omenti

bondi blue

a minipost

Ask elite beach volleyball players to name their favorite beach and Bondi Beach often comes up.  The sand isn't world class, but the water - that amazing blue - can take your breath away.  There's a bit of a controversy on pronunciation, but I've heard an Australian player go with bond-eye.

 

About twenty five years ago Steve Jobs had to bring Apple back from its near-death experience.  There wasn't much in the way of in-house new technology, but Jobs had Jony Ive as well as his own taste.  They went with the iMac.  A strangely shaped, but very cute, little computer with a semi-translucent bondi blue case.  Pundits noted there wasn't anything new except design and pronounced it and Apple dead on arrival.  Apple sold enough to buy time for for the transition to an operating system and later a processor migration (one of two!), all the time working on "company-killing" products like a portable music player and a smartphone. 

 

The surprise success of the iMac set off a tidal wave of design element copycats.  Suddenly everything from routers to hair dryers sported translucent cases - often in bondi blue.  As far as I can tell the new design language didn't case a sensation in any of the non-Apple markets.

In the past month I've seen partly thought-out plans to include LLMs like ChatGPT in some way into existing or newly dreamed up products.  None of them were clearly articulated. Somehow ChatGPT or an equivalent would supply the appropriate magic.  LLMs have become the new bondi blue (bondization?)  There are clear usage cases as well as those that aren't.  I suspect a lot of money will be burned with a single digit survival rate .. sort of what one sees during Cambrian explosions.  

 

I won't comment here on the dangers of these technologies other than noting regulation is necessary with a well-defined "open", ownership of rights to all training data, evolution of regulation, etc.  History across many industries tells us industry shouldn't be involved in its own regulation.  

 

 

 

LIGHTS ALL ASKEW IN THE HEAVENS: Men of science more or less agog

One of the best New York Times headlines ever (although sexist) referred to the total solar eclipse on May 29, 1919 - the longest solar eclipse in over 500 years.  Two teams looked to see if the apparent position of stars near the eclipsed solar disc would be shifted as Einstein had predicted a few years earlier.  Sir Arthur Eddington's team, on the island of Principe, had clear weather and was able to confirm Einstein's prediction.  Much to his dismay, Einstein became a public superstar. 

 

General Relativity makes predictions that seem strange as we're used to the everyday force of gravity as described by Newton.  Black holes are probably the most famous prediction of something that pops out of the physics.  They're not massive bodies, but rather a region in space associated with enough mass in a compact region that nothing, including light,  that falls in can ever leave.  It's the stuff of good and bad science fiction and good science.

 

A black hole the mass of the Sun would have a six kilometer diameter.   A five solar mass black hole would be thirty kilometers across  You may object as the volume of a sphere goes as the cube of its radius.  It turns out black hole's diameter increases linearly with mass. A massive black hole can be much larger than you might expect.¹

 

Besides the date, the motivation for this post is a video from NASA showing how big some of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can get.  It turns out there's a limit ( it's a bit technical) and the largest black hole shown here is close.  But just wow!

 

 

__________

¹ Blame General Relativity - at least that's the usual approach.  You can see it by working out the Schwartzschild radius, but that requires a bit of differential geometry and, trust me, I'm not clever enough to give a quick non-technical explanation...  and not for a lack of trying. But there's a simple way to see it.  The event horizon is a limit in spacetime rather than an object.   You can use a Newtonian analogy and high school physics to think about it.  Consider the escape speed some radius out from a spherically symmetric mass - it's a spherical surface where the sum of its kinetic and potential energy is zero.  Fix the velocity and you get

r = 2GM/v²  

So no surprises. You get a similar scaling in General Relativity and you then realize you're not describing an object.

 

stochastic parroting

a minipost

I just did this (and switched from literary fiction to autobiography between generating the title and the review:-)

It babbles with authority.  There are some great use cases as well as many that are just wrong. (Auto-regressive LLMs are going to auto-regress.  Stay safe and keep your hands on the keyboard:-)

 

 

User
Make up a plausible title and author name for a work of literary fiction.

ChatGPT
Title: "The Songbird's Lament"
Author: Seraphine Monroe

User
With a critical review of Seraphine Monroe's autobiography "The Songbird's Lament"

ChatGPT
Title: Critical Review of "The Songbird's Lament" by Seraphine Monroe

Review:

Seraphine Monroe's autobiography, "The Songbird's Lament," takes readers on a soul-stirring journey through the highs and lows of her extraordinary life. With poetic prose and raw vulnerability, Monroe invites us into her inner world, where triumph and tragedy intertwine like the melodies of a haunting song.

Monroe's storytelling prowess shines as she paints vivid pictures of her experiences, evoking a range of emotions within the reader. From the opening chapters, where she recounts her humble beginnings in a small coastal town, to the dizzying heights of her international music career, Monroe's narrative captivates and mesmerizes.

One of the book's most significant strengths is Monroe's ability to infuse each page with an enchanting atmosphere. Whether she's describing the vibrant streets of Paris or the desolate landscapes of her personal struggles, her lyrical descriptions transport readers to the heart of the moment. The sensory richness allows us to truly connect with her journey on a profound level.

However, amidst the beauty and eloquence, "The Songbird's Lament" occasionally stumbles. The book's pacing feels uneven at times, with certain sections lingering too long on less impactful events, while other crucial moments are hastily brushed over. This imbalance disrupts the narrative flow and leaves the reader wanting more depth and exploration in some key areas of Monroe's life.

Furthermore, while Monroe's lyrical style is undoubtedly a highlight, it occasionally veers into self-indulgence. The introspective musings, while poetic, sometimes come across as self-absorbed, leaving readers yearning for a more balanced perspective and a broader exploration of the people and relationships that shaped her journey.

Despite these minor shortcomings, "The Songbird's Lament" remains a captivating memoir that offers a glimpse into the inner workings of a talented artist's mind. Monroe's courage in baring her soul and sharing her triumphs and vulnerabilities is commendable. Her story serves as a reminder that even the most enchanting melodies can emerge from the depths of pain and struggle.

In the end, "The Songbird's Lament" is a testament to Monroe's undeniable talent as a writer and her ability to capture the essence of the human experience through her words. It is a book that will resonate with music enthusiasts, dreamers, and anyone who seeks solace in the power of art and the resilience of the human spirit.

 

spoken, written, and semi-spoken language

a minipost

My wife thinks it's funny when I'm talking with a native-speaking Montanan. After about fifteen minutes my accent shifts towards my almost hidden native accent.  It's still there,  buried under so many years living out of the state.  The funny thing is neither I nor my Montanan friend notice what's happening.  Similarly I can code-switch and fit into the culture of my parents church - at least over the phone as my beard and dress don't conform with the standards. 

 

In high school I spent a lot of time in Alberta and became fascinated by Canadian English.  I didn't realize Albertan, like the Montanan, was a dialect of its own.  There were the obvious Canadianisms comedians emphasize, but my attempts at using them were unconvincing.  Canadians tend to be unusually polite, but deep down inside they know your attempts are clueless. In college I ran into people from all over the world and quickly got to the point where many of the "rules" of spoken English didn't bother me like they did my k-12 teachers.  

 

A friend happens to be a computational linguist specializing in the rhythm and sound of a language - the prosody of language. Getting this part right - good enough to begin to add the meaning in speech that's often missing in text - is one of those hard problems.  I've read a few  of the papers in her field and find them jargon laden and bewildering.  Still, there's something very important that we just do naturally.  There's another branch of linguistics that's more accessible.  Sociolinguists studies how society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context impacts language.   The good stuff all of us use and misuse. Aalthough nothing like earlier changes in the language, there's constant change. The Gen Z meaning of wholesome comes to mind as a  recent shift in progress.

 

One of my most dramatic experiences with the sociology of language came as I was finishing my graduate work. A Chinese professor who didn't speak English was visiting the physics department. Not really an issue as there were several native-born professors and graduate students.  I was working something out on a blackboard and didn't realize he was watching.  He walked up, took a piece of chalk (yes -- we had lovely chalk back then), and gave me a look that asked permission to annotate what I was doing. It turned out he was interested in the same area.  We went back and forth using drawings and equations that were part of the culture we shared and had a lovely conversation for about fifteen minutes.  It occurred to me afterwards that we were relying on facial expressions and posture along with the chalk marks and never spoke a word.  Afterwards I reproduced what remained on the blackboard in my lab notebook.  Not that it was profound, but rather that it was such a nice chat.  He was only around for a few more days, but there were grins every time we saw each other.

 

Two weeks ago a linguist (not the prosody expert) gave me a beginner's tour of sociolinguistics by Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude  Arguing for the Good in Bad English.   It's great fun! Learn where change in language comes from (hint - it's not upperclass/educated males), how text messaging is entirely different for teens and their 35 year old parents, why ums and uhs in speech are beneficial and much more.   I'd go for the audiobook as she gives acoustic examples.  I'm not good at communication, but now at least I'm a bit more aware.   

 

 

there's no cow on the ice

A close friend and I have been exchanging emails several times a week for nearly thirty years.  I hadn't heard from him in a week, so I asked if everything was alright.   He replied with a single line:

Der er ingen ko på isen.

He's very Danish and, although I'm barely read-only in that tongue, I knew immediately there was nothing to worry about.  The idiom means there's no cow on the ice.   Danes happen to be a practical people. If your cow was on the ice, you'd have something to worry about. 

 

Idioms mean more than the words that make them up are a wonderful window into a culture.  They can come from different periods, subcultures, age groups, common experiences and so on.   And they can hold on well past the time they were coined. 'Hun stikker ikke op for bollemælk' means 'she doesn't stick up for milk dumplings' and is still in use even though the farming references are lost on almost everyone.

 

Courtesy of a couple of Danish friends, I keep a list of Danish idioms and think I understand where they came from a bit more.¹  I'm sure they don't think about where they come from, just didn't think about 'it's raining cats and dogs', until I heard the Danish equivalent which translates to 'it's raining shoemaker's apprentices'.  We're like the fish who doesn't realize it's swimming in water. 

 

A few years ago I started wondering about quantum leap/quantum jump - the idiom that is entirely different from what quantum [anything] means in physics and chemistry. Of course it's so wired in popular culture that it's completely displaced the original meaning. 

 

Pulling out my tiny text two volume OED with its magnifying glass, I find an early use in 1649 referred to a share or allotment: “Poverty is her portion, and her quantum is but food and raiment.”  In about 1870 it was first used in physics to describe the the smallest quantity of electric fluid. At the turn of the century Planck and Einstein started using it in the sense that light consists of small and measurable pieces of energy.  Something very small. In the 20s as quantum mechanics developed the energy change in an atom or molecule was discrete - it was quantized.  In physics and chemistry a quantum jump or leap represents a tiny amount of energy.

 

Quantum mechanics is the study of this tiny world that has properties that are counter to what we're used to experiencing.  It includes particle/wave duality, superposition, entanglement and so on.  By the 50s a deeper understanding had emerged.  It was becoming clear the subatomic world could be more accurately described by fields rather than just particles and forces.   That's what I think about when I hear quantum.  To shift gears to  culture outside of physics I must 'at sluge en kamel' - swallow the camel.

 

According to the OED (I had to resort to the electronic version in the library as my copy is too old) the first use of 'quantum leap' to mean 'very large' came in a 1956 document describing the US-Soviet balance of power:

“The enormous multiplication of power, the ‘quantum leap’ to a new order of magnitude of destruction.”

 It had been used as its opposite and somehow it caught on.  This isn't uncommon with words and phrases..  smart, nice, awful, awesome and many others have been turned around.  There's probably a term for this.

 

I was going to write something the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment as it has also become an idiom, but that can wait as it's fascinating for other reasons.

 

Så er den ged barberet

__________

¹ Note that I use English idioms to explain some of them

At stå op før fanden får sko på -- "get up before the devil puts on his shoes"

Spis lige brød til -- "have some bread with that" (telling someone to calm down)

Hold da helt ferie -- "take a whole holiday"  (no way!)

Lokummet brænder -- "the toilet is burning" (there are big problems)

Der er ugler i mosen -- "there are owls in the bog" (something suspicious is going on)

Man kan ikke både blæse og have mel i munden -- "you can't blow and have flour in your mouth at the same time" (you have to choose)

Skægget i postkassen "beard in the mailbox" (caught red handed)

At gå som katten om den varme grød "To walk like a cat around hot porridge" (to beat around the bush)

Så er den ged barberet "The goat is shaved"  (done with a big task .. big enough for a celebration)

 

 

manpo-kei, gold plated teaspoons and home runs

A friend had been struggling to find regular physical activity for a few years.  She complained enough about a lack of motivation that her brother gave her a low-end Fitbit for Christmas.  Somehow the pedometer function clicked for her.  Being able to see the numbers of steps was as motivating for her as filling in circles on an Apple Watch is for other people.  On top of this she'd heard about the magic 10,000 step number.  Initially the goal was beyond her, but she was motivated and within a couple of weeks she was there.  She's kept it up and regularly does 15,000 a day along with increasing her speed.  Her blood pressure is down from last year's number and she feels healthier.

 

In the 60s a Japanese company marketed a pedometer known as the Manpo-kei - which translates to the ten thousand step meter.  The pedometer became a fad and somehow the 10,000 step goal was enshrined in popular culture.  There's no reason why the number means anything other than being something like five miles of walking for most people.  That's over an hour of walking and good exercise. So people who aim for the number are getting a good benefit because the general direction of walking a lot is healthy rather than the number being the "right" target. 

 

The NY Times recently ran an article on some inaccuracies in smart watches.  It doesn't surprise me.  I've been around Olympic programs and athletes for a few years and know some horror stories about the over-reliance of data when you don't know it's accuracy or the context of the measurement or its use.  Like anything else with data, you need to know why, what and how you're measuring, manipulating, and finally interpreting and using the information.  In sport that turns out to be difficult.  There are a number of interesting approaches to deal with the issues, but that's another post. 

 

The NY Times piece and elite training experience suggest broad trends over time are much more important than local accuracy and precision  If you're trying to improve your fitness level or play amateur level sports, the motivation from a smartwatch can make a big difference.  If you're an elite athlete there are many other things to consider and it's likely you're taking advantage of them.

 

The notion of broad trend over local accuracy has utility in many areas.  One that frustrates me is building  carbon dioxide removal technology.  It's something of a delaying tactic being cheerleaded by the petrochemical and coal industries.  In reality it's extremely expensive, requires a large amount of energy and diverts funding from much more effective technologies and behaviors.  Currently four 1 million ton  class plants are on the drawing board.  With luck each could remove a million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 or so with a projected cost of about a billion dollars each.  So how much of an impact is that?

 

A million tons of carbon dioxide is about 1/40,000 of current yearly emissions.  That's roughly the same ratio as a teaspoon to a bathtub full of water.  Imagine running the tub and in the time it takes to fill it, you can remove a teaspoon of water.  The bathtub keeps running..  in the time another tub of water comes out of the spigot, you can remove a second teaspoon.  And then a third, forth and so on.  

 

We currently have many deployable technologies and behaviors that will turn the tap down much more than a teaspoon worth for far less money.  When we're finally down to the point where we're only putting a gallon or so of water into the tub each year, then it might make sense to deploy a number of teaspoons to make a difference for where it's difficult to turn the tap (aviation and shipping for example) 

 

Spend some money and talent learning how to improve the process, but don't count on it in the near term as it isn't, and will never be,  a silver bullet.  Nothing it.  all we can hope for is silver buckshot and using as much as we can possibly afford.  It makes sense to use the buckshot with the greatest cost/benefit ratio - things like wind, solar, better power grids, efficient transportation (full sized EVs don't count!), and any number of energy thrifty behaviors. 

 

And finally home runs and climate change.  Recently a paper made the major news outlets with projections that climate change will have an impact on Major League Baseball home runs: "Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming."  The paper is poorly done .. basically a sensitivity analysis based on a single variable. I won't give it the credibility of a link.  Something that doesn't work in the real world with something as complex as baseball.  I have a some expertise in the fluid dynamics of balls flying through the air and would argue the effect is small.  In fact they note the same thing, but word the conclusion to make it appear there is an effect and climate change impacts everything.  This is pure clickbait for news organizations and probably has the impact of diverting attention from much more serious issues associated with global warming.  It's trivial to see the home run impact is insignificant, but a poorly done analysis can lead to fuzzy thinking and even harm.

 

the other dick fosbury

A few years ago I was having fun of  thinking about the fluid dynamics of a ball moving through the air.  The main focus was  beach volleyball, but also several other sports that use roughly spherical balls. Of these, the two with the most curious motions are table tennis and beach volleyball.   It came as a surprise as soccer (football in most of the world) has dramatic movements and baseball can be tricky, but they're not in the league of these two other sports.  People found it fun so I decided expand it into a college level class - a one semester physics of sport course for non-majors.

 

It was a very interactive affair,.  After a few weeks a few coaches and their assistants turned up,  offering things to think about.  After going through the Fosbury flop, one of the track and field coaches mentioned there had been a similar innovation in long jump, but it had been outlawed as too dangerous.  He pointed out you lose a lot of energy at takeoff by leaning back at takeoff.  The innovation was to halt the loss doing a forward somersault.  He couldn't remember the name of the athlete who did it, but thought it was in the mid 70s with World Athletics quickly banning it.

 

That evening I took pencil to paper and came to the conclusion it could increase distance traveled by as much as ten percent.  Ten percent is a change in sport where people will try crazy things for fractions of a percent.  Eventually around I found the athlete - a student from New Zealand who would have had the world record on his first attempt if he had slightly better form.  There were a few still images, but no video.  

 

With the recent passing and celebration of the life of Dick Fosbury I decided to look again.  Two years ago  an interview with a video of the jump was posted.  Long jump records would probably be over ten meters if it hadn't been banned.  The physics is simple - the leap was realizing you didn't have to lean back.

something deeply profound

David Epstein mentioned Hillel Einhorn's epiphany about happiness - something triggered by a fortune cookie.

beyond the equal sign

 

 

 

About ten years ago I devoted a good deal of time to learning a bit of category theory - an area of abstract mathematics that's become important to physics.  It deals with relationships rather than objects, abstractions and analogies, context, sameness, equivalence rather than equality, how you see patterns, and much more.  It can impact thinking in many areas beyond mathematics. It provides a rigorous framework that gives choice in how problems are approached and take you beyond  putting things in boxes that don't always make sense.

 

It's very technical, but Eugenia Cheng has written an excellent non-major freshman level book with the goal of getting art students to think about the world differently.  I suspect it will work for many other people - particularly those who have to deal with complexity and seeing curious patterns that are otherwise missed.  The Joy of Abstraction is one of those rare books that can change how you see the world.  I'd recommend getting a physical version and doing the exercises. (I don't buy books from Amazon and recommend you support local bookstores)

 

Steve Strogatz chatted with her on this episode of his Joy of Wh(y) podcast.  Listen even if the book doesn't strike you as interesting!

 

 

a celebration of homophones

For those who use the American mm/dd/yyyy,  it suggests 3.14   With an error of about 0.05%, it’s a good enough approximation for many uses.  And those who use the more common dd/mm/yyyy notion can wait for the 22nd of July for 22/7. At  0.04% from the mark, this one's a slightly better approximation. 

 

But just how much Pi do you really need? Eight digits is overkill for most engineering tasks. NASA uses 16 digits .. 15 to the right of the decimal .. to navigate around the solar system going beyond Pluto. The most I can imagine would be to construct a high quality circle the radius of the known universe, about 46 billion light years, to the diameter of a hydrogen atom,. You’d need 38 significant digits for the task.

 

xkcd has a piece on approximations that’s painfully true. For some back of the envelope calculations in astrophysics and cosmology you can get by with crude approximations.

 

 

It’s also Einstein’s birthday. Pie, being a homophone of Pi, seems to the a good bet for the day. I have it on good authority he loved cherry pie and ice cream, so there you go.

 

He’s one of a dozen or so people who have quotes improperly ascribed to them.  He was a joker and much of what he did say is often taken out of context.  But here's a real one I love. Shortly before his death he was asked to offer advice to young people.  His reply was published in Life Magazine.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."   A. Einstein 1955