° 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 19th 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 demoiselle2
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.
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:
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.
__________
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.
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
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.
__________
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
I'm in the middle of my annual mini-sabbatical, but I spend the evenings and part of the weekends letting my mind wander as well as keeping things running. That seems to work better than total immersion. I was part of a discussion on great projects for a 10th grader who wants to impress engineering schools. UAVs strike me as something potentially fascinating and there are more than a few unexplored areas where a smart teen could do impressive work - the field is very open ended.
Lightweight video cameras and small flying platforms - unmanned ariel vehicles - can be mixed in a variety of ways. You can put a camera on a RC airplane, fly it around, and watch the video later. A more advanced flavor is called first person video - you put a camera in the aircraft, stream the video back and use it to control the flight - often watching the view with video goggles.1 And you can let the aircraft fly autonomously to a pre-planned flight path and either store or transmit the video.
Lots of fun, but there are any number of social implications. It is still very difficult to fly autonomously in the US and commercial use of these flying cameras is still largely barred by the FAA (although they are working towards allowing it). There is an experimenter/hobbyist space with certain weight and distance limitations along with a rule that flying must be within line of sight. Thousands participate and a cottage industry has sprung up making the bits and pieces that make this work. Much of the software comes from research projects at Universities and some of it is fairly sophisticated.
a few videos have become popular
One has to wonder what was running through the moose's mind - perhaps some lines from the Bullwinkle show are appropriate.
Eirik Solheim -the Norwegian guy who created the video - has a site that is rich in content for advanced hobbyists.2 While there are very small toy class platforms, most of the serious experimenting is taking place using kits that require something in the neighborhood $500 to $1,000 to build and fly. Stability and control can be very impressive and the police who were involved in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations became very nervous when one of these appeared.
A number of turn-key autonomous commercial class drones used for police, military, construction, scientific and other work ... the people who make the toy class AR.Drones (still very impressive technology) are involved in an autonomous UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) product called the senseFly. Starting at about $9,000, but currently illegal in the US, you get an autonomous mapper.3 These would have been very useful in the wake of the recent Sandy superstorm. There is a lot of competition in this area with large increases in capabilities and reductions in prices likely.
UAVs bristle with society and technology issues, but can be a great platform for engineering students. I suspect hundreds of organizations in the US probably have someone playing with them on salary or as a hobbyist and suspect a lot of activity if the FAA announces regulations with few restrictions (which is expected). Think about any task that uses a helicopter for observation and lower the operating cost by a factor of 100. And that is just a starting point.
This is very much a technology that an amateur can sink his or her teeth into - we're at a period that is similar to PCs in the late 1970s as far as required sophistication goes. Many reasons to get involved and learn if you have the time and inclination and a great activity for kids who are interested in engineering. I'm a big believer in getting your hands dirty if you intend to learn about anything in depth.
Clearly one of those technologies that, while neutral by itself, can easily be used for good or evil... And all the better reason for learning about it. Not to mention that immersing yourself in something like this can encourage creative thought - perhaps in areas you may not have expected.
__________
There is growing evidence that multitasking limits creative thinking. There is an increasing amount of social research in the field - some of it strikes me as flawed and experimental design can be tricky ... even basic definitions are fluffy .. but this paper in PLoS is interesting and worth reading. It has some issues, but the notion of using nature to promote creative thought is an old one that works for many people. Recommended reading and I'm sure it is far from the final word on the subject.
I've been lucky enough to have advised a couple of exceptionally creative companies on increasing their creative level. There have been some experiments, some failure and a few major victories. The common thread among the best strategies to date has been allowing people to have the freedom to single task and convincing them to try. There are a lot of basic components necessary in the first place - great hiring, great problems, certain communication patterns (very open communication paths are not universally healthy!), and a half dozen other things. But once you have most of these the trick is keeping the gears meshing and tuning the system. Fascinating stuff - but that's all for the time being.
__________
1 There is quite a bit of hobbyist FPV these days as evidenced by sites like this
3 This marketing video from senseFLY gives an idea of their capabilities
__________
Recipe Corner
This is really great - parsnips are still good and you can find Granny Smith and similar apples that are ok. A homemade vegetable stock is, as always, a central component. I've never come across a good ready-made stock. You can make it a bit safer by using substituing skim milk and using olive oil rather than butter. It would still probably be excellent.
Parsnip and Apple Soup
Ingredients
° 28g butter
° 1 tbl olive oil
° 2 medium yellow onions, peeled, chopped and diced
° 600g parsnips, cut into inchish pieces
° 2 garlic cloves, crushed
° 600g pie class apples peeledand cut into chunks
° 1/2 liter (500g) vegetable stock
° 150g whole milk
° kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Technique
° Melt the butter and oil in a large saucepan. Gently fry the onions and parsnips on a low heat for 15 minutes, until the onions are softened.
° Add garlic and apples and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring regularly.
° Add the stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, until the parsnips are very soft.
° Remove from the heat and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.
° Blend the mixture with a blender stick or use a blender. Season to taste
It is wonderful watching a little kid play with a magnet for the first time. They have become so used to pushing or pulling something directly to get it to move that this motion at a distance breaks the model they have of the world and brings delight.
When people started to ask questions about what was happening, the answers brought fundamental changes to society.
You've probably done the experiment in grade school where you can change the direction a compass indicates by placing a current carrying wire next to it. The other part of the experiment is equally beautiful. You move a magnet next to a wire and cause a current to flow in the wire. What is going on?
Before going a bit into that, take a look at Richard Feynman's high level comments on electricity. He has a beautiful and delightful way of expressing himself
He mentioned Maxwell's equations as one of the most impactful discoveries anyone has made. About the time the American Civil War started, Scottsman James Clerk Maxwell published a four part work called On Physical Lines of Force.1 A few additional works were published and the summary of the work did not arrive right away, but we are left with four beautiful equations that are part of the foundation of our society....
If you did any technical work in college you are intimately familiar with them, but even if you didn't you may have seen them on a T-shirt.2
For those who aren't familiar with what they're saying, here is a summary in English2
° a magnet always has north and south poles
° the strength of an electric field depends on how much charge is in the vicinity
° an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field
° a magnetic field is created by either a current or a changing electric field
These are terrifically powerful and much of modern technology rests on electricity and magnetism. The calculations for real world problems can be non-trivial, but it is all there - all that is required is a bit of curiosity and tenacity.
Consider the last two equations. If you remove any charge you get an electric field is created by a changing magnetic field and a magnetic field is created by a changing electric field. You can solve these together with a bit of math and the result is astonishing - you get a mutually sustaining electromagnetic field. The changing electric field gives rise to an electric field which, in turn creates an electric field. The energy oscillates between these two forms, which turn out to be at right angles to each other, as the wave merrily propagates through space perpendicular to both the electric and magnetic fields. What is special is the speed of this wave is constant and just happens to be the speed of light.
About 25 years after the papers were published Heinrich Hertz showed that a spark could create such a wave. Hertz didn't realize it at the time, but others showed that what he created was really a form of electromagnetic radiation - a certain frequency band of which we sense as visible light. A major revolution in physics was underway, but none of the original people thought it would have practical value - little things like electric generators, motors, radio, television, computing and so on...
With this fundamental change came a major problem. How was this electromagnetic wave propagating? Waves traditionally required some medium to propagate though. A material called the luminiferous aether was proposed. A bizarre substance that filled the universe and had the property of being hugely stiffer than any known substance and very ephemeral - any normal substance could easily pass through it unimpeded.3
The whole notion of the aether seems silly today, but a fundamental change in how we thought about physics was required. Somehow this bizarre substance was not as bizarre as what followed. It turns out one of the puzzles it seemed to solve was how could light always travel at a fixed velocity. It allowed the light to travel at a fixed velocity in it rather than worrying about the relative velocities of bodies that were moving at different rates.
One of Feynman's better observations was
First you guess. Don't laugh, this is the most important step. Then you compute the consequences. Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it's wrong. That's all there is to it.
Albert Michelson and Edward Morley did the experiment with something called an interferometer - a device that is very sensitive to movement as well as changes in the speed of light in different directions.
They showed that the speed of light was constant in any direction relative to the moving Earth.4
This was such a startling result they spent years working on improvements to the experiment to find any error on their part. The results got better and better and with it the case for the luminiferous aether vanished and it became clear that electromagnetic waves could propagate though a vacuum.5 It also gave a certain Swiss patent clerk who was doing amazing physics on the side reason for coming up with something he coined Special Relativity.
The Michelson-Morley experiment is one of the fundamental experiments in all of physics. Its results were so unexpected that it was assumed to have been a failure, but careful probing of it by them and others as well as careful thought about what it really meant changed our concept of the universe on the scale that Galileo or Copernicus did.
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
This is the time of the year when I think of a few things I've done - some of them are predictions. In retrospect our memory tends to paint a pretty picture of how we predicted the future. I have been very lucky and have been in on some discoveries as well as inventions. We had what appears to be a good track record, but a more careful examination reveals more than a few failures.
In the past decade I try to spend some serious time thinking about failed - or what appear to be failed - predictions mean. I've come to place a huge value on my "failures" -what is really going on and what additional information did I need to discover there was a flaw.
This process of learning has given me tools and methods to work on unexpected areas. This generates serendipity and it exposes ignorance in a way that I can learn from many people and results including the failures of myself and others.
Aa observation - this process is similar to weather and climate. Weather is a short term projection and is extremely difficult to get right. The particulars are incurably difficult to understand. Climate is a longer term feature It is often much easier to predict the climate a decade out than the weather in two weeks. The same is true for projecting technologies. Rough directions are much easier than exact particulars.
Over the years I've been learning huge amounts from my failures. The amount seems to increase with time, which seems like the proper direction.
My New Year's wish to you is may you be as lucky with failure!
__________
1 It is interesting to note that Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in late 1859. It is difficult to think of any other discoveries in the last few hundred years that have brought more profound change to civilization than these two...
2 Not as precise as it should be, but close enough. It also turns out there are several equivalent ways to write down Maxwell's equations, so the T-shirts may look a bit different.
3 Upper limits to its mass were calculated - the density was smaller than a hundred trillion times lower than that of air.
4 More precisely they sent a limit - the Earth's velocity relative to the aether had to be less than a sixth the Earth's measured orbital velocity.
5 luminiferous aether would make a great song title or band name
__________
before the recipe, an image to fire your imagination
Allegory of Winter
Ambrogio Lorenzetti c.1338-1340
__________
Recipe Corner
A lassi as delicious as it is inauthentic
A Rich Seasonal Mango "Lassi"
Ingredients
° a drinking cup 70% filled with a high quality eggnog at just above freezing (I like Ronnybrook Farms eggnog)
° a canned mango pulp at just a bit above freezing (I like Rellure Kesar Mango Pulp)
Technique
° lightly stir the mango pulp into the eggnog. Finally add a blob and artistically swirl it.
° top with toasted pistachios or sliced almonds (optional)
At a holiday party I noted I had just installed something over 34 billion transistors in Sukie's Macbook giving her a bit more working space and how this amazes me when I think about it a bit - after all, when I was a kid I used to count the number of transistors we had in our house and remember when the number was in the single digits. Someone asked
How big are transistors these days?
Then, a day later another question
What are the special skills of incredible programmers?
The first question came up at a holiday meal. You can quickly work that out in terms of feature sizes on an integrated circuit, but I wonder how many people know what a transistor is? The same for diodes, resistors, capacitors, inductors and so on... Things that were important building bricks to me as I tried to understand radio as a kid.
These days the building block is often module like - integrated circuits or groups of integrated circuits that can perform fairly high level functions. These modules are composed of more basic components - the capacitors, transistors and other things that could turn into a simple radio.
Building a simple radio and understanding what each component is and how they interoperated in an electrical circuit can provide great insight for a 12 year old - or for anyone.
What prompted this was thinking about science kits that show up as gifts during this time of the year. There was a grand age of these things when I was young - the atomic age, rise of physics and chemistry and the space race were all drivers and radios were everywhere and understanding them was straightforward.
Some of these kits were poorly designed with little effort made to instruct. Some were age inappropriate, some (particularly chemistry sets) were dangerous and many were based on low quality apparatus (particularly terrible microscopes and telescopes). As a result a lot of kids were either discouraged and ended up just mucking around for awhile and not learning very much.
There were wonderful exceptions. At the high end motivated high school level kids could work with kits produced by Bell Labs. I remember hearing about them in high school, but had no idea how to get one. They were far from step by step and kids who managed with them were probably prime recruiting material for the best science schools in the country. The photo is from the solar energy kit which had kids making their own solar cells from raw materials and basic principles. Nothing like having to make your own furnace...
Scientific American had a great resource in the form of a column called The Amateur Scientist.1 The best ones were conduced by C.L. Strong and probably made an impact on American science as great as the space race.
I was into telescope and radio building and both "hobbies" were supported through magazines like Sky and Telescope and QST as well as specialty companies. These days richer resources are available on the web, but you have to know where to look and sort out what is good and bad.
A few of us were asked to review science kits a year ago. Most were not very good, but there were standouts. The best general kits - like chemistry sets - were from Thames and Kosmos, but as with all of this the kids should be motivated if they're going to learn anything.
I learned a lot building a simple crystal radio and then progressing by adding elements to the circuit to make it more selective and sensitive. Finally I migrated to vacuum tubes (which were conceptually easy to understand, but a bit dangerous with the high voltage on my homemade "breadboard") - that quickly moves you into understanding forms of modulation (AM vs FM) and you get a low level practical view on how to use radio waves.
A deeper appreciation of electromagnetic waves can, and perhaps should, be built on this foundation. The rules and regulations that drive our radios today are artifacts of ancient policy that came about 80 years ago during an era when radio receivers were very primitive. Our struggles with spectrum allocation and the resulting business models that leverage those rules and have produced oligopolies in the US trace back to policy based on ancient design. You can and should expect major disruptions here, but it will take awhile (a decade?) as policy change is glacial.2 This is an excellent technology and society issue that is only beginning to be addressed outside the laboratory. One wonders if the entrenched companies will defend their current very profitable business model, or adapt and change?
Finding the bits and pieces for a simple learning experience like a simple crystal radio can be a bit difficult these days as no one does it anymore, but I still recommend it if you have an interest in learning a bit about radio. Here is an excellent resource and the explanations are accurate enough at this level - and deeper than most people with a college degree know. Maybe that is motivation enough for a teenager.
Kids can develop any number of interests. The trick is to find an appropriate entry - one that will fascinate them and still be possible. In many of these areas things can get too complicated for a beginner. Some schools are well equipped to handle this type of curiosity and play, but many (most?) aren't.
About ten years ago a tenth grader approached me and wanted to build a cosmic ray telescope.3 This turns out to be a reasonable project for a teenager who knows his or her (it was a her in this case) way around high voltages and some basic electronics. Kids like this really should have mentors. Many universities can match kids with professors. My experience has been that many welcome this kind of interaction and will even provide apparatus and material to do the work. It is possible to even become part of real exploration. My thesis experiment benefitted from a young hacker who only had a high school education and a real talent for particle physics trigger design.
Learning a bit about radio can take you in many directions branching off into science and into engineering. The basic education is good as it gives a better sense of how these things we carry around with us work - moving past the idiot savant stage that mature technologies leave most of us in is a nice education.
I'm particularly excited by the make movement and the inclusion of kids into the fun. It largely works with the building blocks of today - things like sensors and microprocessors and a bit of programming are common - and is probably the modern equivalent of amateur radio. The kid-friendly part is even developing structure - NPR recently had a segment on hacker scouting.
I'm not longing for the times of my youth when amateur radio, telescope making and The Amateur Scientist column were the primary introduction and motivation for many of us. The introductory levels have shifted a bit, computers greatly amplify what can be done and the Internet is a fantastic way to find information. But there are a few basics that are still relevant and more kids and adults probably need to be exposed to the new toolsets and opportunities for learning.
I haven't touched on the important thread of linking this kind of study with the arts. Passion requires a driver. You'd be amazed how many people learned how to do something technically demanding to support a passion, only to find the new subject was beautiful and rich enough that a new passion often develops.
All of this beats passive entertainment.
Oh - transistor size... It turns out a more meaningful question is what is the cell size? For something really simple - like the basic element of a NAND memory chip - the cell is just a transistor and a capacitor. They are generally 3f x 2f (6f2) or about 0.29 square microns for a 0.22 micron feature size process.
The second question is one I'm still thinking about. I'm not a programmer, but know a few amazing ones and have asked them to comment. One thing seems certain to me - play must be involved.
__________
1 Check out Scientific American issues from the 50s through the 70s for examples. They should be in most libraries. There was a CDROM compilation, but it is awkward to use and difficult to find. C.L. Strong's columns were collected into a book that is now out of print, but available through used booksellers.
2 There is no reason that there should be a shortage of "spectrum" for cellphones. The underlying physics, assuming you use proper design and take advantage of computers, should allow for potentially hundreds of times as much usage and it could be very cheap.
3I wrote a high level introduction to making a simple cosmic ray telescope in three parts. Additionally there is a bit on building a cloud chamber, which is something a curious 14 year old could do without too much worry or expense. I would probably worry a bit about younger teens, not because a cloud chamber is difficult, but because you are handling some dangerous materials.
__________
Recipe Corner
I love roasted vegetables - sweet potatoes are particularly wonderful. Normally cutting them to french fry shape, coating with a bit of oil and perhaps some other seasonings and then roasting just plain works.
This one is different and I can't remember where is came from . We coat them with some ground nuts. Pecans are wonderful. No oil is used...
Nutty Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients
° 1 very large or 2 medium sized sweet potatoes
° 1 cup pecans, ground
° 1/4 tsp cinnamon
° 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
° 1/4 tsp paprika
° 1/4 tsp non-iodized sea salt
° a bit of black pepper
° 1/4 cup almond milk
° 1 tsp cornstarch
Technique
° Oven to 425° F and cover a baking sheet with parchment paper
° cut the sweet potato(s) into french fryish strips
° Parboil the strips for 5 minutes in a pot of boiling water. Immediate put the strips into a large colander and and immerse it in a larger bowl (tub) of very cold water (use lots of ice cubes). Set aside
° mix the ground pecans in a bowl with the cinnamon, cayenne, paprika, salt and pepper.
° in a bowl large enough for the sweet potato strips, mix the almond milk and cornstarch until the cornstarch is completely dissolved.
° pull the colander out of the icy water and dry off the strips with a paper towel
° one by one dunk the strips into the milk mixture and then place on the baking tray keeping them closely together (touching even)
° sprinkle about half of the pecan mix onto the array of strips
° one by one turn them over
° sprinkle the rest of the pecans on the array
° now spread them out so they aren't touching
° roast for about 10 minutes, rotate the travel to deal with oven cold sports and continue for 10 to 15 minutes. Don't allow the pecans to burn
° remove from the oven and allow them to cool for about 10 minutes before removing from the tray.
Regular flight in heavier than air machine, much of medical science and making use of the strong interaction; but certainly not the Internet, television or the car...
A few of us were sitting around a lunch table at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey in the early 1990s playing the game where you can transport someone 100 years ahead in time and asking what would surprise them. For fun we were trying to come up with notions that would really surprise the anyone.
We came to the conclusion that communications networks wouldn't be a complete surprise as telephone networks were expanding rapidly. Science fiction in the early 1890s was full of references to forms of communication that look like radio and communication. Novel as the Internet might seem, it wouldn't be a complete surprise.
We debated computers. The ways computers are used would come as a shock - in fact modern use would come as a shock to most as late as the 1940s before people like Vannevar Bush began to connect the dots of what was happening in research facilities.1 But the work of Charles Babbage on the difference engine and Ada Lovelace on programming came a full century before Bush's insight. Digital computation and its use may have well been a shock, but computational engines not.
We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate what ever aroused curiosity. - Orville Wright
Today marks the 109th anniversary of controlled heavier than air flight. By the late 1800s people were beginning to advance past semi-controlled flight in gliders, but with no real success. A real stagnation in design combined with desire and over-funding to kill several would-be innovators and strengthen the notion that even with the advances of the Industrial Revolution, flight was only for the birds and lighter than air machines.
An airplane, or a bird for that matter, has to properly balance four forces to fly - lift, drag, gravity and thrust.2 It must also have a viable control system.
The early aircraft designs were ok on gravity, but lift, thrust and drag were all problematic and viable control systems were nonexistent.
A huge problem that required advances on multiple fronts.
The best way to approach such problems is to address each issue empirically scientifically. The Wright brothers spent years learning how to build and fly kites, understand aerodynamics and simple fluid mechanics to built good-enough airfoils, to lower the drag on their machines, to use a good-enough engine, and to build a control system and learn to fly with it.
The investigations took several years and a careful methodical approach. They built their own airfoils and had the revelation that a propeller could be made much more efficient using a proper airfoil. Air-cooled gasoline engines could have a very high power to weight ratio for the day. Wing warping could control roll and elevators and rudders, pitch and yaw.
By early December 1903 they had enough of the pieces to make the first real flight. The pieces were far from optimal and several of them had been discovered before by others - but no one else had put together all of the pieces.3 What makes this interesting was their funding was modest. Some competitors had enormous funding, but were using designs that were simple extrapolations of earlier non-functioning designs.
One can go on and on about the brilliance of the approach used by the Wrights, but it also needs to be underscored that their design, while good enough, was very primitive. They patented it and proceeded to prove they were as bad at business as they were at fundamental revolution. A problem was their patents and business model were very restrictive and others, once the fundamental problem had been cracked, made new discoveries that made dramatic improvements.4
Last year I was part of a panel charged with making projections for technologies five, ten and twenty years out. While such events are fun (even more fun when someone is paying and the others in the group are smart), they rarely are useful as predicting the future is a hazard at best. But at the same time it is possible to get a lot of useful information from a well run process.
When I look back on some of the things I have done it is possible to say I saw and even invented bits and pieces of the future. But saying that turns out to be a combination of selective filtering and hubris. In reality many of us saw and created many pathways to potential futures. That was the job of pure research at Bell Labs where the rubber met the sky. Of course innovation is the useful application of these ideas and making the rubber meet the road is much more difficult.5
I think it is fair to say almost all of the technologies we'll be using in 2022 are up and running in pure and applied research labs around the world. The combinatorics of factors that come to bear on which will survive are an extremely difficult problem to solve and there is truth to Alan Kay's famous quote - "Look, the best way to predict the future is to invent it..."
Many of the discoveries are impacted by something outside of what is considered to be their normal domain. Television was originally seen as a point to point communication, portable atomic clocks combining with several technologies to create a new class of navigation - the list goes on and on. Ideally you can gather a group of people with an understanding of the technology being studied, wide ranging interests, delight in connecting the dots and an inquisitive nature. From that a variety of useful scenarios can be invented that can form a guide for those who must plan for the future.
Some are expert at understanding the human side of technology along with the rate of sophistication of component technologies and can create new products and even product categories - Steve Jobs and his team being an example on several occasions.
Rarely something is created where its basic design survives for a long time. The invention of the safety bicycle is a great example.
In the early and mid 1880s many inventors tried to come up with a light, easy to ride and safe bicycle. There were multiple failures until John Kemp Starley of Coventry, England put the dots together and came up with the Rover in about 1888. He had come up with a design and geometry that is basically unchanged to this day... a design that happens to be the most efficient way for a single human to move around on the ground ... a design that is nearly four times as efficient as walking.
On this day it is sweet to note the connection between bicycles and early flight. The skills required to build reliable safety bikes proved to be one of the dots the Wrights used in their arsenal of ideas.
I should probably quit now as I'm nearly out of time, but it is also very important to note the adoption rates of new technologies. This the percentage of the population using a technology from in years from the first product - a very different number from the first invention!
The first chart is from a now defunct visualization site. The point that is problem important is the ten percent mark as well as the slope from there through fifty percent adoption. Some technologies compete with seriously mature technologies and require enough further evolution so as to have very gentle slopes, even though they eventually come to become important. Some forms of alternate energy power production and electric cars are good examples.6
The second chart involves consumer "gadget" technologies compiled by Alexis Madrigal - areas that are generally expected to explode rapidly and quickly generate enormous competition. Note the leading examples are all for media consumption rather than communication or creation. There are a variety of interesting reasons why this is so, but there is not enough time to probe that here. Gadget spaces where first moves often are not those making money as the technologies mature. Ideally companies in this space have a deep understanding of how and why people use these things. If they can add this information to the other dots they're connecting they can create more serious contenders. Apple is a prime example as were Polaroid and Sony back in the day.
So while an accurate prediction of winners a decade out is nearly impossible, it is easier to eliminate losers and the process, properly done, can offer a good deal of illumination into just how you think about the future. On the other hand surrounding yourself with narrow subject matter experts frequently leads to noisy blindsidings. 7
__________
1 Vannevar Bush was an amazing mind - inventor, scientist, engineer and brilliant administrator. A real renaissance person. He was one of the people who started the Manhattan Project, ran NACA, CMU, the MIT school of engineering, the NDRC, the OSRD and was a core force behind the creation of the National Science Foundation. His article As We May Think article that appeared in The Atlantic on information indexing and processing was a brilliant piece you should read if you are unfamiliar with it.
2 Gliding only requires three - thrust isn't used.
3 This is a critical point. Some of the tricks had been uncovered at places like MIT and Stevens, but were only known to ship designers. Very little of this was known in the aviation community. Orville and Wilbur, with their experiments, created a problem relevant body of information that was revolutionary in their field.
4 Ailerons are a prime example. There was considerable prior art, but the other pieces of powered flight had not come together. They proved to be superior to wing warping, but accomplished the same basic task - roll control. The Wrights fought this tooth and nail in the courts. They won in the US and demanded very heavy fees fundamentally crippling aircraft development in the US for about a decade as the Europeans quickly caught up and moved forward.
5 Bell Labs had a good mechanism for that - linkages between pure and applied research and applied research and manufacturing. The problem was the last link became weak through a series of consent decrees and the value of the place was diluted.
6 These are rich connect-the-dot regions and I spend some time worrying about them. Get in touch if you have an interest
7 There are a few individual subject matter experts who have enough outside areas of interest and their own forest of dots to connect that they can not only be useful in these investigations, but often central.
__________
Recipe Corner
With the holidays nearly on us I've been experimenting with gingerbreads. The one I offer here is a recipe in progress - I'm on the third version, but this one appears to be a keeper. Unlike many gingerbreads it isn't great warm, but shines after chilled in the refrigerator for at least eight hours. Sukie thinks it is even better with eggnog poured over it or with peppermint ice cream on the side (yes - I've made a batch of peppermint ice cream).
There is an issue of what to do with the holiday experiments as we can't eat all of them ourselves. The trick is a group of always happy-to-try-it-out neighbors.
This one makes a lot. A nine inch round pan is marginal, a nine or ten inch square pan probably works and making it in a two piece angel food cake pan may be best. Be sure and put a sheet pan under the cake pan!
I've begun to measure cake temperature with a thermocouple. The cake is done went the core temperature is about 88° C - don't let it get as high as 90° for any prolonged period.
Ginger-GingerRefrigerator Cake
Ingredients
Cake
° 85g (3 oz) peeled an sliced fresh ginger
° 200g (1 cup) white cane sugar
° 3/4 tsp fine un-iodized sea salt
° 1/2 tsp ground ginger
° 1 tsp ground cinnamon
° 1/4 tsp ground mace
° 225g (1 cup) water
° 2 tsp baking soda
° 340g (1 cup) dark molasses
° 2 large eggs
° 225g (2 sticks) melted unsalted butter
° 275g (about 2-1/2 cups) all purpose flour
Glaze:
° 125g (1 cup) powered sugar
° a pinch of fine salt
° a splash of milk
° a bit of vanilla extract
Technique
Cake
° Preheat the oven to 350°F and butter or pam a cake pan
° Put the fresh ginger, sugar, salt, ground ginger, cinnamon and mace into a food processor and pulse until the ginger is ground into the sugar
° Microwave the water for about a minute, stir in the basking soda until dissolved and then the molasses until well blended. Set it aside
° Add the eggs to the food processor one at a time pulsing it a bit to blend them in.
° Turn on the food processor and stream in the melted butter.
° Stop the food processor, add the flour and then pulse until just blended - don't overdo it!
° Turn on the food processor and stream in the water and molasses stopping when it is just absorbed. Again don't overdo it.
° Pour the batter into the cake pan and bake until a toothpick comes clean - about 50 minutes to an hour for me depending on the pan.
Glaze
° Pour the sugar into a big enough bowl, add the salt and whisk in some milk until it is on the verge of being a liquid. Add a bit of vanilla and whisk to blend.
° Drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake and put it in a refrigerator for at least a few hours.
Expectations were high for the Mars Climate Orbiter as it approached Mars in September of 1999. It was one of NASA's low cost missions that came out of the failure of the billion dollar plus Mars Observer earlier in the decade along with the spiraling costs and lack of mission of the International Space Station. The new mantra was simple, fast and cheap.
Cheap is a relative thing. The MCO mission was still spendy at a third of a billion dollars, but the mission had gone smoothly and soon it would near Mars at a low enough altitude to use a bit of the Martin atmosphere to slow it down into a proper orbit with minimal fuel use. But it turns out there was an issue.
A space probes trajectory is never perfect and mid course corrections are executed along the way. Tiny thrusters are fired at a known thrust for a measured amount of time to determine what the effect of the little force will be. Since the distances traveled are so great small corrections can be made burning very little fuel and still have a significant impact. But there was this problem.
In high school physics you may have puzzled through the difference between mass and weight as well as different measurement systems. Pounds are an English unit and measure force. Kilograms are metric and measure mass. To figure out the weight in metric units (weight is a force), you need to include the acceleration of gravity and the appropriate units are newtons.1 It would be nice if everyone used the same system, and if the convention used was actually correct, but the history of technological development and adoption is neither linear or clean.
The MCO's software expected metric units. Specifically a force times the time the force was applied by the thruster - newton seconds. The commands were sent to the spacecraft in the English pound-seconds. The result of this mismatch was an approach about 170 kilometers lower than anticipated and the spacecraft broke up in the Martian atmosphere.
Subsequent analysis showed assumptions were made by different software teams and full integration tests weren't performed for a variety of reasons - including the time and cost required.
It would be nice if the software compiler was "smart" enough to include units and flag likely errors. To my knowledge no mainstream language supports units, but they all allow the programmer to enter a {quantity, unit} pair. If you do this it isn't a big deal to build in a unit detection capability, but for a variety of social and technical reasons no one does it. If you are lucky you'll see a reference to the expected units in a comment
But this is just the tip of the iceberg when you are trying to build reliable and efficient software that interfaces with machines. It turns out the goals are very different from those of the Internet application and server world. Rather than making the programmer more efficient by throwing computational horsepower courtesy of Moore's Law at the task, it makes sense to have very efficient systems (particularly for systems with sensors with power constraints) and very robust compile time checks. It turns out that new tools and programmers with different education backgrounds are likely to be required. The objectives are fundamentally different from current programming.
But it gets worse. We're trying to deal with sensors - devices which make measurements, but have accuracy and reliability issues that may be hidden to the programmer tasked with writing code that supports them. The programmer may be completely unfamiliar with the quirks of the sensor and it is very easy to trust questionable information streams.
GE is talking about an "Industrial Internet" -- it is really machine to machine communication making use of some of the information produced and processed by a system that allows people or other machines to make informed decisions that would be very difficult to come by using more spartan information streams. It is a grand idea, but the devil is into details.
There need to be specialized tools to deal with the different notion of software design, a deep understanding of the system being built, people who have deep and rich experience with high reliability systems of sensors. Conventional system designers and coders aren't enough, although historically this has been done.2 This is the sort of thing at which JPL, the experimental particle physics community, and a few other science based organization excel - consider the effort required to sort out the experimental design and data analysis from a CERN experiment.3
For the GE approach to work, and ultimately the world will need a lot of this class of programming, computation and analysis, they are going to have to create multidisciplinary teams who fundamentally understand as many of the issues involved as necessary. My guess is they aren't poking around the right areas to find some of the people - you aren't going to do this without a lot of help from the physical science community. I'm pretty sure the old Bell Labs could have made a major impact, but we don't have one of those collaborative, multi-disciplinary organizations in industry anymore.... My suspicion is something not as robust will be produced and then one has to ask the question of what is good enough.4 It will be essential to be able to accurately calculate confidence levels for any critical application!
(I have some other worries about the GE's effort that I won't detail here as I just wanted to talk about the need for a need for a different class of system design... there are other issues. I also recognize their press releases and other documents I've seen are very high level for public consumption and they have a deep appreciation for the critical issues involved.)
Let me make it clear - software reliability is improving, which is a good thing as human society has become dependent on our computational systems. But the complexity of system - particularly those festooned with sensors - is increasing at a rapid rate and our ability to comprehend them is not. The development of the m2m Internet may well be the beginning of a very different branch of programming and systems analysis. One that is not only required, but in some sense is back to the future.
Ugh - three hours!
This is is the third time I have approached this piece and the only omenti posting that has required more than one pass (but I didn't proof this one). The first pass included a few pages of pseudocode examples of why conventional programming techniques won't work and the second pass was way too technical. I'm happy to discuss at greater detail, but hope this gives a sense of the issues you have to consider to do an adequate job.
__________
1 I weigh about 156.5 pounds. My mass is about 71 kilograms. Technically my mass is not a weight, but since most of us walk around on the surface of the Earth and don't worry too much about slight changes in the acceleration of gravity, it is common to call a kilogram a unit of weight. My metric weight is measured in newtons ... in my case I weight about 696 newtons ... 1 pound of force is about 4.45 newtons. So your average supermodel weighs well over 500 newtons.
2 The same could be said for AT&T during the old days when switches in the phone network were to have no more than two hours of downtime in forty years of service including time down from natural disasters. It was impossible to move the design at a rapid pace given this requirement and ultimately the needs of the end user proved to be less demanding, but it did work. It would be overkill to do this for conventional business computing, human interfaces and Internet coding and it has largely vanished.
4 There are many areas where noisy answers are probably fine, but some that will have major financial or even life an death impacts.
__________
Recipe corner
I'm starting to work out Christmas main courses and desserts. Jheri sent a really interesting looking spice cake recipe from a dinner party she was at in Copenhagen and I modified it a bit. Use whatever topping you like - I threw together a cream cheese frosting because there was extra cream cheese in the 'fridge. The cake is very good at room temperature and also great after chilling in a refrigerator.
The cardamom is very Scandinavian and reminds me of the birthday cakes our Swedish neighbor made for her Danish husband (yes - a mixed marriage)
A note on cookies and cakes - really fresh ingredients make a lot of difference. If your flour and sugar packages have been opened and are more than a month old, I would use something fresher. I grind most of my spices.
ChristmasSpiceCake
Ingredients
° 240 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
° 170 g (heaping 3/4 cup) sugar
° 100 g (1/2 cup) brown sugar
° 1 tbl baking powder
° 1/2 tsp non-iodized salt
° 1-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
° 1 tsp ground ginger
° 1/2 tsp ground cardamom
° 1/2 tsp of ground cloves
° 2 large eggs
° 160 g (scant 2/3 cup) whole milk
° 115 g (8 tbl) unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
Technique
° Preheat oven to 350°F.
° In a large bowl, mix together all dry ingredients. In another bowl, mix together eggs and milk. Add wet mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well. Add the melted butter gradually. The batter should be smooth.
° Transfer the batter into a buttered and floured round 9" cake pan (or in a fancy heart-shaped mold:-). Bake for 35 to 40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.
° Let cool for about half an hour then de-pan and transfer to a cake rack. Frost it, spread with whipped cream, top with jam or whatever you like.
Cream Cheese Frosting
The amounts shown are very approximate - you can't go wrong. I like to sprinkle a coating of coarsely chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans on top - but didn't on the pictured cake.
Ingredients
° 60 g unsalted butter softened
° 110 g cream cheese softened (don't use the low fat here - go for it)
° 220 g confectioner's sugar
° a bit of milk
° 1/2 tbl vanilla extract
° a pinch of salt
Technique
° mix all ingredients and whip up by hand or in a mixer
° spread over the top of the cake with a spatula and let a bit flow over the sides
A dozen years ago I took a long and stimulating walk with an obscure designer who has since ascended into international prominence. Two weeks before a few of us had visited his company and somehow its CEO decided to invite me out for a private chat - part of this was walking with his favorite designer.
I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but the walk was fascinating - a discussion that bounced fluidly from material science, to Moore's Law projections, to the anthropology of Victorian women and how they dealt with sweating.
It was clear this was someone who was fascinated by connecting the dots and he somehow saw me as a like minded person. In the end his boss made an interesting offer, but I decided to stay where I was - perhaps a mistake and perhaps not as the next two years were remarkably productive for me.
One of the most curious parts of that walk centered around thinking where personal electronics might be in a decade. He was concerned with how people would relate to the devices as objects - very much part of the user interface in his mind. He was fascinated by the stones some Victorian women would carry on hot days. These were beautifully finished smooth pieces with just the right size, shape and density. They could be rubbed for a soothing feeling that might calm a person if they were nervous or if the temperature was too high - they were gateways away from the craziness of the moment to a calmer state of mind.
It was important that the hand have access to all parts of these stones and that placed an upper limit on the size. He noted that, given the average size of a woman's hand, it was unlikely that you could design something for handheld use with a diagonal measurement that exceeded four inches. He speculated that devices with screens would probably have that as an upper limit on the screen size if the device was meant to be as suited as these old Victorian stones were... We talked about such devices as a stepping stone and where you might go after that and a dozen other things.
It was an incredibly stimulating walk, but the four inch diagonal measurement notion somehow stuck with me.
Yesterday morning I got up around three and sat in bed wondering what the lines were like at the AppleStore in Bridgewater, New Jersey. I could drive there in about twenty minutes and my iPhone 5 pre-order had me scheduled for delivery sometime in October...
since I was already up...
To my surprise the queue wasn't terribly long - I was about 30 in line when I arrived a bit before 4 am. I've been to a few events like these and love the fact that a group of complete strangers is drawn to doing something that is simultaneously unusual and common. Someone brought some excellent chocolate chip cookies and someone else had what must have been a few gallons of hot chocolate. If you sit back and watch you can learn quite a bit.
On that walk in Palo Alto one of the topics of discussion was the Porsche 911. Although far from a general consumer vehicle represents a remarkable example of constant evolution of a design that was close to ideal for the task when first introduced.
It has a distinctive character as well as what should be an impossibly awful front to rear weight distribution. Almost everything in its design is meant to optimize its character and it can probably be considered one of the greatest automobiles of all time.
First introduced nearly five decades ago, the 911 has undergone a terrific amount of change, but current models are roughly the same size and shape of the originals. It is easy for someone with one from the 1970s to get into a current model and feel the sense of connection. The newer models are much "better", but they are also very much the same.
The designer wanted to make the point that the job of the designer was to help articulate this - to work with the engineers and those who build the car, those who have to repair it and those who will use it - to find the best compromise that will work at a given time and place. And then to participate in guiding its evolution. He made the point that these refinements produce something that is so timely that the notion of buying the latest and greatest isn't as important as just having one and taking delight in its use.
... then we talked about architecture, bicycles, violins, and watches ....
Apple has been updating the iPhone on roughly a yearly schedule. Generally there is a large change followed by a smaller change. Year to year it isn't particularly tempting to get something new. The latest phone has improvements over the last one, but not hugely so. But two years offers a large jump.
Most mobile contracts are two years. When your contract is up the latest phone represents a big jump in capability and that makes it desirable. At the same time you don't feel terrible a year into your contract when something new comes out. Apple also softens the desire for the mid-contract upgrade by offering free and roughly yearly updates to the iOS operating system. This works for about three years (four in the case of the 3GS), before a phone is too old to update. You buy into something that generally improves in capabilities over time and the process is mostly smooth and transparent.
The iPhone is not perfect, but there is a uniform design language and the lesson of the Porsche 911 is relevant. There isn't a huge amount of design difference between the original and latest iPhone - it is easy to recognize them as something from Apple. On the other hand there has been an enormous amount of refinement. There is a strong sense that, if you are satisfied with the product, you can comfortably stay with the line for a long time - assuming Apple remains true to the path.
It is popular for technical pundits to criticize new products. Most of these people have never designed, built or programming anything serious in their lives. They love to create specification checklists and use them as a proxy for comparing products. This rarely gets at the user experience, design, "character", ecosystem and the anthropology of something.
There is no way I can comment on these deeply enough, but a few of you asked for an iPhone 5 review. I'll offer a few comments now, but will put together notes for a more detailed review after I use it for a week or two. (I won't post it here as I'm not a reviewer, but let me know if you want a copy when I finish the notes.)
When I finally got inside the Apple Store I was paired with Jeff Stambovsky who turned out to be good at navigating an order that was complicated by the fact that I needed to cancel a previous online order and doing so would cause a problem with my carrier's ordering system - namely it would reset the fact that I had over two years on my last phone. He was able to contact the right people at Apple and my carrier and just make the process happen. On top of that, while we were waiting, there was good conversation and no sales pressure. Apple Stores do the highest sales per square foot of any store in the US. Other brick and mortar stores should study them and a few others who have interesting approaches and perhaps learn.1
Why do we think of these things and call them "phones"? They aren't for many of us. I was talking to a European friend who notes he pays full price for a smartphone and then gets an unlimited data plan for about $13 a month ... He never uses it as a phone, but does "voice" instead using one of several VOIP products. He has routed around his telephone service. Imagine being able to do that in the US.
Out of the box I was startled by the weight and "feel" of it as an object. It is very light for its size, but still has enough density to let you know it is metal and glass rather than plastic. The fit and finish are excellent and comparable to some very high end consumer objects. Perhaps not at the level of a really fine watch, but approaching it.
The screen is excellent and the diagonal measurement, ahem, is four inches - the measurement that has stuck with me over the years. Larger objects have their own niches, but will speak to different design languages. Apple is about focus and simplicity. There is a design balance and Apple speaks strongly on this - excessive choice can lead to some tragically awful design.2
Good design is often about what you leave out.
Many have criticized the eight pin connector. This is Apple at work and I'm amazed the old thirty pin connector survived as long as it did. The new charging connection is much more secure, can be inserted in two orientations and allows a much slimmer case design. Every change like this is criticized as a terrible Apple mistake and a sign the company is in a downward spiral. In the end it is necessary to destroy some of the old and replace it if you want to prevent a Windows-like complexity from taking over. This is an artifact of necessary housekeeping as the design evolves. At the same time it is clear why wireless charging is not good enough to include at this point, why NFC doesn't make sense and so on. Focus and elimination, properly done, are a good thing.
Transferring my mobile life from my old iPhone 4 was simple. You have your choice of Apple's online backup system or a backup on your computer. I chose the backup on my MacBook. It took a couple of clicks and a few minutes to complete the task. All of my apps, their layout, all of my accounts were duplicated - the iPhone 5 is very similar to my old phone. This backup feature has saved me a few times.
There is a big noise over maps that reminds me of the antennagate kerfuffle on the iPhone 4. I'm very curious as to why this happened and can imagine a variety of scenarios that may or may not be a power play between Apple and Google. I don't know if there is a single driver or if both are involved - I suspect the later. That said maps are difficult! Fleshing them out is going to take a lot of user time as well as licensing many new sources (Google licenses dozens and dozens). The databases will improve with time - it isn't as simple as going out and licensing or acquiring one source. I suspect the maps will be much better in six months time and dramatically better in 18 months.
The maps are represented as vectors and render much faster than the old Google supplied bitmaps. The interface strikes me as nicer and cleaner than Google's, but the flyover is only eye-candy. Google's street mapped view is actually useful.
There is something more interesting to note. You can always bookmark the Google maps webpage in all of its chewy HTML 5 glory, as an icon and use it as a proxy for the Google Map app. Apps, for the time being and foreseeable future, seem to work better than HTML 5 for many applications. Apple discovered this accidentally almost immediately with the original iPhone. Google has discovered it, Facebook stumbled and only realized it recently... 3
Speaking of antennagate, the antenna design seems to work well on the new iPhone, but I haven't tested it throughly. WiFi is much improved and it can do 5 GHz 802.11n. My old iPhone had to use the house 802.11b we provide for house guests.
Performance appears to be excellent - similar to our iPad 3 and vastly improved over the iPhone 4. I'm sure it will feel normal in a few days and going back would be impossible.
The screen is beautiful - colors are richer and more vivid and the off-axis viewing is much improved. The size works well in my sort of average sized hands. I wouldn't want something taller and certainly not wider - I find many of the current Android phones to be unusable as single hand devices.
Apple earbuds are not for serious music listening and the new design is not a huge improvement. It is better for calls and the microphone must be improved as four of the five people I've talked to have noted my voice sounds different and more natural. Perhaps I was having a more natural day, but I suspect it is improved. They stay in my ears much better than the earlier Apple-issued ear kit. If you listen to music carefully, you'll want some better earbuds or earphones anyway.
The camera continues to improve. I don't know how many panorama photos I'll take, but it works much better than the third party apps I've used. My trusty Sony NEX-5N is still a vastly better camera, but it is of no use if I don't have it and it is just too inconvenient to pack around.4
Passbook is a very interesting and potentially important experiment. It addresses areas where NFC fails and may even work socially. Really important to think about and understand. It isn't clear if it will succeed and what success might mean for the ecosystem and others, but its success or failure is important to understand.
The bottom line is I would recommend the new iPhone as a great smartphone if you are currently in the market. It is the best I've used to date. I'm a happy camper. I wish I was as pleased with my carrier.
Apple doesn't execute perfectly - far from it and they never have in the past. But it does have a core set of principles that it uses as a guide and perhaps Jobs' best contribution has been making them part of the company. It won't last forever, but I think it stands a chance of going on for some time. Over time I believe we'll see this combination of design, a deep desire for simplicity, an attempt to deeply understand a specific problem and a linkage of the social and technical move in an interesting direction.
There is something deep about good design and knowing something well enough to realize what gets in the way so it can confidently be left out. The principle applies everywhere and turns out to be a fundamental tool for dealing with information. We've touched on that before and are likely to return as so many fields depend on it.
... much more to say, but I've used 70 of my allotted 60 minutes at this point. I'll add a recipe and post this now. Oh - and for those who love hardware the just released iFixit teardown video.
__________
1 Apple Stores have evolved over the years, but have a common core design notion and mission. Copying them directly is probably a mistake as what works for them probably only works for Apple - the concept of brand comes into play. They aren't perfect, but they will probably continue their own evolution.
2 A rich subject indeed. Mass customization may offer meaningful choice and there are aspects that are very desirable, but much of the territory is unexplored. It will be fascinating to see how design couples with it. If you're curious about this it is an area that is of great interest to me and the reason why I spend time looking at where fashion may be going. There is much press given to 3d manufacture, but apart from prototyping and a few niches I think it is much too early to talk about if your horizons are anything under a decade. There are fundamental design and materials problems that need a much richer understanding than is currently available.
3 This is a really important point and helps define a minimal ecosystem. As much as I like some of Microsoft's current work and a few of the new phones, I doubt they'll gain enough traction to do very well. They have a real chicken and egg problem.
Today is the first day of Autumn and muffins are always good with breakfast as the weather chills and crisps. Here is an ancient blueberry muffin recipe I use. The secret to great muffins is to use very fresh ingredients and to barely mix the ingredients. Over mixing just kills them... I won't convert it to metric units.
Blueberry Muffins
Ingredients
° 8 ounces AP flour
° 6 ounces cane sugar
° 2 teaspoons baking powder
° 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
° 1 teaspoon un-iodized salt
° 8 ounces sour cream
° 1/2 cup vegetable oil
° zest and juice of one large orange
° 1 pint of blueberries (probably thawed frozen ...) extra points for wild blueberries
° optional - topping
° 9 ounces AP flour
° 9 ounces cane sugar
° 6 ounces butter
° 2 tablespoons cinnamon
Technique
° Preheat oven to 375°F with a middle rack in place
° Combine all the dry ingredients together and sift once into a large bowl, add the orange zest, and set aside.
° Separately mix the sour cream, orange juice, oil, and eggs until completely smooth.
° Mix the two very briefly on low speed for about one minute. The batter should be lumpy.
° Fold fruit into the batter gently into a greased muffin pan.
° optional
° mix topping together until coarsely mixed. divide on top of the muffins
° Bake until springy and a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean - about 15 minutes.
In some of the posts about sports I've noted the efficiency at converting the energy stored in food into moving our muscles is in the 20 to 25% range. Much of the remaining energy is converted into thermal energy and we have to get rid of quite a bit of heat in the process. In theory it is possible to convert energy from one form to another, but much of our world is less than perfect. While energy is never created or destroyed, often its transfer or conversion results in at least some of it being difficult or impossible for us to easily use and we can talk about the efficiency of a process.1
Here are a few examples:
conversion process
type of conversion
efficiency %
large electric generator
m -> e
98 - 99
bicycle chain drive
m -> m
95 - 99
large power plant boiler
c- > t
90 - 98
natural gas furnace
c -> t
95 - 97
water turbine
m -> m
90
human lactation
c -> c
75 - 80
small electric motor
e -> m
65 - 75
best bacterial growth
c -> c
50 - 60
wind turbine
m -> m
50 - 55
steam turbine
t -> m
40 - 45
supertanker diesel engine
c -> m
50 - 55
turbofan under ideal conditions
c -> m
50
electrolysis of water
e -> c
40 - 50
large gas turbine
c -> m
40
small electric motor under 200w
e -> m
30 - 50
automotive diesel engine
c -> m
25 - 35
automotive gasoline engine
c -> m
15 - 25
photovoltaic solar cell
r -> e
5 - 30, 15 common
home refrigerator
e -> t
10 - 20
human muscles
c -> m
15 - 25
pregnancy
c -> c
10 - 15
modern chicken growth
c -> c
10 - 15
gas stove
c -> t
10 - 15
fluorescent lamp
e -> r
8 -15
beef production
c -> c
3 - 10
peak photosynthesis
r -> c
4
watt steam engine
c -> m
2.5
incandescent lamp
e -> r
0.7 - 3
beeswax candle
c -> r
1
neucomen steam engine
c -> m
0.5
global photosynthetic mean
r -> e
0.3
Here c is chemical energy, t is thermal, r is radiant, m is mechanical, e is electricity
You'll notice that some conversion devices like large generators and bicycle chains are fantastically efficient while those that involve burning fuels, metabolism, most forms of producing visible light and photosynthesis are fairly inefficient.2
When dealing with systems that cascade these processes, you can often find short cuts and extract a lot of unmined efficiency. Co-generation is an example - a large power plant with a steam engine can create a lot of thermal energy that won't run a conventional steam turbine, but can heat a massive greenhouse or office building. Putting solar cells on the roof of a building to power electric lights may only be 10% times 10% - or just 1% efficient. Rethinking the building and using daylight through the windows most of the time offers an enormous savings. It can be like finding diamonds on the beach.
Most of our energy comes from the Sun. The dominant source of its energy comes from a set of light element fusion reactions that are "fueled" by the crush from the Sun's internal gravity. Most of this takes place in the densest part - well within the first quarter of its radius. The power density is surprisingly low - about the metabolism of a lizard and about a quarter of our metabolism - but there is a boatload of star out there. This energy is mostly radiated out into space as light - about half of it visible light. Most of it misses the Earth - we only catch about a billionth of its output. Some of the light is reflected out into space, some is absorbed heating our atmosphere, land and ocean and some of it is converted into chemical energy by photosynthesis.
We should have a hooray for photosynthesis! day. Radiant energy is ephemeral. It takes about 500 seconds to make the trip from the surface of the Sun to us and then needs to be captured. It would be nasty to not be able to make it through the night or even cloud cover ... fortunately we have this wonderful chemical fuel and our cells are filled with little chemical fuel cells.
But photosynthesis is fundamental to life on Earth and its efficiency is terrible - the world average for the biosphere is about 0.3%. This creates an upper limit on how much life can be sustained. You can work out how much energy can be fixed by certain types of agricultural crops. Our main food crops are highly optimized for our metabolism needs, but the overall efficiency of a field is better than the global average, but is generally less than one percent.3
It is fun to work out the efficiency of modern post green revolution mechanized agriculture. The world's cultivated area has roughly doubled since 1900 (we are close to the limit now), but the energy available in the form of edible crops has increased sixfold. This has been made possible by an increase of the energy used by agriculture on the order of 8500% - we are using about ten times as much energy per kilogram of harvested crop, but we are getting much more. We have increased the number of people who can be sustained on earth from perhaps a billion and a half to about seven or eight billion.
This is enormous progress. In 1900 a hectare of good farmland could produce about 15 megajoules of food energy per day - about 3,600 nutritional Calories. The world supply worked out to about 2,400 Calories per capita per day - not much of a buffer if there was a bad harvest. Now we can supply about the same for all of the world's people.4 A huge challenge for science and policy is where to go as there are no clear paths to guaranteeing a good supply of food to 9 billion people - the projected population for 2050 - given current technology and consumption trends. A second green revolution isn't immediately apparent.
We need to revisit efficiency. About ten years ago I wrote a paper noting:
let light be light
let heat be heat
let food be food
The notion was that it is generally inefficient to have serial energy conversions. It is much more efficient to eat a vegetarian diet than one that uses meat. At this point most of the undeveloped world is largely vegetarian, but as the population becomes more wealthy, people tend towards eating more meat. It takes about ten Calories of the energy in grain to make one Calorie of beef - and that assumes the animal is completely consumed. Poultry is somewhat more efficient than beef, but a largely vegetarian diet may be necessary to share meat with others who are newly wealthy as well as to ensure everyone has something to eat.5 A potentially larger problem is growing food as a fuel to displace petroleum.
__________
1 Some people like to talk about exergy which is loosely the maximum amount of useful work in a process. Some chemists and engineers like that way of looking at the world, I prefer using efficiency.
2 It turns out there are strict theoretical limits on many of these. One of the triumphs of 19th century physics was sorting out how to calculate the efficiency of heat engines. That led to a basic understanding of thermodynamics and one of the greatest mechanisms for dealing with "big data" on a scale that is unimaginable to today's big data computations.
3 Getting a handle on these numbers can be very difficult as you have to consider the question of temperature, season, water availability, pests, and energy associated with running the farm, pumping water and making fertilizer.
The theoretical efficiency for photosynthesis is about 11%, but a variety of processes make that very impractical. Ping me if you want a detailed discussion on how many photons of a certain wavelength are necessary to fix an molecule of carbon dioxide (about ten it happens)
4 There is a distribution problem and a huge waste problem. About a billion people on Earth are malnourished.
5 It turns out I'm a vegetarian, but I tend not to care about what others eat as that is a personal choice. There is a huge energy advantage to that way of life and that may be important as time goes on, but currently it isn't a huge issue locally in North America.
__________
The beautiful image credit:
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona,
erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second. T
he CME did not travel directly toward Earth, but did connect with Earth's magnetic environment, or magnetosphere,
causing aurora to appear on the night of Monday, September 3.
Picuted here is a lighten blended version of the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths.
Credit: NASA/GSFC/SDO
__________
Recipe Corner
Before fresh sweet corn goes away. It was fantastic. My vegetable broth was incredible with all of the fresh produce this time of year.
Cashew Corn Chowder
Ingredients
° 1 tbsp. coconut oil
° 2 medium yellow onions
° 6 cloves garlic chopped
° 2 tsp. sea salt
° 2 tsp. turmeric
° 1 tsp. cumin
° cayenne to taste
° kernels from 3 ears corn
° 1 kg vegetable broth
° 1 tbsp. freshly-squeezed lime juice
° 60g raw cashews, soaked overnight
Technique
° Heat oil in a large pot over medium heat. When hot, add turmeric, cumin and cayenne and cook for about a minute, until fragrant.
° Add onions and salt, and cook for 5 minutes until softened, then add garlic.
° Add corn kernels to the pot and stir to coat with spices. Cook for 5 minutes then add the remaining broth and bring to a boil
° lower to a simmer and cook until the corn is bright yellow and sweet (about 5 minutes)
° Remove the pot, add the cashews and blend with an immersion blender. You can reserve a few tablespoons of the whole corn kernels for garnish if you're into presentable food.
° Season to taste.
° Return soup to the pot to keep warm. Serve with cilantro cream, a drizzle of olive oil, a few kernels of corn and plenty of cracked black pepper.
Cilantro Cream
° 60g raw cashews, soaked overnight
° 1 tbsp. freshly-squeezed lime juice
° 1 cup cilantro (leaves only, loosely packed)
° 120g water
° 1 tbsp honey
° 1 tsp. sea salt
° pinch cayenne
° ½ small clove garlic
Technique
° Throw in a blender and blend until completely smooth and season to taste
