The past nine months has been hard for me. Three good friends are gone. The first was Dewayne Hendricks - probably the smartest radio person I've met. Our weekly calls ranged from his love of sci-fi everything (then Sukie would get on the call as that's her area) to working out some interesting math relevant to new ideas for radio propagation to just listening to his wonderful stories. He grew up and had to make his way in a racist country that hasn't learned much and is currently racing towards white supremacism. His passing left a big hole in the Universe.
Next was Rohini Godbole. Standing four foot eight and maybe weighing seventy five pounds, she became a giant in the advancement of women in STEM careers in India. Both of us lived in Stony Brook (we received our Ph.Ds there), but did most of our work twenty miles to the East at Brookhaven National Laboratories. She didn't have a car so we carpooled in my ancient VW talking about math and on the way out and physics on the return trip. We'd leave a bit before five in the morning as computer time until eight and would pick up a bagel on the way. She had a thing for cinnamon raisin. It was on one of those trips where both of us came to an understanding of what Peter Higgs had said in his paper. She was talking about superconductivity when we had one of those oh-my-god-pull-the-car-over moments. I'm so grateful for having known and learned from and with her. India is a richer and more diverse country due to her efforts in educating and inspiring young women.
And then there's my sister Juliette Powell who passed last month at 54. I've written about her on this blog. She's an excellent example of the need for smart women in tech companies. I learned a lot from her thinking and she changed my mind on more than a few things.
All three possessed a special clarity of thought. All three were minorities who had to navigate multiple cultures, racism, classism, and in two cases, sexism. I'm convinced the fact they were different from me was key to our friendship and progress.
Thinking about what's normal reminds me of the work of Lieutenant Gilbert Daniels at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in the 1950s. In the early fifties new fighter jets were killing pilots - even those with serious WWII and Korean War experience - at a frightening rate. The conjecture was cockpit complexity was getting ahead of people. Daniels was just out of Harvard with a degree in statistics and an interest in the physical design of cockpits. To save cost and deal with a size budget dictated by aerodynamic design, cockpit dimensions had been standardized. Over 4600 active pilots had dozens of measurements taken. Daniels looked at what was considered to be the ten most important and looked for averages. Not one of the 4600 were average in all ten (the definition of average in each was quite wide). Picking the three most important he found that less than four percent of the pilots could be considered average using that much weaker criteria. His work led to adjustable cockpit designs and death rates plummeted. No such animal as "average" exists. I'm personally convinced difference are even broader when you look at how we think. There is not such thing as neurotypical.
Last week I came across a preprint of a study that considered how culture changes how we see the world. Three groups of people - the Himba people in Namiba, residents of a semiurban Namiban town, and people in the US and UK were asked to look at six optical illusions and report what they saw. The divergence was dramatic. One of the illusions was the (in)famous Coffer illusion. Take a look - what do you see? I'll confess to taking nearly a minute before I could see the circles. About half of the Himba people only saw circles and the other half saw rectangles and circles. The Western population only saw rectangles and the semiurban saw a mixture. It opens up so many questions.
These days I try to work with a mixture of people with very different backgrounds. A youngish female cosmologist at the Perimeter Institute just sees things so differently than her male counterparts. Not better - but different. Different is better when you're trying to make progress. Organization that think and act otherwise are kneecapping themselves.
I was going to include something on average progress in learning and sport, but that would take too much time. Later!
comments on innovation
A few weeks ago my friend Om began a piece on innovation with the torpedo bat. As with anything Om writes, it's a recommended read. I have an interest in innovation in sport, but will start with some more general comments.
I tend to see innovation as a step in a chain: discovery → invention → development → innovation. These usually don't come from the same organizations and can span a large amount of time. There's also a great non-linear mixing. Discoveries can lead to other discoveries, inventions can lead to discoveries and so on. I've been involved in the first three areas at different times. In my mind innovation is a successful change that embeds itself in some area. I've never been directly involved in that process, although things I've worked on have led to it.
It isn't an efficient process and efforts to make it more efficient usually fail. Research, the leading edge, is often broken into three areas: curiosity driven research, high impact research and applied research. Various labels are used, but curiosity driven research is where major change often comes from. In the US it's much rarer than it once was as funders expect progress on a time schedule. High impact is more common - research that is likely to achieve a stated goal. And finally applied research can be thought of as the leading edge of development.
In many disciplines innovation is the only segment recognized and richly rewarded by the public, but they're all difficult and necessary,
Witnessing the current US regime's attack on science and education is beyond disturbing. I'll stick with the research side as that's what I know best, but the attacks on intellectual freedom, students, faculty and funding will lead to medium term programs and long term disaster for the country and beyond. As an example very little basic research on drugs is done in pharmaceuticals. They take research from universities and the NIH and apply it. An important step, but the pipeline is being destroyed as I write. And the attach on education in general will dry up human resources at all stages. The price the nation will pay for acting on grievance will be enormous.
With that off my chest I'll go back to sports. The International Olympic Committee talks about three principles: fairness, safety and inclusion. I've written about the importance of the ordering of these and the interpretation from science, so I won't expand on that here, but I'll add that entertainment is part of the picture. Some sports are big business as is betting on them. That can and does drive the ordering of the three basic principles.
The quest to win and safety create a desire for innovation. About ten years ago I became interested in the fluid dynamics of a volleyball in flight. Princeton has a rich collection of sports science papers. There are hundreds of papers on baseball, cricket, soccer, rugby, American football, hockey, tennis and the so-called Olympic sports. There are dozens of papers on baseball ranging from the fluid dynamics of the ball in flight, neurology and vision (odd fact - of all occupations and spots, major league baseball players have the highest vision acuity by a good margin. They also have slower than average reaction times), kinesiology, and so on. The physics of bat design and sweet spots goes back to the 1950s. Innovation like the torpedo bat is the results of successful design and testing as the fundamental work has been around for a while.
Running shoes, bicycle design and swimsuits are more controversial areas. All are now regulated for fairness although it raises the question of what a record means. Track bikes from before 1995 were much faster than current designs so how do you compare records. Innovation in shoe design over the past five years has rendered records many track events obsolete. Some innovations are less controversial, although their impact has been great. And there are flexible bars and floors in gymnastics, a steady progression of tennis racket design and so on.
And then there's innovation in technique. The Fosbury flop in the high jump is often considered the single most revolutionary innovation in sport. There's a good deal of innovation in coaching that comes from just trying things to the application of kinesiology. a better understanding of physiology, psychology and even sociology.
With all of this innovation and change there's something more fundamental. The passion, focus and drive of elite athletes. Knowing a few Olympians has taught me a lot about that. At the highest level of sport I suspect that's a constant that remains unchanged. That fierce passion exists in many other endeavors, but sport offers a simple language most of us can understand giving us a way to celebrate excellence.
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With all of the political craziness in the US, I've been listening to music and doing math as a diversion. Here's a wonderful performance of the "Pa-pa-ge-na! Pa-pa-ge-no!" duet from Die Zauberflöte. . It's not often you see a coloratura soprano in the role and there's serious musical chemistry in play.
Posted at 10:18 AM in friends, general comments, music, sports | Permalink | Comments (0)
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