omenti

connecting the dots with curiously ripe technologies

This will be a very short, but hopefully fascinating, post.  

 

People ask me about some of the more interesting projects I've worked on in the past ten years.  Some of them involve clever hacks and some of the more interesting involve position information - feel free to ask for details.  I've mentioned some like Air Graffiti and there are several others that I can talk about and some I can't.

 

What strikes me as interesting is there are types of practical questions that can be answered with brute force and cubic money and, at the same time, have very clever solutions that depend on a wee bit of coupled orthogonal thinking.  The later approach often depends on foundational technologies and science in which there are few short cuts, but benefits extend beyond the wildest dreams of the original implementors. Exactly where connecting-the-dots and having a lot of interests and the ability to dance with others who are very different from you come in handy.  I should add that it is really important to have a rich problem space and can also help a lot to be resource poor (money and people), but connection rich (several people with very different backgrounds and someone who can tie everything together).  Large well-funded projects with massive teams are rarely clever - large organizations that field cleverness tend to use very small working groups.

 

Rather than my rambling on,  take a look at this talk by Googler Michael Jones at the US Naval Institute and see if it doesn't leave you with some interesting questions and ideas   -  its popcorn time!

 

mean free paths - from pinafore to removing risk to custom design

It was a beautiful late Spring day and I found myself of singing a song from The Mikado as I strolled down West College past the Conservatory.  I'm not a good performer, but my rendition must have been recognizable as a chap walking next to me took the one of the other parts and we were doing a bit of harmony as our paths became a formation.  We stopped for the light, stopped and continued until we had finished.  I smiled and nodded.  He reciprocated, but then he started into the first song from  Pirates - We sail the ocean blue.  He had a strong voice and I followed him in whatever harmony I could muster.

 

We crossed the street and continued a block to the intersection next to the conservatory and more magic - two others joined and we continued walking until the song was over smiling broadly and nodding before we parted.

 

Oberlin, Ohio is a tiny town and we had all probably overshot our destinations as we sang together that day late in April 12 years ago.   It was a powerful manifestation of how serendipity - at least a certain type of serendipity - is possible when the mean free path between people with similar interests is small.

 

In physics mean free path roughly means the mean distance between objects that may collide - the mean free path between molecules in a very high pressure gas is less than that of one at a low pressure.  There is also a social mean free path and it is one of the reasons why cities, Silicon Valley, the restrooms and central atrium of Pixar, the old Bell Labs, and any number of other concentrations of talent are important.  Bring people within a few meters of each other and they interact.  Bring passionate and talented people within a few meters of each other and you may just get the unexpected.

 

These clusters may not be stable over time as people migrated - Brooklyn has become one of the East Coast regions that shrinks the mean free path between creative residents. Take a look at the Outlier video Om has featured for an excellent example of what a low mean free path can mean for someone interested in something novel in dungarees.  

 

Brooklyn has become so important for a certain type of young creative that the new Pixar building in California is known in some quarters as "Brooklyn"...  

 

Now back to Oberlin ..  There is enough talent in the Music Conservatory that it is possible for someone without great means (me) to have a piece of music composed.  You need to be tapped into the roots of the beast - I was an adjunct professor there for several years as part of a joint AT&T Research/Oberlin College Music Conservatory project.¹  This position gave me a rich interaction with students and faculty often into the wee hours of the morning with drink and good food.  Ideas would bounce around and people began to sense a few new possibilities that would normally remain hidden.  These things can and do happen over the Internet, but their cross section - the probability of them happened and being recognized as interesting - is much lower.  Our online environment, rich as it is,  is much less sophisticated and rich than the real world

 

Under the right conditions the Internet can decrease the mean free path between parties. Long distance mentor relations and even a few projects.  The problem is finding people well matched for serendipity and creativity.  A large amount of research has gone into creativity in individuals and groups.  To date online creativity - the connecting the dots/serendipity kind - is still a loooooooong way from face to face human interaction.  

 

But the Net can help creative enterprises - often at crucial movements.  Om has recently talked about Kickstarter.  Now most projects proposed on Kickstarter fail, but well thought out and articulated projects do succeed providing enough money to get them over a critical initial hump.  

 

Perhaps just as important is a funded project also gives insight into potential market size.  I know someone with a fairly well known podcast.  Some people had encouraged him to make a transcript of all of the shows aired to date available for sale.  Unfortunately the problem with this is he had about sixty hours of material and even the cheapest transcription services would introduce a risk of several thousand dollars if people didn't purchase the final product.  There was also an issue of understanding how to price it and if a print or ebook version should be made.  

 

He decided to turn it into a Kickstarter project and learned (a) there was a market large enough to support the transcription and editing effort, and (b) the price he picked was considered reasonable by those who bit - two absolutely vital pieces of information acquired with almost no risk.  His success gave me paused and made me think of a few small projects I've seen fail due to incorrect estimates of these questions.  

 

The Kickstarter approach may be superior to funding it yourself even if you have the money as it provides a sandbox to answer potential market size and price questions

 

One of you (the Jheri of the Jeri/Jerry/Jheris I know) happens to be very tall and hard to fit - not only clothing, but also airline seats, countertops, chairs and so on.  She introduced me to her taller friend Colleen.  Both of them don't think about their poor fit that often as you get used to your environment and learn to compromise, but being different can take a physical toll with bad backs being far too common in that crowd.  It is good to have friends like this as they provide a rich problem space you may not have considered.

 

I decided to work on a simple cutting board for Colleen who happens to love to cook.  It turns out there have been numerous studies on work surface positioning for almost every body type and physical condition.  It became clear a raised wooden board would be the best bet and I had one made for her as the cost of hardwood is so high that a woodworking shop could do it at a lower cost than I could and they would probably do a better job.   The owner of the shop became interested in the idea of making this a product and Colleen put together a page promoting it as she loved hers.²  A bit of asking around got the attention of a well-known women's tv show and they wanted to feature it.  The problem was they also demanded a copy be given to everyone in the audience in a special "tall" show.  In the end the cost of doing that was greater than the profit made selling these online.  The product remains as it is custom made for the user, but I don't think they have made  profit on it.  

 

In retrospect this may have been a great Kickstarter project.  Although it is custom made by a small shop the more important function of Kickstarter would have been gauging the size of the market before any major effort was undertaken.  It may also have allowed a volume purchase of hard maple as well as specialized shipping materials.

 

The other project that should have been done on Kickstarter was an attempt to make very long inseam jeans for tall women.  The designer spent about a year online lining up customers, finding a boutique manufacturer and so on.  He rounded up about 2,000 firm commitments that they would buy - enough to allow an initial low volume production run and sell them at a reasonable price.  Based on these commitments he went ahead with a somewhat smaller run to err on the side of caution thinking 500 or so would bring him close enough to break even that he could proceed.  Unfortunately only about 25 orders materialized and he lost a large amount of money.³  The beauty of Kickstarter is that not only must a threshold be reached to start a project, but the money will be there once the threshold is signup period has successfully concluded. 

 

We are moving to a world where individualization and shared design and intellectual property will become much more common.  The Maker movement provides some fuel for this and grassroot interaction street fashion is likely to become important. Sites like Etsy as outposts for the tiny manufacturers and spaces like Pinterest for matching interests with the makers.  There will probably be a lot of evolution and new thinking in this area - current sites and tools aren't up to the task.  We may be at a diamonds on the beach period.

_________

¹ At once the least musical and most mathematical faculty ever associated with the place

² It turns out the standard countertop height in the US is 36" and was determined in an ad hoc fashion when cabinets began to be mass produced for the great suburban expansion after WWII.  This turns out to be optimal for a 5'4 to 5'5" cook.  Significantly shorter or taller cooks will have ergonomic issues and those who are seriously away from average can experience pain bending or an inability to comfortably reach the surface.  On the tall side the threshold is around 5'10 - certainly cooks 6' or taller should use a higher surface.  The shop own and I both thought this meant a market might exist. If you think you might use one I can give a strong recommendation to AWP.

Before settling on a simple raised table I was interested in an adjustable board.  It presented a challange so I attempted to crowd source some solutions from readers of another blog of mine  here and here adding some notes on design. Some ideas were submitted, but nothing earth-shattering, so I went with a simple table.  There are times when brute force is appropriate.

³ It turns out 20:1, 50:1 or even 100:1 ratio between people who say they will order a product and those who follow through is common in apparel

________________

And a recipe.  I needed chocolate and pistachios recently.  In order to manage my weight and deal with Sukie's chocolate allergy a few neighbors had a happy evening.

 

Chocolate Pistachio Cookies
 

Ingredients

° 185 g  (6.5 oz) shelled pistachios

° 28 g (2 tbl) unsalted butter

° 115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, sliced into tablespoons

° 115 g (4 oz) bittersweet chocolate, chopped - I used Lindt

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract

° 60 g (1/2 cup) AP flour

° 35 g natural cocoa powder

° 1/2 tsp baking powder

° 1/2 tsp fine grained sea salt

° 100 g (1/2 cup) white sugar

° 2 large eggs 

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract - you need the real stuff - mine is rum based

° 120 g chopped milk chocolate - again I used Lindt ..  reliable for baking

Technique

* Place one oven rack at the center of the oven and preheat to 350°F

° Line two cookie sheetswith a silicone mat or parchment paper.

° Spread the pistachios on an unlined baking sheet and bake for ten minutes until golden brown, Remove from oven and immediately add the 28g butter and stir well. Set aside to cool.

* Melt chocolate and remaining butter together in a microwave oven. Stir together until smooth and set aside to cool slightly as you beat the eggs. While the chocolate is melting combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a food processor and pulse to blend completely. 

* Combine the eggs and sugar and beat until they become pale yellow and light in texture. Stir in the chocolate. When it is mostly incorporated, add the vanilla. When the vanilla has been incorporated, add the flour mixture and stir gently to blend. When the flour is almost completely absorbed, add the pistachios and milk chocolate folding into the batter. It will be dark and shiny with a texture similar to marshmallow Fluff.

° Spoon about a heaping tablespoon (or 1.5 inch ice cream scoop) of dough onto the sheet tray for each cookie, arranging them in a 3X4 pattern on the tray. Bake the trays one at a time on the center rack in the oven for 10-12 minutes. The cookies will rise slightly, develop a shiny crust and appear to be just set. Let them cool for two minutes and then loosen the bottoms from the lined tray. Let them finish cooling on the sheet trays or move them to racks depending on the final texture you want - experiment the first time.

 

 

 

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.

sharpen your dot connection skills...

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Give it a view - great stuff!

 

 

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

 

Nothing like ending on a mixed metaphor...

 

 

leading horses as well as choosing them

Earlier today I received a note from Jheri about her grades for thetwo remote courses she recently finished.  I had offered to help her with differential equations if she had any problems with the course, but other than suggest and grade some interesting practice problems I didn't do anything.  She is exceptionally motivated and breezed through this and a biology course. It must have been challenging as she has a career that involves a boatload (well - planeload) of international travel.  

 

So three cheers for Jheri!  I am toasting her with some proper homemade ice cream tonight.

 

Jheri is now in her mid 20s and was a poor student in high school.  There were some reasons for this, but the bottom line is that she wasn't ready to learn.  We have an education system that assumes a readiness on the part of the student across many subjects that is probably optimal for a small minority.  But now she wants it and is focused on learning biology and has been finding math and science come easil to her.  I'm not surprised - she has a sparkling curious mind and has discovered the wonderful ignorance that science provides..  She has a career, but is getting a bit of schooling in her spare time and will soon quit and go full time.  I wouldn't be surprised to see her go on for an advanced degree.

 

I'm finding something similar about myself.  I was extremely interested in math and science as a kid and far to focused. (another Jeri knew me a bit then and will probably vouch for that)  Then I found myself as an undergrad in a school that was really a glorified trade school.  I tested out of many of the "non important" subjects and continued my singular focus.  Grad school was a mentor relation that focused almost entirely on physics.  As a result I'm extremely narrow - something that has been bothering me a lot. I have been developing interests in history, art and music playing with these a bit as a curious amateur. Perhaps one day I'll go to a real university and learn how to ask a few questions in these areas in much greater detail.  At least I am identifying my ignorance and am curious enough to learn.  It doesn't matter that I don't know much - at least not to me.  

 

Being ready to learn happens in areas you may not immediately suspect.  The men's volleyball team at UC Irvine took the NCAA Division 1 championship this past weekend.  Except for volleyball they have an unremarkable athletic department, but head coach John Speraw is one of those remarkable characters who is both cerebral and humble.  He knows that he doesn't know and seems to delight in learning.

 

Speraw hasn't been with Irvine that long, but has managed to put together three national championships.  During the last season he raised eyebrows when he hired a female psychologist with no volleyball experience as one of his assistant coaches - even though the program is too small to support full time assistant coaches.  This weekend he praised her noting she gave him and the team the right tools to do the remarkable.  Of course they, as an organization, had to be radically different from the standard men's volleyball team in order to understand, modify and implement what she was telling them.  Speraw observes, experiments and learns from his successes and failures.  He has turned his staff onto his techniques and the players are doing the same.  UC Irvine now has a learning organization that is crushing organizations with rich histories and much larger financial resources.  My guess is more than a few men's programs will hire psychologists and most (all?) of them will be too inflexible to learn and adapt.  In the meantime John will find other tools.

 

One wonders about the parallels with other organizations - corporations for example.  

 

When are companies ready to learn and can you identify them by the questions they are asking?  Does their thinking become calcified over time and do they see a need to learn and adapt?  Where do they find the questions to learn from and what are their mechanisms for dealing with the questions? Do they have an institutional learning process and an institutional memory to take advantage of their learnings?  Do they recognize the value of failure?  Do they recognize the value of play?  Are those charged with running the company curious enough to ask questions or have they followed a path that has given them success to date giving them an artificial sense of confidence?   How do they select and promote employees at all levels and is the ability and readiness to learn part of the process?

 

My guess is learning organizations are probably rare.  I'm reasonably familiar with Apple and Pixar and both are great examples where learning is central. I'm also familiar with many others that are mostly unable - or at least unready - to learn. 

 

Is your organization curious enough?  Does it actively identify, cultivate and celebrate its ignorance?  Is it diverse enough to connect dots and identify potentially new areas of ignorance  - areas that, when explored by the right people will illuminate opportunity that others hadn't considered.

 

Think about the last paragraph and imagine Apple and Pixar. Try it again with average organizations you know.

 

 It makes me think of how new ideas and techniques are identified and, if useful, implemented.   Many companies follow bandwagons - some companies sort out the world by asking the right questions and blaze their own paths, but many become little more than buzzword compliant with a considerable amount of time, talent and money in the process.

 

I think data mining and "big data" (I dislike both terms for a variety of reasons - sit me down with some cold milk and fresh cookies and I'll go into detail) are a great example of the potential success and failure of institutional learning.  A few organizations will understand what they are doing deeply enough to be able to play in this area effectively, but many are probably going to fail as has been true with many "next big things" over time.

 

You really need to understand something deeply enough to know if there is a there there.  I was drawn to physics as, in principal, it is so simple.  Simple enough that you have some hope of asking fundamental questions in a productive fashion.  But add a bit of complexity and the world rapidly becomes far too complex to understand at a fundamental level.  There may be levels of possible understanding that describe it that, if you are sufficiently clever, allow you identify those techniques that will work for your organization.

 

The term "data" is highly contextual - so much that I try not to use it.  It isn't a fundamental piece of information, but rather is a cloud of information surrounding the core of what you think it is.  Some of this cloud may be obvious and some may be hidden.  As an example consider this well-known description of an email problem.  The system is relatively simple (I've written successful email gateways so they must be simple), but the description assumes you have a bit of familiarity with the subject.  Feel free to skip over it if your eyes glaze over - the point is there was an obscure condition that eluded detection resulting in some puzzling behavior.

 

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible
    task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.  "A
little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn't display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics.  "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500
miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily.  "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email.  Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that.  But why didn't you
call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now."  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands.  "When did this start?  A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that
time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along.  It wasn't April Fool's Day.  I tried
to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.  This
was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own
account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond,
and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed.
Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of
the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
down in tears.

Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly
normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn't been
altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.  At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most
of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long
configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the
sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding
no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the
remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
        * 558.84719
        / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

 

 

This example is really easy - it involved a well-defined system built around logical constructs.¹  Understanding humans and human behavior is much more difficult and anyone who says they can is naïve and/or lying.  Data mining may give candidate shards of information, but they are highly contextual and you must know the steps used to gather, filter and process the information and how reliable they are.  You had damn well know the errors and error propagation.  And even then the resulting information may not be terribly useful as human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system.

 

It is more important to develop a deep understanding of what you need to know.  You must learn what it is you need to know and how to get a "good enough" approximation.  For companies like Apple, Pixar, Trader Joe's, and Lululemon success doesn't rest on data mining, but on other techniques.  It is likely data mining techniques wouldn't be terrible useful to these companies for their current products.  It may be that Apple finds some great uses as Siri builds out, but for now great design doesn't rest on it.

 

I suspect the companies successful with data mining will be vendors who sell to the masses and don't really care about the results as long as the money keeps coming in along with a few companies who have learned there is a solid niche for them and can ask the right questions to know the information produced is robust enough to make a material difference in their bottom line.  I suspect the later group will be made up with companies who are indeed ready to learn.

_________

I'm very proud of Jheri!  Here is the ice cream I'll make in her honor defrosting some wild blueberries that were picked last Summer at peak season.  I'll follow it with a quick recipe for something really simple.

The photo is of Colleen enjoying the same recipe on one of her visits.  You always give the dasher to the honored guest.

There are many ways to make ice cream - I use a simple refrigerated freezer that gets reasonably cold.  Liquid nitrogren techniques are even better if you have access.  Drop me a note if you are interested.  Also I have more than a few great ice cream recipes from years of experimentation starting with Steve in the dorm basement at Stony Brook.  We literally wore out three freezers during our experiments.

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

       Ingredients

           

        (all ingredients should be very fresh)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs 

° 1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

Technique

• toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

• wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

• mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

• churn freeze and season if you can stand the wait - I usually just eat it immediately!

 

^{OK now the simple recipe.}

The Un-Egg Cream

Too simple to talk about ingredients or technique.  I like the idea of an egg cream and this is a simple variation.  Get some seltzer or, better yet, Cherry 7-Up chilled to near freezing.  Pour some milk based drink, properly chilled into the glass - perhaps 50 grams or so (about two ounces).  Pour about five or six times as much of the bubbly fluid on top and rapidly stir with a long thin spoon.  

Very refreshing.  My favorite combination is Sunkist Naturals Pina Colada Protein Smoothie and Cherry 7-Up (diet or regular ... diet is probably somewhat healthier)

^_______

¹ There is a class of computer "failures" that are, at their hearts, insufficiently understood systems.  Often "data" is the issue

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.

______

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.

__________________

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.

 

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

______

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

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

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

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

 

locally dense cloud ground fog

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

 

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

 

no - it wasn't the display

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

a pre-review

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

from my notebook:

 

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

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

° remember it must be play

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

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Many cars are much worse.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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