omenti

connecting the dots with curiously ripe technologies

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

sharpen your dot connection skills...

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Give it a view - great stuff!

 

 

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

 

Nothing like ending on a mixed metaphor...

 

 

the beauty of two triangles

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

 

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

 

It is wonderful to realize you are really solar powered.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What are we really moving?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Recipe   Not re-frieds

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

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

Ingredients

° 1 tbl vegetable oil

° 1 medium onion chopped

° 1 bunch cilantro stems and leaves separated and chopped

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

° 1/2 tsp cumin

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

° 2 cups water

° 1 tsp kosher salt

 

Technique

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

a pre-review

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

from my notebook:

 

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

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

° remember it must be play

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

° be totally honest

° deeply know everything about your problem

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Many cars are much worse.  

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

electric car 101

A question came up yesterday about electric cars and it is clear there is a lot of confusion about some of the fundamentals.  Here is a one minute primer.

 

First you need to think about the difference between power and energy.  It isn't technically an accurate definition but think of energy as a storage system that you can draw on to move things. You may choose to use it quickly or slowly.  The rate at which it is used is power.

 

Think of energy as gasoline and power as what you control with the accelerator.

 

There are any number of labels to measure energy and power and this serves to confuse people.  Energy is just energy and power is just power, so the trick is to pick a unit that is appropriate for the task.  For the automotive world kilowatts (kW) is a good choice for power and kilowatt hours (kWh) for energy.  Remember that power is the rate of energy "used" in a given time so this make sense kWh/h = kW.¹

 

A gallon of gasoline represents about 36.6 kWh of chemical energy that can be liberated when it is burned.  You can put this into a lawn mower and run it for hours or a Ferrari and use it in a few minutes if you can find a road that can handle 200 mph.

 

The battery in a Chevy Volt can store about 16 kWh of electrical energy.  Batteries are large, heavy and expensive compared to the equivalent amount of energy.  So the Volt stores about the same amount of energy as a half gallon of gasoline. A Nissan Leaf stores the equivalent of three quarters of a gallon and the Tesla Roadster about one and a half gallons.

 

It may seem like a lost cause, but the energy must be turned into motion.  An electric car does that with about an 80% efficiency and a gasoline car about 20% - the electric car will go four times as far on an equivalent amount of energy.  And if you compare either with muscle power it quickly becomes apparent why the Industrial Revolution was so significant.

 

So the Volt has about the range that two gallons of gasoline will give in an equivalent sized car and the Tesla has a seven gallon equivalent.²

 

The energy storage numbers may seem small, but they are in the ballpark for commuting.  This is the first time batteries have been good enough to be useful in a 3,500 pound car.  You could make them much more useful by lowering the weight of the car and/or increasing the amount of energy that can be stored in the battery.

 

As for power the battery pack on the Volt can easily delivery energy at a rate to produce up to 111 kW in the car's electric motor - this works out to 149 horsepower.  The Tesla is rated at about 215 kW, which is 288 horsepower.  Automotive scale battery packs that can deliver much more power can be assembled, but the car's range is very low at those rates.  But the bottom line is conventional lithium-ion battery packs can supply enough power to provide gasoline car-like accelerations and cruising speeds.

 

Sorting out the economics is another issue.  10 kWh of electricity is sufficient for 40 miles of driving in a Volt.  At average American utility rates that costs about $1.30 (perhaps under $1.00 if delivered off-peak).  That same 40 miles might require $5 of gasoline in a similar class vehicle.  

 

Of course there is this little matter of battery cost...

 

A Volt battery pack may cost as much as $10,000.  It has some specialized electronics along with the battery and a shielded crash proof casing.   This compares to about $1,000 for the gas tank and fuel handling components of a conventional gasoline powered car. Pure electric cars like the Leaf have lower power train costs and are likely to have much lower maintenance costs over the life of the vehicle.  

 

Currently it is difficult to justify a pure electric car without the $7,500 (or more) subsidy that partly bridges the cost of the energy storage component of the vehicle.  If cars weighed half as much as they do the break-even point would be much closer.  But there is that nagging issue of range.

 

The Department of energy has a variety of programs aimed at doubling the amount of energy that can be stored in a kilogram of a production battery by 2020.   Other goals would reduce the price of a Volt scale pack to under $2,000 by the end of this decade -something that appears to be feasible. An exotic type of battery, a rechargeable metal air battery, could conceivably improve this energy density by a factor of twenty. 

 

Ultimately electrics win as the factor of four in efficiency is too great and battery costs will fall and, with the right upstream energy source, electrics can be very clean.  My best guess is subcompacts will be at parity in price around 2020.  Driving range will not be at parity though.  You will be able to buy 300 mile range pure electrics, but there will be a penalty in purchase price.

 

Real change may occur late in North America.  The real game for the car makers is the "megacity car" - small low range vehicles for the emerging middle class in China, India and other very high growth areas.  The economics of smaller cars may make electric power trains likely in massive scales in the next decade or two.

 

In the meantime there is much you can do in the present to dramatically increase your effective travel efficiency - make your driving more efficient and eliminate it where possible.  

_________

¹ In working through physics problems it is convenient to do a quick check to make sure you have the units right.  If you don't there is an error - it would be nice if the media understood this.  Major pieces appearing in the papers and on TV often fail.

² Although the battery can store 16 kWh, only 10.4 kWh is tapped to allow the battery pack to have a long life.  So the useful equivalent is about 0.3 gallons of gasoline and the range is about the same as 1.2 gallons when you factor in the improved efficiency of the electric drive train.

two triplets of choice and truly massive change

Recently I entered a conversation with an organization that is working on a better understanding of how people might respond to global warming and what are the elements that can impact our choices for change.

 

The subject is enormously complex and multi-disciplinary.  In some parts of the world, notably the US, it has also become politically charged.  But human caused global warming clearly exists and there will be increasing impacts.  That makes it a fantastic problem - perhaps the most important change problem over the next few generations.

 

I like to think about our response to it in terms of admixtures of choices that come in triplets.  The first triplet is how we deal with it.  The choices are mitigation, adaptation and suffering.  Most analyses show mitigation - reducing the impact of the change by working on decreasing its scale before it becomes severe - to be far and away the most cost effective choice.  The costs are still viewed as high relative to other societal costs and most people don’t see the threat as immediate and severe enough to warrant serious efforts.  

 

But even if we could do something dramatic there is something of a flywheel effect from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  We will see an increase in average temperature even if we were to cut our emissions to nearly zero and we’ll have to deal with the consequences as nature adapts - after all, many of us and our children will be around for the ride.  We can control the amount of adaptation either through mitigation or by simply ignoring mitigation and adaptation.  

 

Doing nothing will result in increased human suffering.  The uneven distribution of wealth and resources to people will create pockets of losers and these may be enormous.  A few years ago I spent some time in a group thinking about some of these issues and was left deeply troubled - the sort of thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night with awful nightmares.  Some of these it is probably taking place now, although currently one can only look at these events statistically.  

 

The average world temperature is increasing and that is beginning to have a measurable impact.  Most of us think in terms of sea level and shrinking ice caps, but changing climates are probably a larger issue.  The Earth has seen higher and lower temperatures, but these changes generally have occurred over time scales that have allowed evolution to adapt.  The current changes we are seeing are taking place at a time scale that is much faster than the capacity of evolution to respond.¹

 

Most of our energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels - essentially carbon that has been stored over millions of years.  Traditionally there is a balance in the carbon cycle with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere being more or less regulated at about 275 parts per million (ppm) in recent times.  At least until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Now we could burn coal, petroleum, and natural gas.  All of these were formed by storing carbon that was fixed in photosynthesis over millions of years in a very short amount of time.  Nature is incapable of regulating the increase at the pre-Industrial Revolution level and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to creep up to a bit more than 390 ppm  this year.  It should pass 400 ppm by 2015 at the current rate of increase and much larger numbers seem almost certain.  

 

If we were getting most of our energy - say more than 90% -  from non-carbon sources there would be no global warming issue.  We don't, but we have the capacity for change and that brings me to the second triplet. 

 

You can lower the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by using some admixture of conservation, efficiency, and new types of production.

 

Conservation should be a no-brainer, but convincing people to change their usage patterns can be difficult.  Conservation seems to require motivation, a perceived ability to do something and a trigger that prompts action.  Putting this together rarely happens automatically.

 

At a personal level we were able to decrease the amount of gasoline burned in our car from about 650 gallons per year ten years ago to around 200 gallons per year now.  A bit over 20% of that was from improved efficiency in my driving technique and tweaks to the car itself, but most of the reduction came from simple conservation - careful trip planning and the elimination of unnecessary driving.  The steps are simple, but cars are so convenient that it is difficult getting people to make the efficiency or conservation choice.  For many of us efficiency seems to only be considered when a car is traded. 

 

President Carter famously ran into political problems when he suggested people conserve energy at home and even more when a 55 mph speed limit was introduced (although one can argue that is an efficiency step).  Since then politicians seem to work under the assumption that the American voter is lazy and incapable of serious sacrifice even if sacrifice now may lead to a better future.   They seem to believe we are only capable of responding to the immediate.

 

Efficiency is interesting as more efficient devices can those that use more energy and the user is not left with the conscious decision that conservation requires.  An unsung hero of the efficiency game is Art Rosenfeld of LBL - I strongly recommend a talk he gave a few years ago:

 

 

You do have to be a bit careful implementing efficiency.  A car that is five percent more efficient than what you have may be appealing and it probably makes sense to move to more efficient cars when you trade, but moving just based on efficiency neglects the energy required to build the car in the first place - a figure that is often the equivalent of a year’s worth of driving.  On that basis there may be no energy payback from a small efficiency improvement.  On the other hand there may be enormous opportunities that you are overlooking.

 

Some people suggest that improve efficiency leads to greater energy use and imply that it doesn’t make sense to make our energy using devices more efficient.  The Jervons Paradox is usually invoked in their arguments. In 1865 William Jervons published The Coal Question which argued that producing goods with less energy would not result in an energy savings, but rather would encourage so many new goods that ultimately more energy would be used.   The paradox is also called rebound and, where increased consumption trumps the savings from efficiency, backfire.

 

In the December 20, 2010 edition of The New Yorker David Owen published a popular piece on this under the title “The Efficiency Dilemma”.  Unfortunately his analysis doesn’t hold up under careful examination.  It is the result of careful cherry picking that distorts a larger view of the issues involved.² The net result of smokescreens like this is there is a lot of pushback on the move to increase efficiency even though dramatic improvements have been made since the OPEC embargoes and we are seeing the potential for even more.  There can be an enormous bang for the buck here - but, of course - the payback is not immediate and many organizations are not equipped to perform the analysis required to uncover choices that will help them do more with less.

 

New sources of energy production are sexy for the engineer as well as the investor and ultimately we have to move much of our energy production to low or no carbon sources.³  As new power plants are required it makes sense to move away from high carbon sources, but costs are the driving issue.  Hydrocarbons and the machines that convert their stored energy into more useful forms are very inexpensive - particularly as their economics rarely involve the costs of their carbon emissions.  Working at this level, for small and large scale operations,  often involves government policy as these plants are expensed over very long periods of time.  

 

Most people tend to concentrate on new sources of energy as that appears to require the least change on their part.  You can simply use your stuff and don’t need to change your lifestyle assuming the price changes are sufficiently small.  It is a nice way to avoid thinking about the more complex problem.

 

In summary conservation can be immediate and very inexpensive.  Efficiency improvements take more time and generally have a cost associated with them, but often (not always!) have a greater impact than conservation for the average user.  Moving to new sources of energy is sexy and tends to be expensive (at least over the short term). It offers the least bang for the buck, but it is centrally important over the long term.  All of these can be very inexpensive if applied to mitigation, but people usually neglect the proper analysis of including externalities in their calculations.

 

Going back to the first triplet, mitigation is probably the best and least expensive approach, but the train has left the station and we will be forced to adapt to some change that is inevitable.  How much is an open question and we will have some control over that.  Suffering will also occur - mitigation and adaptation can minimize that, but all of this is expensive, political and off the radar of most of us.

 

The holidays are traditionally a time of hope - after all, the Winter Solstice marks a point where we can now look forward to ever increasing amounts of light.  I don’t mean for this to be a bleak and troubling piece, but rather note we are still at a point where we have choices and much can be done.  The difference one person can make is not necessarily insignificant - look at what Art managed to do - but even if you only make changes in your own life and that of your family, that is progress.  And maybe you will be rewarded with a different perspective for looking at the world.

 

If you try something that you hope will impact others recognize that it may well fail and learn from it.  I spent about a year working with a friend on her plan to promote gardening and biking among children in Southern California.  The ride was bumpy and the program ultimately failed, but it wasn't terribly expensive and we learned a lot from the experience.  Hopefully enough to make the next effort - or the efforts of others - more positive.  And even a failed project is much more rewarding than watching television. 

 

I’m very excited to be working with this small group as they are very serious about trying to move the needle on changing the attitude of people.  This is something that is required if we are going to minimize suffering of our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and beyond.⁴

 

_____

 

¹ At least one of the six great extinctions - the Permian-Triassic event - may have taken place in under 1000 years, so there may be a precedent for something as swift as what we are now witnessing. It is important to note that the real issue is not the absolute temperature change, but rather the rate of change - dT/dt, where T is temperature.  As humans 30 to 100 years seems like a long time and is something we generally don’t plan for, but anything under a few thousand years is a twinkling for natural responses.  We have a huge mismatch.

² It is way beyond the scope of a small posting to get deeply into this, but Owen argues that rebound effects are often in the 10 to 30 percent range and can exceed 100%.  In reality they are usually in the small single digits where they exist at all.  Most devices have relatively modest energy costs that few people respond to.  Responding saved energy costs does lead to indirect energy use, but from 1986 to 2006 only about six to eight percent. Furthermore no saved money can buy more than 100% of the energy in that was originally saved (at least not unless you change to a different type of energy with dramatically different costs).  Most people don’t understand the energy costs of their home furnace or air conditioner and don’t use it more because it is cheaper to operate.  Future energy savings are diluted by capital costs and generally heavily discounted.  Owen improperly neglects other contributing factors to economic growth.  His article is intellectually very fuzzy and lacks rigor and proper logic.

³ Production is an inappropriate term that all of us use.  We don’t “produce” energy, but rather convert it from one from to another as physics tells us energy can’t be created or destroyed and is always conserved.  When we burn coal we are turning energy stored in chemical bonds within the coal into thermal energy and this thermal energy generally produces steam that drives a turbine converting thermal energy into mechanical energy.  The turbine spins a generator converting mechanical energy into electrical energy which is a form we can easily distribute and use.  We think of coal as a fundamental energy source as we mine it, but it is really stored solar energy that was captured by plants usually millions of years ago.

⁴ Sukie and I don’t have children.  Many of the scientists I know who study the impact of global warming - particularly the effects on the ecosystem - seem to have lower fertility rates.  I can understand why as there is a great amount of pessimism that suffering can be avoided.  I’m cautiously optimistic, but doubt we’ll do anything close to optimal.  I may not have children, but I do have younger friends I love and what they may have to deal with deeply disturbs me.

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The drawing is from the extremely skilled pen of Gary Zamchick who created it for Colleen Smith.  Gary is a great guy for involving art in the process of innovation.  I've worked with him and give him two thumbs up:-)

 

on the death of the high fidelity industry

One of the more curious learnings I’ve repeatedly had over the decades is that audio and video quality isn’t terribly important to people.  Some jumps have been important, but at some point quality seems to be “good enough” and people become interested in other metrics like price, mobility, convenience and selection.

 

We did a lot of work on audio compression and there was a drive to make our codec (AAC) the best of its class.  This involved a large amount of human testing and the reference music was mostly compact disc class.  Higher qualities existed, but it was felt compressed music to CD like quality was necessary.  

 

We did it.  By 2000 AAC was recognized as the best of its breed and it was statistically undetectable to most listeners at 128 kilobits per second.¹  A CD is 1440 kbps, so this shrinks the data file for a music track to about 9% of its original size - really useful if your network connection isn’t terribly fast. 

 

Audiophiles had been hoping one of several standards would take off by about that time taking us beyond CD quality, but it never really happened.  Internet delivered music and the iPod fundamentally changed how we listened to music.  A few years ago I came across an article that pointed out the aftermarket for iPod accessories was larger than the entire market for stereo equipment.  Good enough sound quality in our pockets and a large and easy to use library was all we needed - onventional HiFi was dying and some would say it is dead.² 

 

The little white earbuds you see everywhere are not exactly high quality.  For $40 or $50 you can dramatically improve your listening experience and for $150 or so the quality can be fantastic.  But almost no one does it.  The quality issue just doesn’t impact most of us.

 

There are other directions music quality could do - trying to create the sound field - the audio experience - of a concert.  But there is this little problem - outside of multichannel sound for television, no one is spending money on audio equipment and very few people spend serious money on good audio equipment for their televisions.  

 

It just doesn’t matter.

 

mostly³

 

A few years ago some of us revisited the issue of speech quality on telephones.  The frequency range of a normal telephone is small compared with normal human hearing and voices, particularly female voices, are altered.  Mobile phones introduce even more issues with low quality audio compression.  The notion was that expanding the frequency range from about 3 kHz to 7 kHz would make a big difference that people might pay buy.  We did some careful studies on 3 vs 7 vs 20 and came to the conclusion that it isn’t a big deal for most people.   In fact people under 30 had a slight bias to the lower quality sound.

 

I speculate that for music or video there is a point at which the underlying performance is more important.  If we don’t reach that point the performance is merely wallpaper and we don’t pay a lot of attention to it.  As we cross some threshold what is being the performance becomes so engrossing that inferior reproduction isn’t a huge issue to most of us.  I’ve seen this repeated over and over ...  In an earlier post  I noted on an epiphanal moment I had:

 

A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

 

I think live performances are still very important - there is a communication between the performers and the audience and the overall sound field seems to make a difference.  The one way music and video we listen to at home or on the go is a different animal and needs to be considered separately. 

 

This notion of good enough quality is important.  You have to consider the entire user experience and not just some component like audio quality as defined by some engineering metrics that are measured with the listener out of the loop.  

 

It is something to watch for in many other industries.  Most people could care less, and don’t even know what gigahertz, gigabytes and other terms used to sell Wintel based PCs mean.  The same for horsepower and torque.  They are used as sales tools and people might think larger is better, but there is only a vague coupling to the final experience in most cases.  Even non-technical  enthusiasts have trouble with the definitions.

 

Perhaps industries where differentiations are made based on technical terms that are not understood by the customer based are  a good first order cut as those where disruption is possible.

 

Video and theater experiences are another rich and interesting area.  A lot of money is being bet that 3D will cause people to upgrade home TVs as well as go to movies, but there are some good arguments that won't happen.  There are other things that are probably more important in the theater and I tend to doubt the 3D revolution - at least as something that is a sustainable differentiator that will cause people will pay higher ticket prices.  

 

In the meantime I love going to live performances!  In the meantime don't bet on quality metrics unless you understand the complete user experience.

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¹  In fact if you increase the rate to 160 kbps statistically no one can tell the difference on normal music.  The guy who was really obsessed with tuning the codec went to Apple and their version of AAC has made great improvements over the years.

We found that some training is necessary to listen closely enough to music to detect artifacts.  It turns out that hearing ability decreases and anyone over about 35 is useless no matter how good their training.   Audiophiles tend to be males over 40 (and more often over 50) who spend tens of thousands on equipment.   

² Apple recently released their Apple Lossless Codec (ALAC) to open source.  Lossless codecs like Apple's and FLAC tend to offer compressions around three to one.  The file that is compressed can be turned into a file idential to the original so they are "perfect".  A few audiophiles use them and some companies even offer music, but this is a very small business.  

ALAC has some advantages over the other lossless codecs as it works with iTunes and iPods.  It can also work with music recorded at much higher than CD quality.  Now that it is an open standard perhaps it will gain some popularity among the enthusiast set.  The fact that Apple is releasing it shows they don't see any commercial value.  

³ At home I still use my 15 year old amplifier and once fine speakers to connect with my MacBook or iPhone or iPad wirelessly.  My 20,000 or so tracks worth of music is completely portable and distributed where I fancy on listening at the moment.

But I see no need to upgrade the system and the CDs just sit - I converted them (at 256 kbps AAC) a long time ago...

 

tools that lubricate human communication

The telephone was an imperfect approximation of communicating with others at a distance using voice.  It was, and still is, enormously useful and a number of innovations have kept it advancing.  Perhaps the last major innovation that was realized was mobile telephony.  For good or bad we could reach out - and be reached - almost everywhere and a tool had impacted how we communicate.  

 

Great lubrication!

 

Synchronous and asynchronous data communications became important and one company successfully recognized that adding lightweight text to a mobile phone along with a form of email that was relevant to how one segment of the population would be important.  RIM made billions on the Blackberry, but it is important to realize it is only a rough tool that resonated a bit with our deeper needs. 

 

A few years later the iPhone came along with a new type of interface and a good enough window into the Internet - for most people a much better model than the Blackberry.  Of course there are some for whom the Blackberry tool is better than the iPhone (or Android) tool, but for the most part the iPhone model is richer.  

 

And now we are seeing the beginnings of a voice driven data interfaces from Apple and Google ..  There is something that seems fundamentally "right" about Siri even though it is very early in its development.  In a few years we'll begin to learn some answers.  I'm pretty sure the Google approach to finding information and human/machine communication is far from optimal.

 

All of these tools are windows into something much deeper -  us and our desire to communicate. I would bet a lot that we are much closer to the beginning than the end of a period of great change.  The Industrial Revolution took about one hundred and fifty years and we're only about fifty years into the current revolution.

 

From my vantage point I don't see the younger generation as being more adroit simply because they grew up in a new world.  They were surrounded by different tools and defaulted to them making them their own, but these tools will change.  The term digital native is popular, but I don't see the process of change as abrupt with people on one side or the other of a divide -- a rich continuum of tools has been emerging.  Some will replace old modes of communications entirely and some will serve niche groups differently.  And there are surprises when very old tools prove to be much more robust than imagined.

 

It is probably best to keep up with tools and see what serves your own needs better.  Moving to them because they are "new and improved" is the wrong approach.   This is going to be an increasingly interesting and wild ride.  Just like the Industrial Revolution some companies will have brief moments in the Sun, most will vanish and a  few will endure.

 

My intuition tells me we really haven't made dramatic changes in how we deal with time - the Industrial Revolution made an enormous impact on us that lingers even though it is antiquated and perhaps counterproductive.  Perhaps in ten or twenty years communication tools will emerge that finally rip apart our Victorian perception of time.

 

uneven rates of progress

I have just unboxed my new camera and am charging its battery.

 

There is enormous choice these days - enough to make Barry Schwartz shake his head with a bit of disgust.  I spent more than a few hours polling friends who know their way around photography and finally tried a half dozen candidates before settling on the compromise that hopefully will cover my needs.  All of the candidates were compromises.

 

There was a time when I loved photography.  My camera was an ancient  second hand Leica M3 that was nearly perfect as far as I was concerned.  It was completely manual in operation, but the controls were perfectly placed and operated smoothly.

 

The Leica was an extension of my eyes and hands.  I would see something and while my mind worried about composition somehow the shutter would fire at the right time.  

 

I spent time worrying about what film to use and the details of processing. That part was expensive so I didn't shoot as much as I would have liked, but the process of photography was enormously satisfying.  Most of the best images I've ever taken came from that period.

 

I stupidly sold the Leica twenty years ago when I bought into a 35mm Nikon SLR system.  The camera was beautifully made and some of the prime lenses were optically amazing, but it was never an extension of my soul.  I tended not to use it.  

 

At one point I found myself helping out on a photoshoot with a famous fashion and portrait photographer.  Alberto used a 6x7cm Bronica and was so comfortable with it that it seemed to be an extension of his mind.  To check the lighting on the model he pulled out an ancient Polaroid camera, fired a few test shots with the strobes, and made the mental adjustments of how he would use his medium format camera.  There were two bodies - his assistant would load the spare with film, while he shot with the other.  It was amazing to watch him practice his art and to see how many of the negatives were usable.   It was also frightening to watch him burn through several thousand dollars of film and processing in the course of a ten hour shoot.  

 

Digital photography finally changed his world and radically altered the fee structure. In the hands of a pro, a $40k Hasselblad quickly pays for itself.  At the high end user interface and experience are critically important and the pros make their choices on that as well as whatever lenses they have.   The process of photography has changed - art directors and models get immediate feedback from tethered computers and ten hour shoots become five hour shoots.  Amazing cameras.

 

The little digital camera I unboxed earlier today has one of the best user interfaces and experiences of the digital cameras in my price range, but it is jarringly awful compared to the UX of my iMac and iPhone.   I doubt I'll ever be comfortable enough with it that it feels like and extension of myself.  On the other hand it takes good photos and, if I don't could the camera's price,  the cost per image is essentially zero.  The images are in a form that are much more useful to me than film.  Positive progress on several fronts and negative progress in one that is very important to me.

 

Shopping for the camera made me think about the marketing of high technical content items.  Many of the aspects that are really important - the modulation transfer function curves of the optical train,  pixel size and response, dark noise, and so on are rarely communicated.  Pixel count is stressed, although it turns out not to be that important.  On-camera image manipulation is pushed although any image editing program is vastly superior.  The marketing message does not overlap well with what the camera really is - you have to spend some time with one and see if it is going to work for you.  For me this means going to a real camera shop - something that has almost disappeared from the landscape.  I find paying list, but being able to audition what I will have to live with for the next 5 to 10 years a small price to pay.

 

I also found myself reflecting on how far digital photography has come.  I've built several cameras over the years.  Pinhole cameras and a Brownie-like wooden camera that used an old lens someone gave me when I was 12.  It had a shutter and iris from a fleamarket camera and took some surprisingly good photos.  There were also a few cameras for my telescope.

 

In 1984 I made my first digital camera.  I was working at Bell Labs where work had been done on CCD cameras for videophones a decade earlier (resulting in a recent Nobel Prize).  I wanted to build a simple digital camera to capture images on my new Mac 128 and faced some roadblocks.  First it was impossible to get a suitable CCD array and second the port on the Mac was a weird RS-422 standard and programming the beast was awful.  

 

Silicon is photosensitive (duh) and I decided to see how good a DRAM chip would be.  A call to someone in chip packaging at the Western Electric Allentown Works produced a small bag of 16 and 32 kilobit DRAMs nicely mounted in ceramic packages with the top protective cap removed.¹  I put one on a scope and found it to be practical for camera experiments.

 

The trick was to put the DRAM in the focal plane of a simple camera lens mounted on a homemade wooden box.  The first camera had a conventional iris and shutter.  It had 16 kilopixels each with 1 grey level.  I could only read a white or black signal.  That was in November and by then my 128k Mac was now a 512k Mac and I could program the beast.  Writing the i/o for the serial port was the big challenge.  The display was really trivial on the little Mac.  Soon there was a second generation camera with an electronic "shutter".  I would write zeros to all of the memory locations and then read them out later. Generation three happened in mid 1985 with an electronic shutter camera with 3 bits of grey level per pixel.  That was as far as I went.

 

The photo shown is of Meltdown, one of our ferrets, taken with the generation 2 camera with a flash.  The best name ever for a ferret - she was born near the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant.  It turns out the name matched her personality, but such is the case of silvermitt ferrets.  It turns out to be one of our few surviving photos of her.  Somehow it kept getting backed up and moved from machine to machine over the years, while our negatives, slides and many of our albums were in the cool basement for preservation.  That seemed like a good idea until the 8 year warranty hot water heater failed at year 6 and destroyed our archive.   

 

Sixteen kilopixels to sixteen megapixels and one to twelve bits per pixel and amazing autofocus and other capabilities in around 25 years and, in 2011 dollars my current camera is much less expensive.  

 

But the project deepened my ties to the resident artist at Bell Labs and that took me down several extremely paths - an important part of my education.

 

Now all I want is one with a UX that is the equal of my old Leica.  Steve Jobs has legitimized good UX in products that are largely defined by engineering.  Perhaps there is a company that will step up and make a "magical" camera for me.

 

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¹ This was a home project where I bought everything but the memory chips.  My director thought it was a neat idea and suggested that I get some same chips to play with, although that was probably stretching the rules a bit.