makes sense to deploy developing technology as the problems that are solved are immediate and huge - climate change comes to mind.  Other areas require more study and thought. In five years to a decade we should be at a point where robust deployments can take place.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Two seasonal items - something really quick and easy for Thanksgiving that is a nice change from the traditional cranberry sauce and a neat side dish with celeriac.

 

Thanksgiving Cranberry-Blueberry Sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 12 oz cranberries, fresh or frozen

° 3/4 cup water

° 1 cup white granulated sugar

° 8-oz blueberries

° 2 tsp vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° Combine cranberries and water in a medium saucepan and cook over medium-high heat until the cranberries begin to pop, about three or four minutes.

° Add the sugar and blueberries and continue to cook, stirring occasionally  until mixture comes to a full boil. Boil for three or four minutes, stirring occasionally, until mixture thickens slightly.

° Remove from heat and stir in vanilla extract and transfer to a refrigerator-safe container and allow to cool to room temperature, then cover and place in the fridge. Chill until ready to serve.

 

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I love celery root - that terribly ugly lump of brown you see in some stores.  It turns out to have some fairly amazing properties and is soft enough that it trims up easily.  Just use a big sharp knife and slice away - and be careful to wash it as there are deep crevices where sand can hide.

 

I don't know what to call this, but it came together well and is a keeper..  Feel free to adjust ingredients and proportions as this was a first throw together.  Next time I'll probably use a good balsamic vinegar. It is really good with a whole grain bread!

 

Apple and Celeriac Bake

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 large onion, finely sliced

° 2 tbsp olive oil

° 750g vegetable stock

°  tsp cider vinegar

° 1 crushed garlic clove

°  3 thyme sprigs

° 600g Piece of Celeriac (peeled weight)

° one largish apple (I used a Fuji - what was crunchy and on hand.  Mine was 190g). 

° 50g almonds, lightly toasted, skinned & roughly chopped - probably great with hazelnuts

° sea salt and fresh ground pepper

 

Technique

 

° preheat oven to 400°F

° fry the onion in a pan with the oil over medium heat until soft and translucent.  Add the stock, vinegar, garlic and thyme and bring to a boil

° cut the celeriac into quarters and then thinly slide what is left.  Add the slices to the boiling mixture.  Reduce heat to a simmer, cover and leave for 15 minutes.  

° season with salt and pepper

° transfer about half the celeriac and onions to an oven proof dish (mine was a pyrex dish about 8x8 inches)with a slotted spoon. Thinly slice the apple and layer on top of the celeriac.  Scatter half the almonds over the apple and then add the rest of the celeriac and onions.  

° pour about 200g of the pan liquid over the layers and scatter the rest of the almonds over the top.

° bake for about 45 minutes

 

is it climate change?

We're sort of ready for Sandy - the combination of three storms that is currently threatening our area.  A quick check of my email found several people wondering if this is caused by global warming.  

 

Of course the stock answer is that you can't state with any certainty that a particular weather event is "caused" by a shift in the climate.  We do know with a very high degree of certainty that global warming is underway and there is a serious piece of it that is caused by the greenhouse gases that come from our burning of fossil fuels.  There are many unknowns - exact mechanisms, the location dependence of future weather events, the location of micro climates, the response of the ecosystem and of human institutions and so on.  That makes it a rich, if somewhat terrifying, field of study.

 

Greenhouse gases are a good thing.  A simple calculation of the Earth's mean temperature without them gives up a bit below 0°F rather than the current figure of about 59°F.   The Earth would be an icy place and life as we know it impossible.  But you can have too much of a good thing.  Life has a very complex set of interdependencies and is finely tuned to local environment including climate.  Over time the planet's temperature has moved around, but these changes have been slow and evolution and a large number of extinctions of species that couldn't hack it have given us our current world.  What exists now is a very swift change - the speed turns out to be much more important than the amount ...  but that is a lengthy subject and I meant to comment on how much of the unusual weather event bearing down on the Northeastern US may be from our hands.

 

One of the best analogies is that of a baseball player who uses steroids.  I've been using it for some time¹...  rather than me writing a few paragraphs here is a video featuring Jerry Meehl of the National Center of Atmospheric Research.

 

So the mean of distribution of extreme weather events if shifted to the right.  There is a lot of fundamental science behind this.  One of the major drivers is the extra energy from the warmer climate.  It turns out it is mostly stored in the ocean and one of the consequences of a warmer body of water is an increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.  In fact the roughly 1°C increase in temperature we've seen in the past century has increased the amount of water vapor by about seven percent and most of that has come in the past thirty years.  This means there is much more water available for precipitation.²  This translates into much stronger storms, although it doesn't necessarily mean more of them.  It turns out it has a tendency to make wet areas wetter and dry areas dryer.  We're currently in a phase where many of these effects are relatively linear, but we're beginning to see a few non-linear events that will probably make extreme weather even more common and could increase the rate of temperature change.3

 

Let's get back to the simple explanation of what a shifting distribution means.  I fired up Mathematica to make a few plots.  The first shows two gaussian distributions with a mean of 0 and standard deviations of 1.5 and 2.2.  Probability is plotted on the vertical axis and the horizontal axis is whatever you are measuring.  These simply give you the probability that a measurement of something that has a gaussian distribution is at a certain value.  Notice that the variation increases as the standard deviation increases.  You might think of a thermometer in your back yard and another in your house.  The variation of measurements in your house is going to be small - probably within a few degrees over the course of a year.  The variation outside your house (unless you live in San Diego:-) will be much larger.  Notice that as the variation gets larger the plot lowers.

 

 

The second plot has two gaussians with the same standard deviation (1.5), but with different mean values - one is centered at 0 and the other at 1.  One effect of global warming is that it shifts the mean temperature. If temperature drives extreme weather events you can expect to find more of them.  Also note that a shift of 1°C over the past century took us from 58° to 59°F ...  there are still many opportunities for cold weather events and if precipitation, which is now more likely to happen in large amounts given the additional water vapor in the atmosphere, happens when it is below freezing we get larger snow storms (on average).

 

Moving on to the third graph we have one gaussian with a narrow standard deviation and the other that not only has a larger variation in measurements, but is shifted a unit to the right.  Notice that the probability of events at the left are larger than the first case in the shifted broader distribution and is much higher on the right side.  It turns out this is what we are currently seeing in our weather system.  The climate models suggest greater variation and a shift and we are measuring just that in our changing weather.   The forth graph just shows all three distributions - the shift from the blue to the green distribution is a qualitative view of what is taking place with the climate.

 

Good luck to all of you in the storm's path.  We're going to have to get increasingly good at dealing with the rapidly shifting climate we'll be experiencing over the coming years and decades.  There is a good chance your kids and grandkids are going to witness much more powerful storms than you'll see, so forget about those "when I was young" stories.

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¹ I think the baseball analogy is from Jeff Masters and Tony Broccoli of NCAR...   One of those great illustrations of something that is highly technical made understandable by anyone.  There should be a prize for people who craft these wonderful communications of science.

² Only a rough statement as the system is very complex.  It can change ocean and atmospheric currents and local climates dramatically.  This is the focus of much of the modeling work underway around the world.  

³ One interesting non-linear event is the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap.  When it exists it reflects most of the sunlight that hits it.  Dark sea water, on the other hand, absorbs solar energy and a dramatic shift takes place when the ice disappears.

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Recipe Corner

 

Sweet Potato and Chickpea Salad

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 largish sweet potatoes diced into inch pieces

° 1 can chickpeas (about 15 ounces), drained

° 2 garlic cloves

° 2 scallions chopped

° extra virgin olive oil

° 2 tbl tahini

° zest and juice of 1 lemon

° salt and pepper

° 1 to 2 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° handful of coarsely chopped pecans (toasted if you like)

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 400°F and line a baking sheet with parchment if you want to protect it

° roast the sweet potatoes for about 20 minutes and then turn them over.  Roast until they begin to brown on the surface - about 35 to 40 minutes in my oven

° while the sweet potatoes are roasting, sauté the chickpeas in a pan over medium heat with the garlic and some olive oil until they are dry and warmed throughout.  About three minutes for me. Remove the garlic cloves and reserve them for the dressing.

° To make the dressing chop the garlic finely and mix with the tahini, olive oil  and lemon juice and zest.  Season as necessary with salt and pepper and whatever else you want (I like it just as it is). Set aside

° Combine the finished sweet potatoes and chickpeas in a bowl and toss with the scallions.

° pour the dressing over the veggies, toss, test for seasoning and toss with pecans and serve.  This is best at room temperature.

 

the relationship between civility and doubt

This past Friday I was lucky enough to have share breakfast with Gregg.  I love these meetings as we cover a large amount of space in the hour or so we have and I leave wishing they were more frequent and longer.  Many things come up, but this time he asked why I had given up on the book.

 

Sigh - that has been painful to sort out.  One of my core beliefs over the years is that education is fundamentally important.  Over the past decade I've spent a considerable amount of time and money attempting to deal with global warming, but can only describe the efforts as a learning experience.  The scientific evidence for the problem having a human origin is extremely strong and, silly me, I expected that to be sufficient to spur people into action as the impact of a rapid climate change is potential devastating.  

 

I started to give popular talks on the subject as well as work with some businesses and found that the level of understanding people have about energy is very limited.¹  This isn't surprising as we all have very different backgrounds - I'm sure I can come off as very clueless in deep conversations with many of you.  What did surprise me is that so many people refuse to believe the consensus of experts.²  I initially thought that education was the key and started on a non-technical energy book as most of the books I've looked at didn't provide enough information or were far too technical.  

 

As I'm a poor communicator I managed to conscript a friend into the project.  She served as something of a gauge of the level to aim for and she writes and tells stories better than I can.  We produced a lot of material over a two year period, but it was very difficult to walk the line of what people needed to know and could understand without a more formal background of physics, chemistry, biology and math.  There are a few bits that might fire the imagination a bit and I have used them in talks as well as in this blog and will continue to roll out more over time, but it didn't make sense to us to move forward.

 

I live in a world of confidence levels and probability - I now only have a small amount of confidence that this approach could be effective.  I was beginning to have serious doubts about the role of education in precipitating change.

 

It is striking how uncivil public discourse is on the subject.  Tonight is the last of the Presidential debates.  It is likely that global warming will be almost completely ignored by both sides.  It is impossible to solve a problem without some kind of understanding of mutual positions and reasonable discourse.  

 

How to you begin a civil discussion?  How can we agree to understand what the other side's position is?  Is there a common ground?

 

Six years I participated in a workshop series that tried to mix natural scientists and theologians.  About a half dozen groups formed around the country.  Only one lasted more than three sessions and broke up in bitter disagreement.  The one that lasted was built on a somewhat different foundation.  

 

I started to think about storytelling as not only a part of basic education, but to bring some civility to the discussion. It may take another generation or so to change minds, but a listening process to understand the other side and to recognize the issues of the masses who are unconvinced and unmotivated is necessary.  My education to date has not equipped me well for the task, so I've been listening and learning at the feet of people who make movies, advertise, write children's stories, create art and music and any other non-technical communication that can aim for the heart I can find.  There are a few people who are worried fundamentally about how to communicate science and some of their insight has been very important to me.³

 

Up until about five years ago my belief was that one had to deal with doubt through reason and education.  My own doubt about that old core belief increased to the point where I abandoned several thousand hours of effort and have switched course.  Now I believe civility may be a more important path here and in other major social changes.⁴ 

 

I wish the meeting with Gregg would have been longer as, with his perspective from psychology and technology, there is probably some deep insight that might help me.  So Gregg - next time! I also suspect many of you have important things to say on the subject.

 

It is fascinating that science can have a rapid impact on technology and our standard of living, but the impact on society's core beliefs seems to be much slower ... perhaps lagging by a few centuries.  It is my belief that this is increasingly unhealthy as the impact of technology has become so dominant.  

 

I still believe education is very important, but I'm not clever enough to use it effectively.  I need to begin to talk and learn where the common ground is in the disagreement  I have.

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¹ This is even true among some people who are normally considered technical.  Many computer scientists have much less understanding than a freshman physics major.

² In retrospect this isn't surprising as there is an extremely well funded effort to discredit science and stir up serious doubt.  These efforts invoke laughable "science", but they are extremely effective nonetheless as the audience is not well equipped to sort out the issues.  It has created a huge distraction and that is sufficient to lead to confusion and inaction.  An excellent read on the subject is Merchants of Doubt by Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes.

³ Folks like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Alan Alda and organizations like RadioLab and the Stony Brook Center for Communicating Science.  There has probably never been a better time with better people working on the problem.

⁴ Gay marriage is an excellent example.  People are enormously uncivil and know the other side is wrong.  It strikes me as though there is an excellent middle ground that would allow some movement forward.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I recently had need for a celebration and what better way than a cherry pie.  People can be religious about crusts and I won't to into that is this post so I made a quick one with half butter and half vegetable shortening and put together an ugly quick lattice top because a proper cherry pie needs a lattice top and they aren't terribly difficult to make.  So use whatever pie crust you prefer or even thaw out a store-bought double crust and find a 9" pie pan.

Finding proper tart pie cherries in NJ is extremely difficult.  I source mine (canned) from Oregon Fruit Products - the quality is very good and I go through a half dozen cans at least twice a year.

 

Tart Cherry Pie 

 

 

Ingredients

 

Crust

 

° I punted here and won't go into detail as I don't have much time to write.  Eventually I'll post on proper crusts, but don't take my word for it and make your own favorite or buy commercial pie crust dough

 

Filling

° 1-1/4 cups white cane sugar

° 1/4 cup cornstarch

° 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1/8 tsp un iodized salt

° 6 cups pitted sour cherries

° 1/4 tsp almond extract

 

Technique

° Set oven to 475°F

° in a small bowl whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and salt and set it aside

° put the cherries into a large bowl, add the almond extract and gently mix in the sugar mixture with a spatula

° pour the cherry mix into a dough lined 9" pie pan and then add the top sheet or work on the lattice.

° put the pie on a baking sheet (it can boil over) in the middle of the oven and cut the temperature back to 425° until the pie begins to brown (about 25 minutes).  Now cut the oven to 375° and cook the pie for another 25 to 30 minutes until the crust is a golden brown and the juices are bubbling.

° transfer the pie to a cooling rack and let it cool for a few hours minimum.  During this time think about getting or making some vanilla or vanilla almond ice cream.  (I did vanilla almond and shaved a bit of bittersweet chocolate onto it.)

 

Few things are as wonderful as a fresh homemade cherry pie!