omenti

solving problems

When I was a junior undergrad - sometime in the late Pleistocene -  I decided to write down what I had learned about problem solving. It has a bit of a Polya-ish flavor, but it reflected the bits and pieces of what I had learned.  I still keep a copy over my desk.  Some of the pieces, particularly those on creativity, mean much more to me now and I would go on for pages, but just seeing them calls all of that up. 

 

Problem selection is more of an art and I have never written much about it as new problem spaces tend to only present themselves when you are hard at work on something else that is at last partly related.  I have never had a problem with finding a list of great problems to work on …  a larger issue is which ones should I be working on.  That can have different answers depending on what the goal is (who or what I'm working for)

 

I was a physics and math double major, but I've found it useful in many other areas.  I should probably write a bit about problem selection other than picking something that you might have a bit of hope on gaining a bit of understanding.

Of course there are many other approaches - this is just mine. Not every problem would have all of these steps.  

 

So here goes: 

1. Understand the problem

 

- do you understand all of the words and equations in the problem?

- can you restate the problem in your own words?

- can you think of a picture or diagram to help understand the problem?

- what do you want to find or show?

- what level of accuracy do you need?

- is there enough information to find a solution?

- is the problem a relevant problem or is it gibberish?

- what is the scale of the problem?  can you do it in an hour or will it require unobtainium?

2. Devise a plan

 

- guess and check

- consider special cases.  what are the boundary conditions?

- select your tools

- do you fully understand your tools?

- draw a picture

- solve a simpler version first

- create a model

- use approximations - but understand their impact

- work backwards

- be ingenious …  this comes with experience and often with re-thinking the problem in a different context.  

This and the next step - connecting the dots are the non-trivial piece!!  Remember:

play and your ability to fail with grace are essential

curiosity is your driver - remember informed ignorance rules in science and math! never lose fact that your final job is to expand your ignorance - results are a by-product!!

- connect the dots - this is a subset of being ingenious

serendipity is another driver.  remember that serendipity is making discoveries by accident, but you must have enough sagacity to note what holds potential.  

dot connecting is best done using averted attention.  Don't tool constantly on your problem.  Focus hard, but pivot off to equally long period of something completely different. This may even fool others into thinking you have a life. 

3. Carry out your plan

 

- find a quiet place with no interruptions.  nature is your friend

- use some care and be a craftsman

- if you get stuck, take some time off and try to forget about what you are doing

- if you fail, use another approach

- know when you have failed

- if you are working with others know where the strengths are and divide appropriately

4. Check with reality

 

- does your answer make sense?

- can your solution make testable predications?

- ask an expert in your field to examine your work for flaws

- reflect on what you have done and examine was worked and what didn't

 

5. Next steps

- what are the new areas that expose new and even beautiful ignorance on your part?  These may be diamonds on the beach to explore.  Perhaps even a new beach and that is your reward.

 

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A Recipe

Cherry and Chocolate Scones

Ingredients

For the scones:

 
° 500 g  all-purpose flour (4 c)

° 55 g white sugar (1/4 c)

° 8 g baking powder(1-3/4 tsp)

° 5 g baking soda (1 tsp)

° 4 g kosher salt (1-1/2 tsp)

° 250 g unsalted butter, cut into half inch pieces (2¼ sticks)

° 300 g cups heavy cream (1-1/4c)

° 125 g dried cherries (1-1/2c)

° 150 g chocolate chips (1 c)  depending on your taste regular Hershey's or the good stuff.  I use a mixture of chocolate chip sized quality milk chocolate and half 60% chocolate

 

For the glaze

 
° 85 g confectioners’ sugar (2/3 c)

° 2 tbl skim milk

° 1 tbl cherry puree

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 350°F with racks in upper and lower thirds.

° Whisk flour, sugar, powder, soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Using a pastry cutter, cut in butter until combined with some pea-sized lumps. Stir in cream, cherries, and chocolate chips until combined.

° Put quarter cup sized scoops of dough on 2 buttered baking sheets and bake, switching sheets half way through (and you were worried about the rack arrangement:-), until golden and cooked through, something like 15 to 20 minutes.

° With the scones baking, make the glaze by whisking together sugar, milk, and cherry puree in a small bowl.

° Once scones are cooled, spoon over glaze, set and cool to about room temperature if you can stand the anticipation, and then scarf down.

 

the delight of playful creativity

At five thirty this morning I made my way to the basement for the morning rowing.  I sat on the machine, cued up the WBUR OnPoint podcast (I usually listen to whatever is current on Thursdays) on the iPod, pushed play and pulled backwards.  Little did I know...

 

Forty seven minutes flew by and I was ready for the next podcast to begin.  I knew I had something to blog about, that was different from what I was thinking about at five twenty five as I started to the basement, and I knew an apology would be necessary.  I rowed on in silence lost in thought and stopped about forty minutes later.  My ergometer said I had delivered 202.4 watt-hours to the flywheel.  Better than 150 watts on average - not bad for me.  

 

Before getting into what I was thinking and why I saw the need for an apology you need to listen to the show. (mp3)

 

Trust me - it is worth the time.

 

An interview and some samples from beatbox cellist Kevin Olusola.  While he's not technically a great cellist, he did get Yo-Yo Ma's attention.  Kevin's playfulness and experimentation and curiosity inform his creativity.  In creativity and playfulness he reminds me of musicians cellist Zöe Keating, Björk, and Reggie Watts and more than a few scientists.¹

 

When you are exposed to something like this you want to find more and let your friends know.  That made me think of one of you - Jheri.  

 

Jheri is this amazing person - creatitive, funny and kind.  The sort of person who amazes you by being a friend.   She knows exactly what I mean when I say play is a fundamental component of creativity and she is off-scale playful.  She also happens to have a hearing impairment.  I want to share this with you Jheri, but I know it won't work so I must apologize... 

 

or maybe not...

 

This is an opportunity.  Jheri is amazingly perceptive visually.  She is aware of the nuances of out-of-band communications that take place in face to face communications that most of us tend to miss.  She sees much more deeply than the rest of us and is a natural empath.  So while people like Niki, Lorraine, Linda and a few others will probably love listening to Kevin, I began to wonder about the part of the world Jheri sees that I am visually deaf to...

 

This is a chance for serendipty. Jheri - perhaps we can  investigate the parts of the world that are beautiful to you that are mostly invisible to people who hear well...   I know they exist - would you like to collaborate and sort a bit of this out?  Thinking about that excites me much more than listening to Kevin's wonderful music.  It is much more fun playing and learning than sitting back - even if what you are witnessing is as wonderful. 

 

Kevin is having wonderful fun and is bringing pleasure.  He started with a simple set of questions.  There is no reason why you can't have the fun in your domains.

 

Let's play Jheri

 

In the meantime I strongly recommend listening to the interview!

________

¹ Reggie performed just before my TED^x talk and his performance completely captivated me.  Look him up - he's amazing.  We were talking immediately after TED and it turned out he is from Great Falls, Montana - he lived about 500 feet from our house.

the paganini strad...

I have a great fondness for artists and musicians.  For me their approach to work is very similar to some of the most enjoyable aspects of science.  Engineering and the natural sciences may be tied by a common mathematical language, but the approaches to the two sports are quite different - again for me, but I know others who share this view.  It is neither here nor there and variety in approaches to disciplines is important.  Others may find different kindred spirits and approaches - it is a fun area to ponder...

 

It turns out I’m a terrible musician.  The cello is my favorite instrument, so my gift to the world is refraining from playing.  I content myself with a bit of theremin building and fooling around with a strumstick - one is obscure enough that no one cares and the other simple enough that even I can achieve a bit of music.

 

But I love being around real musicians - from serious students to the masters.  Stony Brook, where I did my Ph.D., had a good music program.  They were particularly strong in the stringed instruments and the flute.  The Beaux Arts Trio was resident there creating some wonderful concerts and it was possible to find good music several times a week.  

 

There are  lot of fond memories from the music at that place.  As a grad student I co-founded a classical music series at Stony Brook that still exists to this day.  We were able to book the Beaux Arts Trio.  They offered a good price (I think it was about $4,000) as the trio was in residence at the school.  I had a friend who was a cello grad student and Professor  Greenhouse used to let me sit in on classes and master classes - he said it was critically important to connect with the audience, so why not.  

 

The D Major Suite

 

There was an amazing night when he was showing something to Amy (my friend) - something out of the Bach 6^th suite.¹  He played it a few ways, had her play it, play it another way and sighed - "this won't do" ..  then he performed the entire suite from beginning to end.  Sublime is not an adequate description.  Time simply ceased to exist for me and I think everyone else in the room.

 

He was still performing at the highest levels and teaching well into his 90s and only stopped playing about three weeks before he died.

 

Such an amazing person.

 

His favorite cello was the Paganini Cello - more properly known as the Countess of Stainlein Cello.  One of the few Stradivarius cellos and considered the best example of the breed.²  He started playing and time stopped until the last note had faded and we were all jarred back to Earth.

 

He was not a young man at the time.  He died last year at 95 - still playing almost until the end.  I have been lucky enough to have broken bread with Yo-Yo Ma a few times and he maintained a good cellist lacks the chops to do a really great job on the Bach Suites until he has the perspective of age.  He said he felt he could seriously attempt them for real when he is about 70.  Bernard was probably near the height of his powers when I heard him play. 

 

I know this cello well.  It surprised me to see an article in about it appear in this week's NY Times Magazine.   A great instrument is looking for a great caretaker for several more generations before it will be passed down through time.

 

Greenhouse died at 95 early last May - here is the NPR remembrance.  I feel lucky to have known him.  Such an incredible sense of humor and playfulness.  Cellists tell me he was a natural teacher - he was certainly a natural performer.  

 

sigh ..

 

Time is such a funny thing.  My world line has wandered through time and space and somehow managed to intersect with his world line on several occasions.  Those intersections became wonderfully colorful bits of thread for me.  You live for those colorful and lyrical threads that make up your path and they can even bring life to the fabric of spacetime.   I often feel my life is charmed and special.

 

Imagine the 305 year old world line of that cello as it embarks upon yet another segment.

 

____________

 

Recipe time.  Several people have encouraged me to continue with recipes.  This is something I have been doing for breakfasts for the past few weeks.  Basically whole wheat with scallions and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce.  It is really excellent and holds me well until lunch.  Use whatever ratios you like - I prepared a batch and measured for a guide.  I also like to use khorasan wheat which has a large kernel.  Kamut is the variety I like - mine is from Montana although it also grows in Alberta.  You can use any good olive oil, but I find rosemary infused oils add quite a bit - you can make your own, but start with a good olive oil.  I like Sciabica’s as I know where it is coming from in California and it is excellent - as good as any fine oil I’ve tried.  You pay a lot for good olive oils, but they are worth it is you care about your food.  Here is their rosemary evoo.  We've been using them for about 15 years now and find them to be very friendly with great service.

 

° 150 grams of whole wheat kernels

° 4 scallions - chopped

° 25 grams of rosemary infused olive oil 

° 30 grams pecans - chopped

° soy sauce to taste

° a finishing salt like Maldon (optional)

 

° Simmer the whole wheat for about 90 minutes in “enough” water.  I use a crock pot and enough water is something like 350 grams.  It should still have some texture when finished. 

 ° Drain the wheat and mix in the pecans and scallions. Mix in the olive oil and add soy sauce to taste.  I like to get it almost salty enough and then add a bit of Maldon salt at the end.

 

This makes about two servings.  Scale it as you like 

___________

¹ I can't make a recommendation for a single best set of Bach Cello Suites.  I just did the survey and find I have seven on vinyl, one reel to reel tape and four CDs ....  It is important, when you really love a piece of music like this, to hear as many great interpretations as you can.

² Yes - I realize that new great instruments may be as good as the old greats even to the performer - although I was not terribly impressed by the methodology of the paper.  Even if it is true,  there is a real magic of sorts being in the presence of musical history.

 

 

just past the solstice and nearing the sun

Happy Holidays to all!

 

I hope you have a great set of holidays with friends, family and nature and find some peaceful time for reflection and deep thought.

 

Thank you for all of the comments and suggestions for this blog.  A few very interesting conversations have taken place and some are still developing.   Any ideas, thoughts and criticisms are most welcome.

 

I've been spending a lot of time outside during the past few days.  One of the pleasures of working out of the home is that I take an hour walk every day at around noon.  After awhile the subtle changes of nature begin to dominate your thoughts and you escape the smaller issues of your own life and work.  These normally roll out over several days, but there are dramatic periods when a few hours makes an incredible different.  

 

We're nearing the quietest stage in the local woods.  The maple trees are about halfway through the period where they stopped converting sunlight into sugar and where their sap will begin to flow in mid February.  Last year the Winter was severe and the flow was delayed by nearly two weeks.  

 

The crows have been very active.  This happens around now and I don't know why, but it is welcome.  I need to track an ornithologist down one of these days, but there are so many other questions that need to be answered.

 

The divisions between night and are are particularly wonderful and focus your attention on the sky.  Sundogs, pillars and any number of wonderful things concentrate in the periods an hour or so from sunrise and sunset.

 

 

The Winter sky at night is a wonderful place and tomorrow you can watch a pretty conjunction of the Moon and Venus starting just before sunset and becoming dramatic as the sky darkens.  The other planet visible is Jupiter which is currently in Pisces.  A few days ago we had the "shortest" day - the least amount of daylight.  For most of us the earliest sunset came some days earlier and the latest sunrise is still to come  (in Basking Ridge New Jersey the earliest sunset  was on December  8 and the latest sunrise will fall on January 4) - our planet's tilt and elliptical orbit conspire to create the shift.

 

While all of this is happening, we are rushing towards our closest encounter with the Sun on January 5 at about 01 hours Universal Time (January 4th for folks in North America).  We'll get to about 147.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is elliptical will find us furthest away on July 5 at 04 hours UT (July 4 for most of us) at 152.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is nearly circular (the eccentricity is currently about 0.0167) but the  difference is significant enough to easily be measured if you are looking for a fun project.

 

Our elliptical orbit means the lengths of the seasons are not equal as our orbital velocity changes depending on where we are - we're moving fastest as we're nearest the Sun.¹  As a result Winter is shorter than Summer in the Northern Hemisphere by about 4.7 days.

 

With a bit of high school physics you can easily work out how fast we're going at our closest and furthest approaches to the Sun - 30,300 meters/sec in early January and we slow down to a mere 29,300 in early July.² 

 

There is great beauty in nature - a poetry that is much deeper than anything we can create.  While I love the arts, looking at nature and trying to understand a bit of it is so much more satisfying.  Feynman says it beautifully here:

 

 

Get out and walk with nature a bit over the holidays.  I guarantee it will beat any television you can find.

_______

Last night I made a simple sour cherry tart with some excellent canned pie cherries from Oregon Fruit Products.  The tart was the simple shortbread recipe presented here recently:

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

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

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center 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. 

For the filling I just made a simple tart cherry filling.  There are many variations, but this was quick:

 

Tart Cherry Filling

1 can part pie cherries - approximately 15 ounces - drain cherries and reserve the juice

100 grams granulated white sugar

15 grams cornstarch

1/2 tsp almond extract

 

Procedure

° Cook cherry juice, sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan over medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture thickens - about ten minutes

° Remove from heat, add cherries and almond extract.  Cool to room temperature or below

 

When the tart and cherries are at room temperature sprinkle about 30 grams of finely crushed almonds on the tart and pour in the cherry mixture.

 

This is fantastic with ice cream.  I made a rich homemade vanilla with tahitian vanilla beans.  I've had some incredible cherry pies with chocolate ice cream too - so go ahead Nancy.

 

_______

 

¹ Kepler worked this out - an amazing piece of thinking

² You can easily derive the relation v = sqrt[G*M*(2/r - 1/a)] . Here G is the gravitational constant, M is the Sun's mass, r is the Earth's distance from the Sun and a is our semi-major axis - about 1.496*10¹¹meters. At perihelion our distance is a(1-e) and at aphelion it is a(1+e). 

losing the training wheels

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I sketch for recreation.  My pieces aren’t very good as I have never focused and developed technique, but it is a way to express yourself and, more important, it is a way to think.  

 

It turns out sketching is much more important to me than just recreation.

 

Much of my thinking is visual.  It helps me observe and explore.  When I’m exploring new ideas there is quite a bit of play taking place. Lots of little experiments with most of them failing, but you tend to learn from each one.  Seeing what is going on is a terrific advantage.  Sometimes you use computer programs to think visually¹ , but there are even more times when creating a model in your head is faster and more powerful.²  The act of sketching can be powerful tools for getting to those mental models - almost like keyframes that allow you to easily assemble an animation that you can manipulate.  A serious tool for quickly constructing and testing mental models and a tool that happens to be fundamentally playful.

 

I find some tools that support sketching to be very important - a sketchpad with the right paper, the right pencil, a proper slate blackboard and good chalk, a shared visual space with collaborators and so on..  More recently I’ve been using art creation applications on the the iPhone and iPad - two devices that have the fundamental ability to become immersive creative tools.

 

Among other things Autodesk makes high-end sketching tools.  A few years ago they announced a $100 program called SketchBook Pro that ran on Macs and PCs.  It had a powerful interface and seemed to be designed for serious art professionals who wanted to make sketches that could form the basis of more refined pieces.  Using it required a Wacom drawing tablet - you can find one for under $100, but a tablet good enough for most purposes started at three times as much.  

 

I had a good Wacom tablet, so I ponied up the cash and began to play.  Although it was a very capable program, it was complex enough that it got in my way and I fell back to using other tools.³

 

A few years later they released a version of  SketchBook for the iPhone.  To say the least I was very skeptical, but it was only a few dollars a piece by Jorge Colombo had recently graced the cover of the New Yorker.

 

Somehow everything was different.  Although the screen was tiny and the controls more limited, I was directly manipulating the objects just under the glass.

 

I was drawing.

 

I found myself using it to play with ideas and found myself recommending iPod Touches and iPhones to friends who have integrated sketching into their way of thinking.

 

A much more dramatic development came with SketchBook Pro for the iPad.  Suddenly the interface was about the size of a piece of paper you might find in a physical sketchbook and interaction with your art could be completely immersive.  For anyone who thinks visually and uses sketching as a tool this is reason enough to buy an iPad.  The same is true for a kid who is learning how to think visually.  Even, perhaps especially, if the kid has a mathematical and scientific bent, encourage playing with art and get them an iPad.⁴  

 

 

Tools like SketchPad on an iPad have been disruptive for AutoDesk .  The company now has a vastly expanded user base and many of them are finding use for sketches in their professional work and, I’m sure, as a playful tool to sharpen their thinking.

 

AutoDesk is having great success, but there are a variety of programs. I find my current favorite, Procreate,  to have an even more natural interface.  

 

All of these are inexpensive, so try a few of them and spend a few hours playing with them to see which works best for you.

 

Even the original iPad is still a very powerful and far from a mere consumption device if you are clever enough to approach it as a blank slate.  It frees you up and helps your mind glide through playful thought.

 

Truly a bicycle for the mind.

 

_________

¹ Maple and Mathematica are both extremely powerful and useful tools that should be part of your playful thinking arsenal even if you have a modest background in math.  Both are spendy in their professional versions, but the home version of Mathematica is under $300 and student versions of Maple range from $100 to $200.  A regular reader of this blog is a fashion model who happens to have a serious interest in forest ecology.  She has done some nice work using Mathematica as a modeling tool for exploration.

² The creative arts are very important subjects and can form the basis for powerful tools for people who are expected to do “creative” work.  De-emphasizing them in the schools is a tragic mistake.  Even though my skills are limited, my ability to do a bit of art and music has given me a powerful advantage in the playful portion of creative thought.

³ Oddly enough Adobe's Photoshop can be immersive.  I use it for exploration as well as what amounts to my own flavor of art.  I don't know that I would recommend it as a general playful exploration tool though...

Find the tools that fit your needs and don't worry about the latest and greatest.  But at the same time be aware of potentially game changing tools.  I'm currently curious about the Wacom Inkling, but it is vaporware at the moment.

Some tools can be unusual and very individual. I find a bit of fine chocolate, particularly when working with collaborators, is very useful when used sparingly.  A good Lindt is fine, but my favorite is from Mast Brothers.

⁴ You can find used original model iPads that are more than good enough in the $200 range.

 

cheating death and thinking more clearly as an added benefit

Damn it!

 

An email just came that said someone I used to work with died yesterday at age 62.  

 

That makes two in a month - John and George.  George was only 49.  Both died way too early.  Heart attacks.

 

damn it!

 

so sad for their families

 

The last time I saw them both were in terrible physical shape - delightful people, but pure couch potatoes.  Sports meant stretching out on the couch and watching someone else and neither could be convinced to take even a short walk.  It is difficult coming to the realization they are no longer around and I have to wonder what the story would have been if they would have taken better care of themselves.

 

A few nights ago Grant and I were talking about our mutual love of walking.  I've always enjoyed it and find it a place to think.  Some of you share this addiction and I've been lucky enough to have had some great conversations on longish walks.  Mostly I take them to clear my mind and enjoy a bit of nature, but it is impressive how many unsettled problems managed to connect up and solve themselves during these times.  I'd go so far to say that most of the insight I've had so far has managed to manifest itself on walks and bike rides.

 

It turns out there are additional benefits to this modest form of exercise if it is regular and long enough and this is why I mentioned the sad deaths.  Apparently very little exercise is required to increase your likely lifespan.  I'm not terribly surprised by the numbers reported here ... a third of adults get no regular exercise.  Even 15 minutes a day can make a measurable difference, but the recommended levels are at least 150 minutes a week.   Thowing in a bit of more intense aerobic exercise is even better.

 

It is very difficult to encourage exercise without coming off as sanctimonious.  In light of the deaths I feel compelled to write a bit, so take it in that light.

 

Our need for regular exercise is basic.  Most of us have basal metabolic rates that account for about 70% of our energy expenditure - it is generally felt our bodies are made for the 50% to 60% range.  Seriously inactive people may be as high as 80%.  I probably would be a complete couch potato if it weren't for a couple of benefits - the clarity of mind one gets during long walks, the serendipity that sometimes comes with being a bit closer to the natural world (for several months a vulture accompanied me and I've had a fawn back into me),  and a few hours of a good feeling following aerobic exercise.  Those are seriously positive and enough to recommend activity even if no other benefits existed.  Not to mention it is a relatively inexpensive pleasure - I get about 1600 miles from a pair of Asics.¹ 

 

When I started consulting I swore to myself that I'd take an hour off for a walk every day no matter what the weather and no matter where I was.  I've kept that promise at over the 99% level and even take walks during ice storms.  They are often the highpoints of my day - a period where clarity comes easily.

 

Aerobic exercise is great too.  I'm slowly restarting my rowing after my injury in August and am noticing an improvement in how I feel for hours afterwards as well as my mental alertness.  

 

It is sometimes difficult to budget time, but I timeshift enertainment time from the evening to my early morning rowing sessions with an iPod.  An hour of walking seven days a week and an hour of aerobic exercise five times a week seems to agree with me.  Start a program of your own and give yourself an unfair cognitive advantage over your competition.  You're also likely to be more healthy and live longer - assuming you don't walk in front of taxis in NYC (I can hear Juliette laughing now).

 

One of the companies I consult with considers exercise important enough that they match a half hour.  If you put in an hour of exercise, they'll let half of it count as work.  You also get a free lunch as part of the deal.    Their gym facilities are wonderful and trainers regularly visit to help out. I'm told about a third of their workforce uses their gym at least twice a week.  

 

It is inspiring to realize that some go much further - a few of you are much more serious than me.  Dave and Pip run marathons.  My niece Magi is a very serious runner and took first place in a fifty mile marathon a few weeks ago.  She manages to run about an hour a day for training and "several hours" on Saturdays.  

 

Colleen did serious training on the sand - trying sprinting and jumping in the sand some time for a sense of the added difficulty.  Fueling her was a 6,000 Calorie a day propositon.  Imagine doing routines the one in the video five days a week along with everything else an athlete does.

 

 

It is comforting that you don't have to go to the extreme levels that Magi and Colleen chose.  Fortunately simple walking and maybe a bit of low impact aerobics have a very positive impact...  these days Colleen is down to walking the dogs and kickboxing and some regular gym time these days and still feels great. Even with this comparatively light load her BMR probably only accounts for half of her caloric requirement.

 

Note that unless you are into megaexercise you are unlikely to have much success with it by itself for weight control.  In an hour of rowing I do about 150 watt-hours of work and require about 750 watt-hours of energy.  That is equivalent to roughly 650 Calories - about two Snickers.   It helps, but to remove a pound you need to remove about 3500 Calories.  So exercise for other benefits and enjoy the modest benefits of a slightly higher caloric requirement.

 

Make it a game if you can - just start something and give it some time until you get to the point where it is more of a gift than a burden.  The benefits can be amazing.  I don't want to hear about others going before their time.   And if you have kids teach its value to them!

________

¹ inexpensive per hour.  My shoes average $100 a pair so we're looking at six and a quarter cents per mile - a bit more than what I pay for car tires

 

the delight of turning potential energy into kinetic energy

There have been too many weighty events this week - it is time for something fun.  

 

There is something wonderful about watching energy move backand forth betwen potential and kinetic energy even if there aren't many osciallations.  Swings, roller coasters, sailplanes, the arc of a tossed ball, chains of dominos ...

 

You've all seen videos of large domino chains.  By standing a domino on end you are increasing its potential energy.  Energy that can be released later when the domino tips, turning stored potential energy into the energy of motion - kinetic energy.  The key is to find an object that is usually stable, but can tip easily and move its center of mass a long distance in the process.  People make wonderful patterns using thousands of them - but there is another way to spend your day for a few seconds of delight ...

 

Wood is elastic and wants to return to its original position when bent - a property that allowed people to build bows that can propel an arrow at a high speed.  You can use this to store potential energy in a wooden stick.  When given a chance to release the stick will seek its normal shape and the resulting motion is a nice display of kinetic energy.  

 

With a bit of cleverness you can weave a pile of wooden sticks into a structure storing the energy that you used to flex them for later release.  Fifty sticks will give you and idea - a thousand will give you something wonderful.

 

A large number of weave patterns can be used - you just want to construct a regular pattern that bends the sticks enough without moving them past their elastic limit. Craft sticks are recommeded and are inexpensive at a few cents each in quantity.¹  A hundred bucks, a gym floor and a lot of kids would create a dramatic event. 

 

Like many things you can ask a few questions and gain a deeper understanding.  There is enough beauty without the questions, but new delights emerge when you look a bit more deeply.  How much energy is stored in a structure?  What is its energy density? What other materials could be used to improve it?  Could the shape and internal stucture of a stick be improved?   What weave patterns would be optimal? How much of the kinetic energy is turned into sound and heat and how much is goes into the bounce of the sticks?  Could you make a musical version? .. and so on.  Like so many interesting things, this is a rich playground for the mind.  

 

The artist and kid in you might try other weaves, adding some color or even making this part of a Rube Goldberg contraption.

 

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The energy density of mechanical storage systems is not very high compared with other forms of storage the industrial world uses.   Try calculating the energy density of a hydroelectric project as an example.  What about the maximum energy density of compressed air storage? How do these compare to electric batteries and hydrocarbon combustion or hydrogen combustion?  Are you likely to ever see a spring powered cellphone? 

 

On the other hand mechanical energy storage is very useful and even beautiful at the appropriate scale. That scale turns out to be our scale and it is vitally important to many biological systems.   Among other things it lets us run efficiently and makes nearly every sport possible.  To us even a modest amount can seem significant.  An average person on a six story building stores about the same amount of potential energy as the battery in his smartphone, but even that small amount (small for the purpose of running the machines in our lives) is enough be rather unfortunate in a fall.

 

stay curious

 

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¹ stick choice is important. I haven't done this since I was an undergrad, but remember we tried tongue depressors and popsicle sticks - these days you can also buy craft sticks, which I've seen recommended, but I haven't tried.  The amount of "spring" in each of these, their elasticity, varies and will produce very different results.  It probably pays to try small units with a few dozen sticks each before settling on a material for a huge project.

We ended up with tongue depressors mostly because we found a cheap source and made a 500 stick weave.  It was addictive enough that we rebuilt it three times.

 

tp-ing your teacher's house in the 21st century

How would a pack of eighth graders virtually TP their English teacher’s house?

 

About twelve years ago Steve Greenspan and I found ourselves asking questions like that. We were thinking about the social interactions of teenagers and how wireless computation might be used as mobile devices became more powerful.  We observed and talked to a lot of teens.  We needed to build a prototype system to answer some of the more interesting questions.

 

One technique for answering questions like this is to build a “wizard of oz” system.  You somehow convince users they are using a real system when in fact they are just playing with a simulation (there is someone behind the curtain).  We quickly discarded the idea.  We wanted something we could give to teens and watch how they used it in the wild.  We needed to roll up our sleeves and build a prototype or two.

 

Neither of us are engineers by training - Steve is an experimental psychologist -, but that didn’t stop us.  Soon we were puzzling out architectures, designing interfaces, sorting out appropriate technologies, and inventing along the way.   It was a nice engineering research project and we made considerable headway over the course of a few months before we added Wayzen Lin, an excellent programmer just out of Columbia, to the team.  Wayzen could spend all of his time on the project (Steve and I were about a third time) and the pace picked up considerably.  Others (hi Jessica, Dave and Gregg) contributed seriouly interesting ideas that were more than a decade ahead of their time.  Soon we had a throw-away prototype and were fleshing out location mapping inside a building, creating geocaches for time dependent information and messages and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

There was also the little matter of a name ..  thinking about the eighth graders we called it Air Graffiti.

 

Over the next nine months a more serous system emerged with an extendible architecture, a more robust messaging protocol, and a brick like hardware prototype consisting of a Compaq iPaq running Linux connected to a GPS and even a head’s up display worn on glasses.  Another more useable prototype was just a laptop that we carried up and down the corridors.

 

The dog and pony shows were the best I've ever seen.  Internal and external visitors loved it.  Air Graffiti was one of those rare projects that engaged the imagination.  Soon we learned to forget about giving long talks describing the technology and our inventions and would just hand people the laptop or Compaq and walk with them.  They would invariably start dreaming up uses for it inventing on the fly.  I’ve been around many technology prototypes and have never seen such a strong reaction.

 

A few other researchers became involved and the system grew.  Nancy Mintz even created an overlay based on the game engine from Zork.  You could interact with the real world and multiple virtual worlds simultaneously.  We had all been playing, but now part of it had become a real game.

 

We started building a version that focused on how machines might make machine to machine communications without people assuming one of the machines was moving.  Essentially what does it mean to have a mobile device write a blog.

 

Of course there were a few flies in the ointment.  The company we worked for was in near free fall and was downsizing.  The business unit guys could not see a way to make money with the concept and, in truth, it really needed something like an iPhone as a user device.  I projected good enough consumer devices would exist in about five years (it took the iPhone six years from the time that projection was made), but that was far too long.  Well over a dozen patents were written up, but we soon were out of the company as our laboratory was disbanded and the company stopped pursuing the patents and halted work on the project.

 

The reaction was probably right given the circumstances, but it is interesting to note the long lead times associated with many of the technologies we use today. I remember playing with multitouch screens around 1990.  Five years is a short period - ten or fifteen are fairly common.

 

Engineering is about working with constraints and creating something that solves a problem.  We were looking at social behavior and trying to invent a bit of a possible future.  Air Graffiti was a fine vehicle for that, but it was too much of a leap to anything commercial.  

 

It turns out the project has risen from the ashes a few years ago at the same company.  I’m very curious to see how it will fit in with the plethora of location services out there today.  There is still a good deal of room for doing new things with something like Air Graffiti ...  more than half of the areas of interest we identified having been touched by anyone to my knowledge.

 

There are places that are hotbeds for inventing the future.  Xerox PARC and the old Bell Labs, and Watson Labs are classic examples, but they have largely faded.  Academia and the national labs still do it and DARPA cheerleads and funds bits of it for the military. But there is often a leap from the original glimmers of ideas to the companies that end up making them practical.  Companies like Apple are excellent examples of those who deeply understand technology and bring in what is appropriate at nearly the right time.  

 

But for now I’m waiting to see if a few really neat features from our discussions nearly a dozen years ago turn up on my iPhone.  I’ve seen a few of them already and it feels great to see someone do it elegantly.  

One of these days ...

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notes

It took more than 100 grams of a high quality chocolate to dream up the name Air Graffiti....

We subsequently abandoned looking at teens and computationally mediated social change.  the 18 to 30 year old bracket turns out to be more interesting.

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As an addendum I note our department also was worried about out of band communications.  We may communicate mostly in words when we are face to face, but there are gestures, physical feelings and even odors that can be very important.  As you might imagine some of this gets strange as the proxies may miss the mark, but it is fun stuff. Asking questions is frequently very playful.  It also convinced me that face to face is still very subtle and useful - where it is appropriate happens to spawn another set of fascinating questions.

 

Here is Fabian Memmert showing some of the work he is currently doing:-)

 

 

writing the new pages - rules and creativity

It is  December twenty third Nineteen Seventy Two at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The Oakland Raiders had just scored a touchdown with a minute and seventeen seconds to go and the Pittsburg Steelers were trailing seven to six.  Nearly a minute goes by and the Steelers find themselves on their own forty yard line facing a fourth and ten with no time outs.  Fans knew the game was over and were starting to move towards the exits for the warmth of their cars.

 

Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw threw the ball to the Raider’s thirty five yard line towards John Fuqua.   Simultaneously the ball arrived with Jack Tatum of the Raiders and the ball was sent tumbling end over end.  Somehow fullback Franco Harris of the Steelers was in position managing to pluck the falling ball a couple of inches before it would have hit the ground.  He managed to run all the way to the goal and scored a touchdown and the Steelers won the game.

 

This, of course, was nearly impossible and not something that could or would be planned.  A very complex game offered a bit of serendipity to Harris and he seized on it making up the new game as he went along.

 

Many games have similar examples - Wayne Gretzky whacking a high flying puck out of the air and making a goal, a thirteen year old Bobby Fischer giving up his queen but managing to leave the board in such a way that the grandmaster across the board was soon checkmated, Misty May digging an impossibly placed water logged volleyball and positioning it perfectly for Karrie Walsh to crush their stunned opponents, Dick Fosbury  marrying a bit of physics and physiology and reinventing the high jump in the process ....  These are the great moments in games and sport that players and fans live for - the point where the something novel happens.  Something that is not in the book.  An act that writes a new page or even chapter in the book.

 

A good game requires a certain amount of richness for the players and its fans to appreciate.  Simple games like checkers are so limited that all possible moves are cataloged, logical and predictable.  They may be fine for a ten year old just learning the game, but even most ten year olds will lose interest once they figure out the underlying structure.  

 

Rich games offer some complexity that goes beyond our ability to fully understand them .  Chess has vastly more possible games than there are particles in the Universe and Go is even more complex.  There is this wonderful point where the great players are exploring the unknown.  The same can be said for the great sports.  While anyone can enjoy rooting for hometown favorites, cheering for the underdog and getting excited by a winning streak; that is separate from this deeper level. Players and experienced fans revel in that much rarer moment where magic seems to happen.

 

A good game is a combination of rules with the potential for some wild creativity to break the rules a bit.  Mostly it proceeds by the rules, but every now and again creativity changes the nature of the game - sometimes fundamentally.

 

This happens in other fields.  It is one of the driving forces that hooks scientists.  You spend a large amount of your life training and then much more doing very careful work that is anything but the "aha!" moments people imagine scientists frequenting.  All of this is part of the rules - it is the best way we have come up with of asking questions of nature.  The interesting moments are usually not preceded with "aha!" , but rather with "that's strange..."  Something is different and that may be something new.  For a little while you are the only person who has ever known this bit of nature.  You get to write a new page.  And, like a good game, the possibilities are not exhausted.  The answer nature gives may lead to new richer questions which can lead to new chapters that are beyond the imagination of fiction.

 

I’ve been lucky and have touched that place a few times. 

 

This richness exists in business too - perhaps what you do.  These new improbable chapters lead to new ways of thinking. 

 

Young children - say four year olds - are wildly creative creatures.  Their minds conjure up impossibilities that make us laugh and even draw us into their worlds.  But once they are seven or so this changes and they start to think about rules.  The creativity fades a bit, but is still there.  

 

It is this balance between creativity and rules that moves us along and that is worth seeking.  My athlete friend saw her sport as play, but the amount of work required to get to a high enough level was incredible. Some of you practice this to varying degrees in your work and even your lives and watching this can be a pure delight (although not as fun as doing it).

 

I’ve always seen science in terms of a game and the act of doing it as play even though it may be incredibly hard work.  Although I do other things besides science now, I find there are complexities that offer some wonderful insights and those moments that make the effort worthwhile far beyond the monetary reward.  

 

Serendipity is often described as making discoveries by accident, but I don’t buy that.  Horace Walpole wrote a letter to Horace Mann in which he talked about a Persian fairy tale from the land of Serendip (the old name for Sri Lanka) .  He said the heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of..." 

 

There are two important points in this notion.  First you need to be in quest of something and that takes a lot of hard work.  Second is sagacity - you need the foresight and perception to make good judgements and take advantage of the improbability your game has provided.  

 

Play is centrally important!  

 

My advisor in grad school offered a bit of profound advice: act your shoe size.  You need to bring out the child in yourself to be creative and break out of the conventional rules that seem to exist.  Just make sure you are playing in a rich enough game.

 

And speaking of the delight of the unexpected take a look at the beauty of a brainbow.  A bit too technical to puzzle out here, but basically you distinguish individual neurons (or small clusters of neurons) from their neighbors by using fluorescent proteins.  A nice advance in the mapping of neurons plus it happens to be visually beautiful.