omenti

from communication modalities to the higgs boson

About a year ago I was walking with with a dear friend in Manhattan completely engaged in idea building together.  Fore me intensely delightful activities like this make the leap to Csikszentmihályian flow and I tend not to notice the time and space I'm embedded in as carefully as I should...  Fortunately she is far more perceptive of these things and carefully guided me through the human and vehicular traffic without indicent.   I've been told I can be engaging and perhaps even interesting during times like this if the subject is something we both love.  But there is this problem - I'm not very good in other communication modalities.

 

Recently I've been asked to give several talks to general audiences.  I don't mind public speaking, but I also tend not be be very good at it (my TED^x talk is a bit painful to watch - fortunately food was not allowed in the auditorium).  I'm ok if there is a subject of mutual interest and have an idea of the appropriate level.  And feedback from the audience is extremely important - especially visual feedback.  But if the feedback goes away I'm toast and the performance - and value of the communication - leaves something to be desired.  

 

Writing has similar issues.  One of the reasons why these posts and my personal emails are full of typos and spelling errors is in an attempt to keep a conversational flavor I don't go back and edit.  The temptation to wordsmith and tighten up on precision is too strong and the note begin to take on the smell of a textbook.  A few years ago I rediscovered this tendency as I was toying with writing a different sort of energy book.¹  I found myself tripping badly in my attempts to describ the underlying concepts. I couldn't get a handle on who would understand this without explanation and who would need four other concepts under their belt before the concept could be explained clearly. Who would want explanations and who would find them boring.  None of the compromises seemed to work well as story telling.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - finding the right level and words for this sort of thing is not easy work.

 

The strange thing is I can usually explain this type of physics to most sharp people even if they have very non-technical backgrounds, but often only if we are talking to each other face to face.   The telephone removes too much of the presence required for the explanations to work well and face to face is better than a video link.   Many people are much better than me.  Feynman was an expert explainer, but most of his filmed pieces were responses to questions posed by an interviewer - one on one was his natural high information bandwidth channel. He was also a brilliant lecturer, but the nature of his communications changed to something a bit different and focused on a less general audience.  Carl Sagan was and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and E.O. Wilson are fantastic public communicators - a very rare quality among scientists.  These skills require real work to perfect.  Neil told me he will spend dozens of hours preparing for a five or seven minute interview on the Colbert Report.  It is not natural or easy, but he is so good it looks that way.  

 

The issues I have with different communication modalities and the need for direct feedback from what are sometimes called "out of band" channels² and undoubtedly exist in people from many other fields, but I think they are especially important for science as only a small portion of the public have a notion about how science works and what reported results mean.  At the same time science policy is of enormous importance - witness issues like global warming, nuclear proliferation, healthcare, nutrition, and a thousand other things.  The tobacco industry and a few others on the political left and right discovered that the nature of scientific communication makes it possible to easily manipulate public opinion and leave most scientists almost without defense.³  My book project was a reaction to this.  I naïvely thought that better education would make a big difference, but now I'm not certain this is the best way to spend my time.

 

None of this will settle itself soon. I've been having some second thoughts on the book and alternate ways to get some of the more important bits across.  If I think it could make a modest different I will go ahead and find the time somewhere.  

 

In the meantime I look forward to those wonderful times when I can engage with some of you one on one in playful ideas - but, and this is an important safety tip,  be warned if we are walking that you shouldn't take traffic safety cues from me:-)

 

I leave you with a delightful layman's discussion of the Higgs boson that nicely skates through the jargon.  When I'm one on one with a smart non-physicist this is pretty much how I would approach it, but everything tends to fall apart when I shift communication modalities and lose my way.⁴ Synchronous out-of-band communication channels are the headlights that cut through the darkness for me.

 

____

¹ In talking to industry groups about energy and global warming I found most people lacked a basic understanding of the physics to make informed decisions.  The notion of the book was to concentrate on removing much of the jargon and getting the physics of energy and power on the human scale.  The goal was not to have the reader understand the basic physics or how to solve equations, but rather a good qualitative sense of what is going on.  How do you ask questions like a physicist before moving to the calculations?...

² An enormous amount of information is subtly communicated through prosody, gestures, facial expressions, body positioning and more.  Voice channels can pick up some of this, video a bit more - but face to face is almost always best.  Asynchronous and one-way discussions can miss a lot and a good deal of confusion is possible with neither party recognizing that at the time.

³ A few great reference books:

Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson ...  I don't agree with everything he says, but his book pointed out major problems I was unaware of and has allowed me to repair a few (unfortunately not all) of them.

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway  A well researched and incredibly important book to anyone who worries about science policy and the issues of science and the public.

⁴ When I try to explain the Higgs field I use an analogy of a "fame" field and actors walking through a room of people vs the rest of us to explain the concept of a coupling constant.

clues to the mind and the mind-body connection

We're all aware of cute optical illusions.  Some play tricks with our perception of color, size, or motion ...   This particularly beautiful example plays with our perception of brightness - both turn out to be equally bright inside and out.

 

 

Optical illusions are an interesting tool to study how our brain puts together sensory input sent by the eye and there have been some major surprises and there have been revelations that address the question of how much of reality do we sample through our senses as we observe the world.  To what degree are we sampling reality?

 

I stumbled across this example in a PNAS paper by Bruno Laeng and Tor Endestad of the University of Norway in Oslo.   The illusion is well known, but they looked at something else - how the pupil responded.  

 

If you look at something bright your pupils constrict to adjust to the new brightness level.  This takes place in about a tenth of a second - reasonably fast on our level of perception - and it was thought to be a pure reflex that helps protect the retina from damage.  Reflex mechanisms should be fast to prevent as much damage as possible and this one was thought to occur in in a few dedicated cells in lower brain structures.¹  What is curious with this illusion is our pupils contract even though there is no real brightness - the reflex is in response to what we think we see rather than what really exists! 

 

This is fantastic.  Perceptual errors behave more liked learned phenomena and may be adaptations.  Perhaps evolution has made us more adroit at encountering our environment.  

 

A lot of visual information is ambivalent and noisy.  Perhaps there is some contextual processing going on to construct a "reality" that is more useful.  Maybe the reality our mind assembles is a bit better for our functioning that what really exists in nature.

 

The same goes for other senses - particularly hearing, but taste also comes to mind.²

 

As I am writing this it occurs to me that there are many other evolutionary tricks that help us to deal with how we relate to the environment.   We read stories of animal athletes - cheetahs that can sprint to 70 mph, our cats and dogs that can make jumps that appear amazing - and sometimes think humans must be unathletic in the scheme of things.  But we are amazingly good at endurance running.  We probably evolved to this as our ancestors may have had to run down prey in order to get close enough to dispatch it, but whatever the reason we are wonderful aerobic machines.³

 

Many people report a "runner's high" after exertion.  I find it around the sixty minute mark with my rowing and, if I make it that far the resulting rush is enough to encourage me to continue for as long as an extra half hour.  It is a feeling of real euphoria.

 

It turns out the body under heavy aerobic load produces endocannabinoids which are substances that act as neurotransmitters.  The name probably rings a bell - endocannabinoids are chemically very similar to the active ingredient in cannabis.  

 

The runner's high is the real thing and the euphoria can be an excellent reward.

 

Recently it has been learned that a few mammals that are good aerobic athletes(humans and dogs) produce serious amounts of endocannabinoids during aerobic exercise while other mammals that aren't aerobic athletes (ferrets) don't.  It may be we have evolved a reward system to encourage this type of activity - I know it is one of the few things that keeps me on the rowing machine for lengthy periods.   Colleen is more geared towards bursts of power, but she notes that she loved the feeling of euphoria that came over her after an hour or so of intense training and the reward was enough to encourage her to go on for several hours more. 

 

My niece Magi is a runner.  A remarkable runner.  She is a single mom with two very little kids and is struggling with raising them, working a couple of jobs and going to nursing school.  A few years ago she took up running and found it came naturally.  She's done several marathons and does respectable three hour times - not bad for someone who can't run every day and rarely more than an hour at a time and also lacks the money to get coaching - shoes are a major expense for her.

 

She lives in the Phoenix area and has always been comfortable in the mountains.  A few races were in the back country and she found she really liked them.  Also she learned that she's good with distance. Her quarter times on the Boston Marathon were all within a minute with the last quarter being the fastest.   About a year ago she started trying the longer distances and did very well in several fifty mile runs.  

 

With those under her belt it was time to get serious.  Last Saturday she ran the Zane Grey - not a race for the faint of heart.  Rather than writing about it, I'll print the email she sent and add a few images.  Do read the links from the race director and another runner for more color...  like

...

The course runs along the base of the Mogollon Rim, constantly dropping in and out of the little canyons and crossing multiple creeks and streams.  The route is entirely single track trail and is extremely rugged.  Despite a ton of work our volunteers have done on the course, entrants will have to navigate over or under fallen trees, through thick wickets of Manzanita bushes, and over very rocky terrain.  There are also sections where the trail just disappears and route finding can be challenging.  The middle section of the course, known as the “burn area” had the trees burned down from the Dude Fire in the early 90’s. Runners are exposed to the heat of the Arizona sun and have to travel as far as 11 miles between some aid stations.  An unprepared runner can sometimes run out of fluids in these long hot stretches.

 Not easy terrain down there. The Mogollon Rim is rough, tough and relentlessly difficult

...

 

with that, Magi's email:

 

Here is my first race report. I apologize in advance if you do not want to read this much about me, nevertheless this was an incredible experience and I am really excited to share it!

 

The Zane Grey 50 has earned a reputation for being one of the most grueling ultras out there. I had spoken with friends who had completed the race and the consensus was I could expect to add about 2 hours onto my avg 50M time (if there is such an avg) prepare to trip, get scratched, sprained, dislocated, lost, broken, etc.,, this all sounds like adventure right?! The race was a bit of a blur so I am sorry for the lack of detailed trail accounts.

 

 April 21st 2012 was the big day of the notorious race, in anticipation of this I had prepared with all sorts of hot, hilly, long, and really fun desert mountain runs. Emmet was prepared to crew for me race day, this made a huge difference. Knowing that someone 100% reliable is waiting for you at designated aid stations on the course with water and nutrition refills, sunblock, an icy towel to wipe down with, words of encouragement, and anything else you may possibly need is beyond words. I say this because when you are running 50 miles through some of the most unpredictable Arizona terrain, your entire life is narrowed down to the steps it takes to get your butt from aid station to aid station. Emmet has accompanied me on many training runs so he knows my pace, my weaknesses, my strengths, and he also knows how to tell me what I need when I may not realize it, this is important. The weather was predicted to be 90 degrees, I wasn't to concerned about this, by default I have to train in the heat and have learned to be very smart about hydration and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately the heat was by far the biggest hazard on the course that day for many of the runners, out of 126 starters only 84 finished.

 

this link is an interview with the race director

 

 

this link is by a runner, he has great pics of the course in his blog

 

 

In the two days prior to the race I have a total of 5 hours sleep, this was the only stimulus for self-doubt weighing in my head. The night of the race I was lying in bed with the "I want to cry but I'm so mad I can't" feeling. The alarm clock went off at 3:15 am and all that nonsense turned into baloney, it was race day, wheee! We arrived at the start 4:30am, just enough time to hit the bathroom, check in with race officials, and stay warm in the car until just before the 5:00am race start. And just like that the race started, off we went into the woods, all 126 of us with our headlamps beaming in the dark. Actually mine was lightly beaming, I think the batteries died just as the sun rose enough to see without it, lucky me! It was 8 miles to the first aid station, I was equipped with all the nutrition and water I would need to get me to the second aid station (mile 17) where Emmet was planned to meet me, the first 8 miles flew by, it took about 3 miles for the runners to spread out and about 40 minutes for the sun to rise. Running with a headlamp is really fun, the small illumination for your footfalls on new terrain makes me feel like a little kid exploring with a flashlight. Admittedly it really slows me down as the few falls I have had in the past all occurred while running in the dark, thus I now go a little slower. The logic is I'd rather be 5 minutes slower than broken. As we came into the 8 mile aid station we were greeted with cheers, and even better Emmet was there to make sure I was doing OK, (I had started the race with a new hydration pack and he wanted to make sure that it wasn't leaking) I ran through the station on my way to mile 17.

 

 

Miles 8-17 were beautiful, the morning was cool and this portion of the trail was through pine forest ascending to views of the Mogollon rim, I was on fresh legs and trying my best to hold back for the many many hills and miles to come. There were numerous river crossings over precarious rocks that really added to the adventure feeling, the course at this point was on an easy to follow single-track trail, well marked with yellow tape and glow sticks. Coming up on mile 17 I could hear the cheers as runners came into the aid station, this was so encouraging I cried a little! Emmet had prepared an area with everything I could possibly need, I quickly toweled off the crusty salt-sweat, exchanged my hydration pack for a freshly packed one, took 2 ibuprofen to help ward off inflammation and set off again----DANG IT! I didn't take my sunglasses, I was running without a visor on purpose as I didn't want to risk missing any trail markers in my periphery, the trail was now becoming more treacherous and it is very easy to get lost. Many experienced ZG runners have lost hours going in the wrong direction.

 

Mile 17-33 was brutal, I was told to expect the worst during this part, the majority of the trail is an old exposed burn area. Tons of direct sunlight (grrr no sunglasses) lots of elevation to climb, and lucky you if you don't get lost as you have to be super aware of trail markers. This part of the trail has to recover from a harsh winter so the area has a ton of dead tree fall, new dry grass/shrubby growth, and lots of crumbly unsteady soft red rock. At mile 23 there is an aid station only assessed by the official race crew, this aid station is an oasis---it's called Hell's Gate from mile 23-33-- as I ascended into the station the volunteer shouted out "Welcome to Hell, how you doin'? I was doing pretty good considering all the runners were in the same hot boat, I was conditioned for the heat so I knew as long as I kept hydrated I would have no problems. I filled up my pack with water, chugged another few cups of water, and threw a handful of ice down the back of my shirt, off I went into Hell. At this point in the race runners were beginning to drop, many people started out to fast, spent their energy, and were not prepared for the heat. I was not really going to fast but I managed to pass many people during this stretch. The race is organized so that there are rescue workers stationed on the course about every 7 miles with radios, their job is to account for each runner as they pass and make sure nobody goes missing. About mile 25 I came up on a man who had passed me around mile 20, he was hunched over on the side of the trail, he was obviously unprepared with not enough water or calories, as I was offering him some of my water he vomited, nothing I could do for this guy except for run on ahead to tell the next rescue crew they had a runner in trouble. There were some pats of trail during this leg where I would think to myself "seriously?? I am supposed to run this?" and other parts where I had to remind myself that I had trained to go faster and harder, hiking was the only option for many parts of the trail, however dragging my feet was not. My head needed to be reminded to move my feet!

 

Whoo-hoo I made it to mile 33 aid station! The delirium sets in completely about this point, as I came into the station Emmet was yelling "go this way, now go this way, now this way" leading me from the check in to the car where all my gear was. This is where it makes a difference for someone who knows your habits to intervene, I was spot-on for nutrition and hydration but with the heat every ones sweat factor was major--Emmet made sure to impose upon me the importance of taking saltstick caps--these are electrolyte tabs to swallow--if you had seen all the salt crusted on my face/shirt/body it's pretty obvious I was depleted, I now swear by these caps! Seriously, all I could tell you at this point was which way is up or down. My brain was only focused on watching my footfall to not trip and keeping a keen eye on trail markers. A funny note here, about a week prior Max had told me in his cutie voice "Good job Mommy" when I pointed out a local peak I ran to during a training run. During the race I had his cute little voice in my head rewarding me with a "Good Job Mommy!" every time I came upon a trail marker!

 

 

So onto miles 33-44, Emmet loaded me up with 2L of water on my back, 32oz in my hands, about 800 calories in my pack (all of which I would use) and I was on my way! This was serious fun, the trail was about 60% run-able so now I know I need to improve my hiking skillz, other than this I was focused on the next 11 miles of adventure. I think my most proud accomplishment for this race was not falling once, I don't fall often but still this terrain is really 'trippy' (funny right?) so now blur blur blur, hill, hill, up , up , up , and I arrive at mile 44!

 

 

The crowd is cheering all the runners as we descend into the station, Emmet leads me to the car and preps me for the last 6 miles. Hmmm 6 miles, how long might this take...try 1 hour and 40 minutes...uuuuuffffff. This last 6 miles was long and exhilarating, and hard. The terrain was pretty pine forest but my legs were shot, there was spot about mile 42 where some thin ice patches were still frozen on the ground, it just made sense to me to come to a stand still stop to look at them and contemplate lying down on one--I chose to keep on trucking but now I was day dreaming of cold pools to dip in and icy drinks. After what seemed like an endless stretch of trail I rounded a corner and was in earshot of the finish, what a rush! I picked up the pace as best I could and finished strong, the 35th finisher and 8th female to be exact. The whole race took me 12:40 minutes and every second was great!

 

 

I will definitely do this race again, it was a total adventure! Thank you so much for all the encouragement

For many reasons I'm very proud of Magi:-)  Today - a week later - she's running a regular marathon "for fun"

She obviously is mostly slow twitch or red muscle.  This comes from both sides of her family, who tend to be gracile and endurance/non-sprinter types.  I'm really slow and a terrible jumper, but I can go for a long time.  In college I would regularly ride "centuries" (100 mile bike rides) on most weekends and never had any exhaustion problems.  Even now when rowing I specialize on going for an hour to an hour and a half rather than intense five minute intervals of burst effort.

________

¹ This is similar to what happens when you burn your finger. Your finger touches a red hot burner and a signal races towards the closest area that can make a decision - the spinal cord in the case of the finger.  A response is quickly generated and sent back causing the muscles to jerk your finger out of the way.  This happens "reflexively" - long before signal can be processed by the brain and long before pain is even felt.

² By taste I am referring to flavor which really isn't the conventional five tastes on the tongue, but the mixture of taste, touch and smell that generates "flavor" in our mind.

Also color is generated in the mind as is music.

³ This is one of the reasons why our bodies respond so well to aerobic exercise and why we tend to fall apart when we become sedentary.  At risk of sounding preachy, your body and brain with greatly benefit from regular aerobic exercise so find an excuse to just do it.

_____________________

A Very Simple Simple Pea Soup

 

Ingredients

° 2 tbl unsalted butter

° 1 diced medium sweet onion

° 1 clove garlic, sliced

° Kosher salt to taste

° 2 c thawed frozen sweet peas (fresh only if picked on the same day!!)

° 1/2 c lightly packed fresh tarragon leaves

 

Technique

° Melt butter over medium low heat.  When it foams add onion, garlic and salt. Cover and cook until the onions are soft, but don't brown!  Stir frequently - not a walk away and forget it stage

° Add a quart of water and bring to a boil. Add peas and tarragon and cook 'til tender - a few minutes

° take off heat, purée and strain.  

° Reheat if necessary and serve.  I like to garnish with a few whole raw peas and a bit of plain greek yogurt

 _____________

bonus non-recipe

After 80 or 90 minutes of hard rowing I'm soaking with perspiration and am in need of something cold with a lot of protein.  Here is my current favorite - not vegan friendly though.  "Shake" is tongue in cheek - I can make a quality milkshakes.  Ask if you visit and we'll do one.

Berry Yogurt "Thickshake" with Nuts and Chocolate

Ingredients

° A good handful (about 100g) of slightly thawed frozen blueberrys or raspberries

° About 200g plain greek yogurt - I like to use 2%

° a half frozen banana - I remove the skins on very ripe bananas and tightly wrap them in plastic wrap and freeze.  A great way to deal with ripe bananas

° 2% or whole milk.  Start with 100g and adjust

° something sweet - maple syrup, honey, sugar

° 15 to 30g of dark chocolate broken into small bits

° 15 g broken pecans

Technique

° Blend banana, fruit, and about 50g of milk.

° Add the yogurt and milk as necessary to get a good enough consistency.  Add sweetner if necessary

° Pour into a serving glass or bowl depending on thickness.  Stir in pecans and chocolate

 

 

the beauty of two triangles

This morning I overheard a few people fuming about the price of gasoline.  I wonder if they have considered how inefficient their cars really are?

 

The chemical bonds in hydrocarbons are a great way to store energy.  Millions of years ago green plants used the energy in sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen was then combined with carbon dioxide from the air forming glucose molecules and giving off a byproduct called oxygen that we've managed to use in other ways.¹  The neat thing is when you burn the glucose,  energy stored in its chemical bonds is released along with water and carbon dioxide.  Glucose is essentially a energy storage battery.  Plants turn it into other hydrocarbon-based substances largely leaving intact the chemical bonds that contain the stored solar energy.  They tap some of the energy for their own purposes and animals eat the plants harvesting the stored solar energy through metabolism - another form of oxidation - releasing the same energy and byproducts as burning.

 

It is wonderful to realize you are really solar powered.

 

Most of the solar energy that powers our bodies fell on the Earth recently - usually within the past year.   It turns out plants aren't terribly efficient - usually less than one percent for those directly in our food chain - but a lot of land is devoted to the cultivation of suitable plants.² 

 

We can have some fun with some numbers.  An average person requires about 2,000 Calories a day.  Calories are a unit of energy so you can divide by time to find the average power requirement.  Doing this and converting to watts, it turns out we need about 100 watts on average.  Lower at night when we're sleeping and much higher when we're doing something athletic, but 100 watts a person is a nice number to remember for quick mental calculations.

 

The sun delivers an average of a bit more than 1,360 watts per meter² to the Earth.³ Absorption in the atmosphere, the Earth's roughy spherical shape, inclination, day and night and cloud cover reduces this to something usually between 50 and 200 watts/m² - let's pick 100 for a quick back of the envelope.  Average food crops stores solar energy into those chemical bonds with at about a half percent efficiency so their power rating is about 0.5 watts/m².  If we could harvest and process these crops with perfect efficiency it would take about 200 square meters of land to supply one of us with food.  Given seasonal growing issues and various inefficiencies in the chain, a more reasonable number is closer to 1,000 square meters of farmland under cultuivation for every person on the planet.⁴

 

So what does this have to do with the beauty of triangles?

 

Hang on - we're getting there.  This is taking a bit more time to flesh out than I thought so I'm breaking my one hour rule.

 

The Industrial Revolution came in several phases, but at its core it allowed us to effectivvely tap the relatively vast amounts of energy stored in hydrocarbons like coal, petroleum and natural gas.  Up until that time most of what we could do was limited to muscle power - from us or domestic animals.  A good rule of thumb is an adult male in good physical shape can produce about a kilowatt-hour of mechanical work a day ..  100 watts of additional power in a ten hour shift.⁵  A horse may provide about four or five times as much.  This proved to be a very low and limiting barrier to growing the civilizations - many people spend all of their time dealing only with food production and available energy for other activities was very limited. 

 

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas formed over many tens of thousands of years millions of years ago.  The efficiency of their formation was not great and local geologic conditions dictated where they are and how much exists.  But many tens of thousands of years often dominates the low efficiencies and large amounts of energy were stored.  We are mining sunlight from our distant past.

 

Most of the gasoline in our cars comes from petroleum which, in turn comes from dead algae and zooplankton that became trapped under sedimentary rock and "cooked" under great pressure and heat for ages.  At about 36 kilowatt-hours per gallon it is almost an ideal fuel for transportation, it can be stored at room temperature, is relatively safe and easy to handle and transport, and we have had engines that burn it directly since the late 19^th century.⁶

 

The ease and low cost of mining, transporting, processing and using this very old reservoir of stored solar energy has produced an extremely inefficient transportation infrastructure - the automobile.  But early on there was so much oil that inefficiency didn't matter very much.

 

Cars are great for moving us long distances at speeds that give us practical commuting ranges on the order of fifty miles or thereabouts and one day trips ten times that distance.  But internal combustion engines are heat engines and, despite more than one and a half centuries of refinement, only about a quarter of the gasoline you buy is used to turn the wheels of your car.  The majority of it escapes out the tail pipe or heats the engine block.  Improvements have been made and will continue, but they are increasingly expensive and we aren't that far from the limits for a flexible use vehicle.

 

There are other issues like cost and pollution, but let's focus on efficiency and ask a fundamental question.

 

What are we really moving?

Usually just a person or two and perhaps a few bags of groceries - a few hundred pounds at most.  The average car weighs nearly 4,000 pounds.  It takes a lot of energy to accelerate its mass to speed, so a good metric to consider is payload divided by vehicle weight plus payload.  Let's say you and your groceries weigh 200 pounds and your car weighs 3,800 pounds.  Only five percent of what is moving around really needs to be moved around.

 

For short trips bicycles make sense.  I've done some calculations based on Colleen and her bike.  She weighs about 170 pounds and her bike weighs 30 pounds.  Fully 85% of what is moving around is useful payload and that number can increase a bit as she carries groceries on the bike.  She gets the equivalent of 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline.  Her bike is great for speeds up to about 15 mph and trips generally under a five or six miles each way - basically almost any commute in a town or city.  Much longer trips and/or higher speeds or heavy payloads require something like a car - but for short and slow trips Colleen "wins" using a bike largely by not having to carry around all of that extra weight.  We can and should reduce the weight of cars as it is the next area for large (factor of two) improvements in fuel use efficiency, but bicycles are extremely low hanging fruit where practical.

 

In the late eighteen hundreds the biycle, like the automobile, was undergoing change.  The safety bike was developed revolutionizing bike design and safety and giving us a very simple and extremely strong lightweight  structure. It roughly onsists of two triangles fused together.  Bicycle design has progressed, but this basic geometry hasn't changed very much since then.

 

A person on a bike is very efficient - about three or four times as efficient as a walker and more efficient than mamalian locomotion.  Bikes are optimized for urban scale trips and payloads associated with perhaps 80%+ of human trips less than five miles.

 

I sometimes characterize a bicycle as "a human sweat amplifier fashioned of a diamond shaped geometry fashioned from a pair of fused triangles"...  But there is something deeper to it.   Building one can be straightforward - if you like you can even make one using bamboo as a primary frame material.⁷ 

 

Refinements, on the other hand, can be technically demanding and leading edge bike design is a convenient laboratory to material development and fabrication research and development.  The aerospace industryhas been an early driver of carbon fiber use, but bicycle frames have been proven an important vehicle for perfecting less expensive fabrication technologies that are now being applied in a variety of industries.  

 

China has used bicycle manufacture as a mechanism for learning and scaling manufacturing technologies. Beginning with aluminum bike frames in the late 1980sthey have managed to drop the price of an aluminum bike frame by nearly a factor of fifteen.  For about a decade they have been working with carbon filber nad mahve made prie reductions on the order of five with eight or ten looking likely soon.   The resulting techniques have driven wind turbine carbon fiber fabrication along with parts of their aerospace industry.  If they can achieve success in automotive carbon fiber on the order of what they've done with bicycles, the carbon fiber automobile becomes practical and we have a fundamental revolution in the industry.  It would be possible to make a 2,000 pound safe four passenger car and that would translate into much greater fuel efficiency.

 

But bikes may be another subtle, but potentially powerful driver of change.

 

It turns out there are a lot of electric bikes in China - currently 150 million with an annual production that should reach about 70 million around 2015.  Most of these are very unsophisticated - a heavy bike with a small fairly inefficient electric motor and heavy lead acid battery.  

 

Bike batteries don't have to be large and expensive.  We found that Colleen required about 31 Calories to travel a mile making her about 34 times as energy efficient as a 30 mpg car.  31 nutritional Calories is about 36 watt-hours, so a 10 mile roundtrip commute requires about 360 watt-hours.  But Colleen happens to be human and her efficiency at turning food energy into mechanical work at the pedal is about 20% while the battery, controller and motor in state of the art ebike exceeds 80%.  So she could get a comfortable 40 mile range with a 500 watt-hour battery and pedal along a bit to increase the range even more as well as getting some exercise while she's at it.

 

A 500 watt-hour battery pack is about ten times the capacity of the average laptop computer battery.  Currently most lithum-ion ebikes use several laptop batteries, but newer designs use repurposed automotive batteries.  China appears to be encouraging ebike makers to move to lithium-ion designs.  Seventy million lithium-ion ebikes would require 35 million kilowatt-hours worth of batteries.  Smaller electric vehicles use batteries in the 25 to 35 kilowatt-hour range.  eBike production would be equivalent to about a million new electric cars a year and may be an important bridge towards the massive production scales required.

 

There is also an indication that city planners are beginning to rethink the design of new megacities moving more towards a mixture of small cars (mostly electric), ebikes, bicycles, pedestrian traffic and mass transit - much like parts of Northern Europe.  This type of design is much more efficient in energy use and may be less expensive in the long run.   

 

Just two triangles joined into a diamond, but they may be giving us a hint of a possible future.

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¹ Atmospheric oxygen tends to react with a lot of things and doesn't stay around very long on its own - a few thousand years at most.  Its presence indicates something has produced it recently and, at least on Earth, it is an indicator that photosynthesis is working away.

² Sadly there is starvation, but this is a distribution problem.  Green plants provide enough energy for the world's population - but we appear to be within about a factor of two of a fairly harsh limit.

³ 1,366 watts/m² is an accepted number that averages over our orbit and solar cycles, but the last cycle has been very quiet and the recent number is somewhat lower - perhaps about 1,361.  

⁴ This is for diets where we consume plants.  It turns out we eat meat too and making meat is inefficient.  Usually under ten percent, although some meats like industrial poultry can be as high as twenty percent.

⁵ I use a rowing machine to exercise and measure my output directly.  My normal sessions are at an average power level of 150 watts and run 60 to 80 minutes.  A one hour session would represent 150 watt-hours of work.  Since I'm about 20% efficient, that means I need about 600 watt-hours of food above and beyond my normal metabolic needs to support the exercise. That's about 516 Calories (nutritional - there are several types of calories).  People can work at much more intense levels for short periods and expert athletes can work at about three times my level for similar periods.  I note some of that in another post.

⁶ Unfortunately there are some nasty byproducts and side effects.  Incomplete combustion produces numerous toxic chemicals and an enormous amount of carbon dioxide is released as a direct combustion byproduct even if we had complete combustion - approximately 20 pounds of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline burned. This is from carbon that had been captured for thousands of years and sequestered for millions of years. This rapid desequestration is a  root cause of the human caused global warming.

⁷ Bicycle frames are usually fabricated from aluminum, but steel is also frequently used along with the emergence of carbon fiber and, more rarely, titanium.   I'm a big fan of steel as newer alloys are fairly lightweight while offering an outstanding "road feel" Steel can also be easily adapted to bespoke designs where a frame is custom tailored to the rider.  My old Raleigh Pro was built in the mid 1970s using Reynolds 531 - a then exotic alloy that only one company in the world could make.  One of the most exotic steels is a maraging stainless steel called Reynolds 953.  The tube wall thicknesses are so thin - down to about 0.3 mm -  that frames approach the weight of carbon fiber bikes. Colleen is over 6'6" tall and that dictated an unusal frame geometry that required Reynolds 953 and some careful selection of tube diameters, wall thicknesses and buttings to get it "right" ... a fair amount of numerical simulation.

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Recipe   Not re-frieds

I tend to approach cooking on hunches and have my share of failures.  This is a nice success.  I like re-fries, but rather than sautèing the aromatics with the cooked beans I wanted to sautè them first and then cook them with the beans in a pressure cooker to infuse the flavor. I used a mixture of pinto and cranberry beans because that's all I had at the time.  I assume you could use any similar bean and get great results.   A huge key to success with dried beans is to never use anything more than about six months old.

The quantities are approximate as I didn't carefully measure.  I'll use mostly volume measurements even though that is bad form.

Ingredients

° 1 tbl vegetable oil

° 1 medium onion chopped

° 1 bunch cilantro stems and leaves separated and chopped

° 1/2 tsp chipotle powder - use more or less for to vary the flavor

° 1/2 tsp cumin

° 2 cups dried beans.  I used a mixture of pinto and cranberry beans soaked overnight in water - borlotti would be great too

° 2 cups water

° 1 tsp kosher salt

 

Technique

° Heat your pressure cooker with the top off over medium heat and add the oil. Sautè the onion, cilantro stems and spices (not the salt yet) until the onion starts to soften. Don't let it brown. Add the beans and water.

° Close the lid, crank heat to high and lower heat once you reach full pressure (15 psi setting).  Cook about 10 minutes and move to a cold burner allowing the pressure to drop on its own before opening. 

° Reserve a few of the beans for a garnish, add salt to the rest and mash.  

° Serve garnished with the whole beans, sour cream and the cilantro leaves.

 I prefer whole milk greek yogurt (Fage Total) to sour cream, but your mileage may vary.  Sour cream is the classic.  Also I imagine parsley would be a great substitute for cilantro, but I really like cilantro.

 

 

ignorance and thrivable science

OK - Jean is sitting up now...

 

A few people have asked questions and commented about the notion of ignorance so I'll continue to explain ignorance as cultivated by scientists.

 

The popular form of ignorance suggests a state of being uninformed.  But I'm talking about something that is deeply honest.  A recognition that you really don't know something.  If it is an area you are curious about you can begin to explore.  Is it worthwhile? Do you have a sense it is something that can be explored, how connected is it to other lines of exploration?

 

The process of learning more and exploring is a sharpening of the ignorance. The process of this curiosity driven ignorance is very dynamic whereas the standard form of ignorance tends to be static and dogmatic.   Using the old black cat in a pitch block room that scientists like to use, there are a lot of these rooms - some are empty, some have black cats and some have black non-cats that we might imagine as well as those we may not.   There are some ideas that seem great, but after years of pursuing them carefully you may not find anything, but you have learned something and perhaps can find some other entrances to ponder.

 

This is very different from the public perception of science which favors the great discoveries.  This makes science seem to be a deliberate and reliable method for learning new facts and even getting things done -  Just to this research and you will get a new battery for an electric car.  All you need is a pile of money and a group of scientists.

 

That can work for developing existing ideas.  Frequently the problems are so constrained that you can be fairly certain solutions exist and a scientific approach just works.  This is more of an applied science or perhaps engineering research.  It is the sort of thing that allows people who know the field well to predict slices of the future.  Most industrial labs live in this space. A few, like the old Bell Telephone Laboratories and parts of IBM's Watson Labs, actually did real science.  They, at least pieces of them, focused on what wasn't known.  They relied on the cultivated ignorance of some very talented people and changed the world.

 

As an example I was part of an applied group that had a very good idea of where digital music might be going.  We weren't in a position to predict winners and losers, but it was easy to project that five years out X would be possible and 10 years out Y would.  And we did something very similar for location based services.  Not that any of this was useful to our employer.  It also wasn't science. (scientists can be very good at engineering research)

 

Prediction can be an excellent mechanism for cataloging ignorance.  If you sit a scientist down and ask them to predict what might be in their field ten or fifteen years out, you will get some educated conjectures.  It is really a list of ignorance she has identified as ripe for cultivation and perhaps she is even beginning to sharpen it.  Really good scientific projections are very rare and probably no more than statistic flukes.  But cataloging ignorance is useful as it can illuminate potential pathways and asking your scientist friend what may happen is a good way to engage them in what is, for them, a very exciting process.

 

Cultivated ignorance is terribly exciting. Science is not a terribly easy sport, but this drives scientists to do it.   Admitting ignorance and moving on it is the point at which the questions sharpen and become more real.  It is the start of the journey and the end of the journey, like a great road trip, is not the point.  At some point there may be a discovery, measurement or non-discovery (which, as we mentioned, can be extremely important!), but that is not the goal of science.  What happens along the path is the creation of new questions.  Questions that weren't accessible and perhaps not even possible to express before and you realize the game is still afoot.

 

All of this is self-sustaining and quite thrilling.

 

 It is, I think, a manifestation of what my buddy Jean Russell would call thrivable. 

 

Along the way you've probably wondered why I haven't mentioned hypotheses - after all, don't scientists observe or theorize, make a clever hypothesis and then test it?  

 

I'm not terribly fond of that model. For one thing the real process is much more messy than that simple model.  Another is a hypothesis can be far too limiting.  People tend to come to believe them and not be as skeptical and curious as they should be - at least when you are working in new areas. Too much belief in a potential outcome can often lead you astray or not be sufficiently careful with your experimental procedure.  But there is a place where hypotheses develop more formally and you have to deal with them.

 

Scientists rate the quality of their ignorance as well as their findings.  You measure and report a statistically sound confidence level (scientists tend to understand statistics deeply).  This can get in the way of conveying science to the public as nothing is really black and white - finding can be proven wrong by experiment if that is the way Nature really works.  There is always a chance you haven't measured carefully enough - that something is wrong with your technique or that some other signal is present.  

 

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. - Richard Feynman

 

The public expects black and white pronouncements and this breakdown was exploited by the tobacco industry in the 80s and 90s and have been exploited by the fossil fuel industry for more than a decade.  A few weeks ago someone asked me about the consequences of a scientifically literate vs illiterate public and these are beautiful manifestations of some of the issues.¹

 

If you know a scientist and want to really learn more about what they might be doing, the wrong question to ask is "what do you do?"  Some friends have asked me this and I'm sure most come up with the conclusion that I have no discipline and can't describe something that simple.  The right question is "what are you trying to find out?", "what would you really like to know?", "where are you stuck?", "what is unknowable these days?", "is there any progress in how well you can measure something?", "what would be really exciting to work on, but the technology isn't quite there yet?", "tell me about some new questions you would like to ask of Nature that have come to you in the last six months..."  

 

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to explain energy and power at a layman's level and haven't been terribly successful. On the other hand, when confronted with questions - the sort of questions I can't answer, people around me tell me I can be animated and perhaps even a bit interesting.  The level of the material changes from Russian doll science 101 explanations where you keep having to define and explain one set of things to cleanly explain another, to something crisper and much more respectful of your attention and mind.  I'm still hunting for some clear ways to do this and think they are out there, but I need to be more clever.

 

And that is an interesting point - information is being generated at a fantastic rate.  There is no way to keep up with it and that makes any field you aren't a specialist in seem inaccessible.  It reduces experts to high priests in lab coats who speak in a confusing tongue.  It renders science intimidating.

 

Scientists don't really worry about the information explosion at a core level of their curiosity.  Sure they may as necessary part of something they are working on - just ask an experimental particle physicist about his trigger logic or someone sequencing DNA about their data handling issues.  The important task is not information driven, although that is part of the process at some level.  What is important is being curious and able to recognize and cultivate your honest ignorance.  

 

The scientist deals with the explosion of information by realizing ignorance is growing at a much greater rate and this is a good thing.  You can pick a bite-sized piece off and jump in!

 

Dealing with ignorance is something scientists are great at.  Science can thrive - the information explosion is something of a red herring here. Science makes the Universe more accessible and, hopefully, science itself can be more accessible to the public.

 

The black cat and pitch black room metaphor may not be the best.  A great professor of mine explained cultivated ignorance in terms of surfing (this was in Southern California, so do as the natives).  First click here to set the mood with a bit of background music - I loved these guys when I lived there and recommend the electronic version of Pipeline

 

Imagine surfing this big frothy wave.  As you act on your cultivated ignorance (he used the phrase targeted ignorance) you keep moving along and you begin to realize there are other waves that you never noticed before that you can move along to that will take you even farther.  Making it to the beach becomes just silly as you realize you can go forever.

 

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¹ As something is verified and re-verified with increasingly accuratue experiments its  confidence level increases it takes on a more solid nature - perhaps this is moving towards an honest and generally accepted hypothesis. Proving it wrong means you have to be increasingly careful when you do your experiment.  The speed of light, the core notion of evolution, and basic quantum mechanics have very high levels of confidence attached to them.  It makes sense to keep testing them as techniques improve, but it is unlikely that you'll prove them wrong (still it would be thrilling!)  

It is usually the case that science usually builds on itself rather than going through true revolutions.  Newtonian physics breaks down in certain areas - the very small and the very fast for example.  In these regimes quantum mechanics and special relativity are better descriptions of Nature, but they are no better than Newtonian physics at describing much of the world we live in.  We can say with some confidence that the simple Newtonian physics that describes the mechanics of a car will not change.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both reduce to Newtonian physics as speeds and sizes become closer to the physical world we feel and observe with our naked senses.

 

probing ignorance a bit more deeply...

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

It is ignorance rather than data that moves science along.

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

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

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

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

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

 

 

the delight of inflationary ignorance

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

                               - James Clerk Maxwell

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

                                                 - Richard Feynman

 

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

 

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

 

a pre-review

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

from my notebook:

 

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

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

° remember it must be play

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

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

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

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

 

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

 

 _______

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

________

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

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

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

For losers, the most statistically significant behaviors:

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

For maintainers, the most statistically significant successful:

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

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

• Thinking about how much progress you’ve made

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

More important for loss than for maintenance:

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

More important for maintenance than for loss:

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

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

 

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

 

selling a dream

Two multibillion dollar industries - do they work?

 

Weight loss is a massive business in the US and online dating is large and growing rapidly.  Both attempt to satisfy very deeply seated desires and both have a lot of customers.  It seems reasonable to examine how effective they are.

 

Weight loss is certainly possible with hundreds of businesses and thousands of self help books helping people take in less energy than they use.  Losing weight can take a lot of effort, but millions of people do it every year.  One of the problems is a good fraction of those millions turn out to be the same people.  

 

It turns out the regulation of metabolism is a complex thing and cultural issues associated with food and exercise are equally complex.  As science probes these questions it is becoming clear that, while a reasonable percentage of people can lose weight, the percentage who keep it off for even a few years is very small.  It appears if someone has become overweight for some length of time - probably at least six months - their metabolism is permanently lowered, but their hunger levels remain high.  They begin to overeat relative to the level of someone who has always been at their current weight. Frequently all of the weight - or even more - is regained.  

 

Many researchers say "one of the best ways to gain weight is to go on a diet" ...  The community is beginning to talk about getting people as healthy as they can be at their current weights with additional exercise and good nutrition and recommend weight loss only when people are dangerously overweight.  They feel the place to focus efforts are on the young - it is critically important to make sure they never become overweight in the first place.

 

 "Overweight", although the societal norm at nearly 70% of the adult population in the US, is still not considered "beautiful" or "young".  It seems likely the weight loss industry will be in good shape for a long long time.   If science can provide interventions that regulate weight, it is likely they will become very popular - even if there are unhealthy side effects.

 

Online dating is another interesting business.  Millions want to find serious romantic parters and a few large businesses have emerged to create what they advertise as high probability matches.   The ads sometimes suggest a science based selection.

 

The problem is these services don't meet the standards of the scientific method.  There methods aren't testable by peers, and it is unlikely, given the sort of information they take the tests could even be cleanly done.  Science requires a hypothesis be falsifiable. Basically the logical possibility that an assertion, hypothesis or theory can be contradicted by an empirical observation.¹  If you can't do that it isn't science.

 

It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.  - Richard Feynman

 

The claims of "science" are not universal in this business, but billions are spent and it is reasonable to probe how effective this approach is.  A nice paper was recently published that addresses the question (pdf).²

 

Great businesses for different reasons.  

 

One is not effective in the long term and ensures a growing number of customers who are serial failures.  They may jump around from plan to plan in a nearly hopeless effort to find something that works.³   The other addresses a fundamental human need and tries to make it somehow easier.  Much is lost in the initial communication and the matching techniques may be non-robust.  It is likely that many of the approaches will produce a higher percentage of solutions than conventional techniques.  Work needs to be done to settle that question.  Online dating is also fascinating in that it is an example of "big data" that may not have very much behind it.  Getting to the right questions and adding the right information is what is critical.⁴

 

note: based on a discussion with one of the readers I want to point out I am not dissing online dating.  It obviously works for some and doesn't for others.  What I do object to is the marketing use of "scientific" as it fails that defnition.  Since so many people use it and spend so much, it would be reasonable to better understand what is going on - perhaps to learn where it is applicable and where it isn't.  The paper is a good starting point.

 

Also - "big data" is very much in vogue these days.  To be useful it must be coupled with intelligent questions.  Frequently it isn't and since humans are good at finding patterns, a lot of false patterns are being "discovered".

_____

¹ Falsifiability does not mean something is "false", but rather that if it is false a repeatable empirical observation or experiment will produce a result in conflict with it.  When falsifiability is applied to pseudosciences like astrology, much of the global warming denialism examples, homeopathic medicine, intelligent design, etc. - the theories and assertions that underlie them are quickly rendered false.

² Abstract 

Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science

Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher

Northwestern University; Texas A & M University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Rochester; and Illinois State University

Abstract

Online dating sites frequently claim that they have fundamentally altered the dating landscape for the better. This article employs psychological science to examine (a) whether online dating is fundamentally different from conventional offline dating and (b) whether online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating.The answer to the first question (uniqueness) is yes, and the answer to the second question (superiority) is yes and no. To understand how online dating fundamentally differs from conventional offline dating and the circumstances under which online dating promotes better romantic outcomes than conventional offline dating, we consider the three major services online dating sites offer: access, communication, and matching. Access refers to users’ exposure to and opportunity to evaluate potential romantic partners they are otherwise unlikely to encounter. Communication refers to users’ opportunity to use various forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC) to interact with specific potential partners through the dating site before meeting face-to- face. Matching refers to a site’s use of a mathematical algorithm to select potential partners for users. Regarding the uniqueness question, the ways in which online dating sites implement these three services have indeed fundamentally altered the dating landscape. In particular, online dating, which has rapidly become a pervasive means of seeking potential partners, has altered both the romantic acquaintance process and the compatibility matching process. For example, rather than meeting potential partners, getting a snapshot impression of how well one interacts with them, and then slowly learning various facts about them, online dating typically involves learning a broad range of facts about potential partners before deciding whether one wants to meet them in person. Rather than relying on the intuition of village elders, family members, or friends or to select which pairs of unacquainted singles will be especially compatible, certain forms of online dating involve placing one’s romantic fate in the hands of a mathematical matching algorithm.Turning to the superiority question, online dating has important advantages over conventional offline dating. For example, it offers unprecedented (and remarkably convenient) levels of access to potential partners, which is especially helpful for singles who might otherwise lack such access. It also allows online daters to use CMC to garner an initial sense of their compatibility with potential partners before deciding whether to meet them face-to-face. In addition, certain dating sites may be able to collect data that allow them to banish from the dating pool people who are likely to be poor relationship partners in general. On the other hand, the ways online dating sites typically implement the services of access, communication, and matching do not always improve romantic outcomes; indeed, they sometimes undermine such outcomes. Regarding access, encountering potential partners via online dating profiles reduces three-dimensional people to two-dimensional displays of information, and these displays fail to capture those experiential aspects of social interaction that are essential to evaluating one’s compatibility with potential partners. In addition, the ready access to a large pool of potential partners can elicit an evaluative, assessment-oriented mindset that leads online daters to objectify potential partners and might even undermine their willingness to commit to one of them. It can also cause people to make lazy, ill-advised decisions when selecting among the large array of potential partners. Regarding communication, although online daters can benefit from having short-term CMC with potential partners before meeting them face-to-face, longer periods of CMC prior to a face-to-face meeting may actually hurt people’s romantic prospects. In particular, people tend to over interpret the social cues available in CMC, and if CMC proceeds unabated without a face-to-face reality check, subsequent face-to-face meetings can produce unpleasant expectancy violations.As CMC lacks the experiential richness of a face-to-face encounter, some important information about potential partners is impossible to glean from CMC alone; most users will want to meet a potential partner in person to integrate their CMC and face-to-face impressions into a coherent whole before pursuing a romantic relationship. Regarding matching, no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work—that they foster romantic outcomes that are superior to those fostered by other means of pairing partners. Part of the problem is that matching sites build their mathematical algorithms around principles—typically similarity but also complementarity—that are much less important to relationship well-being than has long been assumed. In addition, these sites are in a poor position to know how the two partners will grow and mature over time, what life circumstances they will confront and coping responses they will exhibit in the future, and how the dynamics of their interaction will ultimately promote or undermine romantic attraction and long-term relationship well-being.As such, it is unlikely that any matching algorithm that seeks to match two people based on information available before they are aware of each other can account for more than a very small proportion of the variance in long-term romantic outcomes, such as relationship satisfaction and stability. In short, online dating has radically altered the dating landscape since its inception 15 to 20 years ago. Some of the changes have improved romantic outcomes, but many have not.We conclude by (a) discussing the implications of online dating for how people think about romantic relationships and for homogamy (similarity of partners) in marriage and (b) offering recommendations for policymakers and for singles seeking to make the most out of their online dating endeavors. 

³ I lost quite a bit of weight last year. I'm well aware that I am likely to fail if I'm not diligent. I've been at my goal weight for about three months now and find I must constantly monitor and count Calories and exercise. It is more difficult than losing weight so far. I can see why most people fail - in fact studies that look at people with long term success (only one to two percent of dieters keep at their goal weight for more than five years) note that daily diligence is the only method that seems to work. An excellent reason for never gaining weight in the first place.  

⁴ This will be the subject of several future posts - the often clueless reliance on having lots of data can be a trap.  It is like the kid who doesn't know how to work the problem on the test and puts down the wrong answer to nine significant decimal places because he used the wrong model and blindly plugged input into his calculator trusting that a result was a solid answer.  I can't tell you how often I've seen this in organizations that should know better.

 

global efficiency and flexibility through local inefficiencies

My sister Corinne has a great love for horses.  Part of it is the beauty of their motion. There are four natural and distinct gaits.  The walk with its left hind, right hind, right front, left front four beat cadence transitions to a two beat gait called the trot as the horse speeds up.  Now its legs are moving in unison in diagonal pairs. It is a very stable gait and the horse’s head is often very steady.  

 

As the horse speeds up the cantor appears.  Now you hear three beats and a pause and then three beats and a pause as one of the rear legs supports the horse as the other three move forward. 

 

As the horse accelerates a four beat gait emerges.  The horse is still pushing off with a rear foot -  for brief moments it has entirely left the ground and is flying.  The full gallop -  as fast as a horse can move.

 

Galloping is not terribly efficient and the horse will tire quickly.  The cantor is more efficient, but not by much.  Walking and trotting, on the other hand, are great paces for a horse if it is to travel long distances.  Horses have very narrow  ranges of optimum speeds.  People can tweak these ranges through breeding altering musculature and leg length, but the horse is a four speed creature with two economy speeds.

 

You might think leg length is an important determinant of the best running speeds in humans, but a look at elite runners - both distance and sprint - show they are mostly of average height.  At six foot five Usain Bolt is a rare exception, but he is the exception in several other metrics.  

 

An examination of the energy used to travel a fixed distance in running is fairly constant over a wide range of speeds - something that is unexpected and very different from horses and other four legged mammals. Adding to the puzzle is the most efficient walking speed.

 

I like to walk and have been on long walks with a variety of people. Most of us are of differing heights, but the average speed we walk at tends to be not that much different from the speed we use when we’re walking along.  Most people walk somewhere between 3.0 and 3.4 miles per hour.  The efficiency of walking is strongly peaked.  If you walk at your own natural cadence you will burn fewer Calories per mile than you would if you were walking at a faster or slower pace.

 

This is very curious as people have very different leg lengths.  At six foot one, but long waisted my 31 inch inseam gives me much shorter legs than six foot seven Colleen’s 40 inch inseam measurement, but her optimal walking speed is only a bit higher than mine and is a small amount lower than another friend who has shorter legs than me.  We give up some efficiency, but it is generally easy for us to adapt our speeds to that of our friends and visa-versa.¹

 

The physics and biology of mammalian location is non-trivial and still under active investigation.  A recent paper that looked into the activity of some skeletal muscles involved in walking and running gives some fascinating insight that paints a picture deeper than the problem at hand.²

 

It turns out it is difficult to directly measure the efficiency of a specific muscle while it is working, but measuring its electrical activity with electromyography is a good proxy and you can estimate efficiency.  Seventeen people were wired up and put on treadmills and asked to move at a variety of paces.  Thirteen muscles were monitored and the muscle activity per distance travel was recorded.

 

 

The results are fascinating.  The plot on the left shows the speed at which a particular muscle was most efficient with walking in black and running in grey.  The plot on the right shows the speed of peak efficiency for each subject for walking and running.

 

Note that the muscle efficiencies don’t peak at the same walking speed - there is quite a bit of variation, particularly in running.  Individually our leg skeletal muscles are not optimally efficient at a single speed. 

 

You might think this is some sort of evolutionary failure, but it is probably the opposite.  We don’t spend our time walking at the same speed even though we do have an optimal walking speed.  We have the need for doing many other activities.  We climb, dance, kick, sprint and have the need to match speeds of others.  These different activities involve each of the muscles in different degrees.  We don’t have the best possible efficiency at our optimal walking speed, but we have a huge amount of flexibility and we have a very wide range of running speeds at ok efficiencies.  Often we are more efficient than the horse - my niece Magi participated in a man vs horse race and dropped all of the horses. 

 

This illustrates something deep.

 

The best general purpose optimization often involves a mixture of non-optimized components.  Making each component as good as it can be by itself and allowing it to operate where it runs best usually results in a larger system that is far from optimal.  This is central to engineering which is the practice of finding and harmonizing a variety of pieces into a whole which is the best compromise.³

 

 

_________

¹ How people communicate the proper walking speed is a fascinating look into the subtle non-verbal ways we communicate with others.

 Note if you are walking for exercise and walk over a fixed distance slowing down or speeding up from your normal pace will burn more energy. Speeding up burns the most and if you are walking for a fixed amount of time - say and hour - the higher speed will usually burn the most energy.  

The relationship between efficiency, performance and physical size is a rich subject area and sport is an excellent lens to illuminate interesting questions.

 

² The musculoskeletal system of humans is not tuned to maximize the economy of locomotion

David R. Carrier, Christoph Anders, and Nadja Shilling

Abstract

Humans are known to have energetically optimal walking and running speeds at which the cost to travel a given distance is minimized. We hypothesized that “optimal” walking and running speeds would also exist at the level of individual locomotor muscles. Additionally, because humans are 60–70% more economical when they walk than when they run, we predicted that the different muscles would exhibit a greater degree of tuning to the energetically optimal speed during walking than during running. To test these hypotheses, we used electromyography to measure the activity of 13 muscles of the back and legs over a range of walking and running speeds in human subjects and calculated the cumulative activity required from each muscle to traverse a kilometer. We found that activity of each of these muscles was minimized at specific walking and running speeds but the different muscles were not tuned to a particular speed in either gait. Although humans are clearly highly specialized for terrestrial locomotion compared with other great apes, the results of this study indicate that our locomotor muscles are not tuned to specific walking or running speeds and, therefore, do not maximize the economy of locomotion. This pattern may have evolved in response to selection to broaden the range of sustainable running speeds, to improve performance in motor behaviors not related to endurance locomotion, or in response to selection for both.

 

 

³ A week or so ago I was in an email conversion where someone noted a Steve Job’s quote and I reacted.  I think Apple is an excellent example of a company that understands not only how to make these engineering compromises, but also that the final product involves more compromises than are possible if you “just” use the discipline of engineering.  Consumer electronics has evolved beyond engineering.

 

[friend quoting Jobs} “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” - Steve Jobs

 

[me] Absolutely - and this is *so* different from ordinary engineering and product development. 

 

[friend] How so?

 

[me] This is a *very* long subject so I'll try to just hit a few points.  Engineering is all about finding a compromise among various components to create something that makes specifications.  Great engineers are really good at this and I have enormous respect.  The key point is there is an end point - after all, something has to ship on a certain schedule.  When you are doing this you can only work within a fixed domain.  It can happen that you bump into something new as you work on something, but that is rare and certainly not your job description.  In recent years the goals of a product are specifications and hitting price targets.

 Apple certainly does engineering, but it is a different scale.  Other non-engineering disciplines are involved.  During the design phase there is this tendency to keep going deeper.  Occam's razor is a fundamental driving principal.  You need to simplify wherever possible *even* if you didn't think it was possible at first.  There is also a sense of artistic elegance and pride that comes into the optimization.

All of these competing subcomponents and pieces of software have qualities of their own - along with time dependent evolution curves.  You need to be suboptimal on several to make the global result better.   Much of conventional engineering ignores the fact that real consumers also like to see elegance and a simple UX mixed in too … in fact those may be the defining characteristics of a product.  And the product needs to dance properly with other products in addition to the person who uses it.  Getting these details right is an entirely different skill set and Apple has built an organization that understands this deeply.  Artists get it deeply. 

 Jobs once described himself not as a technologist, but rather as an artist who paints with technologies.    

My heritage and way of looking at the world is through the perspective of science.  Here you are trying to figure out how nature works.  There is an absolute you are working towards, but she tends to reveal herself only when questioned properly and then only a bit at a time as you need to find better questions to progress.  I was not attracted to biology or chemistry as they are so complex.  (they are still very beautiful - but it is a preference of mine)  I found physics to be my sport as it is so simple - you only look at the most simple systems, but you want to go in as deeply as possible. The idea is to find the really fundamental questions.  I find the people who have sensibilities most similar to mine are artists and composers.  

Apple is the company with these sensibilities as they are trying to peel the onion back as they progress.  The analogy isn't great - they are probably closer  to biology as they are working in a complex environment -- Jobs, in a different time and if he would have had academic leanings - may have made a great biologist.

As these products that combine art, electronics and computation progress conventional engineering is going to be an increasing failure as a global solution.  It is a piece of what needs to be done, but the integration with other disciplines is central and, I think, a requirement for success in at least the consumer product environment.   There are so many things that need this approach.  It is terrifically exciting.