omenti

in search of a line and a circle

Those of you who know me know I've spent quite a bit of time in the past fifteen years worried about climate change - it is one of the few high impact high probability events I know of that can be mitigated, so focus seems appropriate.

 

I've tried a variety of approaches and have largely failed to make any impact.  At first education seemed right as it is something I believe in, but you need a stable and sufficient base on which to build and I was assuming that the scientific literacy of the American public was much higher than it was.  I still work at it and have tried several approaches, but the overall response ranges from crickets to a negative reaction.  Of course this is giving me a strong signal on my abilities relative to the challenge and others who are much better communicators have had also had little or no impact.  

 

I sometimes use this qualitative chart in my talks.  If anything the think tank bump should be much smaller, but you get the idea.  The media does not cover the dominant scientific view and tries to balance opinion - the issue is there isn't any opinion in largely settled science.  Science is about confidence levels and for the likelihood that climate change is taking place,  being influenced by us, and will have a large impact, the confidence levels are high.¹

 

Storytelling is another mechanism that might work.  Several people are trying to exploit that path and some are trying a combination of education and storytelling.  That seems like it might be a viable approach, but one is up against pseudoscience, a natural bias in the media and a very well funded anti-science campaign.  I'm not a good speaker or storyteller, but I've been working a bit to support those who are.

 

The result is my views on what to do are shifting from worrying primarily about mitigation and moving more towards adaptation.  It is ultimately much less efficient and much more expensive than mitigation, but there is a lot of potential optimization and it seems like a rich area to study.  I'll still be thinking about mitigation a lot - particularly conservation and efficiency, but staying focused there may be a fool's errand.

 

Even though the state of the American response to climate change is on the depressing side it is fascinating and poses several interesting questions about everything from our social systems to how our minds work.  In thinking about these sometimes it is useful to step back and think about other historical challenges.  

 

And that brings us to a line and a circle...

 

Take a look at any modern ship.  Down near the waterline you'll see a circle with a line through it.  The line where where the hull of a ship meets the water is the Plimsoll Line and the little circle-line is technically called the International Load Line and indicated the legal limit to which a ship can be loaded.²   An extremely useful graphic - getting on a ship with water above the load line strikes you as something not entirely sane.

 

When you see a name as unusual as Plimsoll, you suspect a story.³

 

In the 19th century transatlantic shipping had become common.  Shipping disasters happened, but the introduction of insurance made them much more likely.  A shipper could load his vessels past their design limits and make quite a bit of extra coin on the voyage.  Should the ship be lost it and its contents were insured - often at more than 100% - and he would also come out ahead as ship building meant he could quickly replace his loss.  The only real loss was one many shippers chose to ignore - perhaps a hundred or so crewmen.  The practice was so common - nearly a thousand were dying each year - that merchant seamen called this overloaded and insured ships "coffin ships".

 

Samuel Plimsoll was a MP who crusaded for the rights of the seamen- often against great odds as the ship owners enjoyed a tight relationship with the government.  He is vilified in the House of Commons, but he became something of a folk hero with popular plays and songs written about him and the coffin ships.⁴  This grass-root support grew to a point where it nearly brought down the Disraeli government.  Finally there were sweeping reforms that probably saved tens of thousands of lives.  One of them - in my mind the most dramatic - was a simple little graphic that allowed you to understand if the ship's load made it unseaworthy.

 

I want - I think we need - a Plimsoll Line for climate change.

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¹ There is a lot of normal scientific dispute on the details of how great the impact will be and how this will play out, but that is like people going over a cliff in a car wondering how many times the car will bounce on the way down and if it will burn when it finally hits.  People tend to confuse the normal debate that takes place in science with the fact that some of the results are extremely likely ... it's just the details we're hazy on.

² There are a few other markings that account for the different water densities.  Sea water density depends on salinity and temperature.

³ I first heard about it in college during a visit to a large ship visiting Manhattan.  Much later I ran into a book on the subject and recommend it - The Plimsoll Sensation by Nicolette Jones.

⁴ John Storey sings a modern version based on some of the ballads

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Recipe Corner

 

This one is very easy to experiment with and surprisingly good.  A really good yogurt and olive oil are key.

 

Quinoa, yogurt, fruit and nuts

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl cleaned dry quinoa - red quinoa is particularly good

° a dozen shelled and chopped pistachios  (raw or salted and raw)

° a dozen chopped almonds (I used unblanched, but blanched would probably work)

° 350 - 400 grams of whole plain Greek yogurt (I use Fage)

° 4 medjool dates, chopped and pitted.  I've also tried other dried fruit, so experiment.

° some lemon zest

° uniodized sea salt - a finishing salt like Maldon is best

° a tbl or more of your best extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° Start the oven heating to 350°F

° Put the quinoa in a small pan over medium heat and toast it until it starts to pop.  Then pour it into a bowl and cool.

° Spread the pistachio and almond chunks onto a baking pan and toast for five minutes in the oven.  Then remove and cool.  Alternatively you can do this in a pan over  burner, but you need to be *very* careful to not burn them. 

° Spread equal amounts of yogurt onto two plates and sprinkle on the dates, nuts, and quinoa.  Sprinkle on a bit of lemon zest and salt and finally drizzle on a bit of olive oil

 

yumm!!

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.

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

² try this post for a translation and explanation

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Recipe corner

 

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

Grilled goat cheese sandwiches

Grilled figs stuff with goat cheese

 

those da*n glassholes are on my lawn! and cum hoc non propter hoc

As the year 2000 approached human computer interface labs all over the world were hot onto studying what comes after the desktop and handheld computer.  Some were doing tablets, but others were wondering what happens if you combine a phone that happens to talk to the Internet with a camera, what happens if you have a radio equipped watch with a display on it, what if a fairly powerful computer can be shoehorned into something handheld with a wireless Internet connection, what if that little powerful wireless computer knows where it is ....  My lab was involved in several of these as well as what happens as computing becomes more invisible and ubiquitous. 

 

A few like Steve Mann were doing leading edge work to sort out how a person may integrate with sensors and networks.  The stuff that excites technologists and science fiction writers.

 

You could make reasonable predictions based on Moore's Law and some educated guesses on mobile phone technology.  Designing interfaces was extremely difficult, but just as important was how acceptable to the public would it be.  Some of these devices would be worn.  What had good design and was fashionable?  Could the design be so good so as to be aspirational?

 

The social dimensions of the problem were, and still are, enormous.  We were making all kinds of observations and performing simple tests.  It wasn't science by any means even though some called it that.  People were learning bits and pieces of a larger problems.  We were learning more about the problems so as not to appear totally stupid.¹

 

Some of the trials produced location dependent results.  A lab in Cambridge using a located ID badge found its employees building any number of useful applications for themselves.  A sister lab in Palo Alto had a near revolt with the same devices even though they had similar backgrounds.  The culture of the two different labs rendered the badges aspirational in one location and a pox in the other.  Sorting out why was non-trivial.

 

There were a lot of crazy leaps being made based on small amounts of work.  It was a real disease in labs that did not have a diverse range of skills.

 

Oh yeah - the post's title?  That's Latin for "with this, not because of this" and is found in statistics to emphasize that correlation does not imply causation.  It is one of the first things taught in any statistics class to warn about jumping to conclusions.  You run into nearly everywhere these days - except in science.  It turns out to be a phrase that almost guarantees the speaker isn't a scientist.

 

An explanation is one of degree.  People without a statistical background jump to conclusions - we're pattern recognition machines and historically have come to some very wrong conclusions.  Not only that, we're still doing it.  A good statistical background gives you some tools to calculate correlations, but caution is advised.  A scientist subjects their work to very elaborate testing measuring and taking into account errors along the way and producing a result in terms of how likely it is.  If they don't their competitors will do it for them and there is little tolerance for mistakes.

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

To a scientist correlation suggests causation.  It is an early clue that there is something worth pursuing.  You might quickly rule the linkage out or perhaps there is something wonderful to be learned that generates a shower of new questions.  You don't want to eliminate possibilities early out of hand..  Much of science is playing with any number of ideas seeing if they are worth going deeper.  As in many other fields you develop a talent for it.  

 

Too frequently it is invoked to dismiss something out of hand even though the person who uses it often has no sense of the depth of the statement they are dismissing.

 

All of that the device and interface/interaction exploration in the late 90s was probably good as it was creating a space of interesting questions.  Except for a few technologies like camera-phones, smartphones and high capacity mp3 players it wasn't essential that anyone understand them deeply right away.  Some of those who worked on the near horizon problems were richly rewarded. But now it is time to begin to understand issues associated with wearables. 

 

It seems daunting as we haven't yet worked out social conventions for the use of smartphones.  Technology often outruns the understanding of its consequences.

 

In the past few weeks at least a half dozen have been in touch to ask for my opinion on Google Glass.  A fascinating area, but they're well over their heads.  Not only does the user interaction model need considerable work, but the design and social issues are daunting.²  They aren't going to pull it off by having a designer put together a frame for them.

 

People may develop appropriate interaction and social conventions - that seems to be what Google is counting on - but the company that introduces a new social technology rarely has a change to ride the wave very long. Deeper thinking is required and it will be  more demanding than ever before as we're going well beyond conventional engineering and technology.  I suspect something approaching real science will need to be done and people from a wide range of fields will need to be involved.

 

A few years ago I tried to put together some one line descriptions for each component of STEM ..  it is far from perfect, but here's what I said:

 

° Science is the study of nature.  Some useful insight becomes available as a result, but that is not the driver

° Math is language of science and also of engineering.  It is beautiful by itself.  

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

These four fields are now insufficient.  Social clue is necessary..

 

We need to understand fashion, design and aspirational design, human nature, local and global cultures, and several other areas. I've been trying to become a student of design and fashion and have been reaching out to people in these and several other areas, but am only getting to the point where my questions aren't completely foolish.  Hopefully one can get to the point where they can have useful connections with enough diverse people to make a dent in the problem.  I'll probably be writing much more on the subject as time goes on.   In the meantime I wish Google luck, but this is a really deep people and the Silicon Valley engineering notion of solving everything with technologies is insufficient and broken.

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¹ I look at my own record and find it mixed after 15 years.  There were some solid hits - particularly with location aware services and a large number of misses.  One tends to remember the hits and forget the misses. 

² from an email I sent last week

Google has a habit of asking designers to come in at the end of the process …  they have a reputation for driving HCI types and designers crazy ..  they like to just bolt it on at the end.  So this isn't surprising.  It will be essential to make the things look presentable.

Their approach appears to be taking a vocal command with a specific interrupt, but such approaches have failed in the research world (not for technical reasons). What is needed is a nice set of orthogonal out of channel communication commands - what linguists call phatic interactions (the communications we all use not to carry core information, but rather are meta commands that kept the channel open. If I say "you're breaking up" on a cellphone call, I'm giving a phatic vocalization. There are any number of phatic signalings that are non-verbal - your phone vibrating to let you know there is a text message for example)

They use verbal phatics like "ok glass", but that can be socially awkward and is fairly unnatural.They really need to crack that one - or find some work that has.They may be interested in having the public solve it for them. Just like hashtags on twitter.

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Recipe Corner 

 

Waldorf salads are delicious, but hardly healthy.  I threw together this one that was delicious and healthy.  I like to add some dried fruit like cranberries or cherrys

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

° 1 Granny Smith apple, cored, quartered, and thinly sliced

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

° 2 celery stalks, thinly sliced, leaves for garnish if you like

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

° whisk together the vinegar, oil, some salt and pepper to taste

° add celery, grapes, apple, and nut to the bowl, and toss to coat with dressing.

 

probing your "failures" a bit more deeply

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

° a magnet always has north and south poles

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

° an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

One of Feynman's better observations was

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

before the recipe, an image to fire your imagination

Allegory of Winter

Ambrogio Lorenzetti  c.1338-1340

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

A lassi as delicious as it is inauthentic

 

A Rich Seasonal Mango "Lassi"

 

Ingredients 

 

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

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

 

Technique

 

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

° top with toasted pistachios or sliced almonds (optional)

 

 

warming up the crystal ball

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A huge problem that required advances on multiple fronts.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Recipe Corner

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ginger-Ginger Refrigerator Cake

 

Ingredients

 

Cake 

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

° 200g (1 cup) white cane sugar

° 3/4 tsp fine un-iodized sea salt

° 1/2 tsp ground ginger

° 1 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1/4 tsp ground mace

° 225g (1 cup) water

° 2 tsp baking soda

° 340g (1 cup) dark molasses

° 2 large eggs

° 225g (2 sticks) melted unsalted butter

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

Glaze:

° 125g (1 cup) powered sugar

° a pinch of fine salt

° a splash of milk

° a bit of vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

Cake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glaze

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

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

 

 

sorting out sensors

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Ugh - three hours!  

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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Recipe corner

 

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

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

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

 

Christmas Spice Cake

 

Ingredients

° 240 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour

° 170 g (heaping 3/4 cup) sugar

° 100 g (1/2 cup) brown sugar

° 1 tbl baking powder

° 1/2 tsp non-iodized salt

° 1-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

° 1 tsp ground ginger

° 1/2 tsp ground cardamom

° 1/2 tsp of ground cloves

° 2 large eggs

° 160 g (scant 2/3 cup) whole milk

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

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 350°F. 

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

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

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

 

Cream Cheese Frosting

 

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

 

Ingredients

 

° 60 g unsalted butter softened

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

° 220 g confectioner's sugar

° a bit of milk

° 1/2 tbl vanilla extract

° a pinch of salt

 

Technique

 

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

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

 

 

catching a bit of sun

In some of the posts about sports I've noted the efficiency at converting the energy stored in food into moving our muscles is in the 20 to 25% range.  Much of the remaining energy is converted into thermal energy and we have to get rid of quite a bit of heat in the process.  In theory it is possible to convert energy from one form to another, but much of our world is less than perfect.  While energy is never created or destroyed, often its transfer or conversion results in at least some of it being difficult or impossible for us to easily use and we can talk about the efficiency of a process.¹  

 

Here are a few examples:

conversion process	type of conversion	efficiency %
large electric generator	m -> e	98 - 99
bicycle chain drive	m -> m	95 - 99
large power plant boiler	c- > t	90 - 98
natural gas furnace	c -> t	95 - 97
water turbine	m -> m	90
human lactation	c -> c	75 - 80
small electric motor	e -> m	65 - 75
best bacterial growth	c -> c	50 - 60
wind turbine	m -> m	50 - 55
steam turbine	t -> m	40 - 45
supertanker diesel engine	c -> m	50 - 55
turbofan under ideal conditions	c -> m	50
electrolysis of water	e -> c	40 - 50
large gas turbine	c -> m	40
small electric motor under 200w	e -> m	30 - 50
automotive diesel engine	c -> m	25 - 35
automotive gasoline engine	c -> m	15 - 25
photovoltaic solar cell	r -> e	5 - 30, 15 common
home refrigerator	e -> t	10 - 20
human muscles	c -> m	15 - 25
pregnancy	c -> c	10 - 15
modern chicken growth	c -> c	10 - 15
gas stove	c -> t	10 - 15
fluorescent lamp	e -> r	8 -15
beef production	c -> c	3 - 10
peak photosynthesis	r -> c	4
watt steam engine	c -> m	2.5
incandescent lamp	e -> r	0.7 - 3
beeswax candle	c -> r	1
neucomen steam engine	c -> m	0.5
global photosynthetic mean	r -> e	0.3

            Here c is chemical energy, t is thermal, r is radiant, m is mechanical, e is electricity

You'll notice that some conversion devices like large generators and bicycle chains are fantastically efficient while those that involve burning fuels, metabolism, most forms of producing visible light and photosynthesis are fairly inefficient.²

 

When dealing with systems that cascade these processes, you can often find short cuts and extract a lot of unmined efficiency.  Co-generation is an example - a large power plant with a steam engine can create a lot of thermal energy that won't run a conventional steam turbine, but can heat a massive greenhouse or office building.  Putting solar cells on the roof of a building to power electric lights may only be 10% times 10% - or just 1% efficient.  Rethinking the building and using daylight through the windows most of the time offers an enormous savings.  It can be like finding diamonds on the beach.

 

Most of our energy comes from the Sun.  The dominant source of its energy comes from a set of light element fusion reactions that are "fueled" by the crush from the Sun's internal gravity.  Most of this takes place in the densest part - well within the first quarter of its radius.  The power density is surprisingly low - about the metabolism of a lizard and about a quarter of our metabolism - but there is a boatload of star out there.  This energy is mostly radiated out into space as light - about half of it visible light.  Most of it misses the Earth - we only catch about a billionth of its output.  Some of the light is reflected out into space, some is absorbed heating our atmosphere, land and ocean and some of it is converted into chemical energy by photosynthesis.

 

We should have a hooray for photosynthesis! day.  Radiant energy is ephemeral.  It takes about 500 seconds to make the trip from the surface of the Sun to us and then needs to be captured.  It would be nasty to not be able to make it through the night or even cloud cover ...  fortunately we have this wonderful chemical fuel and our cells are filled with little chemical fuel cells.  

 

But photosynthesis is fundamental to life on Earth and its efficiency is terrible - the world average for the biosphere is about 0.3%.  This creates an upper limit on how much life can be sustained.  You can work out how much energy can be fixed by certain types of agricultural crops.  Our main food crops are highly optimized for our metabolism needs, but the overall efficiency of a field is better than the global average, but is generally less than one percent.³

 

It is fun to work out the efficiency of modern post green revolution mechanized agriculture.  The world's cultivated area has roughly doubled since 1900 (we are close to the limit now), but the energy available in the form of edible crops has increased sixfold.  This has been made possible by an increase of the energy used by agriculture on the order of 8500% - we are using about ten times as much energy per kilogram of harvested crop, but we are getting much more.  We have increased the number of people who can be sustained on earth from perhaps a billion and a half to about seven or eight billion.  

 

This is enormous progress.  In 1900 a hectare of good farmland could produce about 15 megajoules of food energy per day - about 3,600 nutritional Calories. The world supply worked out to about 2,400 Calories per capita per day - not much of a buffer if there was a bad harvest.  Now we can supply about the same for all of the world's people.4  A huge challenge for science and policy is where to go as there are no clear paths to guaranteeing a good supply of food to 9 billion people - the projected population for 2050 - given current technology and consumption trends.  A second green revolution isn't immediately apparent.

 

 We need to revisit efficiency.  About ten years ago I wrote a paper noting:

 

let light be light

let heat be heat

let food be food

The notion was that it is generally inefficient to have serial energy conversions.  It is much more efficient to eat a vegetarian diet than one that uses meat.  At this point most of the undeveloped world is largely vegetarian, but as the population becomes more wealthy, people tend towards eating more meat.  It takes about ten Calories of the energy in grain to make one Calorie of beef - and that assumes the animal is completely consumed. Poultry is somewhat more efficient than beef, but a largely vegetarian diet may be necessary to share meat with others who are newly wealthy as well as to ensure everyone has something to eat.⁵  A potentially larger problem is growing food as a fuel to displace petroleum.

 

__________

¹ Some people like to talk about exergy which is loosely the maximum amount of useful work in a process.  Some chemists and engineers like that way of looking at the world, I prefer using efficiency.

² It turns out there are strict theoretical limits on many of these.  One of the triumphs of 19^th century physics was sorting out how to calculate the efficiency of heat engines.  That led to a basic understanding of thermodynamics and one of the greatest mechanisms for dealing with "big data" on a scale that is unimaginable to today's big data computations.

³ Getting a handle on these numbers can be very difficult as you have to consider the question of temperature, season, water availability, pests, and energy associated with running the farm, pumping water and making fertilizer.

The theoretical efficiency for photosynthesis is about 11%, but a variety of processes make that very impractical.  Ping me if you want a detailed discussion on how many photons of a certain wavelength are necessary to fix an molecule of carbon dioxide (about ten it happens)

⁴ There is a distribution problem and a huge waste problem.  About a billion people on Earth are malnourished.

⁵ It turns out I'm a vegetarian, but I tend not to care about what others eat as that is a personal choice.  There is a huge energy advantage to that way of life and that may be important as time goes on, but currently it isn't a huge issue locally in North America.

 

__________

The beautiful image credit:

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, 

erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. T

he CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere, 

causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3. 

Picuted here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. 

Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO

__________

Recipe Corner

 

Before fresh sweet corn goes away.  It was fantastic.  My vegetable broth was incredible with all of the fresh produce this time of year.

 

Cashew Corn Chowder 

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbsp. coconut oil 

° 2 medium yellow onions

° 6 cloves garlic chopped

° 2 tsp. sea salt

° 2 tsp. turmeric

° 1 tsp. cumin

° cayenne to taste

° kernels from 3 ears corn

° 1 kg vegetable broth

° 1 tbsp. freshly-squeezed lime juice

° 60g raw cashews, soaked overnight 

 

Technique

 

° Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. When hot, add turmeric, cumin and cayenne and cook for about a minute, until fragrant.

° Add onions and salt, and cook for 5 minutes until softened, then add garlic. 

°  Add corn kernels to the pot and stir to coat with spices. Cook for 5 minutes then add the remaining broth and bring to a boil

° lower to a simmer and cook until the corn is bright yellow and sweet (about 5 minutes) 

°  Remove the pot, add the cashews and blend with an immersion blender.  You can reserve a few tablespoons of the whole corn kernels for garnish if you're into presentable food.

° Season to taste.

° Return soup to the pot to keep warm. Serve with cilantro cream, a drizzle of olive oil, a few kernels of corn and plenty of cracked black pepper.

 

Cilantro Cream

 
° 60g  raw cashews, soaked overnight

° 1 tbsp. freshly-squeezed lime juice

° 1 cup cilantro (leaves only, loosely packed)

° 120g water

° 1 tbsp honey

° 1 tsp. sea salt

° pinch cayenne 

° ½ small clove garlic 

Technique 

° Throw in a blender and blend until completely smooth and season to taste

 

 

 

artifacts of patents and licensing

A friend wrote with a pointer to a piece on how the Apple/Samsung verdict harms consumers.

 

Ah intellectual property ..  

 

I was compelled to reply and perhaps it is worth sharing even though Om said far too much will be written on the subject.

 

I think this is just the nature of how patents and licensing work when a technology is perturbed - something we've had since the time of Watt and have seen repeated over and over. In the end it is probably good, although locally good and bad products will be impacted - some positively and some negatively. Google was way to caviler artificially reducing the mfg cost of its operating system to zero. There were and are numerous patent violations - not much has been written, but I'm told Microsoft makes $8 to $15 on most of the Android phones sold in the US, Europe and Japan. There will be a lot of court action for a few years, but ultimately there will be licensing on the sticky points all around. The marginal mfgs will drop out and new players will have to either have their own innovation (I hate that word - way too fluffy) or be large enough to pay for licensing.

It would be nice if all were robust, but that isn't going to happen with the current system.¹  Individual patents come into play, but  licensing agreements at this level usually involve portfolios and you have to have relevant portfolios to have any standing.  Google had almost none and the purchase of Motorola was probably driven by a desire for an instant portfolio so they could play the game.  Unfortunately for them it appears as though Motorola's portfolio is not terribly relevant and they may have wasted billions of dollars.

I would be surprised if Apple ends up with more than 15% of the market in 5 years (and that would be 15 percent of a billion phones per year or more - still an incredible business if there are any margins). I also believe that Microsoft is the potential big winner in this round. Their OS may be cheaper than Android with its licensing fees and uncertainty and the UI is both clean and novel (Apple and Microsoft, despite the hard words, have elaborate cross licensing agreements and an agreement not to use each other's UI features - both have very competent UI and UX teams - something Google lacks)

Now the bar is raised for what innovation has to be and there will be companies other than Apple doing the original work that appeals to end users.

For me the importance brilliance of the iPhone is it broke the carrier's stranglehold on tech, design and how people used these portable computing devices. Nokia could have built something as good or better, but companies like AT&T and Verizon were their customers and not the end user. They basically wouldn't let Nokia, which had its own stranglehold on much of the mobile market, be creative.²  We would still be in 2006 with only marginal change if the iPhone didn't happen.  

It is extremely important to note that when the iPhone was introduced it was roundly criticized for only having a single button and no hardware keyboard. Most of the tech  pundits as well as its competition predicted it would fail.  A few years later everyone says the design was obvious...  funny how that happens, eh?³

In order to do well Apple needs to figure out how to destroy the iPhone rather than allow the competition to do it. That will be very hard work.

I don't worry much about the impact as people change their phones every few years. What bothers me is the stagnation at the carrier level and the very high degree of lockin on things like spectrum (an artificial concept dictated by tech established by 1930 and reinforced by policy) and enormously high infrastructure costs. Much better things could have happened... We pay far too much for far too few bits per second and are forced to deal with congestion and scarcity that are not dictated by the underlying physics...

 

I'm convinced there will be good competition and real progress, but it is important to remember that this has played out many times before.  The trials will take a few years and produce a lot of smoke - the important things to watch are the licensing agreements and how they shift the game as well as new ideas that happen to be outside the scope of current patents.

 

I'm not happy with the patent system, but it does create a stable framework and can encourage competition.  If you are interested in this sort of thing I recommend reading the history of intellectual property disputes.  The development of the airplane and what happened to the Wright brothers is particularly interesting.  That is a cautionary tale Steve Jobs stressed with associates.

 

It is clear that anyone who wishes to play in this space at a deep level needs to combine social and technical clue.  That is a major change for this industry.  And a final note: while this may seem messy it doesn't hold a candle to the train wreck that is copyright.

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¹ There are two major types of patents that are relevant - design patents and utility patents.  We tend to think of utility patents, but the design of something is also protectable under the system.  Many elements that feed into user experience happen to be design patents, which is almost virgin territory for the tech world.  

² Decoupled customers and end users can be a real problem.  It may be this is ultimately an issue for companies like Google and Facebook and gives an opening to a very clever challenger.  It is certainly a huge issue in American politics.

³ This is historically true for some of the largest ideas and best design.  Often we don't stumble into the really great solutions but, because they are great, they seem completely obvious once we see them. Something like the iPhone's UI and UX is subtle and extremely complex - very difficult to get right.  Most of those elements are missed with quick high level dismissal of how original it seems.  You might say the same thing about something like special relativity, which is based on simple geometryand can be taught to a smart 14 year old.

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Recipe Corner 

 

Well - this is too simple to be a recipe, but it is trivial and turned out very well.   One of my standard breakfasts involves a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.  I mix various things in and this morning found a winner.  

Cut a plantain into half inch rounds, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle on some sea salt (non-iodized as heat will be used), some brown sugar and some pumpkin pie spice.  Spread it on a baking sheet and roast it in a 450° F oven for about 25 or 30 minutes turning them roughly half way through.    It really smells good!  Mix it in with a your oatmeal - I topped with some crushed pecans, cinnamon and blueberries and a bit of maple syrup. And had it with milk.  

Wow it was good!

And also food related.  A youtube video on a clever technique for separating egg whites and yolks.  This sort of thing has been done approximately forever in introductory physics demonstrations, but it is still deeply cool.  

 

trvling to the future

The mid 19^th century was a fascinating time with a lot of technological lessons for today.  As Andrew teaches us about railroad technologies that coupled with curious investments that led to bubbles more dramatic than what we see today, another emerging technology would lead to an Internet of sorts that predicted quite a bit about our current Internet.

 

A few weeks ago I was wandering around the MIT campus spending some time in their excellent naval museum.  Naval architecture was obsessed with the clipper ship - 3 or more huge main masts and a square rig coupled with a then-optimal very long and narrow hull design, these things became the fastest way to move atoms about over any intercontinental distance for about five decades.  Most of the exhibits illustrating that period were created with the perspective and insight of time and focused on novel propulsion systems and steel hulls.  Very nifty and a cool thing for engineers, but if you wanted to get something to China quickly in the day, you really wanted to use a clipper ship.

It wasn't that steam engines weren't recognized, but they weren't quite there yet for the large commercial companies.  Clever people were focused on squeezing out efficiency from those greyhounds of the sea (I wish I had come up with that line - it is from the exhibit) and say the steam engine as a sweet power source for the winches that were used on the huge and very heavy sails.  They could be great labor saving devices - a 20 hp steam winch could do the work of 100 men.

It made me think about publishing...

When you look at emagazines aimed at the iPad, it quickly becomes apparent that those from the big publishers are confused and don't really take advantage of the platform.  This is probably a combination of lack of insight on the part of the magazine - after all - they are experts focused on their existing world, and a poor tool choice. The current model mostly relies on a new spigot placed in the standard magazine pipeline to "streamline" the task.  Adding an emagazine means telling InDesign to produce a pdf at the appropriate point. Of course these magazines want to cut costs and sending content electronically to a remote screen that the user pays for seems to be just the ticket.  And Adobe has tweaked their toolset so you only have to add about one headcount to your workforce to accommodate this new world.

The problem is the experience for the enduser tends to be poor.  Reading pdfs is anything but good and the experience could be much better.  Furthermore the pricing structure most of these guys use just doesn't make sense as little real value, other than moving to a paperless world, is offered.

I'm becoming more aware of this as a few important print publications to me have e-versions..  The New Yorker, Science, Physics Today, Nature, and Sky & Telescope are the ones I have tried.  Most of these are "free with subscription", but are sufficiently painful to use that I only download them for travel and then find myself getting irritated when reading.

But there are a few guys out there who see the iPad and recognize a new type of transportation rather than a steam engine running a winch on a clipper ship …  for about six months I've been addicted to TRVL - a neat publication out of The Netherlands.  It is a mostly weekly travel and photography magazine that also happens to be free.  To get it into Apple's magazine app on the iPad they had to make a subscription and that meant offering a paid version.  They charge a buck, but donate the money to charity.  I don't know their business model other than they are very lean and have a couple of big sponsors that haven't really stepped forward yet - at least I haven't noticed them.

TRVL invites interaction with the page - there are maps on the pages, deep information about the beautiful photography, the flexibility for authors and editors of being able to ignore printing constraints and the obvious feature that old issues can always be relevant as it is free to constantly update them if necessary. 

Apple featured them as a great app at WWDC this year and that got me looking around a bit the other night to learn more about the company.  There are only six employees and a couple of programmers who roll their own publication tools - they have managed to steer clear of the Adobe Victorian model of what a print publication is and that has liberated them.¹  Again I don't know anything about their business model and how they will do financially, but they can turn out a great product (I spend about a half hour with each issue --  if you want to try it I recommend the piece on Amsterdam as a good starting point as I think many of you has some experience with the place as a reference - a few even live there:-) with a staff much smaller than any conventional travel/photography magazine I'm aware of.  This is a great publication for learning a bit about other cultures as well as seeing some of the nuts and bolts of photography.  If you have an iPad it is a steal for the price of $zero and even cheap at a buck.

I don't have a good clue on the direction digital publishing will take, but this gives a sense of at least one potential path that is quite different.  I can imagine some possibilities and undoubtedly other people are too.  I'd love to have a conversation with some of you to see what sort of wacky ideas are out there.  Certainly the notion of who creates content is up for grabs and so much more can be done than just adding audio and video.  Reader explorations may become interesting to other readers in their own right.  Why not invite interaction beyond the page and beyond the net?  I'm thinking about what synesthesia might mean as an example¹ ...  Business models also will need a lot of cleverness.

 

At the moment we're confined to a rather rigid and ancient definition of what we think a periodical is.  We can see the steam engines just under the deck, but the real trick - building a new hull, engine and propeller - is lurking and some people will go beyond that with airplanes and starships.  You get a bit of a shiver thinking about it.

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¹ I have a bit of experience here.  Some years ago I was the art editor for a very small black women's fashion magazine called FEVA (yeah - long story ...  ask sometime if we both have an hour).  This was something of a vacation from my research work and I learned a boatload about the fashion industry and magazine publishing.  Not enough to claim any expertise, but certainly enough to be dangerous and allow pathways for deeper looks later on.  One of the immediate learnings was how workflows worked.  At the time it was all Quark based at the layout and editing level - something that InDesign mostly took over, but both of these toolsets are highly constraining and force you to think of your work and projects a certain way.  While constraints can be important for some things, this was an enormous sap on creative ideas.  I'm really excited by the potential of breaking free of this print-imagined model.  

² I'm thinking about a conversation Juliette and I had on a Central Park walk two years ago that celebrated the midday between our (close) birthdays. We were talking about ways to not only make synesthesia real for those who don't have it, but to go beyond it and mix what sensors can detect in with another sense.  With practice you may begin to navigate that new space naturally.  Now an iPad has a camera and could easily BT to some other sensors and there is enough computation to do some clever stuff. What about extending visual (wavelength) range or perhaps adding some very fine gradations (what if you could "hear" very fine gradations of color for example?)  While a bit orthogonal to the concept of a magazine, it shows that you might ship interesting computation filters and apps as part of the magazine to make points and enhance experiences - and even to collect information and insight from others.

Recipe

Sweet Cherry Tart

I usually make tarts with pie cherries, but tried this with some amazing Rainier cherries a few years ago.  You can use of those premade pie tart shells, but it is far better to make your own, and it is very easy if you have the right pan.  As it is Summer,  quick and easy rules.

 

Ingredients

° 25g cornstarch (about 3 tablespoons)

° 170g white cane sugar

° 1 teaspoon fine sea salt

° 1 orange, juiced and zested

° 1 tablespoon butter

° 1 vanilla bean, cut and scraped

° 55g amaretto 

° 800 - 900g pitted, fresh cherries (about 2 pounds)  used Rainiers, but any "eating" cherry will work.  If you use black cherries you should increase the sugar a bit.  If you use pie cherries, a lot ...

° 1 prebaked tart shell 

Technique

° pit and halve the cherries, reserving them in the juice.  

° combine everything but the cherries in a pan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly

° Reduce heat to medium high and cook 'til a thick creamy paste forms.  

° remove from heat, strain, and immediately stir in the cherries.

° cool until just above room temperature, stirring occasionally.  

° fill the shell and bake at 450° F until the crust is baked through. 

° cool and serve. It is great a bit warm and also chilled.  A good vanilla ice cream can be served with it and chocoholics might appreciate a bit of shaved chocolate on top.

 

Prebased Shortbread Tart Shell 

 

Ingredients

° 130 grams all purpose flour

° 35 grams powdered sugar

°  a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 ° 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 Technique

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a central position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

 

 

sharpen your dot connection skills...

Scientists are skilled dot connecters as that is one of the more powerful tools of the trade.  Years ago Greg, another physicist, recommended visiting "companies that make stuff"and see if they'll give you a tour of their process.  Making physical things presents multiple challenges including human factors and social challenges and, if you get someone who is proud of what they're doing, you can dive in and ask a lot of questions getting some real depth in the process.  

 

Over the years I've visited companies that brew beer, cartoon, make rocket engines, fabricate ICs, build large gas turbines, do precision wood work, build submarines, bake cakes, make ultrasound machines, pull wire, smelt copper, make exotic steels, make potato chips, make electric motors, make dresses (many companies here - it is a rich area), craft bespoke shoes for athletes, build exotic batteries, make LED lamps, and build bikes (that is a small list - it has been going on for years).  

 

All of these tours have been worthwhile and some of the visits have given serious insight for problems I have worked on years later - the potato chip factory visit provided just the right clue in thinking about mesh networking. Although the reasoning is a bit difficult to explain, all of a sudden the network problem became obvious in light of the clues I had learned watching a quality control step at the Utz factory in Pennsylvania.  

 

Post 9/11 it has been more difficult to get tours (I tired for a few years to get a tour of the place that makes water tanks for buildings in Manhattan before having success) and many companies are giving up the fabrication phase at this point.  But don't let that stop you - there are a lot of places that are thrilled to have someone take an interest.  Except for the Mars company (M&Ms) - one I will probably never crack...

 

I've learned a lot from bicycles including their design and fabrication.  Simple machines  hold a special interest as you can easily wrap your head around the integrated design.  So this 1945 film on the fabrication of Raleigh bikes is particularly good.  I'm keeping this short today as I spent the 17 or so minutes watching.  Comments from the company:

Our resident historian (HR Manager Frank Ellis) tells us that the bike was a “Low Gravity Carrier” (a Butcher’s Bike to you and I) and “The guy putting ball bearings in the bottom bracket took me back….he had that authentic piecework dance…people used to say that if you worked at Raleigh long enough you started doing the dance in your sleep!” 

Frank, who carried out time and motion studies when he joined Raleigh as an apprentice in the 70s, said: “The hub lacing shot towards the end was great to see. It used to be done by hand by women and the first frames capture the classic fanned spokes that the women achieved with a simple flick of the wrist…try that one and see if you can get them anywhere near as evenly spaced! I’m always telling people the top women pieceworkers were faster than the automatic hub lacer, but I might be exaggerating just a little.”

Give it a view - great stuff!

 

 

Bike manufacture has changed considerably in the 65+ years since then and that is another story...  I've been involved in it a bit myself and for someone without a mechanical engineering background it has been a terrific education and has expanded the pool of dots in my quiver.

 

Nothing like ending on a mixed metaphor...