omenti

on core questions - what are the real questions you need to ask?

Sukie recently had eye surgery which left her without the use of an eye for a few weeks.  She remarked that it was interesting that she still could judge depth - don't you need two eyes for stereo vision?

 

For years people have been building 3D displays.  The idea usually amounts to recording an image with two slightly offset lenses and then presenting the images to the eyes in such a way that you can detect the parallax.  As far back as the 1950s many of these were intended to revolutionize movies and then television.  Many are clever and the battle to put 3D everywhere continues today, but there are some serious technical problems that include the need to match camera lenses, screen brightness, lowered resolution and the fact that some cues required for vision are broken resulting in a less than quality experience for anywhere from 10 to 30 percent of viewers.  Combine this with the need to create and polish a different directing technique for live action like sports or post production with movies and it is easy to see why ESPN is dropping support for 3D sports.¹

 

It is important to think a bit more deeply about how the senses work.  To date the approach has been to deliver what is believed to be the right proxy for realistic 3D to a pair of retinas.  After all - this should fool the brain which should just assemble the right image.  The problem is that realistic vision doesn't work this way.  In fact the parallax information is only one of several cues we use to create images.

 

Several years ago I was given a talk at the Disney Animation Studio in Burbank, California.  A fabulous place complete with a Mickey Mouse Wizard's hat, the place is filled with history.  It was my first visit to the place and we got a great tour of the place, its people and some rather curious historical kit.  The piece that really interested me was the multipane camera.

 

I had too many questions, so the guide scurried off and brought back one of the older animators to explain.  You've probably noticed animations move a background relative to the foreground when motion is involved.  The technique gives one of the depth cues our brain uses to create images.  What you may not have noticed is the old Disney films use up to seven layers of depth and the motion is very smooth.  

 

The technique was mostly invented by Ub Iwerks - a legendary animator and director at Disney, although he was not with the studio at the time.  Several groups refined the technique during the 30s and the one I saw was invented by William Garity.  Its first movie won an academy award for an animated film. Disney was an interesting place at the time.  It did serious perceptual work and invented many of the tools of animation to use in-house - very much like Pixar does today.  If it is core to the business, there is a need to invent, own and perfect it.  

 

What I saw was one of the old production machines that was used in Bambi, Peter Pan,Fantasia and Pinocchio, but the film it was invented for was called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:-)   The technique is still used in computer animation and has been highly perfected at studios like Pixar and Disney Animation - I saw one of the tools in action one some preliminary work for Tangled. It is also used dramatically by Hayao Myazaki at Studio Ghibli.²

 

Here Walt talks about it

One of many things that impresses me about the film makers I know at Disney Animation and Pixar is the rich model they have for human vision.  This and subsequent discussions noted they see depth as coming from several cues - things like closer objects being larger than farther ones, the blurring of far away objects, relative motion, lighting cues, parallax (sometimes called stereopsis) and the focus of the eye (often called accommodation).  Regular movies and video can have all of the cues except parallax and accommodation.  3D movies only add parallax and in many cases it is broken as the camera optics are not well enough matched to the eye and some crosstalk is created.

 

Some studios have achieved a fair amount of success with current 3D technology, but they tend to use it sparingly - mostly on the foreground and using great care with the viewing box.  This is somewhat easier in animations and mixed mode films (like Avatar) where great control is possible, skilled artists are present, and there is a time and resource budget.  But it is not a real 3D effect and perhaps we are entering a form of uncanny valley.  The last bit - accommodation is really hard.

 

It is interesting watching the spec wars among 3D vendors.  They have metrics which they are optimizing and some fine work has been done, but they are only attacking part of the problem.  They are ignoring the full experience and, for many people, dropping an imperfect parallax leads to lower production costs and a better viewing experience.

 

You really need to consider the full experience.

 

In the late 80s the Japanese were taking over the tech world at the time and a huge effort was underway for the US to create a digital standard high definition standard that would be better than the analog version the Japanese were working on.  Bell Labs was part of this Hail Mary effort and some of the physical scientists and applied math folks were asked to make sure the tests made sense.  I was invited to be part of that critique.

 

They were doing all of the right engineering things and it was a lot of fun getting to see a bit of the future, but my experience was while the video signal was better than anything I had ever seen, what really blew me away was the audio.  Since then I've talked with a dozen other people who saw the demos and tests and everyone said the same thing - really good video, but mind numbingly wonderful audio!

 

The audio was there because it could be.  Digitally encoding the signal allowed for a lot of compression and there was space for a compressed multichannel audio signal.  The test videos were carefully made with a big budget and the audio guys were world class.  The demo room was set up to take advantage of this.  It dawned on me that the experience of watching a movie or television is much greater than the moving image ... the audio is important.

 

When you talk with some of the serious movie guys they'll sigh and note 3D is there to fill movie houses and first and second to save television makers.  Some good work is being done, but there is a lot of garbage and it is increasingly being viewed as a checklist item that only adds a tiny amount of value to the movie artistically at best.  The monetary value is rapidly dropping and there is historical precedence for this.  All of them said what they really want is better control of sound.  The problem of sound field reconstruction is a thorny one and doubly difficult if the listening stage is much larger than a single seat.  When it is done at a single seat level you get a dramatic response from the viewer that is much greater than any 3D effect that has been tried.  This, if and when it arrives, will probably require a new direction and post production language, but may well be worth the effort.

 

Multipane made animation dramatically advance.  3D hasn't had a similar effect on film.  You have to understand the limitations of an art deeply and have a good enough model of perception if it is to become art.  Techniques or may not easily jump from one art form to another.  And you have to ask yourself what is the full experience?  Is your little corner of the world inclusive enough?

 

Apple appears to have asked that question with iOS 7.  While the reception has been a bit polarizing, one thing they've done is multipane to add the illusion of depth.³  When I saw a video of their keynote demonstration I was immediately reminded of my tour of that building with a wizard's hat and William Garity's amazing machine.  I'm assuming they have probably learned at the feet of their friends at Pixar as a considerable amount of experience is needed to make this feel right.  I don't know how well it will work, but Apple is asking the right set of questions.

 

The right set of questions applies in so many disciplines.  I recently read a couple of great urban planning books and recommend them as examples of people who have thought deeply about core problems - Cities for People by Jan Gehl and Walkable City by Jeff Speck.  Sometimes a few questions outside the popular frame give a much deeper understanding of the real issues.

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¹ Sports is particularly difficult as scene transitions can be jarring.  ESPN is forced to use about 80% fewer transitions than best practice television uses.  This makes the experience worse for 2D viewers.  Fatigue is an issue for a significant percentage of their viewers and that gives advertisers something else to worry about with placement position.  Some viewers become more immersed, but many don't.  Both might have a negative impact on advertising.  Additionally it is very expensive and difficult to maintain precisely matched zoom lens pairs on multiple cameras.  

² Very convincing flying scenes can be created with it:-)  Animation is all about good enough immersion.

³ Apple's video showing the early beta of the interface.  You begin to see multipane a bit after a minute into the video and then around 2:15. (there are other depth cues)

 

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Recipe corner

 

I had a birthday recently and that means cherry pie.  Mine isn't too fancy, but demands high quality tart pie cherries.  If you don't have a source it is best to forget about baking one.  I won't go into crust building as that is religion.  I use a combination of crisco and butter and never lard (I'm a vegetarian).  A good flour is important as is chilling it.  I don't use the popular vodka trick as Sukie is allergic to potatoes.  

The recipe is for some good canned cherries I get from Michigan for off-season baking.  This is good for one 9" pie.  I like to lattice the top:-)

 

Tart Cherry Pie (assuming you have a the crust prepared)

 

Ingredients

 

° three 425g cans of sour pie cherries (about 5 yo 6 cups of pitted cherries if you have fresh)

° 150 g white cane sugar

° 3/4 tsp cinnamon

° 45g quick cooking tapioca or 100g of King Arthur Pie Filling Enhancer

° 1 tsp almond extract

° 1/2 tsp salt

° 30g butter

 

Technique

 

° line a 9" pan with pastry dough

° Drain the cans and reserve 2/3 cup of cherry water from one.  Put the cherries and water into a large bowl

° combine sugar, tapioca or pie enhancer and cinnamon and stir in the cherry bowl 

° stir in the extract and salt.  Let it sit about 20 to 30 minutes if you're using tapioca. 

° pour the filling into the pie pan and dot with bits of the butter

° work a lattice on top or just roll out a second crust.  If it is a second crust you need to cut some vents.  Get fancy with the design

° put it on a baking sheet (I put some parchment on the sheet to keep spills from burning in) and pop into a preheated 425°F oven for about 40 minutes until the crust is golden brown.

° remove and cool it on a rack.  You may have to defend it.

 

how much is enough?

It is remarkable when you think about it.   Put a pair of athletes on a field and give them a ball.  After a bit of tossing it back and forth, one might throw it well past the other.  Without using any equations she creates a model of its trajectory and starts it running as she turns from it and starts running down the field.  At some point she knows when to turn, makes a few corrections to her position and catches it.  Apart from the interesting sensor and computation problems there is the question of how accurate does she need to be? How bad can her mental model be and still allow her room for correction?

 

Knowing just where you are in position and time has been a traditional problem.  For navigation it is relatively simple to calculate your latitude to reasonable accuracy with 15th century tools, but longitude was a different matter as the Earth is spinning on its axis.  In 1707 this came to a head with a terrible naval accident that claimed four warships and perhaps as many as 2,000 sailors in British waters.  It was later blamed on the inability to compute latitude accurately enough and it lead to the Longitude Prize of 1714 - an Act of Parliament that offered a then huge reward to anyone who could create a practical solution.  

 

Clocks are still very important, but you need really good clocks.  In fact the trick is to orbit and few dozen of them, each with a radio that sends out a time stamp and location. Your phone has an antenna, receiver and some computational power to receive some of these signals and quickly give you a mostly good enough idea of where you are.  

 

The GPS system turns out to be simple in concept and difficult in practice.  It is one of those problems that you would normally discount as just silly - too expensive and impractical - unless you had experience in navigation.  A few years ago a few of us were asked to look at the problem of GPS denied navigation.  There are any number of ways you might learn where you are and it makes sense to re-visit these periodically for certain niche applications (this was navigating in caves), but in the end if you can see the sky and the GPS constellation is operational, it is far and away the best solution. 

 

An interesting feature of GPS is that relativity is turns out to make a difference.  The satellite's speed with respect to a stationary point on Earth makes the time noted by the satellite slow by about 7 millionths of a second a day - just special relativity.  But the satellites are farther from the center of the Earth than we are, so the general relativity tells us the clocks run a bit faster - about 45 millions of a second a day - these add up to a 38 microsecond per day correction and it is built into the location model along with corrections for radio propagation through the atmosphere, orbit determination and a few dozen other issues.  The model is thorny and has enough understanding of applied physics that it works well enough for conventional navigation.¹

 

So Einstein was important to a critical piece of our defense and economy.  But we rarely use special relativity in our normal lives.  Frequently it is claimed that Special Relativity replaced Newtonian physics.  It turns out special relativity reduces to Newton physics in the limit where objects are moving "slowly" with respect to each other.  For most practical purposes we can just go ahead and use the simple mathematics of Newton. One theory augments another rather than replacing it.

 

The same can be said for quantum mechanics.  What triggered the blog was hearing that Ken Wilson had died.  Quantum mechanics is elegant, but also very strange to our expectations - a bit kooky as Feynman would say - but that's the way Nature works.  When you get to a small enough scale it is time to throw out classical physics and use quantum mechanics instead.  Possibly no one understood quantum mechanics more intuitively than Wilson.

 

Quantum mechanics happens to be very important for us - numerous bits of how our electronics work depend on a rigorous understand for example and it drives many physics processes at the atomic and even the molecular levels.  But, like relativity, it has an influence in when you might think you can totally discount it.  Recently a beautiful little experiment showed just that.²

Now there are about a dozen directions I could go, so I'll just pick one and see where it leads.

 

A very interesting question is will new physical law replace relativity and or quantum mechanics and where will it be important?   Both are difficult, but I suspect classical physics will be just good enough for 99.99% of what we do as humans for a long time.  When you get to smaller sizes and much higher energies (temperatures) that we're used to you need to go to newer physics.  

 

It turns out there are four known forces in nature - gravitation, electromagnetic, strong and weak.  Three of them have been unified - the standard model was developed in the mid 1970s.  There are bits and pieces to nail down, but it is a remarkably solid and predictive model.  A problem, it turns out, is gravity.

 

Gravity may seem like a big thing to us, but we're pretty big at about halfway between the size of an atom and a star. There is a lot of mass in us and we tend to have problems falling on something as massive as the earth.  But gravity is weak - astonishingly weak.  If gravity has a strength of 1, the electromagnetic force has a strength of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (36 zeros if I counted correctly), the strong force is about 100 times stronger than electromagnetism.  The weak force only has 25 zeros after it, but still ...³

 

You've probably seen Feynman diagrams popular with particle physicists.  They are a shorthand notation that buries a boatload of math and allows you to examine a large class of fundamental interactions - electrodynamics with some quantum mechanics and relativity thrown in.   Usually time runs along one axis and position along another.  Particles collide, forces are represented by squiggles and so on.⁴

 

Imagine a particle that interacts with another particle through some force.  The top diagram represents two particles interaction with some force f between them (if it was electromagnetic the squiggle would be a photon).  One of the beautiful things about the theory is that if this is true, you can rotate the diagram 90 degrees and, if the energy is high enough in the collision between the particles labeled p, new particles labeled x are created.⁵

 

This turns out to be useful.  Physicists can do experiments and look for unknown forces. Perhaps the force is very very weak or it only works at very short distances.   The strange looking plot from a paper a few years ago that summaries searches for new forces (discover a new force and you get a Nobel out of it which can lead to amazing perks like reserved parking places).  It is possible to rule out new forces in much of the observable world, so it seems likely at our scale that we will never see much of a modification of what we have.  Any new force with a range on the human size scale would have to be more than 100,000 times weaker than gravity!  Of course finding new forces, even though they apply to odd conditions, can lead to a deeper understanding of what makes the universe tick, so lots of good stuff remains.

 

t is interesting to thing that, at the level of human observation, fundamental physics is largely solved.  That doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of fundamental physics lurking out there, its just that we probably won't need the corrections for our daily lives.  now, this sounds like an absolute statement and they tend to fall, but there is a lot of confidence behind this.  There is also a huge amount of non-fundamental physics at our scale that needs to be done.  Our understanding of even simple amounts of complexity is poor at a deep level.  In theory we could work it out, but it is just too complex - we need new understandings.  

 

This is a natural pivot to emergent properties, but time is out.  sigh ...  such a wonderful topic.⁶

 

I strongly recommend finding a friend or your dog and playing around a bit with some simple classical physics.  It may not be at the edge, but it is still amazingly fun and even seemingly simple things (like the biomechanics of walking) are yet to be sorted out.

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¹ An applied physics discussion of relativistic corrections to GPS by Neil Ashby of the U of Colorado.  It turns out there are deeper relativistic corrections that would be necessary if we wanted a more accurate system.

² The introduction may give the impression this is new physics - it isn't.  It confirms what is expected.  This happens all the time in science.  People figure something is too difficult to measure and move on to other things.  Then someone comes along with real cleverness and/or better measurement tools and performs the experiment.

³ As an exercise calculate the electric force between the electrons in two gallons of water separated by, say, ten cm or so.  It turns out to be strong enough that it could easily lift the weight of the earth.

⁴ I'm not being precise, but just to give a rough description.

⁵ Being really caviler on particles and antiparticles here.  Generally think of a particle and its antiparticle colliding and creating another particle and its antiparticle..

⁶ It is wonderful to think that a room full of air molecules with someone on the order of 10³⁰ equations that would need to be solved in the simplest possible case, reduces to a couple of equations due to an emergent property of scale.  

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Recipe corner

The really good produce isn't here yet, so in the meantime this is a nice Summer soup that will improve as real corn arrives.

 

Corn and Avocado Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 avocado

° 3 cups almond milk (could use regular whole milk if not vegan)

° 4 cups yellow corn (canned unless you can get it on the cob)

° 1 tbl finely chopped onion

° 1/8 tsp turmeric

° 1 tsp cumin

° some sea salt

° some freshly ground pepper

° coriander

 

Technique

 

° toss everything except the corn into a blender and blend 'til smooth

° add the corn and season to taste.  If you like try running about half the corn through the blender for a different texture.  You can also add chopped herbs if you like  -- experiment!

 

 

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Bonus section

A WNYC Soundcheck interview of the director of the Macaulay Library's extensive audio collection - about 150,000 samples



An amazing resource!

Also recommended is The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause.  I link to the iBook version which has higher quality audio than the Kindle flavor.  Of course it should be listened to with good headphones or speakers rather the internal speakers to hear the detail.  A downside is iBooks current doesn't work on laptops, although that supposedly chanages in a few months.

 

forty three years

The amount of time between Lindbergh's flight and Neil Armstrong's small step a bit further away...   Forty three years ...   For whatever reason I found myself thinking about Earth Day, a golden duck, and lightning in a bottle.

 

Forty three years and two days ago I was in high school in Great Falls, Montana.  The town is known for strong winds that keep the air very clean these days, but back then it was also known for the stack...

 

North of town, across the Missouri, was a large smelter owned by the Anaconda Company.  Montana was pretty much a company state and few commented on the pollution that came from the 500 and something foot stack on the property.  You didn't notice it unless the wind was light and from the right - er - wrong direction.  The surrounding land is mostly wheat farm claimed from the prairie and the stack was visible from a long distance.  People didn't think in terms of pollution, but that was beginning to change.

 

In the Fall of 1969 when I read Senator Gaylord Nelson's suggestion that a national teach-in take place to raise environmental awareness and perhaps create some political support at the grass-root level.  Shortly there-after the proposed was called Earth Day and April 22, 1970 was the selected.  Two of us, Doug Safely was the other partner in crime, were taken with this and started a little club "cleverly" called Students to Oppose Pollution.  We found a faculty sponsor and I think about six people showed up for the first meeting in September of 1969.

 

I'm not terribly sociable and both of us expected the effort to fold, but the next meeting filled one of the science classrooms.  It kept growing to the point where we had to use the auditorium by April and there was some media attention - the effort was on local TV and radio and we had our 30 seconds of fame on the Today Show.

 

It was a heady experience and gave me the false impression that we knew what we were doing.  We didn't.  Rather the time was right.  There was an enormous amount wrong in the country, but there was also a strong sense from a variety of movements that people could make a difference.  When I think about it these days I am reminded of what Douglas had to say:

 

...

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy suggests, and try it.

The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.

That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

...

 

 

Since then I've spent a considerable amount of time on a few causes I feel are important.  In the past decade I've spent several thousand hours trying to understand and communicate global warming information - I've been trying to move the needle just a bit.  And I've mostly failed to do that, but I've managed to learn quite a bit.  

 

This came into focus this morning as I was listening to a KERA Think podcast - an interview with Adam Rome about his new book The Genius of Earth Day.  As far as I know this is the only history on the period and I've just put it on my reading list.

 

It did give me a sense of how powerful empirical information could be.  I found a chemist at another company - the local oil refinery - and asked him about techniques to measure arsenic, cadmium, lead and a few other nasties.  Industrial scientists and technicians are rarely asked about their work and they love to talk about it.  Extra points to talk with an interested kid and I was very interested.  I went over to Smelter Avenue and dug up a dozen soil samples.  He showed me how to do the analysis and the results were rather frightening.  We did something about it our combined with our organizing Doug and I found ourselves honored with about three dozen other Americans - including one Richard Milhouse Nixon - with Field and Stream's highest conservation honor - The Golden Duck.¹  At some level I have more pride about that than my degrees.

 

In retrospect we could have done things differently.  Doug was much more outgoing, but both of us were probably below average.  It would have been brilliant to team up with Jeri - someone who reads the blog.  She was savvy and a communicator and much more would have been possible.  To say we were clueless would be understatement.

 

But something did happen and it changed my life.  This type of activity was almost completely grass roots and it seized the attention of the politicians.  Nixon probably did more for the environment in terms of absolute change than any President.  There was no real political divide at the time on the issue.  Laws were changed by the thousands and life is much better now than it had been.  It can be better - it needs to be better - but the amount of social change was dramatic.

 

The time was right and thousands of us caught lightning in a bottle.  Even with the Internet we have today no social movement has come close in the US.  I only hope something as strong happens again during my lifetime.

 

Oh - the smokestack?  It is gone now - taken down around 1980 for safety reasons.  The Company sold the property and now the land is a superfund site.  Great Falls now has some of the cleanest air in the nation - thanks to some of the strongest average winds in the nation, not that many pollution sources and change brought by thousands of Montanans and millions of Americans.

 

I was originally going to continue writing about the use of time - focusing on the places where time is spent.  That will have to wait, but I note that a friend in the physics department of a really well-known school noted the professors are pushing for offices that have CO₂ levels that are less than 150 ppm over outdoor readings.  CO2 levels are considered important as they are easy to measure and are a proxy for other serious issues, but there is new evidence that some cognitive impairment may begin around 700 ppm and is very evident at 1,000 ppm.  Outdoor background is about 400 ppm now - so they're pushing for 550 or below.²  

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¹ Pretty frightening for a vegetarian pacifist, eh?  That was a different time.  Sportmen were mostly interested in conservation and party divides on environmental issues weren't deep.  Nixon was probably the most environmental modern day President.

² Get in touch if you are interested in measurement and abatement techniques.

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Recipe Corner

 

I came across some sprouting broccoli and grilled it.  The taste is distinctive, but it is hard to find and regular broccoli would probably be fine, but the sprouting version is really special.

 

 

Grilled Broccoli

 

Ingredients

 

° 500 g sprouted broccoli (something over a pound)

° 1 tbl extra virgin olive oil

° salt and freshly ground black pepper

° tahini sauce (recipe follows)

° 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds

 

Technique

 

° cut off the leaves and the woody part of the stems.  Blanche for a few minutes in boiling lightly salted water, rise in cold water (or dump in ice water), and allow it to dry.

° toss the broccoli with the oil, salt and pepper

° broil or grill for a few minutes on each side until charring begins.  Set aside to cool

° plate, drizzle the tahini sauce over the broccoli and top with scattered sesame seeds

 

A quick tahini sauce

 

Ingredients

 

° 50 g tahini paste

° 1/2 tbl honey

° 2 tsp lemon juice 

° small garlic clove peeled and smashed

 

Technique

 

° whisk the tahini, lemon juice, honey, a bit of salt and garlic.  Add a bit of water at a time until it gets to the consistency of warm honey

 

the car as an accessory for your phone

Today I was asked to give some educated guesses about industries that were ripe for disruption.  One immediately came to mind was automobiles.  Lots of forces that everyone talks about, but a last year a young friend mentioned it was frustrating that she couldn't send a message to her car.

 

It is odd when you think about it.  Most of us walk around with network connected pocket computers and think nothing of communicating with people around the world in many ways.  These computers have a growing number of sensors that provide information to us and other people or systems.  The most basic new cars have an order of magnitude more sensors than the most complex phones.  These are connected to a few networks and usually dozens of small computers (usually called electronic control units) that mostly lied buried away making sure some rather sophisticated systems mostly function.  But we are more aware of an infotainment layer - a layer that usually has a terrible user interface and user experience.  Not only is the experience bad, but we are stuck with it for the life of the car.¹ 

 

There are a lot of reasons why the industry moves slowly on automotive software. I won't get into that now as I only have an hour, but the infotainment systems do not require the type of careful design and testing required by drive train, stability control or restraint deployment systems.  In theory these could be more like PCs or smartphones.

 

Or - as my friend suggests - perhaps they should be designed to use her iPhone as a network connected controller and display.  Perhaps the car is properly just the transportation attachment to her phone and networked life.

 

Others have thought about that - Automatic uses a small box that connects to your car's OBD-II data link connector.²  This allows them to tap into realtime information that normally is only available to your mechanic and beams it to your Android or iOS phone via Bluetooth.  Now a lot of clever things can be done on your phone.  

 

What impresses me is not what it does as it could do much more - but that no car maker has gone this far.  I'm guessing they have a half dozen competent software engineers.  A large car maker has hundreds - but no imagination.  This is basically a hack using an available port that was never intended to do this sort of thing, but it works and people will see it as amazing and desirable.  

 

Much has been written on the relationship between people under 35 and their cars, but one thing I keep coming back to when I work with this group is the notion of a car has changed.  The old images conjured up by Ned Jordan for the Jordan Playboy in the Saturday Evening Post no longer cause the imagination to fly.³  The car has become more of a high maintenance appliance.  A very comfortable and useful one perhaps, but still an appliance that is not as central to your life as your smartphone.  It should be an accessory to your phone.

 

A few years ago I visited a dealer to look at the current version of our then eight year old car.  I've been happy with the car and its relatively clean interface and delightful shifter and clutch. The new model looked dramatically better on paper, but a test drive told me I couldn't live with the user interface.  I made the decision then and there to do some work on our car with the intention of keeping it at least five or six more years.

 

I understand why the car companies aren't going in this direction, but they are opening themselves up.  Someone, perhaps a Chinese, Indian or Korean company, could build a car that made sense as a smartphone accessory.  While it may not be mechanically brilliant there may be a generation that considers that point irrelevant.

 

There are many other interesting forces in addition to this ..  a lot of risk for some of them, but there are a few with little risk and nothing but upside.

 

So our cars are information producing objects and we're not terribly in the loop.  There is much more information than we could use and the relevant question is to consider what we need and how it should be manipulated and used.

 

Recently a short piece by E.O. Wilson appeared noting that not all of science is intensely mathematical.  

...

I was never more than a C student while catching up, but I was reassured by the discovery that superior mathematical ability is similar to fluency in foreign languages. I might have become fluent with more effort and sessions talking with the natives, but being swept up with field and laboratory research, I advanced only by a small amount.

Fortunately, exceptional mathematical fluency is required in only a few disciplines, such as particle physics, astrophysics and information theory. Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

Everyone sometimes daydreams like a scientist. Ramped up and disciplined, fantasies are the fountainhead of all creative thinking. Newton dreamed, Darwin dreamed, you dream. The images evoked are at first vague. They may shift in form and fade in and out. They grow a bit firmer when sketched as diagrams on pads of paper, and they take on life as real examples are sought and found.

...

 

While math is basic and essential for many areas of science, it is observation, logic, clear thinking and abstraction that is most important.⁴  In some areas there can be partnerships.  Nothing comes directly from playing around with pure math and hoping it appears in the physical world.  Nature doesn't make it that easy.

 

My background is very mathematical and it is a centrally important tool in my sport, but it is a tool.  One learns how and where to use tools and importantly, how and where to use information.

 

There is a tendency to measure everything and try and use it - extreme quantification.  The problem is the information and/or the models we have built are sometimes faulty.  With careful thinking one can be find far more parsimonious.  

 

In the mid 90s a few of us were involved trying to measure the human form to fit clothing.  We came up with a scanner that could digitize the body with about a half million data points.  A few years later I realized it was much easier to employ a good tailor who would take about 30 measurements.  Furthermore, the experienced tailor, could communicate information to the pattern maker and cutters that was much richer than our big and somewhat noisy datafile.  

 

It is possible to find examples of this everywhere.  Currently the "big data" approach often misuses information.  There is a notion that if you have enough "data" with the right sort of connections that you can mine that.  To some extent you can, but it is not an easy task.  There needs to be a deep understanding first and many lack that.  I've seen a few brilliant solutions and many more expensive and troublesome toys that offer misleading information.  

 

People have been doing smart and dumb things with data for hundreds of years.  Computers allow us to do even smarter and more stupid things.

 

Imagination, day dreaming and play are central to getting the core understanding right.

___________

¹ Some dealers update the flash memory of some your car's computers during regular service intervals, but this is rare and is often avoided even when the manufacturer recommends updates.

² All American cars since 1996 have these ports - there is a lot of error code information as well as real time performance information.

³ Check out the second half of this post for details on the brilliant ad copy by Jordan.

⁴ A smart high school student can grock special relativity with no more than a bit of algebra and trigonometry and a bit of careful reasoning.

___________

Recipe Corner

 

A few weeks ago Om posted something on Holi which brought back a flood of memories when I lived with a group of Indian graduate students at Stony Brook.  One of the foods I remember from Holi was a spiced milk - I think it was called Thandai.

I've had it with whole milk, but imagine it would be interesting with coconut milk and would probably also work, but be different and more healthy, with almond milk.   

 

Thandai for Holi

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 cups whole milk

° 5 tbl white cane sugar

° 1/2 tbl fennel seeds

° 1/2 tsp black peppercorns

° 12 green cardamom pods

° 3/4 cup raw almonds, peeled and slivered

° an inch of cinnamon stick

° 2 tbl rosewater

° crushed pistachios

 

Technique

 

° roast the seeds, cinnamon and spices in a small pan without oil over a low heat until they become fragrant.  Let them cool

° remove the cardamom seeds and discard the pods

° put the almonds, spices, seeds, sugar, cinnamon and rose water in a bowl and cover slightly with water.  Let it sit for about 2 hours.

° pop it in a blender and grind until you get a paste

° add the past to the milk and mix

° filter through a cheesecloth into a bowl. (Rohini had a very fine mesh)

° chill it in the 'fridge, serve in chilled glasses and top with pistachios

 

Recipe corner

in search of a line and a circle

Those of you who know me know I've spent quite a bit of time in the past fifteen years worried about climate change - it is one of the few high impact high probability events I know of that can be mitigated, so focus seems appropriate.

 

I've tried a variety of approaches and have largely failed to make any impact.  At first education seemed right as it is something I believe in, but you need a stable and sufficient base on which to build and I was assuming that the scientific literacy of the American public was much higher than it was.  I still work at it and have tried several approaches, but the overall response ranges from crickets to a negative reaction.  Of course this is giving me a strong signal on my abilities relative to the challenge and others who are much better communicators have had also had little or no impact.  

 

I sometimes use this qualitative chart in my talks.  If anything the think tank bump should be much smaller, but you get the idea.  The media does not cover the dominant scientific view and tries to balance opinion - the issue is there isn't any opinion in largely settled science.  Science is about confidence levels and for the likelihood that climate change is taking place,  being influenced by us, and will have a large impact, the confidence levels are high.¹

 

Storytelling is another mechanism that might work.  Several people are trying to exploit that path and some are trying a combination of education and storytelling.  That seems like it might be a viable approach, but one is up against pseudoscience, a natural bias in the media and a very well funded anti-science campaign.  I'm not a good speaker or storyteller, but I've been working a bit to support those who are.

 

The result is my views on what to do are shifting from worrying primarily about mitigation and moving more towards adaptation.  It is ultimately much less efficient and much more expensive than mitigation, but there is a lot of potential optimization and it seems like a rich area to study.  I'll still be thinking about mitigation a lot - particularly conservation and efficiency, but staying focused there may be a fool's errand.

 

Even though the state of the American response to climate change is on the depressing side it is fascinating and poses several interesting questions about everything from our social systems to how our minds work.  In thinking about these sometimes it is useful to step back and think about other historical challenges.  

 

And that brings us to a line and a circle...

 

Take a look at any modern ship.  Down near the waterline you'll see a circle with a line through it.  The line where where the hull of a ship meets the water is the Plimsoll Line and the little circle-line is technically called the International Load Line and indicated the legal limit to which a ship can be loaded.²   An extremely useful graphic - getting on a ship with water above the load line strikes you as something not entirely sane.

 

When you see a name as unusual as Plimsoll, you suspect a story.³

 

In the 19th century transatlantic shipping had become common.  Shipping disasters happened, but the introduction of insurance made them much more likely.  A shipper could load his vessels past their design limits and make quite a bit of extra coin on the voyage.  Should the ship be lost it and its contents were insured - often at more than 100% - and he would also come out ahead as ship building meant he could quickly replace his loss.  The only real loss was one many shippers chose to ignore - perhaps a hundred or so crewmen.  The practice was so common - nearly a thousand were dying each year - that merchant seamen called this overloaded and insured ships "coffin ships".

 

Samuel Plimsoll was a MP who crusaded for the rights of the seamen- often against great odds as the ship owners enjoyed a tight relationship with the government.  He is vilified in the House of Commons, but he became something of a folk hero with popular plays and songs written about him and the coffin ships.⁴  This grass-root support grew to a point where it nearly brought down the Disraeli government.  Finally there were sweeping reforms that probably saved tens of thousands of lives.  One of them - in my mind the most dramatic - was a simple little graphic that allowed you to understand if the ship's load made it unseaworthy.

 

I want - I think we need - a Plimsoll Line for climate change.

__________

¹ There is a lot of normal scientific dispute on the details of how great the impact will be and how this will play out, but that is like people going over a cliff in a car wondering how many times the car will bounce on the way down and if it will burn when it finally hits.  People tend to confuse the normal debate that takes place in science with the fact that some of the results are extremely likely ... it's just the details we're hazy on.

² There are a few other markings that account for the different water densities.  Sea water density depends on salinity and temperature.

³ I first heard about it in college during a visit to a large ship visiting Manhattan.  Much later I ran into a book on the subject and recommend it - The Plimsoll Sensation by Nicolette Jones.

⁴ John Storey sings a modern version based on some of the ballads

__________

Recipe Corner

 

This one is very easy to experiment with and surprisingly good.  A really good yogurt and olive oil are key.

 

Quinoa, yogurt, fruit and nuts

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl cleaned dry quinoa - red quinoa is particularly good

° a dozen shelled and chopped pistachios  (raw or salted and raw)

° a dozen chopped almonds (I used unblanched, but blanched would probably work)

° 350 - 400 grams of whole plain Greek yogurt (I use Fage)

° 4 medjool dates, chopped and pitted.  I've also tried other dried fruit, so experiment.

° some lemon zest

° uniodized sea salt - a finishing salt like Maldon is best

° a tbl or more of your best extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° Start the oven heating to 350°F

° Put the quinoa in a small pan over medium heat and toast it until it starts to pop.  Then pour it into a bowl and cool.

° Spread the pistachio and almond chunks onto a baking pan and toast for five minutes in the oven.  Then remove and cool.  Alternatively you can do this in a pan over  burner, but you need to be *very* careful to not burn them. 

° Spread equal amounts of yogurt onto two plates and sprinkle on the dates, nuts, and quinoa.  Sprinkle on a bit of lemon zest and salt and finally drizzle on a bit of olive oil

 

yumm!!

mooning austin

° Some of you have asked why I'm not at SXSW: as a person with cancer, have I not suffered enough already?

 ---- tweet from Xeni yesterday

° I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

                ---- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt 

° looking for a light bulb for a difficult to reach area - possibly an LED for the first time

 

Three shards came together to spark an hour of writing.  Believe it or not they are connected, so grab your towel and a cup of tea.  We'll need to travel to 19^th century London to start the connection game.

 

It was 1810 give or take a few years and demonstrations of all things electricity were the rage in the Royal Society.  Sir Humphrey Davy had filled the audience with rumor of his discovery and connected the final wire to one end one end of a battery developed only a decade earlier by Alessandro Volta.  The wire from the battery was connected to a carbon rod with a pointy tip separated by a short distance from a similar carbon rod pointed at it and connected with a wire to the other end of the battery.  

 

The crowd gasped as the current jumped the distance between the points creating a bright glowing arch.  Everyone had seen bright sparks jump before, but this one was different.  The arch was brilliant and kept going.  As it burned away applause filled the hall and then an ovation.  The first electric light had been demonstrated.¹  Within a couple of years he invented a second technique passing a strong current through a platinum wire causing it to glow through incandescence.  Davy had invented both the arc and the incandescent lamp.

 

Candles had fallen in price to the point where many families could afford a few, but outside of cites where a bit of gas lighting had come into use, night brought darkness.  I can sympathize - with the help of three major storms in the past two years we've been without metered electric power for a total of nearly three weeks.  We resorted to candles and a flashlights, but one comes to appreciate the old French saying 

A la chandelle, la chèvre ressemble à une demoiselle ²

In the early part of the 1800s a lot of experimentation with gas lighting was going on.  At first demonstration projects like the lighting of Westminster Bridge in 1813, but lighting was so desirable that despite toxic and corrosive fumes from incomplete combustion and a serious fire hazard, the technology rapidly spread to a businesses and the homes of the wealthy in cities.³   People wanted something that was safer and it was assumed that electric lighting was the answer, so inventors slaved away on the problem.

 

I have to skip over a very rich account of the sausage making of a series of technologies, but it took seven decades from Davy's arc to Edison's light.  Along the way there were newspaper reports and articles in magazines like Scientific American and Popular Science on new breakthroughs that would bring inexpensive and safe electric lighting to everyone "real soon now.."

 

Cracking the problem required a series of technologies to come together.  Electric generators had to be developed, a cheap way to create a long lived vacuum, the right materials and so on.  Edison gets the credit, but hundreds of people had been involved over the decades.

 

Edison was involved in an early practical use of electricity - telegraphy.  In his 20s he had a few patents that gave him enough funding to become a full time inventor.  A curious type he came up with the phonograph.  No one knew what it would be useful for, but it seemed brilliant and he was elevated to the status of wizard.

 

Edison's most important innovation was probably the industrial laboratory.  He put together a team of scientists, engineers, and what we would call makers and focused on a few problems.  He sensed the practical electric light was close - a number of almost practical approaches had been patented when he announced to a few wealthy investors that he was on the problem.

 

He took too long for their taste, but when he finally made his demonstrations in 1880 he had delivered the whole ecosystem - generators, wiring, the light bulbs, manufacturing techniques and the ability to train technicians to install and maintain the system.  Other people had delivered bits and pieces of the puzzle.  Arguably some of these other inventions were superior to bits and pieces of Edison's system, but no one else had the whole ball of wax and Edison's ball of wax worked.

 

Electric lighting had a dramatic society and technology impact. People started reading in bed and bookstores did very well in communities with lighting.  Children could play at dusk and in the evening unattended.  Many businesses, like restaurants, expanded evening hours and other inventions involving the electric motor erupted.  

 

For about thirty years there was an unsettled period before real standardization and much lower pricing came about.  A serious have and have not divide existed in America and you could see it every night.  

 

But enough of the history other than one bit.  Early on it was expensive and one scheme was to put brilliant arc lamps on towers spread through a town or city to provide artful light at night.  These "moonlights" were intended to provide enough illumination to read a watch at about a thousand feet.  They were erected in a few dozen cities and mostly failed - except in Austin where they still exist.

 

A few years ago I was at the technical session of a SXSW and became a bit bored by the level of work.  To be sure a few interesting things popped up.  One was Twitter.  I'm not a regular user, but make a quick scan once or twice a day.  Yesterday Xeni tweeted the SXSW comment that was one of my triggers.  I won't go into my issues with the conference, but note the past decade with Internet 2.0 has been somewhat chaotic.  There are certain good explanations, but much of it leaves me cold.  There are so many more interesting things to do...

 

I wandered away from the conference and found one of the old moonlights.  I had no idea what it was and was delighted to learn a bit about their history.  It illuminated a time we mostly forget but one has to remember the quote attributed to Mark Twain:

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme

I would add this is doubly true for the history of technical innovation.

 

Xeni made me think of Marvin the Robot

 

Douglas' birthday is today. He was famous for missing his book deadlines and had to be forced to complete his books.  Much of his time was spent playing with friends.  He was one of those who connected a lot of dots and seemed more at home with others who did the same, but were in very different fields.  One of his hangouts when he was avoiding what he regarded as work was Bell Labs and I was lucky enough to have spent time with him.  He delighted in the jumps that occurred when different ideas came together and had a keen ear for the history of technology.  He would have been delighted by the moonlights.  It was so sad seeing him leave so soon, but today celebrates his birth and that was such a positive thing.  I was delighted to learn Brynne - one of the readers of this blog - shares his birthday.  Fantastic!

 

Yesterday I found myself thinking about a new form of lighting that is still very much in development.  It has been in development for a few decades with people saying "real soon now" for about a decade.  Finally there are acceptable bulbs for a few of my applications.  The shape of the adoption curve for this technology is very similar to other technologies. The slopes can be very different, but other than software innovations these things tend to take much longer than people expect.

 

Two hundred years since Davy and we're still not there...  but in the meantime electric light has been one of the most important society and technology innovations of all times. 

 

I'll stop here - I really wanted to get into intensity - but fodder for a future post.

 

And thanks to you Douglas for giving the advice on how to fly.   Such a fantastic machine he was  - fill him with tea and wonderful connections of the mind came out.

__________

¹ The arch was somehow shorted to arc and thus the name - arc lamp - came into use.

² try this post for a translation and explanation

__________

Recipe corner

 

Just a brief note rather than a recipe, but it clearly has to involve goat cheese.  Warm weather isn't far off and many of you will probably fire up the barbecue.  Two things:

Grilled goat cheese sandwiches

Grilled figs stuff with goat cheese

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

But back to the phrase ...

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

° Engineering is the art of building tools and 

° Technology is the tools and their use

 

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

 

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

__________

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

² from an email I sent last week

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

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

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

__________

 

Recipe Corner 

 

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

 

Heart Friendly Waldorf Salad

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl white-wine vinegar

° 1 tbl walnut oil 

° sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

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

° 1 cup seedless red grapes, halved

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

° 50 grams coarsely chopped toasted pecans and or toasted walnuts 

 

Technique

 

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

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

 

taping-out in a material world

I was sitting in a restaurant in New Hope on a bright Winter day chatting about some technologies that have evolved dramatically in the past several decades and was asked about the term tape-out.

 

New Hope, Pennsylvania is one of those places that has become something of a tourist trap on nice weekends.  Stores come and go with a few enduring to give the place a bit of flavor, but you get the impression this place is hiding something.  

 

Walk around the back streets for awhile.  A bit of poking around reveals more than a few surprises in architecture, art, crafts and fine instruments.

 

I've found glass blowers, sculptors, a variety of painters, a precision telescope builder, steam engine restoration experts, musicians, lyricists, dress designers, architects and an truly amazing workshop...

 

If you have the time, arrange to visit George Nakashima's workshop.  George was one of the leaders of 20th century furniture design and, although he died in 1990, his family keeps the workshop going and it continues to turn out furniture as fine art.  This is where Steve Jobs finally decided to buy his chairs and tables after years of contemplation.  

 

There are several artisan woodworkers at work and the setting is decidedly old world. But you are struck by the care and thoughtfulness that permeates the place.  Selection of the wood is a borderline religious experience for the people I met.  They will tell you about a specific piece of wood, where it came from and how they intend to honor it.  

 

Seriously elegant pieces.

 

I am often struck by the importance and complexity of material in design.  Function, form and beauty all strongly depend on the proper choice.  Dave and I "know" that carbon fiber is wrong for any bike we would ride - the "feel" of a proper lugged steel frame is entirely different and wonderful for the types of riding we do.  

 

 A fundamental principle of design is that it is the art of compromise and the choice of materials is an important part of that.  There are hundreds of materials that can a used for building a working bike ranging from cardboard, bamboo, and several different hardwoods.  More commonly steel, stainless steel, aluminum alloys, titanium, or any one of a large number of carbon/resin combinations are used.

 

So even if you choose a steel frame it turns out there are several dozen types of steel, each with its own distinctive characteristics.  The special frame that was built for Colleen required a very exotic stainless steel - Reynolds 953 - one that costs considerably more than carbon fiber and is difficult to fabricate, but just the ticket to solve some frame resonance problems that didn't show up in the CAD modeling tools.¹

 

Once material selections have been made construction techniques are important.  Some techniques, like those used a table from George Nakashima's workshop or a making a fine cello, are celebrated as serious art, but even common household objects represent complex choices and construction techniques.

 

Back to the lunch in New Hope...  The conversation had focused on 3D printing

 

My normal observation about 3D printing is that the material selection is terrible compared to those conventional builders have at their disposal - the situation is not unlike a chef being limited to white flour, water, and mustard. She can make lovely prototypes and create designs that would be impossible with normal techniques, but the final result isn't exactly appetizing.  I'm bullish on the technique for certain applications, but not for general use anytime in the near future.

 

But it struck me I had been ignoring a very important form of 3D printing - one that  has already changed the world.  Integrated circuit fabrication.

 

When thinking of the development of technology over the centuries I tend to consider major themes and drivers.  Things like transportation, improvements in power densities and energy conversion efficiencies, and the ability to write fine lines and spaces.

 

Lithography is an important subset of writing lines and spaces and I was lucky enough to have become deeply invovled some of the R&D associated with it when I joined Bell Laboratories.  While IC fabrication is a very technical process, it is conceptually simple.  You shine light at a silicon wafer through a patterned mask.  The silicon is coated with a material that exposes where light strikes it and a chemical process transfers the pattern to the silicon. While this is subtractive, a series of layers are built up forming a thin three dimensional structure.²  Although usually not considered 3D printing, it should qualify. 

 

Many layers are used with very specific material choices.  Up to thirty masks may be required for an advanced processing technique. Large sums are spent on material science, applied physics and several other areas with the progress is recognized as Moore's Law.  

 

This ability to write fine lines and spaces had progressed for centuries driving our capability to increase the precession of mechanical objects and dramatically improve the reproduction of text and images on paper and electronic screens.  Photolithography is merely one branch of a much larger trend.

 

My first involvement with photolithography came when 2.25 micron technologies were used in production chips and 1.5 in development.³  I was interested in the part of the process where information became physical - mask making.

 

The process has strict rules, as do most fabrication processes, but there is enormous flexibility in the capabilities of the circuits that can be produced.  The number of possible combinations of simple logic gates is, for all intents and purposes, practically infinite.⁴

 

And that brings us back to tape-out.

 

When I first heard the term I though it meant writing a digital representation of the design to digital tape which would be used to tell the mask making machines exactly what to write.  It turned out the term had been in use for some time.  At Bell Labs and other places it described the process of making a photomask.   A huge enlargement of each mask level would be from black line tape or cutting rubylith on a table or wall.  These were photographed and reduced in the form of a photomask. Somehow the term tape stuck and has found its way down to us over the years.

 

These early circuits only had a small number of gates.  Well before my time came the first really successful microprocessor - the Intel 4004 with its 2,300 transistors and 10 micron half pitches.  Now we call carry billions of transistors around in our pockets embedded in these rather serious networked computers we call smartphones.⁵

 

Some say tape-out came well before early ICs - that it was used to describe the photolithographic process to make printed circuit boards.  

 

This 3D printing technique based on photolithography has changed our world beyond what seemed possible in the 60s when it was first tried. What we call 3D printing simultaneously solves some hard prototyping problems, but falls short in many others.⁶ This tends to be the rule of many technologies - they find their niches and new ones that we hadn't envisioned while falling short of our original dreams.  We are selective creatures who tend to search for patterns.  The technologies we remember are those that open entirely new areas.  Making bets is a tricky matter.

 

One of the tasks I'm asked to do as part of my work is assist in making these bets.  Everyone has their own approaches.  I find having a deep grounding in some areas through experience creating the technologies or in the fundamentals behind them is important, but not enough.  Increasingly it is important to understand the social element.  

 

These developments seem obvious in retrospect, but are very difficult to create or predict.  They are fundamentally multi-disciplinary - something our education system seems to be moving away from and something that only a few companies have internalized.  I've seen it in the most peculiar places ranging from a workshop that builds tables to a storyteller that makes movies that take years to create.  From a curious consumer electronics company to a massive program that put a human on the moon.  It even exists in workgroups in and outside of companies as well as a few very rare individuals.  A commonality is it is often difficult to easily categorize these organizations as they connect many dots and, as a result,  find interesting new patterns. Much more to say, but this is the theme of this blog so more will be said...

 

Oh - and tape-out again.  I've heard the term applied to what is considered 3D printing in the past week.  Chalk it up to the inertia of language.

 

__________

¹ This is an important point.  Although computer aided design tools have become very sophisticated, they can't handle the variety of compromise in design that is given them.  In bicycles handling characteristics are important and current CAD tools can't perform the level of analysis to understand the dynamics of a bicycle with a specific rider and road.  There needs to be some grounding with reality and test "mules" - sometimes instrumented - are constructed, wind tunnel tests conducted, and so on.   This process can be expensive and time consuming, but it is sometimes essential to produce something that is great.

² The thickness is generally under a half micron at the silicon level and perhaps five to ten microns when the interconnect layers are added.

You can get a sense of the additive nature of the layers created by the successive masks by considering this simple device - a simple CMOS op-amp.  The layers are polysilicon (red), a metal layer (blue), N-doped silicon (green), P-doped silicon (brown) and the X's are connections that cross layers. (The design is from a public domain digital design course.)

³ Design technologies usually refer to the half pitch distance between two identical features in a repeating array.  The dominant production technologies are based on CMOS processing and a series of generations has been identified.  Current leading edge production is at about 0.22 microns (Intel's Ivy Bridge processor line for example) and the next generation will be about 0.14 microns.

The cost of fabrication lines has risen dramatically with each succeeding generation.  When I started in the early 80s a small fab line could be constructed for $10 to $15 million and a leading edge facility perhaps three times as much.  The "steppers" that expose the silicon (they step from chip to chip in a large array on a wafer) cost about $1 million then.  Steppers for 0.13 microns probably cost $100M each and the fab lines probably will cost more than $5B a pop.  The number of companies that can participate has dropped dramatically over the years and the scale of produced has increased even more dramatically to match an enormous demand.

⁴ In addition to the functionality of a fixed chip there are FPGAs - field programmable gate arrays - where chips can be customized by engineers after manufacture for specific applications.

⁵ I remember bringing the first transistor into our house.  I was seven years old and had used some Christmas money and my savings to buy a five transistor AM radio.  I stopped counting after I got my first calculator - a HP-35.  Now there are over a half trillion transistors under our roof.  The mind wobbles.

⁶ Sometimes it is important to consider the "job we have hired something to do" .. in the case of 3D printing it is usually assumed to be extreme customization and/or local fabrication.  These need to be very carefully considered in their own context and the context of the technology.  If the goal is mass customization there are other segments of the economy that will be impacted in large ways well before 3D printing becomes a mass market reality. Included in these are custom specification and fabrication of clothing.  Way too demanding for 3D printing, but addressable using other techniques.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

This used some "wheat berries" - whole grains of wheat.  We have a lot of Kamut berries (I recommend Bob's Red Mill as a source).  The instructions all tell you to soak them overnight, but I find you can get away with simmering them in water or stock for about 45 minutes.  It leaves you with a grain with a very nice texture.  Experiment and find what you like.

 

Kamut and Brussels Sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° 180g Kamut or other wheat berries

° 700g vegetable broth

° 450g trimmed and quartered brussels sprouts

° 1 large shallot, chopped

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 50 g walnut pieces

° 1 tbl lemon juice from a fresh lemon

° zest from the lemon

° salt and pepper to taste

 

Technique 

 

° Add the both and wheat berries to a pan, bring to a boil and reduce heat to a simmer. Cover and cook for 50 minutes, drain and set aside

° Heat the over to 425°F

° Toss the brussels sprouts with the shallots and 1 tbl of olive oil in a big bowl.  Transfer to a baking sheet and bake about 20 or 25 minutes until browned.   Turn them over at about 15 minutes.

° Remove from the oven and add the walnut pieces  (you can throw them on a couple of minutes before you take out the sprouts if you like them toasty)

° Whisk the lemon juice, zest, 1 tbl olive oil, and salt and pepper in a big bowl.  Add the sprouts and wheat berries and toss them to combine.  

° yumm!

 

into the wind

You know it is really windy when you see pieces of tree flying overhead during the daily walk.  It wasn't easy keeping the normal pace going into the wind, but the trip back was easy.  Going back to sports it makes you think about the impact of wind on running and what the right strategy might be.  

 

A bit of physics will sort this out.  Consider a thought experiment where a runner starts off on a square course from leg 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 4 that she runs at a constant speed s.  There is wind of velocity w that parallels two sides of the course and is perpendicular to the remaining two sides.  The amount of effort she has to spend to overcome wind resistance is proportional to the amount of power she must develop on each leg of the course.  I'll leave the physics to a footnote, but it turns out the power per lap is proportional to 4s( s² + w²).¹  Since w² is never negative, having any wind always forces her to deliver more power.  Her time in a single person race will always be slower if she is running at a maximum power level.

 

 

Now her strategy is clear.  When running with the wind at her back she should make sure she is running in clear air - that none of her trailing competitors can take advantage of her breaking the wind.  When she is running into the wind, she should be drafting faster runners to lower her apparently airspeed.

 

The reason we don't see dramatic difference in races with and without wind is that, at the speeds a human generates in a marathon, the power necessary to overcome air resistance is small - only a few percent that necessary to run.  It can make a difference comparing race times, but the disadvantage isn't enormous in most running events. 

 

Cycling is a different beast.  Since the power needed to overcome air resistance goes as the cube of your speed and cyclists are approximately not wind-cheating, racing benefits from any aerodynamic improvements.²  Improvements occurred over the years, but dramatic improvements came when experts in fluid dynamics began to study the problem.³

 

One area where you see an improvement large enough to make a difference in a race is in the design of the wheels.  Here is a high level paper from a state of the art wheel maker discussing why a racer would want to do this along with details of their design.  It isn't very technical, but it does give a sense of the amount of work that is done combining computer models and real world testing in low speed wind tunnels.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that such wheels can be very expensive. A few thousand dollars a pair is common and some will shrink the bank account by over six thousand dollars.

 

An important point is the computer tools are available.  Getting time in a wind tunnel is a different matter, but computer modeling has become important.  The important thing is you need engineers who are knowledgeable and can build accurate models.  Tools like this can give a false sense that you know what you are doing and it is possible to do more harm than good.  

 

Education and experience are critically important

 

Which brings us to the "Industrial Internet"

 

Recently several people asked me to comment on GE's announcement of their new initiative.  Here is the note I sent:

 

A few people have asked me about this since it was announced.  It turns out I have some deep experience as one of the designers of the mask lab information system project at Bell Labs in the late 1980s.  This is really hard to get right and hinges on success in several key areas.  It has and is being done by a few companies and requires a non-trivial effort (I've seen estimates that it consumes about 25-35% of the cost of building an IC fab line these days - of course they require it to make their process work as so much is at the leading edge of what the tools and process can do).

a bit of commentary...

GE has made a big deal about the "industrial internet".   I don't have deep knowledge of their specific program other than their PR documents (which are too high level and shallow) and high level articles like this one from  Technology Review 

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/509331/an-internet-for-manufacturing/

This sort of monitoring and analysis is not new.  Science has been doing it for a long time as fundamental part of understanding experiments.  Starting in the 60s this began to become computerized and it was common in particle physics from the mid 1970s.  I was involved with its adoption in integrated circuit manufacture in the mid to late 1980s.  Places like Intel, Bell Labs and IBM were trying to capture rich information from silicon processing.  It turned out to be an expensive task (the Bell Labs effort, which impacted mask making at two locations, involved a dozen people full time and probably $3-$4M a year for a five year period - the efforts at Intel and IBM were at least ten times that size, but one that was cost justified.  Many components were required to make it work: lots of sensors, a flexible database, good programmers, experimental scientists (physicists and chemists), mechanical and electrical engineers, and *really* good process engineers.  

Figuring out what was noise, understanding the sensors and finding good process engineers were the most difficult parts - along with finding people who were actually willing to change the process.  Even then there were many elements that couldn't be captured and leading edge places like Intel create carbon copies of fabrication lines to minimize variation in process.  

Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Intel and others attempted to understand how to do this more generally to create a product that could be sold to manufacturers.  There were some large problems - many of which trace to understanding the process at a deep level. I'm aware of at least two approaches that involved anthropologists along with the physical scientists.

It was very clear you don't mix a network (of any kind), database and sensors and expect magic.

I hope GE does well, but there are a lot of issues genericizing this that range from computer science to mechanical and electrical engineering to process control and sociology and anthropology.  It is very easy to build a money sink if you don't get all of this right.

Experience has taught me there is a lot of experience that lives in the production lines that is largely untapped by the engineers and managers who created the processes in the first place. It needs to be underscored that sensors need to be understood deeply - I'm continually impressed with the lack of education in this area in most computer science courses.  The people who traditionally do these things are production engineers, but outside of a few areas the field is almost dead in the US.⁴  I find it exciting that GE is working in the area, but producing anything that is reasonably generic is will be a hard multidisciplinary problem.  Any organization that wants to tap the potential benefit needs to understand their process and measurement deeply - and that may not be a bad thing.

 

I'm at the end of my allotted time, but need to mention a wonderful development.  

The maker movement where people are building things that tend to lace computation with the real world is growing.  People are learning how to use sensors and microcontrollers and cheap computers such as the Raspberry Pi are accessible to kids in middle school.  

At the same time about a half dozen people have told me they intend to get their amateur radio license this year.  Understanding radio at a practical level is something I would recommend to anyone who wants to know a bit more about how the modern world works.  I'm going to hazard a guess that the average ham radio operator knows more about the fundamentals of radio than the average wireless executive.  

Perhaps we are at the beginning of something great. Maybe there is a natural hobby for many who can make contributions to the "Industrial Internet" and beyond as we move closer to the real world with sensors and computers.  And perhaps a few will even be instrumenting their sports and mixing that with a bit of critical thinking for a deeper undersanding.  It gives me a lot of hope - much more than using computer science and networking for selling things.

 

__________

¹ OK - a bit of physics.  First note that speed does not have a direction - velocity has a direction and magnitude, speed just a magnitude.  First consider an earlier post where I show the power needed to overcome air resistance is proportional to the the cube of the head wind.  The force of the wind goes as the square of its velocity, so power for the runner to overcome wind resistances goes as s * w² , where v and w are both vectors. In this case the wind direction has been chosen so we can ingore the vector nature, so s and w will just be the scalar components.

So running with the wind at her back, our runner needs to develop power proportional to s (s - w)²  and going into the wind her power needs to be s (s + w)². 

The crosswind case is a bit trickier.  The wind now comes in at an angle and the magnitude of the the resultant vector is  (s² + w²)^.5.  The magnitude of the force is the square so the power on each crosswind leg is s(s² + w²).  

Now we can add up the total power per lap.  It is proportional to s(2s² + 2w² + s² + w² + 2sw + s² + w² - 2sw) = 4s(s² + w²).  

 ² Cycling at commuting speeds has a cost, but it isn't significant until you face a headwind that exceeds 15 mph.  Commuters can comfortably pedal away in an upright position that would be impossible at 25 mph.  It is possible to dramatically improve the aerodynamics of a human powered vehicle by enclosing it in a shell.  These velomobiles can be pedaled by normal humans at 25 to 30 mph for long distances that would tax an Olympic cyclist on a conventional racing bicycle. 

³ The same can be said for swimming - remarkably the equations are similar.  Water is a fluid that is about 800 time denser than air.  

⁴ Production engineering is alive and well in Northern Europe, Japan and China.

 

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Reicpe Corner

 

The Super Bowl is in a few days.  Try to make some healthy snacks.  These are too simple.  You can roast almost any root vegetable like the first recipe and try other produce like sweet potatoes and even cauliflower (which is great when roasted with the same hot sauce you use for buffalo chicken wings -- something like Fred's hot sauce)

 

Roasted Carrots

 

° slice carrots into thin - say 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick slices and toss in olive oil and a bit of salt.  

° roast for 20 to 25 minutes at 400°F

 

 

Roasted Chickpeas

 

Ingredients

 

° 15 oz can of chickpeas

° 1 tbl olive oil

° 1 tbl curry powder

° 2 tsp cumin

° 1 tsp chilli powder

° 1 tsp coriander

° 1 tsp non-iodized sea salt

 

Technique

 

° Wash the chickpeas and dry off on a paper towel

° toss them with the oil and half of the salt

° roast at 400° F for 35 to 45 minutes until golden and borderline crunchy. Don't burn!

° let them cool to room temperature

° combine all of the spices in a large bowl and toss the chickpeas in with the spices

 

 

beyond 3d printing

4:37 AM - a minute past nautical dawn and a pleasant breeze of negative pions continues from the South Southwest at 17 GeV/c ...

 

We tried to make at least one log entry per shift entertaining for the next shift.

 

This was from a particle physics experiment.  We were colliding negative pions into a target that was mostly protons (liquid hydrogen).  There were millions of tiny collisions that had enough energy that allowed the creation of new particles.  I was specifically interested in finding a few that would say something about the fundamental nature of the charm quark.  The problem was such events were very rare - there was an enormous amount of uninteresting information to sort through.

 

You get rid of most of this - about 99.99%) very quickly by knowing something about what the physics of the interaction you were looking for predicted.  This had to be done quickly as information was constantly flooding in.   Back then we built event triggers out of fast logic elements - literally AND, NOT, OR, and NOR gates.  It looks like a rat's nest as all of this had to be precisely timed.  A one foot long wire provided about a billionth of a second of delay.¹  We also had a more complicated trigger...

 

At the heart of two of our charm triggers was a then huge two megabyte memory array that allowed us to store the geometry of likely charm events directly.  If an event fell within some predicted position and energy boundaries, it was saved to tape - if not we dropped it on the floor. This was a new revolution in physics at the time - programmable triggers.

 

What made it possible was the rapidly falling price of memory and the emergence of cheap microprocessors.  There was a revolution underway with hobbyist computers fueled by eight bit chips like the Intel 8080 and  Motorola 6800.  We took advantage of it and I programmed the 6800 in assembly language to make it run as fast as possible.  We were surfing the microcomputer tsunami.  

 

A few years later I found myself at Bell Labs doing physics and applied physics.  I found myself doing lithography - one of the fundamental technologies of the past few hundred years - how finely can you draw lines and something at the heart of making integrated circuits.  The process was automated with computer aided design tools and the bits became atoms in the photomask.  The process was a form of custom manufacturing.  There were a couple of chemical processes for positive and negative image masks, several sizes of quartz plates, design rules and so on - but it was rare for the writing tool to write the same design unless it was a replacement.²

 

Somewhere along the way I did some work with a computer vision group.  There was an interest in building a 3d copy machine.  What would it take to scan an 3d image and recreate it in atoms rather than bits?  A hot topic in the late 1980s and it continues to be interesting.  Somewhere about 1990 I printed a crude 3d part taken that replicated a scanned model of the Star Wars death star.

 

My little death star wasn't very impressive, but it was an exercise you learn from.  I went on to other things, but periodically tried state of the art printing just to see how it had evolved.  By 2000 it started to make a dent in the prototyping world and, maybe 5 years ago, the hobbyist market began to explode.

 

There have been many predictions on how 3d printing is the next PC revolution or, a bit more conservatively, the next printer revolution.  While it is fundamentally important to some types of design, I don't buy those predictions for a variety of reasons.  Materials, physical limitations of existing and laboratory tools,  and the difficulty of design drive my belief.  But it is a great hobby and it is making a big impact on industrial design.  And for a few like Iris Van Herpen,  those who understand design and art, it is given access to new materials and shapes that influence their creative process.  

 

There is a larger revolution underway that 3d printing is often connected with...

 

The revolution is inexpensive computer assisted manufacturing in low quantities.  Mass customization and even single unit manufacturing.  The barriers to manufacturing anything used to be enormous, but now hobbyists can find a niche. Perhaps a niche that would allow them to quit their day job.  The hard piece -- going from a few dozen examples to thousands is now relatively easy.³  

 

There are still many tools to build and write and people need to be trained in design (STEM k12 education is not sufficient - you need to add the arts - STEAM eduction!).  Good design is approximately hard - most of us have no idea how difficult it really is.  There is great design in physical objects and services, but the best way to appreciate it is simply to get your hands dirty - most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to articulating design, let alone creating it.⁴  

 

One can go on and on, but a recent interview of Chris Anderson by Glenn Fleishman (52 minute mp3) on his The New Disruptors podcast is a great tour of the new bits to atoms world of mass customization and scaleable manufacture

 

Highly recommended!

 

__________

¹ Rear Admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper used to carry around foot long wires and handed them out as "nanoseconds"  In the old charm experiment all of the fast signals were timed to within about a half nanosecond.  Colleen, who is exactly two meters tall, sometimes tells people she's six and two thirds of a nanosecond tall when people ask...

² The lithography tools of choice were electron beam writing machines.  We had a homebrew system called EBES - the Electron Beam Exposure System.  It could write half micron features to about a twentieth of a micron accuracy.  There have been enormous improvements since then.

³ I still regularly build 3d objects.  They are still temperamental and very restricted to design and material.  My larger interest lies in other types of mass customization.  In particular clothing.

For those who are interested in this revolution - even those who just track the state of technology - I  strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty.  You can learn an enormous amount trying to design and 3d print something on your own for example.

⁴ This notion of the learning of design is something that has been fascinating Jheri and I for the past few months.  How is design learned and articulated in apparel and how is that impacted by different types of community? There is a good deal of change taking place.

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Recipe Corner

 

Two recipes this time.  The first is so quick, easy and good.  And many variations with topping them.

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

° cut the brussels sprouts in half, coat in oil salt and pepper 

° arrange face down on a tray and roast for 25 minutes or so until beginning to caramelize

° flip over with a spatula and continue roasting for about 10 minutes

° plate and drizzle a mixture of maple syrup or honey and white wine vinegar

 

_____

 

The second is hardly a recipe, but is way better than store bought peanut/cashew/almond butters.

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

Find some honey-roasted cashews, almonds or peanuts and throw them in a blender for 5 to 6 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender as necessary, until you have a peanut butter consistency.  

That's it!

If you like you can roast the raw nuts yourself (7 - 10 minutes in a 350°F oven), but the honey-roasted nuts (or legumes in the case of peanuts) have a little sugar and sweet and work out very well without all of the stabilizer nasties you get in most commercial spreads.  If you roast your own you probably want to add a bit of salt and possibly some honey or maple syrup.