omenti

from watches to red:white muscle ratios - and a rapidly evolving technology

While reading a recent issue of Science I came across a short article on the metabolic mechanisms invoked during judo.  Now I know nothing about judo, but a fair about about metabolism and that sparked a need to for a short post.  Not one centered on sport or metabolism, but rather it makes sense to move back to my human-computer interface department at AT&T Research in the mid 90s and something completely different...

 

Among other things we were charged with looking at user behavior and began to notice that as people became more comfortable with mobile phones they were beginning to use the watch that came on some of them in place of a watch.  The trend seemed to be larger among groups of young users, but nothing for Swatch to worry about at the time.  

 

We did a bit of work with Swatch - they were convinced the technology trend was more towards a focus on the watch and were busy trying to concoct ways to move some of your personal information to your wrist.  The concept that the phone was the important target was lost on them and those of us who were working along the phone line did not - or at least I did not - have an extremely strong conviction one way or the other.

 

About the same time some of the folks in the lab started working on combining digital cameras and mobile phones. The early attempts were incredibly crude to the point of being unusable and the dog and pony shows would produce a lot of abrasive comments.  But there was a certain amount of magic in it.  

 

A few of us had become fascinated by digital music devices and serious work informed us that quality - at least as measured by the standard measurements found in audio magazines - didn't matter very much.  People were more interested in convenience.  Terrible quality was shunned, but as it increased there was a point ..  around 96 kbps mp3 - where the objections went away.  People might be able to tell, but they didn't care.  Furthermore, when they were isolated from comparisons to a reference, they could put up with cheap reproduction hardware including very cheap headphones.  It was something of an epiphany to me.

 

At the same time we were seeing the same thing with video and video conferencing.  Just make it work and get it to a minimum acceptable level and the vast majority of people don't really care about quality.  This gives you a very different way to think about cameras - use Moore's law and a bit of optics from physics and you could convince yourself that cameras on cellphones would begin to make real sense around 2004 give or take a year or so.  

 

I was thinking a lot about photography at the time as two of us were deep in thought about how people interact with music and were inspired by Susan Sontag's essays in On Photography as a framework.  The real question for digital photography was convenience and cost was a major part of convenience followed by size.  The notion of taking an instant image at no cost and of being able to have a camera with you always was compelling.  It was easy to predict film was going to die and we did.  We also suggested the camera would become part of the phone as an always present ability to capture images was highly desirable.  It was then that I started to see the mobile phone as a small box that could be filled with sensors and that these sensors had a connection, albeit an imperfect one, with the external world.  We got excited about what it meant to attach a real computer and have it disappear into that box.  It all seemed so obvious (Steve, Nancy, and Wayzen are all nodding now).  We did something called Air Graffiti around 1999 to 2001 with bits that would still seem interesting today.  All you needed was something like an iPhone to make it work.

 

I've been thinking about other sensors recently - the urge comes every few years.  The most recent thinking came with noticing the new third generation iPad has BlueTooth 4.  BlueTooth is pretty ugly as a protocol (or pile of protocols), but it works and volumes are high enough to render it approximately free and ubiquitous.  BT4 has some lightweight features that seem tailor-made for talking to external devices that may have a sensor or two, but have very tight power requirements.  You look at the world and begin to imagine what a home with a few hundred - or thousand -  sensors might look like.

 

An obvious use is making measurements of what your body is doing.  Smart shirts and so on start to become very inexpensive.  Up to now a considerable engineering design effort was required to make a system work - you had to source and program a very small computer, worry about communications and do a hundred other tasks that drive the costs high enough to prevent enough volume for them to be affordable.  A lightweight radio link and remote processing and display would vastly decrease costs.  That would only decrease the costs of the tiny computers and radios used by the sensors. They would probably all be integrated into a single chip that could be produced for pennies - plug in an antenna, battery and a sensor or two and you're all ready to go.

 

This, and a few other things, has me thinking more about the science of sport as that is a leading edge for this sort of device (arguably so is the medical world, but that has some strong legal restrictions and I don't know that many medical researchers.

 

Anyway the trigger for writing this was a fascinating paper on metabolism in Judo.  The muscles turn energy into motion using two (three depending on how you count) basic mechanisms - anaerobic and aerobic metabolism.

 

We use two basic forms of anaerobic (without oxygen) metabolic systems - alactic and latic.²   The first is for short intense bursts of exertion using energy stored energy compounds known as phophagens that are present inside the muscle.  Terrific amounts of power can be generated.  World class sprinters like Usain Bolt develop power in the vicinity of 2.5 to 3 kilowatts for about ten seconds - impressive when you consider the electric burner on an electric range uses about 1.5 kilowatts.  For the runners about 80% of that energy is turned into waste heat, which causes their internal body temperatures to soar.  Anything much over fifteen seconds at that level can be fatal, but they have exhausted their store in that period. The second allows muscles to break down sugars anaerobically and is good for a few minutes, but at power levels well under those unleashed by alactic metabolism.

 

Longer term muscle use requires externally supplied oxygen - aerobic metabolism - which basically works as long as there is oxygenated flowing blood and  energy being converted by breaking down food or stored fat.  A world class runner or bike racer can probably manage 350 watts of output indefinitely.   Think of invoking them as shifting gears.  You can get a sense of the power available in this post.

 

There are several muscle types, but they are often categorized at a high level as white and red muscle.¹  Red muscle is optimized towards aerobic metabolism and is best for long duration use.  White muscle excels at getting its power from anaerobic metabolism and is useful when bursts of power are required. People have different muscle compositions based on their genetics.  Sprinters tend to have large percentages of white muscle - up to 70% -allowing them to convert a lot of energy into motion for a short period.  Endurance runners and cyclists can convert a more modest amount of energy over extended periods and have as much of 80% red muscle.  Most of us have about half and half, but most marathon runners are usually at least 60% red muscle.  Even very athletic average people can have serous problems with endurance work and marathoners are notoriously bad at jumping. 

 

Judo is interesting as it is an unpredictable sport with differing output demands. 

 

The judo work informed us that all three metabolism types are important.  Phosphagen metabolism was critical in throwing people and the other class of anaerobic metabolism came into play, but aerobic metabolism was much more important than suspected. Probably enough that conditioning for the sport probably deserves a more critical look.

 

This caught my eye as I've been worried about the energetics of volleyball; another unpredictable sport which is a combination of moving around the court in longish bursts with brief moments of extreme output.  Indoor volleyball, the the elite level, tends to specialize and some extremely good jumpers emerge, but the beach game is too much of a generalists game.  Height is important in both, but tall extremely good jumpers are rare as most people - including tall people - tend to have a 50-50 red:white muscle ratio.  It is spectacular when it occurs, but they tend not to have a lot of endurance.

 

Learning about how the body works in sport means asking questions demands measurement and that may provide novel techniques that are useful in many other areas - perhaps sorting out interesting sensors that naturally pair with smartphones and may be useful far outside of sport.  Spinoff happens all the time - just another form of connecting the dots.

 

Predicting many of the big trends in technology a decade out is certainly possible and it is much more likely among those who are engaged in serious play and connecting with areas beyond technology.  Smartphones were very obvious 10 years out when you started to think more about how people relate to music and photography.   Getting the specifics is probably impossible.  At the same time it is possible to rule out many other technologies.  You need multidisciplinary teams with multidisciplinary - and really curious - people.

 

Oh - and on watches - in 1997 we wrote a paper that the watch industry would have serious problems, but the high end would probably do well as watches are also a form of jewelry and that serves an important function for many people.³  We suggested watches could also house sensors that would talk to small computers housed elsewhere - like in a mobile phone - using very short range radio links.  One of us even developed an unusual pointing device that listened for the acoustic signals caused by rubbing fingers together.  The convenient place to locate it was in a ring.  While it was impractical at the time it was formed the seed of a line of extremely rich inquiry.

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¹ Also fast and slow twitch muscle.  A general comment.  At elite levels genetics and body type are important components of winning, but at lower levels it makes sense to go with your passion.  I see parents moving kids into sports that may be optimal for their genetics when they are nine or ten years old ..  completely silly.  For most of us sport should be recreation and a pathway to lifelong fitness.

² Alactic metabolism is also known as the ATP-PC phosphagen system - a very beautiful piece of biochemistry that is well beyond the time I have to write.  If you haven't been exposed to it I encourage you to read about it.  The other lactic metabolism is as known as anaerobic glycoloysis.  Glucose and glycogen are used anaerobically and one of the by-products is lactic acid, hence the name.  Duration is in the 200 second range at power levels significantly below phosphagen metabolism.  This mechanism is very important in 400 meter to mile long foot races.  

Here is a nice little video from the School of Physical Education and Sport University of Sao Paulo showing how some of these things are measured in sport.

³ Pocket watches are now being embraced by leading edge 20 somethings, although it is too early to identify a real trend.

 

probing ignorance a bit more deeply...

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

It is ignorance rather than data that moves science along.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

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

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

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

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

 

 

homeward bound

 

Homeward bound 
I wish I was 
Homeward bound 
Home, where my thought's escaping 
Home, where my music's playing 
Home, where my love lies waiting 
Silently for me 

....

 

Home is one of those loaded words that brings to mind a certain image for many even though it has a much broader meaning.¹

 

Pip, Dave and others in that team have been using it to talk about an important aspect of how companies can deal with customers ...  sort of a peace of mind that is quite different from low prices, product selection and so on.    I'm probably not using the concept in exactly the same way, but hearing about it from them recently caused me to reflect on some organizations that are good at it.  I suspect it is something best accomplished face to face and may be a powerful tool for brick and mortar stores as online ordering becomes more prevalent.  There may be some interesting ways of addressing it online too.

 

There are a lot of examples where it breaks too...  shopping suggestions based on prior searches and visits annoy me to no end.  It reminds me of Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" - a hypothesis that as robots begin to look and act like humans there is a point where we sense they are imperfect copies and that grates on us.  Inferior models are preferable.  Pixar is very aware of this effect and are careful to stray into the region as they found rather dramatically in the animation Tin Toy about twenty years ago and other works have been burned - famously Polar Express.  I suspect a huge amount of social understanding and much more sophisticated techniques will be required to make interacting with these online ads less negative to many of us.  

 

Many of you think about this more deeply than I do and I'd love to hear your experiences and insight.  To start things off I put together a short list of a few recent experiences in brick and mortar stores and something a bit more personal to illustrate a positive sense of being understood and cared for even though the interactions were with strangers for very short amounts of time.  In all three cases there is a very careful selection of staff along with a considerable amount of training.  The experiences were all powerful and left with with a strong images of a company that is doing something right.

 

Lululemon

About a month ago and friend and I were in Manhattan trying to understand a bit more about street fashion and its possible future directions given new technologies and rich online social networking.  Our base camp was the Lincoln Center area as Fashion Week was underway and the street fashionistras were curious about the shows as well as showing off what they had done and watching others - it was something of a sartorial scene.  Out of curiosity we found ourselves in a Lululemon across the street.  

 

Last week I was taking a gelato gelato break from some street fashion interviews with J across from Lincoln Center.  On the way back we walked by a Lululemon Athletica store.  She made the comment that she hadn't been in one, but some of the women she knew in the US who did yoga were passionate about the place and were regularly dressed in their togs.  So we went in… as two tourists…

J happens to look like a model, and also happens to be in great physical shape (she runs an hour a day and bicycles everywhere).  She tried yoga, but finds it frustrating and gave it up.  I happen to not look like a model.  I tried yoga a decade ago and quickly gave it up as I just couldn't get my mind and body to couple with the experience.  Both of us recognize it has a passionate fandom, but we're not part of it so we were visitors from a foreign land.

As she looked through the clothing a salesperson approached and asked if she was here for fashion week, where she was from etc.  Then came a few yoga questions with J noting that she didn't have much luck with it and considered herself a more kinetic personality.  The salesperson (very personable) noted a lot of people have issues like that and finding the right trainer can be a deal breaker - she said she could recommend several who specialized in working with people who were left with a distaste.

J then introduced me noting she rarely visits the city, but that I have similar issues. The salesperson asked a few questions and said she could link me with trainers who specialize in working with men and there were a few in my area of New Jersey.  Up to this point there was no sales pitch to J.  She consulted a sheet and wrote down some phone numbers for me.  

In the meantime J was looking at clothes and was told she would probably be too difficult to fit as she is very tall and thin.  She asked another woman who came over and said J could try on a top, but it probably wouldn't fit.  She knew of someone in the city who had a specialized business making custom athletic clothing for women.  She Googled on her iPhone and sent J the contact information.  

Our ten minute visit left us with a warm feeling that an effort had been made for both of us when a sale was impossible.  The feeling was a yoga lifestyle was being sold - the clothing was incidental.  J liked the styling and quality of the clothing, but felt it was overpriced - but she added:  "this isn't really a clothing store, is it?"  

They clearly wanted to make sure we both had had a proper trainer before abandoning us to a yoga-free life.  The fact that I was male and would never use their products didn't seem to make much of a difference.  I've seen similar behavior at Apple Stores.  A key point is these people really aren't salespeople (I shouldn't have used that term), but provide service instead and have a high degree of integrity.  I've seen that time and time again at Apple Stores, Trader Joe's and suspect it is true here.  

As we walked out we went past the Manhattan Mormon Temple …  an interesting juxtaposition …

 

Apple

 Apple Stores are almost always too busy, but somehow the sales guys manage to find you without being too intrusive.  You are encouraged to play with the products and the atmosphere is such that other customers often offer their own comments and suggestions.  The only pressure I've ever felt wasn't that great - mainly being encouraged to purchase AppleCare when I buy a computer.

 

The sales people do not work on commission and can route you to others if you have very specific questions.  Trouble shooting of existing product is done at the "genius bar" and the stores offer one-on-one training.  I've been visiting the stores since the first opened in New Jersey and note how much they've changed as the company learns more about retail and its customer mix changes.  There is a nearly constant experimentation and the overall quality of experience is kept high throughout.

 

The ability to help people with various skill levels use their computers is remarkable.  They have a few classes, but increasingly they offer one on one training using a full or part time employee who is expert at teaching and a few applications.  A friend spent $99 for this service and spent about 20 hours learning fine points of a serious video editing program taking him much futher along than he was able to get using books on the subject.  A user group meeting even meets in this Apple Store (in Manhattan on West 14^th St - sort of ground zero for that sort of thing)

 

I was interested in how a new AirPlay enabled amplified speaker might be sold.²  The speaker is the product of a medium to high end European audio company and it is one of their first excursions into the larger consumer market.  I approached clerks at several Apple Stores and was routed to their audio expert.  All of them gave the right advice for me - that this amplified speaker wasn't going to make me happy and I could put something together on my own for much less and almost no effort.  Three of them made lists of what to buy elsewhere.  How novel - get the maximum value out of what you own rather than buy something expensive - even though the item I originallly asked about is sold by the Apple Store.

 

Trader Joe's

I suspect many of you have shopped at Trader Joe's.  It may or may not be to your taste, but it caters to people who like a curated selection of a certain class of food.  We're often struck how much we identify with other customers as well as the clerks.

 

Channeling Barry Schwartz and Steve Jobs, they limit product selection to make the experience easier.  They cheerfully refund the inevitable disaster purchase, allow you to taste products in the store, offer advice and, most important - they watch and listen.

 

Information is gathered from employees and customers and is frequently acted on.  A friend worked in one for a few years and noted several customers wanted their particular store to open an hour earlier.  The store put it to a customer vote, found there was general support and that particular store now opens at 6am.  I suspect their information gathering system is much more powerful than massive data mining attempts by others...  Knowing your business and customers well enough to listen makes a huge difference.

 

personal chef

I've had a personal chef cook for me a few times as a present.  G. is the brother of a close friend and is amazingly talented.  More important is the fact that he listens and tries to come up with an experience involving fresh food, your own tastes, and his experience and inventiveness.  He loves to give surprises and walk you in directions you have never been.

 

I can only decribe him as passionate.  The experience starts with a trip to a farmer's market earlier in the day with you picking up things you like and letting you sample other items that might work out well.  There is a conversation about food and he's building models of what might work in his mind as the trip progresses - it is clear he never uses recipes.

 

The cooking experience, at least for me, involves me helping out as I want to learn technique and he's a great teacher.  To this day we still have email conversations about interesting things to do about food and he almost makes me feel welcome even though many of my ideas are probably naïve.  

 

His goal is not to cook a spectacular meal, but rather to spark a passion for food and cooking in me.  To this end he's also interested in learning what I can offer - sort of the physics of cooking and some of the chemistry involved.  This is so much better than a restaurant experience - so much deeper and more personalized and it inspires me to cook for quite some time afterwards.

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None of this  is rocket science, but rather the hiring of passionate workers along with clear policies of doing right by the customer.  In most cases the product being sold only enhances what the customer is really after and it is up to the organization to make that desired experience central rather than the product itself.  Only a few organizations manage to pull that off.  

 

It may be helpful to have additional information available, but only if it enhances the ultimate goal.  And most remarkably it makes a lot of sense to recommend services and products that the company does not offer if it makes the most sense.  

 

One can imagine that happen as a community based experience online as well as in hybrid online/brick and mortar mixed model. Some - like street fashion - are probably best done by the mixture.  

 

I suspect getting this right takes a lot of common sense as well as the experimentation and honing that Apple and Trader Joe's are constantly performing.  You need passionate employees and a structure that gives them a bit of freedom and treat them fairly.  Your best employees may come from the pool of your most enthusiastic customers.  Commissioned sales probably poison the process as the optimization shifts from the customer to the employee.

 

Most of all drawing up this list makes me reflect on my own practice.  Am I bringing the appropriate passion to what I do and am I finding what my client is really after rather than what I - or they - may think on the surface?  My greatest value is probably helping people connect the dots where they didn't see connections before ...  other things may not matter as much to either of us.

 

So what are your favorite companies and what makes them special?  What about your passions - are they well supported?  Feel free to add your comments!

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ok - I mentioned cooking, so it is time for another recipe. This is my chocolate chip cookie recipe.  It is decidedly not healthy, so don't make it all the time.  It is simple, but a bit strange and has a long resting time in the refrigerator before baking.  Not exactly the Toll House recipe.  Although I don't really measure in cooking, I use a scale for everything in baking.  If you bake a lot you need to get a good scale accurate to the gram!

This one came out of the realization that all purpose flour is a compromise, so I use a mixture of bread and cake flour.  The cookies need to be large to take advantage of this mixture and it produces a soft and moist interior with an exterior with a nice crunch.  Make sure your ingredients are fresh!  I am a big fan of King Arthur flours.  Also - I am addicted to eating a bit of the raw cookie dough.  This isn't safe unless you use pasteurized eggs.

 

Monster Chocolate Chip Cookies 

ingredients

240g cake flour

240g bread flour

1.25 tsp baking powder 

1.25 tsp baking soda

1.5 tsp kosher salt

2.5 sticks butter (fresh and high quality!)

225g white sugar

285g light brown sugar

2 large eggs (pasteurized if you sample raw cookie dough like me)

2 tsp vanilla extract (I make my own with vanilla beans and rum and time for aging)

550g 60% to 70% bittersweet chocolate.  I like Lindt in the thin sheets and break them into bits about the size of a nickel

150g chopped pecans or walnuts 

small amount of large crystal sea salt (Maldon)

method

° sift dry ingredients into a bowl

° cream the butter and sugars in another mixing bowl until light and smooth - about 3 or 4 minutes on a medium speed with an electric mixer for me.  Add the eggs one at a time mixing well after each.  Add the vanilla.  Now add the dry ingredients and mix at low speed until just combined.  Don't overmix!!  About 10 seconds for me.  By hand carefully mix in the nuts and chocolate pieces.

° press the dough into a plastic wrap and tightly wrap into an airtight package.  Refrigerate for a day or so.  I usually go for a day to 36 hours.  There is a very slow chemical reaction going on and baking sooner won't produce the same result.

° preheat oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper

° scoop some large mounds of the dough into golf ball sized globs (I have a four ounce round scoop).  Some of the chocolate chunks will stick up - push them flush.  I go for about six cookies for my sheet to give them room to expand - these are BIG DANGEROUS COOKIES.

° sprinkle each with a bit of Maldon salt and bake until golden brown.  About 20 minutes in my oven (which runs just a bit cool).

° the leftover dough will keep a few days if you want several days of warm monster cookies that are fresh.

Also - Sukie is allergic to chocolate and I make a version with dried fried and more nuts that is pretty good.  If you aren't using chocolate, skip the Maldon salt finishing step - salt pairs well with chocolate, but not dried sweet fruit.

 

 

 

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¹ In my Human Computer Interaction department we kept track of some of these and tried to avoid them when there could be a misunderstanding.  Community is another example.

The lyric sniplet is from Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound.  If you don't have a copy, you need one.

² Airplay allows to to wirelessly stream content from Macintoshes, iPads, iPhones and so on to any stereo system or TV in your house.  Content can be on any of the devices or from iCloud.  Properly executed it can add a good deal of flexibility to a home system.

 

 

empathy at the foot of a dangerous academic

Last night, on the train ride back from the city, I found myself thinking about the last post on ignorance and empathy.  

 

The reason for the trip was a semi-annual get-together that Pip Coburn hosts.  There were several sessions built around themes and I tend to go to a few where I might know a little as well as others - like story telling and marketing - where my ignorance is great in hope of picking up a bit in case I want to start down those paths.  Ignorance is a fine thing as long as it is a conscious and even a cultivated ignorance. 

 

It reminded me of the period when I was trying to learn a bit about sociology, psychology and anthropology in order to interact with my Human Computer Interface department at AT&T Research a decade and a half ago.  That was a wonderful time.  You know so little that the possibility space is great and I had several wonderful tutors to help me as I played.  I knew that most of the engineering problems were solvable, but the social problems were deeper - this interaction of the social and technical worlds was really interesting.

 

One of the anthropologists who worked there got in touch a few years ago and asked if I knew Sam Richards of Penn State.  I didn't, but ended up getting in touch and talking and visited.  

 

A fascinating guy.  He's a sociologist and was called one of the "101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" by David Horowitz.

 

sweet

 

One of his core notions is that empathy is at the heart of sociology if you want to be really good at it.  Rather than bore you with my filtered version of what I learned from him, I'll point you at his TED^x talk.   

 

Trust me - it is well worth your time.  He'll challenge you.

 

___________

ok - I took the easy way out and put up a video, so I owe you something.  Last night two people needled me about not posting any recipes in awhile, so here is one that worked out wonderfully.  And please write if you have any positive or negative comments.  I get very little feedback and, as a result, tend to treat this as a weekly journal rather than a conversation.

 

A note on my recipes.  I have a tendency not to measure, but keep rough track in the event something works (I do carefully measure when baking and usually start with a recipe as a guide - cooking is so incredibly different from baking).  I also tend to weigh rather than use volume measurements and the kitchen is metric.  

 

Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Parsnips

 ingredients 

4 parsnips (about 750g total for me)

4 medium red onions

150g really good extra virgin olive oil

2 sprigs rosemary

4 sprigs thyme

1 head of garlic (let how much you love garlic be your guide on what a head means)

2 medium (or one really big) sweet potatoes - about 600g 

24 to 30 cherry tomatoes (they weren't in season, but they seemed necessary)

2 tbl lemon juice

4 tbl capers roughly chopped

1/2 tbl maple syrup

1/2 tsp Dijon mustard (pick a good one)

salt and pepper

 method

° Heat the oven to 375°F

° Peel the parsnips, cut horizontally in half and then lengthwise a few times.  I aimed for about 2 x 1/2 inch pieces.

° Peel the onions and cut into 6 or 8 wedges

° Put the parsnips and onions into a large bowl and add about 3/4 of the oil along with the rosemary,  thyme and garlic (I cut the cloves about in half).  Mix well with a fair amount of salt and some pepper.  I like a good sea salt here (Maldon).  Spread on a baking pan and roast for about 20 minutes

° Take the top and bottoms off the sweet potatoes and then cut in half across the middle and then wedge each of them - maybe about 8 wedges from each half. Add them to the baking sheet with the heated parsnips and onions and bake about 45 minutes more.  You are looking for a golden color.

° Now they have cooked mix in the halved tomatoes and continue roasting for another 10 minutes or so.

° During the last roast whisk the lemon juice, capers, maple syrup, mustard and the remaining oil and salt it with a sea salt.

° Take the veggies out of the oven and drizzle with the dressing.   Stir and fool with the seasoning just in case.

° You can dress it up with roasted chopped walnuts or pecans - I like pecans:-)

 

Finally I had to do a cake for a very colorful friend's 60^th birthday.  Thinking about the tune from the Stones made me realize white cake and a bit of food coloring might work out pretty well.  

 

My guess is kids woud really love this too.  Make nice scratch white cake (much better than the mixes) and a good buttercream frosting.  I think coloring the frosting would be overkill, but use the person as a guide:-)

 

no pantones were harmed in the making of the cake...

 

the delight of inflationary ignorance

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

                               - James Clerk Maxwell

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

                                                 - Richard Feynman

 

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

 

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

 

locally dense cloud ground fog

My new iPad arrived last Friday at around 4PM.  Normal FedEx deliveries are much earlier, but our delivery person said this was the "Apple holiday" and they were under huge strain delivering "boxes" from Apple.  She also noted an unusual percentage of recipients were home to sign for the packages.

 

This is my first iPad - white, 32GB and WiFi only for what its worth.  Sukie has an original model from early on and is a heavy user.  She doesn't see the need for anything newer or better as the old one, with its current software, is just fine as far as she's concerned.  She uses her a lot for almost anything you can imagine and I rarely get to use it.  That wasn't a big deal to me - I didn't see a big need for one until I learned about the new model.

 

no - it wasn't the display

 

I sketch quite a bit.  This is an important piece of how I think and I'm rarely without my pad and pencils.  I also sketch recreationally doing bits of what barely passes for art, but it is fun and relaxing and something I wouldn't give up.

 

A digital sketching interface is something I lust after.   I have a Wacom tablet for my Mac and have done some sketching and photoediting using it, but there is a disconnect between the stylus and image.  Wacom "solves" this with a very expensive display tablet - but they cost much more than a Mac and have some problems.   

 

iPads don't support a pressure sensitive stylus, although some hacks have been made - but they had issues.   It turns out the new iPad supports Bluetooth 4.0 which allows you to make such a device that would have good enough performance and interface with the iPad fairly transparently.  I had been talking to a small company that does a fantastic drawing program as well as another that will be doing the right sort of stylus.  The pieces aren't here just yet, but they'll be on sale within a few months.

 

So I ordered the iPad about ten minutes after the announcement event ended

 

There is something deeper going on which may give a bit of insight into Apple's direction. Over the weekend I sent a note about that to a few people and here is a slightly edited version:

 

I've been playing with the new iPad for over a day and have a sense this is something that will identify a major new direction for Apple.

Apple is very careful with product evolution. Of course they aren't perfect at the game, but they stay away from checklists of features that trip so many in tech, preferring to focus on real form and function. 

The core of the Mac was the notion of the Mac as a hub.  Their new major direction is not iOS devices, but rather the cloud (iCloud in their case) as core with Mostly Apple products attached. 

The cloud is not evenly distributed for a variety of reasons. A difficult part is what to do at a very local scale - what is the notion of cloud within a home and how is it distributed? I suspect Apple intends to crack this with WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.

The new iPad has BT 4.0 which frankly is what pushed me over the top into a purchase. I do a lot of sketching and need a pressure sensitive stylus. The best approach without resorting to piano wire and chewing gum engineering is BT 4.0. It enables very simple lightweight short range communication links at very low power drains. Simple essentially means auto pairing. I'm doing that now with a prototype piece of kit I can't talk about - it just works and gives a sense of how all of your stuff can interact with apple devices in your house, office or factory. Sensors in everything at very low cost and Apple can deal with much of the difficult data management with the cloud let sharing structure they've developed.

Already I can get at all of my digital photos, video and music and play it on any of my Apple devices using AirPlay - our home has become a tiny WiFi interconnected ground fog that links directly to iCloud and indirectly to other public and private clouds.  BT 4.0 will make this *much* less expensive and I expect explosive third party development. It looks like the new Apple TV "hobby" box has a BT 4.0 capability in addition to WiFi.

Apple's challenge is to make sure this works transparently - so far they seem to be on the right path. This is really big - forget little things like Apple TV - they are a proper subset...

Oh yeah - the iPad is a excellent by itself - there are enough reviews that I won't waste your time with mine. But it is only part of the story and watching our little Apple fog expand so much showed me a bit of the possible future - a manifestation of something I worked on a decade or so ago.

 

This patchy but locally dense fog is a natural extension of the cloud idea and is also a natural play for Apple at this point.  You could execute it with any number of standards - just pick one or two and make them work.  Apple will do it with WiFi for the heavy lifting and BT for the lightweight and inexpensive communication with enabled devices - perhaps hundreds of them in your house.  It is just the beginning, but it is pretty stunning seeing how well sharing already works to TVs and stereos from any Apple device.  Just wait for the next level - the BT level - to take off.  There is incredible potential if they can pull it off and this goes way beyond the scale of much smaller markets like entertainment.

 

I hope others can offer some serious competition - the dream of what is needed and a few of the uses have been known for a long time, but Apple is the first company with a shot at it and there are signs they are engaged.    I suspect there will be uses we can't dream of now and this thing we call the Internet will become much more useful.

 

a pre-review

Jon Gertner's new book on Bell Labs has just been published and a few people have written to ask what I think about it.  I haven't read it yet, but am very curious as I was part of that organization from the end of its golden years through its demise.  It was a unique and amazing place - a fundamentally different approach to "innovation" than what is common today.  It isn't clear to me which approaches are better or worse - the old Bell Labs approach doesn't square with how companies work these days.

 

The old AT&T was a regulated monopoly divestiture in 1984.  A few percent of its income was channeled into running the labs - known as the Bell Telephone Laboratories and, through a series of regulatory consent decrees - funding was incredibly stable and sufficient to insure very long term research and development projects.  After a decree in 1956, inventions were licensed under very liberal terms to the rest of the nation and the Labs had become something of a national laboratory.  

 

I won't go into the history of the place and will be interested to see how it is charted in Gertner's book, but the core DNA of the place needs to be explained.

 

Innovation had a very specific meaning.  It didn't mean invention or discovery, but rather was discovery taken through stages of development and finally implemented at a scale that would change society.  

 

The Labs was primarily advanced and applied development with a core basic research arm (area 10 - later renamed area 11 about the time I joined it).  Fundamental researchers were presented with an amazing array from curious problems.  The notion was not the standard approach of engineering where you attack a problem by tallying your resources and try to build an optimal result, but rather something a bit more zen.

 

In the research unit you defined and attacked problems by looking for the unknown and then trying to understand as much as your could about it.  You had to go deeply into uncharted territory not knowing if your efforts would pay off or if you had the right intellectual tools for the job.

 

This approach - solving a jigsaw puzzle not by identifying your pieces and putting them together, but rather looking for the missing pieces and trying to solve a puzzle by understanding what was missing - required a multidisciplinary approach.  It is close to the approach of physics and basic research had a high percentage of Ph.D. physicists.  Really good ones.  Their specialties were not as important a their taste in problem solving.  I was an experimental particle physicist.  Bell Labs never dabbled in particle physics, but that was "the right stuff" and they saw an immediate match.

 

We worked with computer scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, opticians, chemists, acoustics experts, material scientists, psychologists, neurologists, biologists, musicians and artists to name a few backgrounds.  The central laboratory at Murray Hill, New Jersey was built around a five story corridor a quarter mile long with a sometimes maze-like structure of smaller buildings.  Going to lunch or visiting someone else's lab would force interaction with others. It was said a researcher going to lunch was like a magnet rolling by iron filings.  It was a brilliant architecture and aspects of it have been duplicated elsewhere.¹

 

Some of the projects had very long horizons - digital communications took about four decades and thousands of researchers years of effort.  This type of time frame is only seen universities and national laboratories these days and is rarely directly coupled efficiently with commercial development.

 

But the next step in innovation - and one where the majority of Bell Labs people worked - was development research and engineering.  This is enormously difficult to get right. Most of the projects were defined by either Bell Labs management based on needs of the Bell System or by the government for national defense.  Many were difficult projects that advanced the state of the art by an order of magnitude and this was something of a model for DARPA, which came about in the 1950s with a clearer focus on military needs.

 

As the applied research and development proceeded it was productized and turned over to Western Electric - the manufacturing arm.  People in the various units spent time with each other.  Small branch development labs were built into Western Electric factories and the development folks often worked directly on the lines to understand the problems.  

 

The approach wasn't as clean as I describe it and there were tensions that had to be dealt with, but it was an innovation engine that changed the world.  It even paid a lot of attention to education creating everything from science and engineering ciricula to identifying promising students - mentoring them and getting them through their Ph.D.s in the best universities at no expense.

 

A very different approach than what is used, and perhaps needed, today.  The model today has universities and national labs doing the basic work with companies mostly engaged in short term development - real corporate research is not common.  Even long term development is rare^.2  True corporate research is mostly dead as is an integrated multi-disciplinary approach.  

 

Companies identify the pieces of the puzzle they have and try to build something optimal rather than trying to understand the missing pieces deeply.

 

As the Labs started to crumble in the late 80s I switched my focus from physics to something more applied - broadband to the home.  The problems were how do you do it and why do you do it.  The later lead to work in digital music and both led me to the notion that I *really* needed to understand social research.  I immersed myself in a human computer interaction department and hopefully helped out a bit with a bit of experimental rigor, very different thinking and a lot of naïve questions that turned out not to be so naïve.  I learned a lot in the process, but the efforts of the group were never coupled to the company at that point.  We did a lot of neat stuff that is finally beginning to be realized now.

 

I still try to search for projects that are looking for a bit of deeper understanding when I consult.  There are a lot of diamonds on the beach these days - as there probably always are.  The approach is rare and I find it odd that I'm sometimes seen as much broader than I see myself.  It is really just a bit of curiosity and the luck of having an amazingly rich chance to work in an environment that makes places like Apple and Pixar look lame when it comes to "multi-disciplinary".  I think there is great value to bits and pieces of the approach as suspect we'll see more of it as the tech world matures and energy becomes a more pressing issue.

 

I don't know what picture the book will paint.  I was witness to an amazing dinosaur and hope some of the better features of the place can be replicated.

 

We had a crisp definition of innovation. The physics people had a crisp definition of data and information.  I find the physics defnition at odds with common usage and I'll post on that in the near future - I've hinted at it before.  Data isn't basic...

 

Om recently commented on creativity talking about John Maeda of RISD.  This caused me to think of some comments from the professor of a graduate physics course I took as an undergrad.  The professor was famous for his creativity having been sprinkled with Swedish holy water.  Somehow he wanted to get over a few points on being creative - he thought you could inspire it.  

 

from my notebook:

 

° be curious about anything and everything. expose yourself to different people and ideas

° don’t be frightened to try the unknown. Many solve puzzles by figuring out what they can do with the puzzle pieces they have. A better approach is to figure out the missing pieces and solve a puzzle you don’t know anything about by learning about them.

° remember it must be play

° the delight is not in finding the answer, but in coming to it yourself

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

° real creativity simplifies – aim for simplicity as it is beautiful

° get into something so deeply you forget everything else. you need large pieces of uninterrupted time

 

much more on these later, but back to the old Bell Telephone Laboratories for a bit. When I first started I was delighted to learn that my first director was something of an aurora expert.  He was invovled in the Telstar communications project and was involved in the beginnings of creating the field of what is now called space weather. He would have loved this time lapse of the aurora taken from the ISS a few days ago...

 

 _______

¹ Pixar uses centrally located washrooms and has a design that reminds me of Murray Hill on a much smaller scale.

² IBM, Intel and Microsoft do longer term work in the tech sector. Apple has a ten year horizon for some projects, but anything longer than three years is very rare in industry. One of the longer term interests was video telephony. Here is something on developments in color video telephony .... in 1930.

the best part is how it intimidates the guys...

A few years ago I helped a young relative learn how to operate a manual transmission.  The idea was that used manuals were inexpensive and it isn't that difficult.  It turns out there was a bit of serendipity as far as she was concerned - none of the guys she dated knew how to use one and this fact gave her enormous pleasure.

 

In 2010 only 6.7% of cars and light trucks sold in the US had manual transmissions.¹  As manufacturers continue to drop manuals from their lines a backlash of sorts has developed and a few niche models are doing very well with people who love to shift by themselves.

 

Cars are fascinating examples of user experience and user interfaces.  Development is glacial by the standards of the consumer electronics industry - most manufacturers are well into design of models four and five years out and there are ideas that reach out nearly a decade.  Power trains are enormously expensive to engineer and are not only used in several platforms of a maker, but are sometimes used in other makes.  The laws of countries and physics both weigh heavily on design.  Mix into this economics and an attempt to create a desirable looking vehicle and a good user experience and you are left with an optimization process with thousands of variables.

 

Automobiles and light truck are remarkable examples of industrial design.  They are Fantastically complex pieces of engineering, they represent the most complicate mechanical objects most of us own.  Over the years they've become more trouble-free, safer and, at least by some metrics, more efficient.²  We take it for granted, but the interface is very similar and predictable.   Furthermore most cars can accommodate a wide range of human body types - generally from the 5% female to the 95% male, but some expand the range on one side or the other.  I was impressed that Colleen could get into my smallish Audi Coupe as she's at the 99.99% male level in height.  She can't drive it as her right leg can't get past the steering wheel, but there are cars she can drive and someone who stands more than a foot and a half less can easily drive the same car after fiddling with the seat a bit.  In theory both configurations offer protection from crashes.

 

Small badges can craft brilliant vehicles for specific niches, but the costs of low production runs mean the buyers have to be well heeled.  A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting a few of Ferrari's top engineers including the engine guy who was largely responsible for the user experience of the drivetrain.  His title was very different, but he was in charge of how it felt to the driver - a defining feature of the brand.  Even the exhaust note of each model is carefully tuned and part of the art of engineering compromise.

 

As production volumes of a model increase this complex design process and comes with a cost.  Two years ago I was thinking of trading my 2001 TT for the current version.  I test drove one.  A lovely engine and transmission, but the cockpit displays and user interface were jarring and, in a word, wrong.  It had a frightening array electronics and several byzantine interfaces.  Compared to my simpler cockpit was like fingernails screeching a path across a chalk board.  It was like using Windows XP after having used an iPad.  I decided to keep my current car and worry about keeping it running for a long time.  

 

Many cars are much worse.  

 

There is very little flexibility and major change comes slowly.  The industry tends not to optimally modularize. Electronics constitute 20% to 30% of the production cost of a car and that figure is increasing rapidly.  But the electronics that are part of the user interface are rarely optimal and the pace of car design evolution is not in synch with consumer electronics. It probably makes sense for the makers to user modular assemblies that are swapped out regularly to refresh the car, but to date efforts have been lame - witness the Ford/Microsoft effort.  There is an enormous opportunity for innovation and partnership in this area, but there would be a clash of engineering culture.  Steve Jobs told Walter  Isaacson that he'd love to work in this area if he could start fresh.  My guess is he would have had to start his own car company to make it work - or at least to have complete freedom over interior design at the bare minimum. 

 

 In addition to cockpit electronics, this decade will offer fantastic opportunity for fundamental change as the nature of power trains is shifting for the first time in nearly a century.  At this point pure electric cars are basically a platform that is closely related to a conventional car powered by an internal combustion engine - largely because radical change would be too expensive and volumes are currently to small to allow creativity.  But the ability to move battery packs and motors around will allow a much richer set of possibilities.³

 

It seems likely that the US, Europe and Japan will not be the primary drivers of design. Indeed the next billion cars are likely to be destined for use in China, India and some rapidly growing third world countries.  These cars may be much smaller than what we are used to and may have less range and much lower price points.  Serious work is only in its infancy and will roll out over the next three or four decades.  All of the big manufacturers see this as perhaps the core piece of their long term strategies.  The megacity car or the post-internal combustion car...   Population growth and the need to leave fossil fuels behind will be powerful forces.

 

Of course there are some of us who believe human power and human electric hybrids have a place in the mixture.  It will be interesting to see how all of this evolves and if it changes the notion of where people live and what mobility means as much as the automobile did.  

 

So I'll be using a mixture of human power and an IC/manual transmission car for awhile.  At some point the IC vehicle won't be practical for me and I'll get a pure electric.  Hopefully there will be a niche that couples me to the act of driving as well as a stick shift and a clutch does now.⁴

 

_______

¹ Government figures show automobiles came in at 9.0%, but light trucks were much less and manuals are non-existent in SUVs and minivans.  In Europe the numbers are nearly reversed and automatics are comparatively rare.

² Engine efficiency per unit of displacement, power to weight ratio, fuel consumption per unit of power, and overall power train efficiency.  Where they have fallen down is in overall efficiency for moving people and payloads.  There have been improvements, but nothing like the other improvements suggest - it turns out cars and trucks have also become much heavier and this erases many of the technological gains.

³ Designers tell me that the potential for a much greater life of an electric car and the ability to have greater design freedom may mean you'll buy a car for 15 or 20 years and remodel it when you need to along the way.  Some of the concepts are very clever indeed.

⁴ The highly peaked power curve of an IC engine and its torque characteristics demand the use of a multispeed transmission.  People on bikes have similarly narrow characteristics.  Electric motors have much broader ranges where they are efficient and usely can get by with a single speed gearbox.

 

phase transitions and the ipad

Earlier today Om penned a delightful note on his and, more important, his mother's experience with the iPad.  It sparked a bit of thinking about my feelings towards the device and to technology in general..  

 

but first consider a bit of physics....

 

Imagine that you can watch the movement of water molecules an ordinary ice cube.  Cold ice.  Perhaps -20°C or so.  The water molecules are locked into a fairly rigid crystalline form.  There is a bit of jiggling motion that gets more intense as heat is added to the ice.   Temperature is a physical property of matter that turns out to be related to the intensity of the motion of the molecules.  The greater this motion - this kinetic energy - the greater the temperature.

 

Without becoming formal it is important to note that heat is not directly related to temperature.  To understand this turn keep transferring energy to the ice - heat it up.  As you transfer heat energy the temperature of the ice begins to increase:

 

-14°, -8°, -2°, 0°, 0° ‚0°, 0°, 0°,0° ...

 

Hold on .. something seems wrong.  We're adding heat energy to the ice and the temperature stopped increasing at 0°C.  Looking at the molecular scale you notice something else is taking place.  The nice crystalline structure is beginning to break down.  There is just enough motion that some of the bonds that have been locking the water molecules into a rigid body begin to break.  As the process continues order continues to break until almost all of the molecules have taken on a new order where a few of them link up and then break apart in an incredibly complex and chaotic dance.  The water molecules have a natural attraction to each other, but there is enough jiggling that they can only hold together in small group, typically about four or five water molecules at a time, for about a thousandth of a billionth of a second - a picosecond.¹  The resulting mass of water is no longer a crystalline form and is now a liquid.   The heat went to change the structure of the ice cube from a jiggling crystal to wildly dancing groups of water molecules.  The liquid water has a motion that corresponds to 0°C.  All of that energy being transferred to the ice crystal went into changing the structure of the ice rather than raising its temperature.

 

Now with the 0° liquid water, begin adding heat to the water and measure its temperature:

 

0°C, 6°, 12°, 18°, and so on

 

The change of physical state of the water from a solid crystal to a liquid that can easily flow is called a phase change.  It turns out that water requires a lot of energy to move from solid to liquid form, but to the naked eye you really don't notice much is going on other than you have to keep transferring a lot of energy to get the cube to completely melt.²

 

So what does this have to do with the iPad?

 

Nothing physically, but it is an interesting metaphor for me.  I'm very interested in transparent, some would call them liquid, interfaces where the machine seems to melt away and you find yourself directly manipulating information and concepts.  Such interfaces allow you to get deeply into a task and become oblivious to the machine.  Take Yo Yo Ma's cello as an example.  In his hands it is really an extension of his body - perhaps an extension of his soul - as he enters a flow and wonderful music comes from them.  The interface, for him, is perfect and he doesn't think in terms of playing an instrument.

 

I've had these experiences of flow with good paper and pencils sketching things or doing physics.  Colleen has had them playing volleyball.  You can probably make a list of interactions where you've had them.  They are enormously important for creative work and I find myself trying to create conditions that allow them.  I find, like Douglas Adams, that distractions can destroy flow and send you crashing back to the local reality.³

 

So a really good interface - more than that - a really good user experience does not distract as you move through the boundary into flow.   In a sense it has supported a phase transition in how you think.

 

The iPad has a very good user experience.  I don't own one, but I use Sukie's original iPad regularly.  I frequently find myself doing things and not realizing I'm using a computing device.  It has begun to melt away.  I've also noticed the retina display on my iPhone 4 makes displayed objects seem like they are on the surface of the glass and that I am directly manipulating them through touch.  The illusion can be quite strong in well designed programs.  But to date neither device supports the type of program that would cause me to rush out and drop five or more Benjamins to have my own.

 

About a month ago I found myself sketching a gift for a dear friend.  I tend to make gifts rather than buy them for those who are close and this one involved a trace-like flow as I sketched out the design.  At one point I realized I was really hungry and noticed six hours had gone by in a blink.  Then it became time to work on the final design using my Mac and a drawing tablet.  The fact that I am drawing on a surface that is disconnected from the display makes it very difficult to achieve flow and the result wasn't quite what I was getting with the paper and pencil.

 

The iPad 3, or whatever it is called, may have enough computational power and resolution to achieve the level of transparency that allows my creative phase transition to kick in and bring flow.  I'm going to be very excited if it is demoed with some killer drawing applications.⁴  To me a transparency of user experience that allows me to seemingly directly interact with information is the core of the post PC dream.  The price point won't be terribly important to me.  It would probably support any of the creative things I do with a pad and pencil and has the potential to go far beyond.⁵

 

The Mac was the first computer good enough to criticize.  I want something good enough to give my mind a bit of freedom.  I suspect we're very very close to the beginning.

 

________

¹ The chemistry and physics involved is *really* interesting and I recommend further study if you want to understand the nuts and bolts!  Basically the water molecules are attracted with a special class of dipole-dipole interaction known as hydrogen bonding.  Note that a picosecond is about the distance light travels in a thousandth of a foot - about a hundredth of an inch.

² Water has a very high heat of fusion (solid to liquid) and heat of vaporization (liquid to gas).  It turns out to be very important for weather and many other systems.

³ From The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where he describes how to fly.  Look up the text or listen to him read the section.

⁴ Procreate is probably the best iPad drawing program to date.  Add what I think the better display might give and some additional power to let the objects flow easily combined with iOS  and a pressure sensitive stylus and it can happen.

⁵ Consider what Garageband and some other music creation programs for the iPad have allowed ..  as well as transparent interfaces for music for Macs in general.  Just ask Björk.

 

 

trying to stay on track and finding some great questions along the way

Fourteen months ago I started a serious weight loss program that successfully transitioned into a weight maintenance program about three months ago.  Along with the weight loss and the associated benefits and problems that come with that, many questions presented themselves and finding answers and new questions has been a rich experience.

 

Some of the high points have been learning that, at least for me, losing the weight was much easier than maintaining it.  It turns out this is generally true and most diets end in failure.  Specialists in the field are not joking when they say “the best way to gain weight is to go on a diet.”  Why this is happens to be a rich area of academic study.  The general explanation most people use is the body needs less energy due to less weight to support, lower muscle mass, and a shifted metabolism.  But why does the urge to eat more than what the body needs at its new weight exist?  Is this relate to “plateauing” in weight loss?  What are the biochemical signaling links?  Why is this predominately unidirectional (why is it that underweight people are usually more successful gaining and keeping weight)? How much of this is genetic?  How much is epigenetic? ...

 

Curiously the exact energy available to us in food is only approximate.  Calorie charts must be viewed with a bit of skepticism, but they are still essential for tracking and it isn't terribly important that their listing may not match what your body is really doing - especially when what you eat doesn't dramatically shift.  You can learn to deal with the bias.  The same is true - but even more so - for exercise.  You can infer some of these relationships and adjust your calculations, like the Caloric calculations, with a weighting coefficient.  If you aren't into this sort of detail just adjust your intake downwards and/or increase your exercise if you are slowly gaining with time.

 

There are a pile of open questions and research is only beginning to probe some of them. Of course a magic bullet would be worth billions to the drug companies and many of them have tried to crack the problem with no luck.  The diet business is filled with pseudoscience and terrible nutrition advice.  Some of it may be good, some is neutral but doesn’t cause harm, and some of it is downright dangerous.  The best paths - and the best segments of the population - for dealing with the epidemic of obesity still are unclear, although prevention is probably the cheapest and most effective option at this point.

 

The fundamentals of controlling weight for someone who has never been overweight are well known, but the current level of inactivity coupled with the easy availability of low quality good make this difficult.  You would think children are important and in need of protection, but there are no signs they are well protected from this epidemic which seems to be lowering projected adult life spans in many countries.

 

In theory it is easy - eat good food, but don’t overeat, and get enough exercise.  Sadly that is impossible for the majority of the population.  

 

I’ve been overweight so I have to fight signals that my body is sending to return to a higher weight.  This means I have to monitor my activity and food intake.  Doing this isn’t too difficult with a little software assist as well as exercise coaching from a friend - basically I’m using techniques similar to those I used to lose weight, but with a different target on my daily energy balance. There are indications that the best techniques for losing weight and maintenance are somewhat different.¹  I keep a daily journal, but don’t worry about being a few hundred Calories over target here and there as long as I can cancel that excess from other days - I try to have a weekly balance where  my energy intake minus my energy expenditure are equal to my energy need.  Setting goals and giving myself rewards also seems to work for me.

 

To help with self-motivation I’m going to post the last nine months of my weight chart every few months.  It will be embarrassing to record a gain.  For background my doctor suggests the ideal weight given my height, age and bone structure is somewhere around 155 pound - conveniently close to the 70 kg assumption for a standard human used in many medical calculations.  He initially asked me to drop to something under 170.  

 

There could be some tools to make this easier and I’ll probably write one for my specific case.  I found it important to understand my regular daily energy requirement without extra exercise and had to extract that from my daily logs.  The number I come up with is about five percent lower than the standard medical calculations suggest and are probably related to a shifted metabolism.  Very interesting stuff!

 

Currently I’m experimenting on when I should be eating to feel most satiated. Earlier experimenting showed that taking my time to eat was important - one must learn to savor food, which has a real benefit of encouraging you to learn to become a better cook.  I suspect this is unlikely to generalize, but it is clearly useful for me if I’m to get to a point where I don’t have to monitor as much as I do.  In talking with some experts at Yale and the University of Toronto I’m coming to the realization that people who are successful in holding a proper weight after a significant weight loss (over 10% of their weight) need to be vigilant for at least a decade and possibly much longer before the body readjusts.

 

In the meantime I’ve learned that one needs to have quality food and real treats at times - as long as you don’t overdo it.  So there is no reason why you can’t make some delicious things. I can recommend Talenti gelato for example:-)

 

So apologies for something this personal and narrowly focused, but I suspect some of you have this issue or have family members who are trying to get to and maintain a healthy weight.  If so I strongly recommend using it as a learning experience and be able to sort out all of the snake oil.²  Informed common sense is very important in this game.  Just remember - losing weight isn’t easy, but is much easier than keeping it off.

________

¹ My physician was very impressed with the success of my weight loss program.  The core learnings I had were I needed exercise and Caloric restriction - neither was sufficient by itself, although food restriction is much easier than enough exercise. A nonjudgmental exercise coach was very important.  I would not have had the motivation without her help.  Support from family and friends was also very important.  Being a vegetarian probably helps as does cooking most of your own food.  Weight has to come off slowly - nothing faster than 3%  month or you will probably fail.  And finally you have to let yourself eat healthy and delicious food - it isn't worth the effort if you are eating cardboard.

Note there is evidence long term success in keeping weight off is different from weight loss - here is an interesting resource. (pdf)

Then they looked for patterns among what successful losers do and patterns among what successful maintainers do. And they found significant differences. For example, people who exercised consistently or ate plenty of lean protein were almost twice as likely to succeed in weight maintenance. People who engaged in a variety of exercise activities or planned their meals ahead were about two and a half times as likely to lose weight.

For losers, the most statistically significant behaviors:

• Eating a lot of fruits or vegetables
• Eating healthy snacks
• Limiting the amount of carbohydrates eaten
• Controlling portions
• Doing different exercise types

For maintainers, the most statistically significant successful:

• Eating a lot of low-fat protein
• Following a consistent exercise routine
• Reminding yourself of the need of controlling weight

There was only one behavior highly significant among both losers and maintainers:

• Thinking about how much progress you’ve made

From the study 14 behaviors were associated with either loss or maintenance but not both.

More important for loss than for maintenance:

• Participate in a weight loss program
• Look for information about weight loss, nutrition, or exercise
• Eat healthy snacks
• Limit sugar
• Plan your meals and snacks ahead of time
• Avoid skipping meals - especially breakfast
• Do variety of exercise types
• Do exercises you enjoy
• Think about how much better you feel when you are thinner

More important for maintenance than for loss:

• Eat a lot of low-fat high protein foods
• Follow a consistent exercise routine
• Reward yourself for maintaining your weight
• Remind yourself why you need to control your weight
• Journal what you eat and how much you exercise

A rich source of scientific work in this area is the open access Journal of Obesity.

 

² The pseudoscience associated with the diet and nutrition industry is awful. It turns out weight loss isn't difficult using any number of techniques, but few are effective in the long term and some are unsafe. ping me if you ever want more information..