omenti

placetime

trees are the poems nature writes to the heavens

 

I need to find a suitable tree in the woods.  Sandy caused so much damage as did Irene and the pre-Halloween snowstorm.  Finding the right tree has not been easy this time.

 

but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

When I was an undergrad I read Polya and decided to write down some steps on problem solving.  This is not meant to be specific to a field and it tries to be serious even though some of the steps may seem trivial.  It isn't a checklist - just a rough structure for approaching a problem.  I wrote these on a sheet and keep it above my desk.  

there are many techniques. Not every problem would have all of these steps and some would have new ones.  I've added a bit of annotation (in blue) to the original for clarity, but feel free to skip down.  The point is I wanted to impose some structure to make progress.

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 what worked and what didn't

 

 

This approach helped with physics and math problems, but needed modifications for doing real science - something that I began to taste in grad school.  Observation and experiment have their own techniques and learning that answers may not be what you are looking for requires adjustment.¹

 

There are many places to jump from here.  Several have been mentioned in earlier posts, but I want to concentrate on how this fits with place and time.

 

Finding a bit of nature has been important for me - even in city environments.  As an undergrad I would spend time in the library listening to music for awhile and then going to "my rock" - a large rock just inside a small wooded area that no one seemed to walk through.  Being able to lay on my back and look up through the trees seemed to clear my mind and it was easy to tune out other noises.  

 

You can always build a simple tree platform or even a tree house.  These don't have to be elaborate, but they have the feature of purposefully removing you from some of the world.  Of course it is important to not have electricity and you need to leave your mobile phone behind, or at least turn it off.   

 

Working mostly out of my home these days I'm finding the woods to be an extremely important place and tool.  In addition to spending time working there I take a daily walk around lunch that allows one to mentally shift.  There is something constant, but always changing nature about the place that is worth a lot to me. 

 

I was lucky enough to have started in a lab at Bell Labs that strongly believed in some daily private time.  Even the phones went dead for incoming calls during the period.  You could chose to collaborate, but the choice was yours.  When I moved to other organizations that didn't have this policy I found myself coming in very early to get a few uninterrupted hours.  

 

The organization that first used the private time approach evolved a few curious practices that seemed to be organic extentions.  There were a variety of small collaboration areas outside the (private) offices.  If you wanted to collaborate and could find someone else agreeable (signaling was done with colored flags just outside your office door),  you would often meet in one of these areas - somehow that was better than either office.  They had nice chairs and a blackboard and were tucked into quiet out-of-the-way parts of the building.  Places for special collaboration times.

 

Intersection and collaboration with others is also critically important.  The old Bell Labs Murray Hill installation was something of a maze.  Throughout a career your office would move and would find yourself collaborating with people in other parts of the building.²   I don't believe in most forms of brain storming, but I've seen it work in some small and stable groups.  These groups were usually attached to place, time and often had some ritual.  One of my favorites was unscheduled, but usually took place late on Friday afternoons (three to seven pm was common), invovled a couch, a nice view of some trees, had three or four regular participants who were friends and was fueled by chocolate covered coffee beans.  

 

Collaborations can, of course, be remote.  There is a growing understanding of what works and doesn't.  Collaborations in place often fail and remote collaborations are sometimes fruitful.  It is important to understand for you and your organization what works and what doesn't and why.  Much of it comes down to personality and relationship strength, but corporate culture often has a role.

 

Working on some ideas and projects, one tends to run into walls.  Ideas and approached become stale and work slows to a crawl.  A good approach is to shift the primary focus to something else - something entirely different.  Sometimes a break to an extremely different activity or place is called for.  Somehow the mind seems to be considering the original problem and a flash of insight can come.  

 

Proper toolkits help a lot.  Perhaps it is the time I'm from, but a real slate blackboard and high quality chalk are important to me. Whiteboards don't cut it.  When AT&T Research moved to Florham Park, NJ after the AT&T/Lucent fission, the head of research recognized this and gave everyone a choice of board.  The same holds for paper and pencil for sketching - get something that feels wonderful when the pencil is in motion.   Sketching can be anything of the moment - sometimes visualization of the problem, sometimes working through equations and sometimes doodling or trying to focus and draw something.  The last is a form of meditation to me and a often a path to clearer thinking.  The paper has to feel good under a good sharp pencil.  Everyone will have something that is important to them - the point is figure out what it is and use it.  These are cheap paths that can encourage flow.

 

These are some of the tools I find useful - time from an earlier post and place and the interaction of time and place.  The point is you should find what placetimes and supports to them work for you.

 

Back to the beginning of the post.  Clearly the line is much more beautiful than anything I would pen.  Yesterday Om tweeted an Instagram post of his with a somewhat similar line by the poet Kahlil Gibran.  I've read quite a bit of his work. This one is famous and, while beautiful, breaks into sadness

 

Tree are poems the earth writes upon the sky

We fell them down and turn them into paper

That they may record our emptiness

Several years ago one of you had a similar line - the one at the beginning of this post - and I had to ask.  It turns out she had rewritten a someone similar line from a much older poem in her native language

 

God's fingers are the trees painting the sky

 

I realize poetry often doesn't translate, but consider Jheri's inspired variation much better and have been using it.  

 

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¹ I can't stress enough how important simple things like wiring are a well as trying to deal with all sources of error.  Play is even more important as is the ability to play with others who have different skill sets and views.  There is also a realization that hunting for the discovery - that rare eureka moment - is not what science is about, but rather finding new questions is much deeper.  But that is a core theme of this blog (hopefully)

² It is wonderful that cross disciplinary collaboration is "hot" again in some institutions.  I've never seen a place that supported it better than the old Bell Labs.

making use of time

Mary Roach is one of the more entertaining non-fiction authors and I've been enjoying Gulp over the past few days.  Highly recommended, but I'm afraid this isn't what I like to be doing.  Don't get me wrong - I love to read for pleasure, but there are other things that are better.  Things like tithing my time.

 

I've written about it before - the short version is I was looking at a few practices in religion that didn't make much sense on the surface to see if there was anything I could adapt.  I started tithing my time as money seems like a silly thing for the purpose if it is to be meaningful.  First it was about four hours a week to a variety of causes, but I wasn't learning.  Somehow I started working on the projects of friends and the epiphany came.  I was getting back much more than I offered.

 

I'm lucky enough to have friends with a range of very different interests and this has become a rich source of new learning and even serendipity.¹  These days my practice is to tithe my waking hours - about 11 hours a week.  I read for pleasure is there isn't a project to work on...

 

My goal, of course, is to be as poorly read as possible.

 

This is centrally important of my practice and to me as a person - perhaps something that differentiates my work from others.  It has given me a rich set of connections far removed from my normal boundaries.  One of the brilliant features of the old Bell Labs was its rich diversity in research interests.  While perhaps not optimal for some tasks, it was fantastic for discovering new areas.

 

Mentoring fits in with this, but there are times when you are working with people of different interests that the act of mentoring has a strong two-way flow and you find yourself being mentored.  It can be a waste of time if you lose your curiosity and just try to teach. 

 

Jean has been talking about time lately and Charlie has suggested I put together a post on the subject.  I'm not exactly a model user of it so caveat lector...

 

I don't multitask well when I'm supposed to be thinking deeply about something.  Multitasking is something that is generally inefficient - while there are a large number of processes running in our brains, the conscious mind seems to like single tasking and context switches from task to task when presented with multiple tasks. There is a cost in context switching ..  somehow the state of what you're doing needs to be saved and  the new process started.  When you re-enter the original process you have to somehow re-create the state of where you were.  For simple tasks this may not be difficult, but deep thought can be a disaster.  There are cases where it is impossible to recreate where you have been.

 

To single task I give myself blocks of time where I cut distractions.  The phone goes off, no net, no distractions from other people or even the critters.  The go is to find a state of Csíkszentmihályian flow - largely because it feels so wonderful and it has traditionally been very useful to me.   The first lab I was in at Bell Labs had this as policy.  Researchers could pick a three hour block in the morning or the afternoon.  When I moved to different organizations I had to create blocks of time.  If they were adverse to it I would come in before others started work leading to my practice of arriving at about 5:30am.  Others feel into the same practice - more than a few people in the Labs referred to going into cave mode.² I find it interesting, talking to some friends who teach graduate courses in physics at some of the best schools in the world.  They note that few of their successful students have any major involvement in social media and they tend to focus - no laptops during lectures, no smartphone use, etc ...  very much in contrast to what one sees in undergrad classes.

 

When I'm working on very deep tasks I tend to not work on them all day.  I do them as long as I can manage and then shift to other, usually easier, tasks.  If I haven't made progress in a month, and that is common for many tough problems, I set things aside and do something challenging that is completely different.  It doesn't have to be formal work - sometimes physically building something or getting heavily involved in a drawing is sufficient.  The remarkable thing is, during the different task, the mind seems to be continuing on with the original, but at a lower layer so I'm not conscious of it.  Sometimes there is a realization of what should be done, but more often the problem is much easier when I finally get back to it.  

 

I mentioned drawing...  I'm no artist, but I draw recreationally.  It is a very convenient way for me to empty my mind and prepare to move to focused work.  I'm picky about my drawing tools and usually throw the results out, but it is probably the closest I come to meditation.  A lot of people do variations on this - an athlete friend does photography and writes poetry to get into a state where she can focus on training and playing.

 

Playing ...

 

Play is centrally important.  Playing with others and their ideas when I can and approach work playfully where possible.  This means not being afraid to fail assuming you can learn from your failures.  It means that you have to budget time to allow for this.  Sadly many forms of work don't allow a playful approach.  I suspect it is not only useful for creative work, but at some level necessary.  Probably something for a future post.

 

There is more to say (the importance of exercise and the use of iPod time-shifting to give myself the luxury of at least 90 minutes a day), but I'm approaching my one hour limit.  I find it useful to put a limit on some tasks as it gives focus and forces single tasking.  It also prevents me from reading and editing what I've written, which for the purpose of this blog is a feature.

 

 Drop a line or leave a comment if you want to talk about this at a deeper level... and if you're looking for an entertaining read try Gulp.

 

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¹ I gave a TED^x talk on the subject of serendipity and collaboration.  Time tithing is central to that practice.  I should note that I use the old definition of serendipity - namely it is the act of paying attention and having the sagacity to notice there is something new and interesting.

The talk isn't well done - I'm not a good public speaker.  Also the format of these talks is very restricted and not something I feel works well.  

² One of the companies I've worked with decided to try this internally.  My understanding is several hundred of their people use a two hour slot every day.  They can focus on their own work or use it for collaboration with others who agree and don't want external distractions.  It should be noted the employees have separate offices and a flag that indicates they can't be disturbed.  They've told me they consider it an important tool and something they hope their competitors don't adopt.

Many types of work don't adapt to this as interruption is a necessary feature.  There is a lot of very interesting research on the subject and some HCI workers are trying to offer the right interruptions at the right time - not an easy task, but potentially valuable.  

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

I'm a big fan of soups - particularly easy soups.  This one is mostly for a food processor, is simple and easy to modify.  It is particularly good with a warm crusty baguette

 

Avocado and Corn Soup

Ingredients

 

° 1 avocado

° 3 cups almond milk

° 4 cups corn kernels

* tbl finely chopped yellow onion

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1/8 tsp turmeric

° sea salt (I use Maldon)

° freshly ground pepper

° coriander chopped (you could use parsley) 

Technique

 

° blend everything but the corn and coriander in a food processor.

° add the corn, season and heat until warm - I think it is better warm that hot

° serve into bowls and garnish with the coriander

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

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

 

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

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

² from an email I sent last week

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

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

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

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Recipe Corner 

 

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

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

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

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

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

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

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

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

 

from lance to chimps via godzilla...

As I was taking a walk a peloton of perhaps 30 bikes whizzed by in relative silence.  Everyone was dressed in the lycra uniforms that cyclists seem to prefer and each bike probably cost well north of $5,000.  There are several groups of serious amateur cyclists around here.  You rarely see people commute on bikes, but there is a small racing culture.

 

The train wreak that is Lance Armstrong made me think of how cycling has changed over the years.  When I was young that's how kids got around - cheap transportation that offered freedom.  In college I took up riding to unwind on weekends along with commuting as I didn't have a car.  I joined a club that regularly took 100 mile rides - centuries - and found them to be an ideal way to unwind from the pressures of school.

 

There wasn't any lycra, helmets were rare and most of the bikes were inexpensive Schwinns.  The lack of proper kit didn't make any difference.  None of us followed racing.  Bicycles were simple transportation.

 

Somehow biking faded.  There was a resurgence for awhile as "mountain" bikes appeared, but it was a fad for most people.  But then this guy named Greg LeMond won the Tour de France.  Greg was an American - an American who managed to break down a barrier by winning a quintessentially European race.  People took notice and amateur athletes took up cycling.  Then a more remarkable series of events - Lance Armstrong came along winning several consecutive Tours.  His performance was nearly super-human with a power output in the mountain stages that was freakish - fewer than one in a billion people would have that sort of capability.  Not to mention he was a cancer surviver.

 

Amateur cycling in the US became a big thing.   Cycling for commuting and for the fun of it was still fading, but a visit to a bicycle store revealed serious exotica.

 

My cycling club in college had an interesting connection.  Paul MacCready had developed an interest.  Not in cycling, but in cyclists.  He was mounting a challenge to the Kremer Prize - £50,000 to the first person who could take off, stay at least ten feet above the ground and complete a figure eight around two pylons separated by a mile and a half.  Many had tried, but materials had changed and Paul happened to be a serious boffin when it came to aerodynamics and aircraft design.

 

Finding the right engine was important.  I can't quote the exact numbers, but something around 400 watts were needed for takeoff and perhaps 250 watts for cruising - assuming the pilot was *very* light.  Bryan Allen was an amateur cyclist who could develop enough power while not weighing much - probably under 130 pounds.  To cut a long story short they not only won the prize in August of 1977, but went on to cross the English Channel with an improved airplane.

 

If you've ever been around a group of world class cyclists you are struck by their size.  They are rarely over 5' 9 and tend to have amazing leg development while having very little muscle in their arms - not terribly surprising.  The rules of many sports conspire with physics and physiology to give world class athletes in a given event very similar body types and sizes.  A great luxury of just doing a sport for fun is hard work and passion can produce results that are good enough to keep you going, but as the level of competition increases there is a selection driven by genetics - you won't see 6' gymnasts or 5' 5 basketball players in Olympic competition.  Even with freakish athletic abilities physics gets in the way.

 

For some sports "bigger is better" doesn't hold.  Some sports favor the ability to change the direction your body - or part of it - is traveling.  Others require pure strength.  For those you either need the largest possible muscle or create special classes to allow athletes of a range of size to compete.

 

Here is where scaling comes in ..  if you scale up a body by some amount, how much does his or her strength change?

 

The strength of a muscle depends on how many muscle fibers are pulling together - strength increases as the cross sectional area of the muscle.  A person's cross sectional muscle area changes as the square of their height.  Their weight, on the other hand, increases as the cube of their height.¹  What is important to note is their strength to weight ratio changes as the square of their height divided by the cube of their height.  The chart shows a reasonably good correlation between the olympic records for the "clean and jerk" and the weight of the athlete to the two thirds power.   The smallest class of weight lifter can have lift three times his own weight while the largest class world record holder can only lift about 1.7 times his own weight.

 

There are some interesting consequences.  This limits the size of animals.  Scale up an animal and you reach a point where it is simply too heavy for its muscles to move around.  Scale down an animal and its strength to weight ratio increases dramatically. Godzilla wouldn't be able to move.²

 

Some sports like discus and hammer throwing don't have weight classes, so only pure strength is valued and the largest athletes have an enormous advantage.  Other sports, like cycling, have more complex interactions dictating ideal size and weight.³

 

This brings up back to the elite of the elites.  There are some sports where you need genetics that are one in a million or even one in ten million to compete at the highest level.  Someone like Lance Armstrong recorded such freakish performance racing in the mountains that it was more like one in a billion - or even rarer.  The problem with cycling is there are perhaps fifty cyclists at least one in hundreds of millions ... an indication of foul play.

 

Doping of one form or another exists in some sports.  Much of this is dangerous, but where do you draw the line?  Caffeine has been shown to enhance some types of performance as an example.  What is the acceptable normal for a human and what are we comfortable with kids emulating?⁴   Already we have seen debate over "handicapped" athletes like Oscar Pistorius in the London Olympics  We are nearing the point where an elite athlete might have an advantage by amputating limbs replacing them with artificial limbs that use exotic materials. There are advantages for runners as well as cyclists.  And we are on the verge of manipulating genes - some of the modifications may be unhealthy, others may prove to be neutral or even healthy.  It comes down to the fundamental question of what competition means and where we draw lines.  Many sports at the most elite levels have become entertainment with the potential for great financial reward.  We've seen many athletes trade the increased chance of a shortened life for short term rewards.  Watching the Lance train wreck play out and seeing if it changes cycling may be an indicator of what we tolerate - at least for the present.

 

The good news is most of those who play amateur and school sports are not playing at the elite level and don't need to be in order to be happy.  Doping and body modification, along with a need to be an Olympian, are just not important.  Short people can participate in sports that favor height and make up the difference with training and passion.  Tall or short people can cycle.... the list goes on and on.  

 

A few years ago I spoke with the athletic director of an academically elite school.  They require three semesters of physical education for all undergrads. They participate in N.C.A.A. Division III, and their record happens to be at the bottom of the barrel.  What impressed me was the school's attitude towards sport.  Their goal was to allow students to find physical activities that they liked well enough to continue on their own for life. The goal was to provide counterpoint to what was likely to be a sedentary work style and promote health over the long term.  They saw themselves as having a mission to act as a personal trainer.  Team sports and competition are a driver for some of their students, so they participate.⁵

 

And that leaves chimps.  An adult chimp is seriously stronger than any human - their strength to weight ratio is off-scale relative to ours.  This seems odd as they are close relatives sharing about 99% of their DNA with us.  The trick is they lack fine motor control - their muscle fibers are wired to contract in large groups where ours contract in much smaller groups and we can't contract the same percentage of muscle fibers as they can.   A chimp baseball player might have a wicked left hand, but their ball control would be seriously lacking and their handwriting would be awful.

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¹ Assuming their body shape and density remains the same.  A good first order assumption for very elite athletes in a given sport.  Area will increase as the square, volume as the cube.

Specifically if the length of an object with an area of a₁ changes from l₁ to l₂ the new area a₂ will be 

a₂ = a₁(l₂/l₁)²

double the length and the new area increases by a factor of four, triple it and it increases by a factor of nine. 

The volume will increase by the cube of the length.  

v₂ = v₁((l₂/l₁)³

Now doubling the length increases the volume by a factor of eight, tripling increases the volume by a factor of twenty seven. 

Since strength is proportional to the cross sectional area of a muscle and weight is proportional to their volume if everything is scaling uniformly, a person's strength to weight ratio changes as the square of their height divided by the cube of their height.  Or as their weight^2/3

It is important to stress that this ratio only holds if everything is scaled.  My friend Colleen, at 6'7, is about 23% taller than the average adult female.  Appling simple scaling, you would expect her to weight 86% more, but she is both thinner and more muscular and her ratio of leg length to height is much greater than the average female, so the rule doesn't hold.  Simple scaling breaks down when body proportions change and variation is common with extremely tall and short adults. What is true is she is quite a bit stronger and heavier and the length of her limbs means she can't accelerate them as quickly as a smaller person.  The rules of volleyball give her a great advantage in many positions, but less where quick movements are necessary.  This means she needs a teammate who is significantly smaller and capable of greater accelerations.  Woman's beach volleyball seems to favor those with a height of about 6'0 to 6'2 and a slim build.

² Not only would Godzilla not be able to move, but his bones wouldn't be able to support his weight.  Note that elephants have to have much thicker bones proportional to their size than smaller animals just to deal with the extra weight.  

³ It would be fascinating to make a composite representation of the measurements of the top ten athletes in every sport (accounting for specialists in team sports) and make a chart of the silhouettes ranging from the smallest gymnasts to basketball centers.  There is a lot of physics going on!  

⁴ I couldn't find the reference, but someone published the weights of line backers on top ranked high school football teams in Texas over the past fifty years.  The increase was greater than you might expect for recruiting very large boys and giving them enormous amounts of weight training.  There is a chance that doping is taking place.

⁵ The school is Caltech.  Oddly enough they managed to violate the N.C.A.A academic eligibility requirement. Very strange as Caltech may be the most selective school in the nation.

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Recipe Corner

 

I'm a big fan of garlic and of pressure cookers.  Why not use to pressure cooker to cook garlic?  You'll need a trivet for your pressure cooker and a small steamer basket.  Most pressure cookers come with trivets.

I'm still exploring my pressure cooker and am finding it extremely useful - you can save a lot of time and energy plus modern cookers are very safe.  I use a Kuhn Rikon - a bit spendy, but well-made and recommended by every experienced user I talked to.

 

Roasted Garlic

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 large garlic bulbs (see if that will fit in your steamer)

° a bit of high quality extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° chop the top quarter or so off the top of the garlic bulbs - keep the top section for your future garlic needs

° pour about a cup of water into your pressure cooker and place the bulbs cut side up in a steamer that sits on a trivet  

° cook for about 5 minutes on high pressure and then let the cooker come back to atmospheric pressure naturally - e.g. - just move it to a cold burner and let the pressure come down by itself

° remove the bulbs with tongs, place them in a heat-proof dish and drizzle the olive oil over them.  Broil on the top rack of your oven until they are nicely caramelized - about five minutes in my case.

° yum!

 

on creativity

Over the years I've been lucky enough to have known and worked with several exceptionally creative people and a couple of creative organizations.   There seem to be a few components that enable it.  Perhaps the best news is it doesn't seem to be a talent someone is born with.  A few themes emerge:   play, being unafraid to fail (confidence and play perhaps), the opportunity and ability to focus on a single task without interruption, isolation at some times and the right forms of communications at others, and letting the problem become a background task at times seem to be centrally important. ¹

 

This morning I was going through email and an old client wanted a bit on the subject for his organization.²  As an introduction I sent him links to two excellent John Cleese videos.  It seems appropriate to share them, so rather than writing much in this post (no recipe corner today - I need to get to my mini-sabbatical - a critical piece of my own journey to being a bit more creative), here are the videos:

 

from 1991

 

 

 

and from a few years ago ...

 

 

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¹ Many of these are connected and simple to state, but many are very difficult to achieve in a conventional workplace and many of us find critical pieces difficult to implement.

² In the past decade I've been asked to help a few organizations enhance and grow the creativity of the organization as well as that of its members.  There have been some successes, but this can be a non-trivial task with many dependencies.  

 

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on thanksgiving

I have so much to be thankful for that it is good we celebrate this day several times a year.  Some great family members and a few astoundingly wonderful friends who I consider family.  Too many of them are at a distance, so for a few we put on a Thanksgiving celebration when they visit.

 

I'm also thankful for the wide span of interests I'm regularly exposed to.  Connecting the dots and uncovering brand new ignorance is aided by this approach and I'm lucky enough to know some very different and very brilliant minds.  It certainly adds to the quality of my own work (except writing - I doubt I'll ever sort that out properly).

 

Music and art are very important to me.  I'm not very good at music and maybe a bit better at art, but they impact me deeply and are part of how I think and solve problems.¹ Last night I heard a NPR All Things Considered report on Max Richter's recomposition of the first four concerti of Vivaldi's Il Cimento dell' Armenia e dell'invenzione - otherwise known as The Four Seasons.

 

First some background is in order...

 

I'm something of a musical omnivore these days.  The range of music that interests me has grown with time - as an undergrad it was mostly western classical music, folk songs and some emerging electronic music.  When I went to grad school on Long Island I bought a VW Rabbit and wanted a vanity license plate.  

 

At the time I was deeply into the late baroque and early classical period and decided on VIVALDI on my Montana plates (I was still a resident).²   Having them generated more than a few stories, but my favorite took place at a Mobil gas station in Rocky Point, LI.

 

I had just filled it and gave the attendant my credit card - full service was still standard in New York in those days.  She went to the back of the car to write down the license plate.  Watching in my rearview mirror (she was about 18 or 20 and a pretty blonde), I noticed a look of confusion spread over her face.  She slowly walked back to the station, completed the transaction and started walking back...   Halfway from me her gait suddenly changed and her countenance switched into that smile of delight that comes with an "aha!" moment.  She handed the card and receipt to me and said with a knowing confidence

 

"Vivaldi - that's the vampire, right?!"

 

How could you possibly ruin such a perfect moment...   I gave her a knowing and impressed look and said - "you nailed it.  You wouldn't imagine how few people come up with that..."

 

Such a delightful moment - one is thankful for them whenever and wherever they appear.

 

I add the music is wonderful and something of a revelation if you know the Vivaldi work well.  It is very different, but added to my appreciation and understanding of the original - I've already listened to it three times.  Available on iTunes and probably elsewhere. Essential  stuff!

 

I'm also thankful for delightful little hacks that private citizens come up with.  Jheri points out this delightful bit of social hackery to help non-Danes pronounce street names in Copenhagen.

 

 

WTPh? - What the Phonics from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

 

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Recipe Corner 

 

Two items this time.  A quick improvement (at least for me) on Thanksgiving cranberry sauce followed by a good side dish for this time of the year.  The ratios probably aren't that important - particularly the sugar .. more if you like it sweeter, less for a tarter sauce.

 

 

Cranberry and Blueberry Sauce

Ingredients

° 350g  cranberries (thawed if frozen)

° 175g water

° 200g white cane sugar

° 225g blueberries (thawed if frozen)

° 2 tsp vanilla extract (I use a good homemade extract)

Technique

° cook cranberries in the water over medium-high heat until the cranberries begin to pop (about 3 minutes)

° add sugar and blueberries and cook until mixture comes to a full boil.  Continue on boil until the mixture thickens a bit - maybe 3 minutes

° remove from heat and add vanilla -> refrigerate

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I love celeriac.  Cutting them is much easier than you might think, but be sure and wash out all of the dirt.  You need a good vegetable stock for this one.  Store-bought sock will not cut it.

Celeriac Gratin

Ingredients

° 1 large onion finely sliced

° 2 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° 750 g vegetable stock (I made a really rich one based on mushrooms)

° 1 tsp cider vinegar

° 1 largish garlic clove, smashed

° 3 sprigs thyme

° a large celeriac (mine was 600g after peeling)

° 180g eating class apple

° 50g hazelnuts, lightly toasted, skinned and roughly chopped

° a sea salt (I like Maldon) and fresh ground black pepper

Technique

° preheat oven to 400°F

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

° quarter the celeriac and thinly slice.  Add the celeriac to the pan; reduce heat to simmer, cover and let cook for about 15 minutes.  Season to taste..

° move half the celeriac and onions to a shallow ovenproof dish with a slotted spoon.  Peel and thinly slice the apple and arrange slices on top of the celeriac.  Pour about 200g of the liquid over the pile, scatter  the hazelnuts over the top and back 45 minutes.

 

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¹ Two of my senses, hearing and vision,  are non-orthogonal. Having crisply orthogonal senses makes a lot of sense if you are a hunter and potential prey, but the specialization that comes with civilization has allowed some of us with this condition to survive.  I find it a great aid in doing physics and math, although I would love to experience crisply orthogonal sight and sound for awhile.

² The plates were stolen four times.  In New Jersey I used to have the plates WEASL 1 (we have ferrets) everyone who asked assumed I was a lawyer ... go figure...

 

 

dialing back gravity and where to stand for sport

When you jump into the air the height you reach is by how strong you are, how much you weight and gravity.  We don't have much control over gravity without a bit of serious travel, but what if we could dial it back?  Imagine travel to other worlds where the gravitational field is less - where you weigh less.  The gravitational acceleration depends on the radius of the world and its mass.¹  Relative to Earth the moon's surface gravity is about 0.17, Mercury is 0.38, Mars 0.38, and the tiny Martin moon of Phobos is only about 0.005.  

 

My vertical jump is approximately embarrassing, but Colleen is athletic and has trained hers and got to where she could raise her center of mass 31 inches.  She does this by converting energy from her muscles into a vertical velocity and reaches her peak height when that velocity has burned off - her initial energy = m_colleengh.  If you solve for h you note that if g is varied, her ultimate jump height varies as the inverse.  So her 31 inches on Earth becomes a bit over 15 feet on the Moon and 515 feet on Phobos!  Of course her weight on Phobos is only 14 ounces.

 

You can also calculate how long she would be above the ground.²  On Earth her flight is about four tenths of a second, but on the Moon it would increase to 5.7 seconds and Phobos gives a leisurely long trip of about 2 minutes and 40 seconds.

 

Imagine what sports would be like (assuming you could breathe, of course)!

 

Phobos would present some interesting challenges as the escape velocity is about 25 miles per hour.  It would be easy to throw a ball fast enough to leave the little moon and sail off into space.  You can also imagine constructing some not terribly cumbersome wings and flying around in an air filled room on our moon.  Any number of fantastic new sports could be created.    For fun let your imagination take flight and out a few numbers so you can invent some new sports for the Moon, Mars and beyond.  We appear to be wired to take delight in sport and I have no doubt this will happen some day even if it is largely impractical now.³

 

But we can move around on the Earth and find a bit of advantage for another reason...

 

The Earth spins about on its axis once every 24 hours.  There is a centripetal force from this spinning that tries to pull something off the surface. If you are on the equator the force of gravity plus the centripetal force makes you effectively a bit lighter.  At the poles the outwards force vanishes and you are a bit heavier.  A bit of physics and geometry gives the effective value for g is about 9.8061[1 - 0.00263cos(2Θ]), where Θ is your latitude in degrees.⁴  Plugging in the extremes of 0 and 90 degrees ... 

 

you weigh about 0.53% less at the equator than at the poles

 

There are a few other  terms -  one that depends on your height about sea level - you weigh about 0.11% less at 3,000 meters than at sea level....  and yet another smaller term that depends on the tides.⁵  The bottom line is that on a spherical rotating planet like the Earth with its variations in altitude there will be significant differences in the acceleration of a body due to gravity that depend on where you are.

 

If you want to lift the largest weight or jump as high as possible, you want to go as close to the poles as you can. Going to a higher altitude might hurt your athletic performance as there is less oxygen, and most Summer Olympic events seem to be held close to sea level these days. 

 

But the real world is a bit more complex.  Even if you include these corrections, very careful measurements of g show something else is lurking under the surface.  The big one is the shape of the Earth.  Our planet turns out to be far from spherical, but is rather a bumpy ellipsoid, so the altitude dependent terms needs correction.  Reference geoids are calculated and are an important component of the GPS system.  We also have high quality maps of the Moon and Mars...⁶

 

Under the surface are regions that vary in density - mountains and continents tend to be lighter material that "floats".  Maps of the distribution of mass under your feet changes depending where you are -  accurate gravitation maps have been tabulated by experimentation with satellite observations greatly increasing the accuracy of the models.  The value for g changes by about 0.2% within the boundaries of the lower 48 states.  Across the planet the difference can be as large as 0.8%.

 

Position is something you need to correct for if you care about precision weights and measures, but it is something that sport does not consider.  There are usually other factors that are larger in sports performance, so we can get away with ignoring it - but for some sports like weight lifting it may make a difference.  But if you really need to lose that extra pound and are into extreme travel ....

 

And some day we may be doing sport in spaceflight using simulated gravity (a rotating the spacecraft for example) or even on another planet or moon....  

 

... then things get fun!

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¹ The force of gravity is Gm₁m₂/r² where r is the distance between two bodies, m₁ and m₂ are their masses and G is a constant of nature.  We simply this on Earth by noting that force = mass times acceleration, so for a body on the Earth's surface the force of gravity is the mass of the object times the acceleration due to gravity.  A bit of algebra shows this is Gm_earth/r²_earth  It shows up in physics texts as g.  Your weight is the force that holds you to the planet and is just this acceleration times your mass.

The important thing to note is g depends on the radius and mass of the body you are standing on.  

² distance = gt²/2, so t = 2sqrt(2h/g) because it takes the same amount of time to go up as it does to fall.  Note that this neglects air resistance.  

³ This would be fertile ground for future completely immersive computer games where you senses can be altered - or at least a powerful enough simulation can give a sensation of very low gravitational accelerations.  

In the real universe a few astronauts managed to jump around on the moon and Alan Shepard even smuggled some golf balls and his six iron on Apollo 14 managing what was probably the more impressive shots ever

⁴ the centripetal force is mv² /R_earth where v is the speed the Earth's surface is moving at at a given latitude.  At the equator v is about 463 meters per second and it is 0 at the poles.  

⁵ At sea level g = Gm₁ /r² , so at altitude h, gh = Gm₁ /(r+h)² = Gm₁ /(r² + 2rh+h²). Noting h²/r² is extremely small and rearranging we get gh ~ g/(1+2h/r).  Note that the centripetal term changes a bit as the radius changes from r to r + h.   Plugging in the numbers this altitude dependent term where g at a given latitude decreases by about 3.92 *10^-7h, where h is the distance above sea level in meters.  It is straightforward to calculate the tidal term, but I won't in interesting of time.

⁶ Very accurate gravity maps can be made by carefully tracking the position of an orbiting satellite. The best are made using a pair of orbiting satellites flying in formation perhaps a hundred kilometers apart. They compare their relative positions to better than a millimeter.  Depending on what is directly under them, they speed up and slow down changing their separation a bit as they fly. One of the more impressive measurements in science.

 

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Recipe corner

 

Barbecued Okra

 

Okra has a bad reputation - largely from inappropriate cooking techniques. Getting it right is simple - just wash and carefully dry some fresh okra, string on a pair of bamboo skewers (don't run one through your finger!), brush with olive oil and a finishing salt like Maldon and throw on a hot grill for about 10 to 15 minutes turning a few times and brushing on more oil along the way.  

When experimenting with fresh produce it is often best to just try simple things and explore the flavors using various techniques rather than relying on many seasonings (other than salt) and other ingredients.

 

Rugbrød

 

Europeans usually have much better breads than Americans.  I'm a fan of the dark and dense ones - Danish rugbrød in particular.  Making it isn't easy and I can't find anything like it in bakeries (I keep trying - if you have a source, please let me know!).  I even wrote to the Danish embassy in Manhattan and had a reply lamenting the poor state of bread in the US.  They get deliveries from the motherland, but the staffer suggested I try a Swedish mix from Ikea.  

It turns out to work very well - look for Brödmix Flerkorn (Swedish for multi-grain bread mix). This is the old packaging.  Ikea has largely burned through that stock and has the same thing under their own brand with directions in English.  Making it is very very easy.  Just add some water to the milk carton-ish container, shake and pour into a baking pan.  You let the yeast do its thing for awhile and then bake.  It isn't the best rugbrød I've had, but it is still very good and a great basis for open face sandwiches.  Very healthy stuff too...

 

recommended!!

 

back to regular recipes soon...

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!

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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.

 

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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 

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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.