omenti

leading horses as well as choosing them

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

"What's the problem?" I asked.

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

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Geostatisticians..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

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

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

_________

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

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

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

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

       Ingredients

           

        (all ingredients should be very fresh)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs 

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

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

Technique

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

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

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

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

 

^{OK now the simple recipe.}

The Un-Egg Cream

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

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

^_______

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

rules of thumb and approximations

An aspiring chef was taking about some of the rules of thumb she is learning 

 

° to tear Saran Wrap, put your thumb on the W of the box

° for potato salad use one and a half medium potatoes and an egg per person

° good popcorn pops to 33 cups for every cup of seeds

° use a third the amount of a dried herb to replace its fresh version

° food cost is usually about 25% to 30% of sales

° drive through sales are 40% to 50% of a fast food restaurant's business

° hamburger should be cooked to at least 155° F 

° for catering you should have a half pound of uncooked meat and three quarters of a pound of side dishes per person

° leave the oven door cracked open when broiling in an electric oven, closed when using gas

° ...

 

I mentioned a calendar trick and, without effort, dozens come to mind: 

 

° In any calendar year 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12 will fall on the same weekday - Wednesday for 2012...

° An average adult of normal weight requires about 100 watts of power from food

° skeletal muscle is about 20% efficient

° a car with an internal combustion engine radiates about three quarters of the energy in the gasoline it burns as waste heat 

° a person on a bicycle is about three times as efficient as someone who is just walking

° the average adult male in good physical shape should be able to provide a kilowatt-hour of physical work in a day.

° the average home uses about one kilowatt of power

° the average nuclear power plant generates about a billion watts of power - so it can run the homes in a city with a million residents (San Diego is very close to this)

° electric motors are about 90% efficient

° a pound of fat is equivalent to about 3,500 Calories

° fat, pound for pound, has a similar amount of energy as gasoline

° losing more than three percent of your weight per month in a diet is medically dangerous

° fewer than five percent of dieters are at or below their starting weight two years later (the surest way to gain weight is to go on a diet)

° there are about Pi * 10⁷ seconds in a year and about 8,800 hours in a year

° it takes about an acre of land to feed a person

° getting your energy from beef requires about ten times as much plant energy as just eating the plants

° about 1000 watts of solar power per meter makes it to the ground with the Sun directly overheat on a perfectly clear day

° molecules in an ideal gas at room temperature have an average kinetic energy of about 1/40^th of an electron volt.

° digital music needs to be sampled at least at twice its highest frequency

° when estimating angular widths stretch your arm out: your finger tip is about 1°; the distance across your index, middle and ring fingers is about 5°; your fist 10°; the space between your outstretched pinky and index finger 15°, and the span between your outstretched thumb and index finger is about 25°

° the angular size of the sun and moon are both about a half degree

Any field will have rules of thumb for quickly making approximations with very little work.  You can probably list a few dozen with five minutes of reflection (if you have some interesting ones add them as comments).

 

The etymology of the term is hazy, but the sources I've seen either relate it to an approximation for length based on the thumb (inch and thumb are commonly linked in European languages) or for some agricultural purpose like the depth for planting seeds. 

 

I find it useful to make many back of the envelope calculations as I come to grips with a problem.  There are a lot of tricks - units analysis (which tells you mc² has the units of energy, mc³ or mc don't.  Many calculations are speeded along with drawings for visualization and approximations for doing mental or back of the envelope math.   I'm a big fan of slide rules.  Learning to use one gives you a natural sense of what a logarithm is.  You had to know roughly what the answer might be and keep track of the order of magnitude in your head.  I was banned from using mine when invited to some corporate strategy sessions at a big telecom that I used to work for -- I was out-calculating the guys who were using laptops (they often got their answers wrong to 8 significant decimal places) and it was somehow wrong to have a researcher doing that...  I recommend learning how to use one if you want a more intimate relationship with back of the envelop calculations.

 

There is probably a lot of information about any field embedded in its rules of thumb and how they change with time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

seeing the future

And inventing it in an industrial lab...

This morning I found myself chatting with an old friend and client.  I did some physics related work for his firm as they were heavy with computer science people, but lacked background in the physical sciences and suddenly found themselves in need.  He noted some of the things he learned from our interaction was outside of the primary work - namely he came to recognize the importance of mobile devices and good user experiences as gating factors for a revolution.  Sadly he retired - he was complaining about all of the fun he had missed.

 

Twenty years ago we had been at the same place - the Bell Laboratories.  He had been there longer than me - I joined shortly before AT&T was broken up into AT&T and the regional Bell Operating Companies and a few other pieces - but both of us had a good window into the most productive and exciting periods of the place.  AT&T had been a regulated monopoly - a mishmash of the good and the bad.  One of the good pieces was a real honest to goodness R&D lab could be supported.  The Bell Telephone Laboratories was probably the best industrial lab of the 20^th century and fundamental research as well as the invention of the scientific and technological underpinning of electronic communications happened there. 

 

These days real industrial soup to nuts R&D is very rare.  While there is a lot of development, there is very little pure research - even applied research is not terribly common.  It exists, but massive laboratories where the atmosphere is charged with the possibilities of chance collaborations and the serendipity that result are gone - relegated to Universities and government laboratories where departmental barriers tend to be high.

 

BTL was where I learned the importance of connecting the dots and learning things outside of my normal areas of math and physics.  That continued even as the place began to crumble and I found myself bridging into areas I didn't know existed.  The trick was being curious and walk around listening to people who were excited by something, learn about it, find a common language and jump in with both feet.  You also had to be open to inviting those who were interested in your projects to your corner of the sandbox.

 

What we have now is still very interesting, but this is a different time and companies have to be more opportunistic.  Some of them, like Apple, have been brilliant about recognizing technology by itself isn't enough and have profited enormously.  A few other companies have been doing this at a smaller scale and we are on the edge of several disruptions.  I see new structures that allow serious dot connection and play beginning to emerge.

 

This morning's a wave of nostalgia caused me to remember some of the old AT&T ads another friend sent a few months ago.  AT&T had a strong public outreach for STEM education as well as general public relations pieces.  Some of this appeared in ads that ran in places young males (sadly not many women were encouraged although we had a few superstars) might find time - these ran in Boy's Life Magazine in the early 1960s a year after Echo, but before Telstar...  

 

with that, Chip Martin - College Reporter:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

resolutions and such

As a rule I'm not the sort of person who makes New Year's resolutions, but last year was an exception.  For a variety of reasons I decided to lose some weight and, mirabile dictu, found success.   Now I find myself making another resolution - namely to stay within a "good enough" weight range and to eat a healthier diet while doing so.  A recent post mentioned the weight loss and several people got in touch asking for tips.  Oddly enough my family physician also asked for tips. While I'm not an expert by any means, but here are some comments.

 

I kept track of everything I ate as well as how much I exercised and compared this to a baseline to make sure I was six to eight hundred Calories below my normal daily requirement.  The idea was to lose about five pounds a month - a slow and steady rate that hopefully would be maintainable.  Some estimates were required (restaurant food) and I found the need to weigh what I ate when possible.  Staying motivated was a big issue for me and access to an exercise coach was central to my success.  The basic technique with product recommendations is here.

 

The type of food and even the timing of meals and food types became important.  I found it necessary to track fat, saturated fat (for safety), protein and carbohydrates.  In general I became very hungry by dinner if I didn't have at least 15% of my breakfast and lunch Calories from protein.  As a lacto-vegetarian I need to carefully monitor protein anyway so at least I was paying attention.¹  Very low fat meals caused a similar problem.  What seemed to work best was aiming for about 20% of my Calories from protein and 20% from fat (as little saturated fat as possible).   Much of the fat came from tree nuts like cashews, pecans, walnuts and pistachios. I tried to eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains as they are generally agreed to be important parts of a healthy diet.  

 

I found allowing for some treats was very important.  For me this usually means a bit of chocolate.  I was able to only have four days this past year when I was over target and only two of those were feasts.  Quality food was important.  I found preparing most of my meals myself allowed me to track what was in them and gave me more satisfying meals.  I recommend anything by Mark Bittman as a a starting point for recipes.  He is committed to a quality diet and most of his dishes are very easy to make and delicious. He has about ten books in print, but since I'm a vegetarian I relied on his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.²   

 

As I progressed I was able to hone in on my daily energy requirement before exercise.  It was a bit different from the published values, but was stable and gave me a baseline for planning.  Of course as I lost weight it changed as did the exercise numbers.   While a lot of people have success by just eating less, I found journaling to be very important.  If you use this approach, do yourself a favor and use software.

 

Here is the result for the year - January 2 through today.

 

Now my goal is to stay between the 155 and 165 pounds, which is medically my healthy weight range as I'm 6'1.  It turns out if you have been heavy the body will modify metabolism, hormone signals and even muscle type and percentage. The net effect is roughly a ten percent decrease in requirements.  If a person at, say 160 pounds, requires 2,000 Calories a day to maintain weight, a similar person who had been significantly heavier but is now 160 only needs about 1,800 Calories.   The hunger signals remain at, or even above, the 2,000 Calorie a day level - it becomes easy to overeat.   This is probably the reason why people gain weight after a diet, so the challenge is to eat less, eat better and add exercise.  It appears this is not a short term change - that it may take a decade or more for the body to move back to their earlier normal level.³  We are very well evolved to store energy for lean times.

 

At the suggestion of my doctor I tried to avoid sustained monthly weight drops that exceed three percent.  There is evidence that drops in excess of five percent are dangerous and damage hormone signaling to the point where long term stability at a healthy weight is nearly impossible.

 

A few months ago I began to approach my target range and, hoping for a smooth transition,  I adjusted the slope of the curve to decrease my monthly loss.  I'm where I should be now, but left to myself I would eat enough to gain weight.  It is clear I need long term monitoring.  So I find myself on the eve of another resolution - namely to stay within a weight range.  Some long term studies suggest I may need to do this for a decade.  Keeping it off will be a big challenge.  Sorting out a healthier diet is also important.  

 

So if you are planning a weight loss resolution my suggestions are:

 

° Go slowly!  Plan on losses under three percent of your body weight per month.

 

° Find a safe and balanced diet. Talk to your doctor and ignore pulp magazines andTV infomercials with their quick and easy fixes.  Fad diets are generally bad news. Also remember that if you have problems taking off weight, it is going to be even harder keeping it off, so find something that can work for you as well as a long-term transition diet.

 

° Monitor and journal everything you eat. 

 

° Use a good food scale that reads accurate to the nearest gram.

 

° If you don't cook for yourself, learn.  Hire a personal chef for a few lessons or go to an adult education course.  A culinary student or off-duty chef will sometimes provide a few hours of hands-on training for a very low price.

 

° Find a way to have some treats every now and then and allow for a few days when you eat by the old rules (Thanksgiving for example). 

 

° Find an exercise coach as well as exercises you like - or at least don't actively dislike.

 

° Plan a long term (years) maintenance strategy.

 

° If you have your own tips, post them in the comments section

 

A downside to all of this is that none of my clothing fits anymore.  I can get away with the tshirts, but jeans and slacks are a different matter.   I'm slowly buying new togs, but currently a belt is certainly a safety requirement as I've gone from a 36 to 38 inch waist to 31 to 32 inches.

 

________

¹ Anyone with a non-standard diet - vegetarians and vegans for example - should consult with a physician before taking on a challenge like this.

² The $4.99 iPhone version is particularly useful when you are in a store in need of inspiration.  I recommend his blog for his views about food and society.  I'm in general agreement - certainly more than I am with Michael Pollan.

³ Quite a bit of research has been done on metabolic shifts and a bit is mentioned in this recent NY Times Magazine article.  It is clear that keeping weight off is an enormous challenge - greater than taking it off - so the diet industry may be the perfect business with lots of repeat customers.  There has also been interesting work that indicates liposuction may be counterproductive - that the weight comes back and, no matter where it was initially removed, it tends to concentrate in the abdomen - medically the most dangerous location.

 

on the death of the high fidelity industry

One of the more curious learnings I’ve repeatedly had over the decades is that audio and video quality isn’t terribly important to people.  Some jumps have been important, but at some point quality seems to be “good enough” and people become interested in other metrics like price, mobility, convenience and selection.

 

We did a lot of work on audio compression and there was a drive to make our codec (AAC) the best of its class.  This involved a large amount of human testing and the reference music was mostly compact disc class.  Higher qualities existed, but it was felt compressed music to CD like quality was necessary.  

 

We did it.  By 2000 AAC was recognized as the best of its breed and it was statistically undetectable to most listeners at 128 kilobits per second.¹  A CD is 1440 kbps, so this shrinks the data file for a music track to about 9% of its original size - really useful if your network connection isn’t terribly fast. 

 

Audiophiles had been hoping one of several standards would take off by about that time taking us beyond CD quality, but it never really happened.  Internet delivered music and the iPod fundamentally changed how we listened to music.  A few years ago I came across an article that pointed out the aftermarket for iPod accessories was larger than the entire market for stereo equipment.  Good enough sound quality in our pockets and a large and easy to use library was all we needed - onventional HiFi was dying and some would say it is dead.² 

 

The little white earbuds you see everywhere are not exactly high quality.  For $40 or $50 you can dramatically improve your listening experience and for $150 or so the quality can be fantastic.  But almost no one does it.  The quality issue just doesn’t impact most of us.

 

There are other directions music quality could do - trying to create the sound field - the audio experience - of a concert.  But there is this little problem - outside of multichannel sound for television, no one is spending money on audio equipment and very few people spend serious money on good audio equipment for their televisions.  

 

It just doesn’t matter.

 

mostly³

 

A few years ago some of us revisited the issue of speech quality on telephones.  The frequency range of a normal telephone is small compared with normal human hearing and voices, particularly female voices, are altered.  Mobile phones introduce even more issues with low quality audio compression.  The notion was that expanding the frequency range from about 3 kHz to 7 kHz would make a big difference that people might pay buy.  We did some careful studies on 3 vs 7 vs 20 and came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big deal for most people.   In fact people under 30 had a slight bias to the lower quality sound.

 

I speculate that for music or video there is a point at which the underlying performance is more important.  If we don’t reach that point the performance is merely wallpaper and we don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  As we cross some threshold what is being the performance becomes so engrossing that inferior reproduction isn’t a huge issue to most of us.  I’ve seen this repeated over and over ...  In an earlier post  I noted on an epiphanal moment I had:

 

A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

 

I think live performances are still very important - there is a communication between the performers and the audience and the overall sound field seems to make a difference.  The one way music and video we listen to at home or on the go is a different animal and needs to be considered separately. 

 

This notion of good enough quality is important.  You have to consider the entire user experience and not just some component like audio quality as defined by some engineering metrics that are measured with the listener out of the loop.  

 

It is something to watch for in many other industries.  Most people could care less, and don’t even know what gigahertz, gigabytes and other terms used to sell Wintel based PCs mean.  The same for horsepower and torque.  They are used as sales tools and people might think larger is better, but there is only a vague coupling to the final experience in most cases.  Even non-technical  enthusiasts have trouble with the definitions.

 

Perhaps industries where differentiations are made based on technical terms that are not understood by the customer based are  a good first order cut as those where disruption is possible.

 

Video and theater experiences are another rich and interesting area.  A lot of money is being bet that 3D will cause people to upgrade home TVs as well as go to movies, but there are some good arguments that won't happen.  There are other things that are probably more important in the theater and I tend to doubt the 3D revolution - at least as something that is a sustainable differentiator that will cause people will pay higher ticket prices.  

 

In the meantime I love going to live performances!  In the meantime don't bet on quality metrics unless you understand the complete user experience.

__________

¹  In fact if you increase the rate to 160 kbps statistically no one can tell the difference on normal music.  The guy who was really obsessed with tuning the codec went to Apple and their version of AAC has made great improvements over the years.

We found that some training is necessary to listen closely enough to music to detect artifacts.  It turns out that hearing ability decreases and anyone over about 35 is useless no matter how good their training.   Audiophiles tend to be males over 40 (and more often over 50) who spend tens of thousands on equipment.   

² Apple recently released their Apple Lossless Codec (ALAC) to open source.  Lossless codecs like Apple's and FLAC tend to offer compressions around three to one.  The file that is compressed can be turned into a file idential to the original so they are "perfect".  A few audiophiles use them and some companies even offer music, but this is a very small business.  

ALAC has some advantages over the other lossless codecs as it works with iTunes and iPods.  It can also work with music recorded at much higher than CD quality.  Now that it is an open standard perhaps it will gain some popularity among the enthusiast set.  The fact that Apple is releasing it shows they don't see any commercial value.  

³ At home I still use my 15 year old amplifier and once fine speakers to connect with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad wirelessly.  My 20,000 or so tracks worth of music is completely portable and distributed where I fancy on listening at the moment.

But I see no need to upgrade the system and the CDs just sit - I converted them (at 256 kbps AAC) a long time ago...

 

2:38:17 pm indeed ...

Jheri sent a note complaining about being jet-lagged after a flight from Nanjing to Copenhagen - six hours difference.  It should have been more, but China ticks to UTC+06:00.

 

Someone asked me to think about major changes that I thought technology might inspire.  Things that may even be quietly taking place now, but will grow and make themselves known a few decades from now.   Like speculating about what would really impress someone from 125 years ago (it probably isn't the Internet or television), these are interesting exercises that hopefully give a bit of insight into the interaction between society and technology.

 

I've thought about this before but wouldn't claim great insight.   I do find myself with the same candidate every time I think about this namely our relationship with time.  Specifically cutting the tight bindings we have with synchronized time.

 

It is interesting to think about when the concept of modern time began to take hold.  Once we responded to natural rhythms - sunrise, sunset, the seasons and so on ..  but a mechanical means of dividing days up didn’t become very practical until about the 14^th century and then only as expensive devices that showed hours.  It took another four centuries or so for hands to appear.

 

Local solar time was still widely used in much of the 19^th century - the concept of “high noon” ruled, but the advent of the telegraph and railroads required a synchronization of time.  In the US there was railroad standard time with each railroad with its own flavor.  Large stations had multiple clocks each showing different times.  The concept of a timezone was invented and finally implemented in 1883 on the day of two noons.

 

The concept of modern time - 2:38:17 pm EDT eastern time being a meaningful point - dovetailed nicely with the needs of the industrial revolution and tied us to schedules driven by clocks.  Efficiency and the concept of “scientific management” was promoted by Taylor and others.  Many people became widgets and most of us became obsessed with this synchronization of time. 

 

Einstein found himself working in a patent office while he was working on his Ph.D. remotely using the mail system.  His speciality was looking at patents of schemes to synchronize time - meshing rather nicely with the physics he was working on at the time. Very deep thinking about simultaneity led to special relativity in 1905.

 

Today most of us know where we are in time and space to a fair degree of accuracy due to the global positioning system our cellphones use.  

 

Clearly useful, but is it on target?  Are the lives we lead - private and work - really much better than the world where 2:38:17 pm EDT was a ludicrous concept and “between lunch and dinner” was accurate enough?

 

Early in my Bell Labs career I found myself in a laboratory where personal time for creativity was a valued concept.  There were meetings during the day as well as scheduled talks.  The lunchroom opened and closed at a fixed time and there was tea every day at 4 pm.  But much of the day was more flexible.  The lab director was a believer in the need for an uninterrupted stretch of time where you set the pace.  

 

We all had individual offices with doors on them.  For three hours a day - our choice of morning or afternoon - our phones would go dead and we had a flag outside our office door indicating if we were in “cave mode” or if it was ok to have visitors.  Most people collaborated, but you could get three full hours in the event you had achieved a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow.  Of course the brain handles a many tasks simultaneously, but I find my conscious mind, whatever that is, tends to task switch single processes rather than multitask and there is a serious overhead associated with saving and restoring state.  We had control over interruption.

 

We were held accountable during our yearly merit reviews, but researchers in the lab were carefully vetted and trusted. 

 

Our lab was extremely productive - I would even use the word creative.  

 

Several years later I transferred to another lab that didn’t have this boundary and felt an enormous difference.  Fortunately I was able to move to another area where people could pretty much establish their own workflow.  It was a negotiation with collaborators, but we had a reputation for doing great work and being difficult to schedule.

 

When I began to consult I mentioned this to an extremely creative company I have ties with and, mirabile dictu, they were fascinated and experimentally adopted the three hour block.  I’ve been told it is something of a secret weapon for them.  It does require people to get used to a different way of working and thinking. 

 

Yet most of us are micro scheduled and are forced to deal with a stream of interruptions that destroy any kind of deep thinking.

 

“Overnight” or at most two days is the period that some assemblage of atoms should require to be sent from any point on the planet to our desk.  A flood of people travel to and from work mostly during the same hours artificially clogging the roads and making the commutes much worse than they might otherwise be.  We schedule “quality time” with families and even schedule blocks of time for our kid’s activities.  

 

Some of this is necessary and some of it is pushed more than it needs to be.  Having the ability to communicate whenever we want and wherever we are is something that implies choice, but many of us become slaves to it.

 

I have a gut feeling that our mobile networks and a few other technologies have the ability to free us a bit.  In the mid 90s I began to notice that young people with cellphones were discovering that synchronizing meetings could be fuzzy - that you could tell someone roughly when and where you might be able to meet with them and go into hover mode where you might be doing something interesting rather than waiting on a corner for 35 minutes wondering if their train was late.  At AT&T Research we prototyped a conceptual system called air graffiti that put a few other twists on this fuzzier concept of spacetime and could even act as a catalyst for serendipity while supporting normal modes of tight synchronization.  

 

We’re all different.  Some of us might be really creative at 11 am and dead to the world at 3 pm.  I think we have a chance of moving to a world where the Talorized concept of tightly synchronized activities will begin to fade.  

 

Perhaps we can take advantage of the fact that time is indeed relative.  We may be at the beginning of a radical rethinking of what time is and means to us - as radical as when we started treating the artificial concept of 2:38:17 as something rigid. 

 

And Jheri?  Although she is tightly bound to the clock now, her path may lead her to forestry research and she may even find long periods of time where she takes note of and uses sunrise, sunset and the seasons.  

 

 

 

delightful creations

This week I found myself reflecting on the death of Dennis Ritchie - co-creator of the Unix operating system and the C programming language.  Both of these were revolutionary, paving the way for much of what we know as modern computing.  If you use an iPhone or a Mac, buried in the machine's soul is a form of Unix.  And most other heavily used operating systems and programming languages are based directly on Dennis' work.

 

One of the Dennis' notions that struck me was "death to excessive relevance." Of course some relevance is necessary, but if your goal is change too much relevance is a muddy quagmire from which you will never escape.  His organization - the 1127 Center at Bell Labs - had a gift for killing excessive relevance and the spirit existed throughout Bell Labs until the mid to late '80s when relevance began to kill the magic of the place.

 

A few years ago I was reading some of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh to my niece Magi over the phone...

 

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.

 

A few individuals and fewer organizations think expansively enough to deeply consider their customers (I really dislike the term customer - there must be something better).   Unfortunately too many are bound in getting product out the door, living in the short term and just getting by.  The few that thrive are able to stop the bumping for awhile and think.

 

With that, here are the responses to last week's questions.  Thanks to those of you who replied - some interesting comments.  There is a strong signal that hand-made objects rate among some of you.

 

_____________

What are results of human minds and hands that you love?  

 

Off the top of my head: so many books, so much music, and anything that comes from my 5-year old son putting crayon to paper (but that's emotional; then again so is love). 

 

Things that you evangelize

 

The Blues

Peking Duck

Crisp, cool, autumn air

Accepting that you're bad at golf and enjoying the company you're in and a good walk (unspoiled)

Asimov's Foundation series

 

 

things that fire passion

 

Teaching enthusiastically 

Elegant simplicity

 

 

Name something created by a person or persons that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write a bit about it

 

I have a few Movado watches, all of the classic museum design, all very similar. Intellectually, both the design and architecture are perfect. That was my attraction so many years ago: their elegant simplicity. Emotionally, my favorite is the one that's paired to my wife's in our "his and hers" set. My second-favorite Movado is the one I've had the longest, since about 1992 or so. I wore that watch every day for 10 years or more. (They are fragile, so I've invested a lot of money in having it repaired a few times... worth every penny.) 

 

 

Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write away..  

 

I've been a TiVo customer since their launch about 10 years ago. The first eight years were great. My TiVo worked perfectly. It was fairly elegant, if not that simple, but simple enough. I had innumerable discussions with many other CS/techie/IT-types over the years about the advantages of TiVo over systems like MythTV and other "free" options. My argument was that TiVo "just worked" while the other systems required Rube Goldbergian antics to even get running and were impossible to keep running over time because they were too complex. Even though I *could* do it given my background and profession, I didn't *want* to do it, having more interesting things to apply my background and profession to. The additional cost in dollars was nothing compared to the cost of my time and antifrustration. 

 

Once again this is emotional. I love TiVo because it gives me total control of the media I harvest from the fire hose of cable TV. I'm not beholden to time periods, commercials, silly intros, or boring guests on talk shows. I treasure the ability to watch only the segment(s) of 60 Minutes, The Daily Show, Charlie Rose, or Tavis Smiley that I want, skipping the others.

 

 

Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for over a year and then fell from grace.

 

The last two TiVo years have been filled with a succession of buggy hardware and much frustration. The modern TiVo is also beset with software problems. Their customer "support" is gawd-awful. But it's still the best DVR in the market, so I suffer with it and enjoy the time periods when it's working all the more.

 

 

 

- -- -  - -- -  -

 

 

Re-reading, there is an obvious theme here of elegant simplicity and emotional connection. Advertisers have known of the importance of emotional connection for decades. Now it's common knowledge as so much has been written these past few days about elegant simplicity and emotional connection being the essential ingredients of Apple products. The uncluttered face of the iPhone, with its single button, is quite reminiscent of Movado. I wonder if Apple ever considered putting that button at the top.

 

-Alan

 

______________________

 

when i was 18, i spent the outrageous sum of $185 on a large woodblock

print.  'torero viejo'.   a gaunt somber figure in black and crimson,

cradling a tiny bull in his hands, that somehow manages to convey hope

and resilience. it was a foolhardy purchase, given my minuscule resources

at the time. i had to scrape and squeeze to cover it, and still pay my

rent. many meals were scrounged from friends that month.

 

since that purchase, i've spent much larger sums on cars, vacations,

dinners out, electronic toys, ... the cars are long since rust, the

vacations and dinners only pleasant memories, and the electronics gone

to recycling.

 

the torero hangs in the living room, as somberly gorgeous as ever.

i smile at him every day when i get home.

 

what's more, that purchase gave me the confidence to buy other art.

(this was a thing unheard of in my family -- art was something you went

to a museum to see.) now, every room in the house has a painting or

photograph or pot or sculpture. they're an unfailing source of joy.

 

- Nancy

 

___________

 

 

In answer to your questions:

 

For 1 and 2 the answer is my iPhone 4. It makes me so much more connected to information and to the world via mobility, and by the fact that it works seamlessly and flawlessly. I spend as much time on it as I do my laptop. It's the first computer I check in the morning and the last one I check at night. I never expected it to play such a vital information role in my life. 

 

For question 3, I would say it's the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. I subscribed for 25 years and read it each day. Plucking it from the front porch (or the bushes) was a morning ritual, as was reading it with the morning coffee. Because of the paper's curated perspective and voice I felt a kinship with the reporters, columnists and editors. But with the Internet being 24/7, and deeper and more specific, the print newspaper faded in relevance. Pretty soon it was just "paper" with yesterday's news. It went unread. I have great respect for traditional journalism and journalists, and for newspapers, but eventually the paper copy served no purpose and had to go. To me it's a loss, really, because nothing has really supplanted it. It was a shared culture that's given way to fragmentation.

 

Please consider my replies as "Anonymous."

 

___________

 

° Name something created by a person or persons that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write a bit about it - a sentence to an essay.

 

This is easy, but no one will know the name. When I was very depressed a good friend who was cheering me spent some time and made a portrait that startled me when I saw it.  It was mostly pen and ink, but my hair and eyes had intense color and it made me giggle and smile for the first time in months. Somehow it gave me a bit of hope and better yet it was made for me by someone who knew and loved me.  It still touches me deeply.  The best things are handmade even if the artist may not be the best in the world.

 

° Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write away..  (this may be the same as the first item)

 

Two things.  The first is my custom bicycle.  She is bright red and I call her Kirsebær, which means cherry.  I am tall but a girl, so it is very hard to find a bike that fits.  She is handbuilt to my exact measurements and everything is to my specifications.  The welds are works of art rather than the mess you see on most bikes and the detail and pride in her construction is everywhere.  She only has one speed and does not coast. You can balance her when you are stopped by pedaling back and forth a bit.  She has brakes, but if you are careful you don’t need them.   I won't ride her in bad weather or for commuting, but only for pure pleasure.  I'm sure she will be with me for the rest of my life.

We have our games on a nice Sunday morning and chase colors here in København.  I think of a color and ride as fast as I can until I see it and then turn at the next street and sprint off to find a new color.  My hair tries to keep up with us.

Kirsebær is the most expensive purchase I have ever made.  She cost maybe five times as much as my commuting bike and I had to wait six months in queue for her.  Of everything I have purchased with my own money she has given me the most in return and the most pleasure.

The other thing is certainly my iPad.  I travel a great deal and it simplifies my life hugely.   There are several other Apple products that are important to me, but this has made travel much easier for me.  

 

° Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for over a year and then fell from grace.

There are too many of them.  The most recent was a line of clothing that made jeans that came close enough to fit and look good on me.  They just changed the production from Europe to South Asia and the quality is terrible now.  The fabrics are cheap, there is poor control over sizing and the prices are the same.  When I'm in a clothing store, I tell other customers to stay away if they are looking at that brand.

 

• Jheri

________________

Something created by a person - My mother made me a hooked rug according to a design and colors I selected. She has since died but the rug reminds me of her. 

Product/service gave pleasure for at least a year - We have a Gitzo 6x carbon tripod. The tripod's simplicity, elegance and form/function provide enjoyment every time we use it. 

 

Product that fell from grace - I used an ad blocker (WRQ's AtGuard) that early on was a stand alone product. It did the job and I loved it. Within 2-3 years it was sold to Norton who integrated it into Internet Security Suite. Over time it became annoying due to Norton's lack of support. I no longer use Norton.

 

-Margot

___________________

 

iPad

 

Blackberry/Kindle. 

 

But I am back to using both Blackberry and Kindle, since they reinvented them and made them better. 

 

• anonymous

 

______________________

 

° Name something created by a person or persons that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write a bit about it - a sentence to an essay.

 A painting from my dear and old friend Hava. Although I have now had it for over a decade, I still find it fascinating and see new things in it. It is also precious to me because it draws me back to the times I watched her paint, which was something exquisite in itself. The stroke of brush following an image in her imagination fascinated me.

° Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for at least a year and write away..  (this may be the same as the first item)

Netflix. I love streaming video. No more objects coming into and out of the house. No time in a store deciding what I want. Social information that helps me select what I will like. Immediacy. 

° Name a product or service that gave you great pleasure for over a year and then fell from grace.

 Cell phones. Each time I get one I am in love with all the new features I get. A year later, I want the newer features. It changes so fast, and we so easily become accustomed even dependent on the features from the last iteration, that I take them for granted. Getting a camera in the phone....then wanted a decent camera in the phone... googlemaps in the phone, and now want faster internet access. Today I want to give up the smart phone all together and merge my computer with my phone by using an ipad.

 

• Jean

 

______________________

 

Something that a person made - I have a great picture of my son that a photographer at his school made over a year ago. It features as the wallpaper of my iPhone, and every time I see it I'm touched by the look, I feel love and pride, but I also feel vulnerable, and it always makes me want to go home, wherever I am... A service that has given me pleasure for at least a year - the gym and my personal coach there. I've been going regularly for a couple of years now, the atmosphere is just right, the attention at a nice level and the provide a free breakfast in the morning, which for me, still is the best way to start my day...all about the people there making me feel at home, and giving me a great optimistic start. A product that fell from grace - my Apple TV, used it quite a lot in the beginning, to watch all the stuff that I downloaded on my TV-screen, but now I haven't put anything new on it for over a year I think (or at least it feels like that). Interestingly though...although it fell from my grace, my son is the biggest user of it at the moment as he is able to watch all his Disney movies on it ;-)

 

• Jörgen

_______________

 

Something created by a person - an idea called "bio-cost" created by michael geogeghan and paul pangaro (i got to embellish and market it), which is a human economy, the stress, time, attention and energy required to get what you (we all) want. this idea has stuck with for 8 years and its importance has grown over time... Products that have stuck with me for over a year - all apple products, of course, and the philips sonicare toothbrush, and "4-wheel drive" suitcases from rimowa...

• CJ

_______________

 

Music!  There is so much awesome music that I can't be specific.

 

Being tall I am constantly bending over, get crushed into seats with no leg room, bend to get a shower,  and crack my head into doorways I don’t notice..  Clothing doesn't fit.   A raised cutting board makes kitchen prep painless:-)  And Indi makes jeans that actually it.  

 

Airlines.  Coach seats don’t fit,  but up until a few years ago the ticket agent would take a look at me and make sure I got an exit row or bulkhead seat. That always made me feel good about them and their company.  Now the planes are full and airlines and the chances of getting a seat are low even if you pay extra.  I've had cross country trips where it takes days for the pain to go away.  The airlines say I need to buy a business class seat, but there is no way I can afford that.  I hate it when someone makes you pay for a physical condition you had no control over.

 

• anonymous

 

__________________

 

It is difficult for me to name one thing that pleases me the most as it would be music, art or something made by a friend with me in mind - or perhaps wonderful a wonderful instrument like the Hubble Space Telescope. But if I limit myself to a product that I have owned, my old eight inch newtonian telescope comes to mind. I had it as a teenager. A few parts were made by a small optical company in Southern California - probably a shop with a couple of people - and I added the rest from here and there including pieces of my own design. It gave me a window into the Universe and sparked my imagination. I learned a bit of optics and mechanical engineering during the day and astronomy at night. I built a spectrometer for it and started to learn a bit how science was done. It gave me a source of questions that I asked of some mentors and my real education ignited. 

 

iPods. We had been working on digital music schemes and portable players where I worked. It was clear small hard disks would soon be cheap enough to pack a hundred hours of music into a handheld device. We built something that could store about fifty tracks, but the next leap presented a huge usability problem. How would you navigate your music? The original Apple iPod gave a great solution. I saw the photos from the first talk and a lightbulb went off. I bought what was probably the first unit sold in New Jersey at one of the first Apple Stores. It was insanely expensive, but it worked and showed a path to something that had been bothering me for some time. It had a wonderful scroll wheel that gave a nice analog feeling to the interface. Its integration with my Mac made earlier attempts, including the one we had built, look like painful jokes. Mine still works - I've had to change the battery a few times, but I use it a few times a year just to remind myself what a leap it represented. Portable music and words (podcasts) mean a lot to me and are a necessary part of my exercise program. The current iPods are much better, although they are fading into iPhones. They have brought me delight. 

 

Several companies that have fallen from grace for me - notably Sony and HP, but Sony probably the most. I once bought their audio and video gear with great confidence. It may not have been at the top of the heap performance wise, but great care was given to how products work and how I experienced them. They had wonderful feeling knobs and their operation was simple. They also tended to be very reliable. All of that changed. Newer products were a cheapened experience and reliability went out the window. The interfaces became frustrating mazes that showed little thought of how people might use something. These days I avoid their kit like the plague and advise others likewise.

 

- Steve

 

 

 

a bike for the mind

I've been thinking a lot about Steve and can't offer much more than what has been said already.  It is difficult to convey the energy and nimbleness of mind I felt the few times we talked.  He clearly wasn't an engineer or a manager - those conversations reminded me more of having deep talks with an artist or a composer.

 

I wrote a short piece six weeks ago when he retired that sum up my feelings of why I was attracted to his approach

This morning  some of his comments came to mind.  His "bicycle for the mind" notion of computers is both telling and compelling.  He was struck by an article in Scientific American that examined the energy cost of transportation.  Most people, when they see this sort of information, have their eyes glaze over and get manage to get caught in the particular mode of transport, the sources of energy and various externalities.  Jobs was struck only by the joules/km-kg metric.  He noted humans are not very good as animals go - I think he used the phrase "the crown of creation doesn't fare well" and most personal forms of transit are much worse.  But there was one gem …  when it comes to moving a single organism a person on a bike beats anything else.  We had created an elegantly simple mechanical device that managed to beat evolution.  

He continued to admire bikes as practical design.  I had a conversation with him in 2004 or 2005 where he brought it up as a near perfect embodyment of functional design.  He mentioned Italian track bikes from the 70s as accomplishing their goal with incredible beauty and simplicity, completely integrating a person with their own motion even eliminating the need for brakes.  That was the moment when it became clear to me that he needed to strip away the extraneous of any socio-technical initial solution.  Breadth of intellect and a willingness to ponder deeply and struggle with the issues are critical to this approach.  That is where you begin to recognize there are many pieces to a puzzle and begin to connect the dots.  Real creativity becomes an afterthought as it is obvious.

This is often how creativity happens in science - problems need to be expressed in the greatest simplicity as nature is otherwise too confusing.  Jobs was gifted - and hardworking - enough to take on several monumentally complex problems and render them obvious.  His competitors would look at what he did learning at the superficial Cliffs Notes level and trying to pass the test, but they weren't learning at a deeper level.  They weren't investing their intellectual horsepower or that of their organizations in deep understanding.  They were comparatively inefficient intellectually and lacking in real education.

I have great hopes for Apple going forward as I think he built much of his thinking into the organization.  That is a powerful weapon that isn't terribly secret, but is enormously difficult to duplicate.  

This approach should be core to the educational experience.  Forget about simple training for work as the core focus.  A broad general education is critical.  My own early education was deep in a few places rather than broad and I consider it a handicap.  Over the years I've broadened out a bit, but still have a long way to go.  It is something we can all aspire to and something that needs to be built into the education system.  You need art, music, sports, history, philosophy, literature, poetry, math, science, the ability to observe and think critically and several other things to even see the dots involved.   Then, and only then,  you can begin to connect the dots and hopefully you are in an organization that can appreciate that approach.

 

Peace to his family and close friends, but thank you for underscoring the importance of such a powerful way of thinking.  What an incredible ride.

 

Simplicity is incredibly difficult, but its value is enormous 

and a final note

steve

damn it

I was lucky enough to have had long chats with him on several occassions.  An amazing clarity of vision and Apple is his legacy.  So sad for his family and close friends ... 

If you have never seen his Stanford Commencement, watch it now...

may they ever dance across the prairies in the moonlight

Hope is a wonderful thing.  Here is an example:

Thirty years ago today a  Black Footed Ferret,  assumed to be extinct, was found near Meeteetse, Wyoming.  The colony was on the verge of extinction and the few remaining ferrets were captured for a captive breeding program.  Slowly - sometimes eight steps backwards and nine forward - progress towards re-establishing these amazingly playful critters has been made.  

Watching one of them dance across the prairie in its freedom is one of those experiences that electrifies your soul. Perhaps they will be able to survive without our help in my lifetime - that would be sweet.  

Ferrets are part of our family.  Not the Black Footed variety, but domesticated close relations.  One of our was named Meeteetse and she was mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered a few times - including a sweet obituary.  It seems she  had a fascination for certain voices and would come running whenever Richard Harris - an NPR science reporter - was on the air.

Oddly enough the plural collective noun for ferrets is business.  If you want to probe the Oxford English Dictionary gives a bit of illumination where the term business came from and it is entirely appropriate to link it to a group of ferrets.