omenti

sorting out what a product announcement means to you

Our neighbor left the box with my mother.  He was an Air Force Captain taken with building things of one kind or another.  During my Junior year in high school it was building electronic kits.  Back in the day that meant anything from Heathkit.  The company produced well-designed stereo components, oscilloscopes, an analog computer (long story, but my high school had one), test equipment, and amateur radio gear.  If you knew how to solder they were almost idiot-proof and you could repair them yourself when they broke.  A few of his old projects somehow made it to me.

 

It was a Heathkit AA-40 - a 40 watt per channel class A tube amplifier.  Unlike many of his gifts it still worked. The problem was I didn't have a turntable or speakers.  We had a family stereo, but touching it would have been socially dangerous.  I found an old turntable and a single very not very good speaker.  Anything moderately good was out of the question. Sometimes it's useful if you can't afford something.

 

I had read that the mass of the driven element, a speaker cone, was important.  Low mass meant high acceleration for a given force.  It made sense.  There were exotic electrostatic speakers with even lower masses than a cone.  Supposedly they sounded great, but had some technical issues.   It started me wondering if I could go to an even lower driven mass. 

 

A feature or flaw about me is I'm usually more interested in how something works than what it does or what it might do for me.  I thought ham radio would be exciting.  It turns out it was mostly people telling you how good your signal was, the weather and a few other boring things.  On the other hand how radio waves propagated through the atmosphere was fascinating and still is.  Faced with needing a speaker I was drawn to the basics.  It was just turning an electrical signal into a mechanical motion which would create a string of pressure differences in the air.  Speaker coils, magnets and paper cones.  On the other hand if I could make a plasma dance... 

 

I used a blow torch with a wick made out of asbestos (I know) that brought a salt solution into the flame.  Of course there was a background noise and it was a serious fire hazard, but you can't have everything at once.  The amplifier's output went into a high voltage transformer from a junked TV and into two electrodes in the flame.   It worked! The flame moved  in time to the music which was sort of identifiable as music.  It sounded terrible with the hiss and wasn't exactly safe for indoor use. But I've never been an audiophile, so it was an achievement in my book.

 

The same with a lot of technology.  It's deeply fascinating, but how chips are made and how semiconductors work seems more interesting than how I use them. And how people use technology is more interesting than how I use it.   (Sociology is way beyond me.)   There's a lot I'm interested in, but when it comes to personal adoption I tend to be in the middle and sometimes the trailing edge.  I'll buy something new,  like the first iPod or iPhone, and replace it every year until it does what seems useful.  Then I keep it until it fails or, like my old MacBook Pro, has a maddening keyboard.

 

I'm mostly in Apple's ecosystem so smartphone means iPhone to me. As time goes on I've made an effort to rely on it less and less.  It packs enough very useful features that I wouldn't go back to a pre-computer wireless phone, but my four year old phone is currently in a wait until it fails mode.

 

That said I follow Apple developer's conferences and product announcements.  The current iPhone 13 has a remarkable set of photographic and video capabilities.  Computational photography gets better every year and is now at stun level.   Apple is using the processor, graphics processor and machine learning hardware at the same time in some of the modes.   It's astounding.  If you're a serious photographer like Om or Bryan, you probably need one and have already ordered.  The device seems mature at this point.  They didn't make a big deal of it being faster, but rather concentrated on battery life.  Pro tip - mature portable electronics that check all of the feature boxes focus on battery life.  In the end user experience wins.

 

I'm not a photographer so a new iPhone would be overkill.  Maybe in a year what I have now will be unusable and I'll have something new.  How these things work and how they're built is the exciting part.  I would not have predicted some of the video features on the new phone. 

 

Horace Dediu has one of his always insightful pieces on the importance of the new iPhone.  In my case I'm probably a trailing edge user at this point - different from the much larger group Apple is addressing as they reinvent what the iPhone is useful for.  He's worth following if you have an interest in on person computational power and the micromobility revolution.

 

On the other hand Om may have nailed the really important product launch this season.  Then again, he offers an excellent iPhone 13 Pro review. 

 

 

 

some really big changes

event                    species eliminated     million years ago        cause(s)

End-Ordovician                       85%                 444                     global cooling  

Late Devonian                    70-80%          372-359                    multiple events, low O₂ in oceans    

End-Permian                      90-95%                 252                     volcanism

End-Triassic                            75%                  201                     volcanism

Cretaceious-Paleogene           75%                   66                      impact event, volcanism?                                              

 

In the late 70s a group led by Luis Alvarez found a very thin layer of an element that shouldn't be there in locations all over the Earth.  Iridium is very rare on the Earth, but common in meteorites and probably asteroids.  The layer was found in enough places that could be accurately dated.  Dinosaurs fossils were abundant below the layer and non-existent above it.  About three quarters of the species on Earth had vanished in a short amount of time.

 

It remained an interesting hypothesis until about a decade later when a 200 kilometer wide crater was mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and just happened to date to the end of the Cretaceious - about 66 million years ago.  It looked like the smoking gun, but any remnants of the asteroid were under layers and layers and layers of limestone.  But a few years ago what may just be the smoking gun was found.  The area around the crater has a large amount of high sulfur evaporate sedimentary rock. Drilling deep into the crater the sulfur-rich rock is mostly missing.  When the asteroid slammed into the earth so much energy was liberated that layers of this rock were vaporized.  In the atmosphere they combined with water and surrounded the Earth with a thick dark cloud layer that dramatically dropped the average temperature of the Earth.  For something like ten to twenty years temperatures on the land were near or below freezing. Not good if you're a plant. Not good if you're cold blooded and/or have a large enough body mass to require a lot of food.   

 

At the same time a large amount of carbon dioxide was emitted.  This probably helped preventing the temperature from going way below freezing, but it acidified the oceans killing a lot of marine life.   Land and ocean-based food chains were interrupted.  

 

The Chicxulub impact event is very compelling, but is it the whole story?

 

Perhaps not.

 

Around the same time, perhaps a few hundred thousand years earlier, something dramatic was underway in what is now Western India.  Four major volcanic events produced enormous lava flows collectively known as the Deccan Traps.  About a million cubic kilometers it would be enough to cover the US with about 120 meters of lava. Could it have been part of the extinction event?  After all, two of the major extinction events were volcanic and this one was approximately huge. (over three hundred times larger than the Yellowstone event)

 

Over twenty or thirty thousand years enough carbon dioxide was released to dramatically increase the Earth's temperature.  There's a growing consensus that it was part of the extinction event, although there's a lot of academic debate as to how important it was . Was life weakened by this increase and then finished off by the asteroid, or was most of the damage done by the eruptions?  A lot of interesting questions are being worked on.

 

The last extinction is relevant because at least one part of it was quick.  We're now at the beginning what appears to be the sixth extinction event.  The one we're causing and perhaps an extensional threat to humanity  It's also shaping up to be a very swift event. Learning how the atmosphere and oceans respond to such events is important. 

__________

Some of you know I've been trying to do something about global warning for about twenty years.  I've made another major change in approach.  I've never expected a major impact, but my first two approaches of education and storytelling have been failures.  I've moved on to targeted conversation.  Well beyond my pay grade, but in retrospect it appears to involve less titling at windmills.

 

 

on good design for those who need it

Olympian Sarah said she is more impressed by the achievements of Paralympians than Olympians.  She loves events like running with a guide and is particularly taken with goalball.  Goalball was invented after WWII for the blind.  The ball has two bells and the athletes have to use their sense of hearing to sort out where the ball is along with the other players.  It's stunning to watch.  (The first match is the gold medal match between the US and Turkey.)

There's a lot of interesting design in the Paralympics.  Sometimes the type of game, sometimes mechanical devices like special wheelchairs, and perhaps most important is a classification system to keep competition fair,  The amount of thinking that has gone into this puts many conventional sports to shame.  If you haven't watched any of the events go back and marvel at a few.  

 

Building proper access has been an uphill battle and people still fight against the Disabilities Act claiming it's "too expensive" or "just not worth it."  Getting the design right is a journey of its own.  A book that may change how you think about the built world is What Can a Body Do? by Sara Hendren. Solid recommendation!  This kind of design goes beyond physical affiances involving politics, law and sociology with the book addressing that and more.  The Paralympics are a shining example of it being done right in a limited area. 

 

This may seem a bit off topic, but I'd claim otherwise.  I've learned a lot from areas far from what I do.  Thinking about beach volleyball  led to a useful technique for studying neutron stars.   Get interested in something very different and you just might find interesting connections to something else.  Thinking about those with challenges is a rich area and probably useful for even non-designers to spend some time on.  It's a target-rich environment. 

 

 

the universe has it in for computers

a minipost

Cosmic rays have fascinated me since I was 13 and found a detector with a couple of patient physicists on the summit of Sulphur Mountain in Banff.   That was my first exposure to relativity.  I written a few posts on cosmics, but just say the word if you ever want to get me started on particles that can have the energy of a fastball and require detectors spread over thousands of square kilometers to properly detect.   Smashing into molecules in the upper atmosphere they produce large showers of elementary particles.  These can make it to the ground - or to a memory chip in a computer.  A direct hit on a memory cell can flip a bit from 1 to 0 without damaging the memory.  It's why you don't locate computer animation companies in Albuquerque or Denver.  It's why you use ECC memory in computers that run programs for more than a few hours and why many spacecraft have multiple radiation-hardened computers.   In addition to computer problems they're responsible for a large number of biological mutations.  They're one of many reasons why I think it's nutty to send humans into space beyond near Earth orbit. 

 

It's a very rich topic and this video by Derek Muller is an excellent introduction with historical examples of problems.  They've even interfered with an election. 

low distortion rearview mirrors

 

History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

      -  Mark Twain

Except it wasn't him.  

His clever and prolific writing made people assume he said it even though he never did.  It turns out it first appears around 1970 in a poem by a Canadian artist named Robert Colombo.  When asked if he knew where it was from Colombo couldn't recall other than he might have seen it in a literary section of the New York Times a few years earlier.  In fact it appears with and without attribution several times around the time of Colombo's poem in the early 70s.   That said, a hundred years from now people will still think Twain said it.

 

The process of science is much messier than the simple order kids learn in school.   There are too many dependancies to list.  A few philosophers of science  - notably Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn - have tried to describe how scientific revolutions and change happens.  The how, where and why of scientific change.  Kuhn and Popper are somewhat at odds.  Kuhn's ideas were popularized and are still taught as how scientific revolutions happen.  It turns out that both of the frameworks are deeply flawed and have fallen from favor with serious students of the history and philosophy of science.  I came to it late, but I'm more a fan of an earlier step - trying to understand some of the history of science. 

 

Unfortunately the history of science is often neglected in scientific training.  Students are told a few selective stories from the great revolutionaries without much context.  Experiments, theories and techniques are described with little background.  The struggle and small steps forward and backward are  missing.  The world seems much too messy when you start doing real science on your own.  (this is probably true in many fields!)

 

One gets bits and pieces of local history from the last generation or two in their subfield.  This can be very powerful. I learned a lot about the development of the atomic bomb as some of the people I studied with were parts of the Manhattan Project.  You need to learn the importance of failure as well as hunches and the need to distrust your own work.  

 

The history of science, like the history of art or music,  is a story of the development of ideas that can be appreciated by non-specialists.   There are some wonderful books out there.  The trigger for this post was one of them:  Einstein's Fridge by Paul Sen.  I know the technical area well, but have big holes in my understanding of how all of this came about.  If you can follow articles in the New York Times science section, you'll learn a lot of what the physics is saying without the math and how it changed the world.  He gives a very simple, but accurate, description of entropy and has the best description of photosynthesis I've seen that doesn't get into biochemistry.  The historical motivations make it come alive.  I'm stealing some of his clear descriptions.

 

Most of this is probably true in many other fields.  About twenty years ago a friend invited me to dinner with Maurice Wilkes - his grand advisor.  Even though Maurice was in his late eighties the discussion went on late into the night and continued on two more occasions. I'm not a computer scientist or engineer, but Maurice is a physicist who happened to invent a good deal of the fundamentals of computing that's still in use.  Hearing him talk about the early history and the connections to our shared background made it all come alive.  The problems computers had to solve as well as the nuts and bolts of designing one - provided a wonderfully rich learning experience.  There was this hint of how the great mind of this humble person worked. A good history book can provide that kind of experience.

 

 

on fundamental change

 

Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

It's not uncommon for a professor to quote the first paragraph of States of Matter by D.L. Goodstein on the first day of an undergrad statistical mechanics course.  Statistical mechanics is an outgrowth of the study of thermodynamics which had become a major intellectual effort attempting to understand heat engines in the 19^th century.  You can derive the results of thermodynamics from it and it led to much deeper explorations including the beginnings of quantum theory.  It's also concerned with entropy.    Entropy is at the heart of understanding change.  It's deep enough to be tightly connected with why time only goes forward and what cause and effect are.  Popular definitions aren't accurate. It isn't the tendency to disorder and it isn't the entropy computer scientists talk about (although Shannon's entropy is an exceptionally important tool for thinking about information). 

 

Unfortunately the fundamental concept of entropy is a bit abstract.  xkcd notes a problem common in science and undoubtedly many other places.  I'm frequently guilty, but I started to put together a post on the difference between entropy and complexity and why increasing entropy doesn't imply increasing complexity that doesn't involve math.  I found myself sketching pictures and wishing they were animated.  Then I remembered Sean Carroll did a series of very short YouTube videos with Henry Reich creating the animations as part of Henry's Minute Physics series.  They're wonderful!

 

The third video: Where does complexity come from?,  gets at the core of the entropy and complexity and why entropy isn't disorder.  It works as a stand-alone, but I recommend watching all five in order.  They achieve a good balance of getting the basic concepts across without any danger of anyone committing suicide.

 

Sean begins with why doesn't time go backwards and covers a fair deal of what the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies.  Things like cause and effect, the origin of complexity and even how life can exist.

 

Some deep and sexy physics without the math.

 

 

woodie would be proud

a minipost

About two years ago I commented on the sad news of Woodie Flowers' passing.  Watch the video in the link.  His Design and Manufacturing I course was fabled and the reason of many for going to MIT.  The core idea is for students to build something tangible with their own hands using core principles of mechanical engineering.  Pure lean forward hands-on engineering in a collaborative environment.  To make it interesting Woodie provided a challenge that became a contest as well as uniform kits of junk that parts had to come from.  You don't get these skills from online learning or playing with CAD tools - the deep learning is hands on. Several engineering schools have created similar programs over the years, but Woodie was one of those rare people with a serious gift for connecting and mentoring.  

 

A pandemic arrives.  How do you recreate the course as a remote learning experience?  It turns out you can if you send abut 130 pounds of kit and junk to each of the students. The link has a great video that notes the at home experience was excellent - arguably better than on campus.  The course has evolved and the learnings will be incorporated as students come back to campus.

 

 

silver linings?

The pandemic has been responsible for an enormous amount of pain, agony and death.  While we're not out of the woods and won't be for the foreseeable future, a few potentially positive change has been made more likely. It's easy to make a long long and think about some more deeply, but for now a short list.

 

° mRNA vaccines have been under development for over two decades.  Their value has been shown in the most dramatic fashion.  Expect many more - some for conditions that have been very difficult or impossible to treat.

° American contributions to a worldwide network of outbreak observatories were killed by the Trump administration. Finding the next outbreak early enough to contain it requires this kind of work.  We've been lucky and able to catch and contain a few recent candidates early.   Finally there's  a large amount of interest and it's likely to happen.

° We saw an existence proof that parts of nature repair quickly when human impact is reduced.  Unfortunately most of these improvements have disappeared, but many of us have seen them and perhaps some of us will be better motivated to create change.

° Many cities tasted alternative transportation and street use.  It seems to be sticking in some areas. The automobile doesn't belong in cities for a variety of reasons.  Side note:  Electric cars are insufficient - the transportation system needs serious reworking.

° It appears that part of the reduction on business travel may be permanent. 

° A huge social experiment is underway to see what kinds of work can be done remotely.

° Likewise a similar social experiment is underway on remote education.  This is a very complex problem involving much more than what is normally thought of as education.

° Serious work is underway on indoor air quality. This has positive implications beyond airborne viral transmission.

° It's still a way off, but more thought is being given to single payer insurance.

° Massive universal basic income experiments are underway worldwide.

° There are indications young people are spending less time connecting online.

° There's  renewed interest in good science communication.

° A few have been afforded the opportunity to create personal change.  This may prove to be one of the most interesting impacts.

There's much more than this - I wrote these down in a couple of minutes.  I encourage you to make your own lists. Some of these are rich topics for exploration.

 

 

very light narrative structures

I first heard about Norwegian Slow TV a decade after it began.  I watch a half hour of one of the rail trips. It didn't do anything for me.  Other than hearing about other hits like chopping wood and knitting, I almost forgot about it.  Two months into the pandemic I found my watching a semi-live train trip across Norway.  Much of the  scenery was similar to where I grew up and I found myself watching.   It wasn't long until I found myself daydreaming, creating my own narrative to match the flowing images.  Two hour later I stopped a dream-like story in my head.  

 

About four in the morning the next day I was jolted out of bed with an interesting approach to some physics that I had abandoned months before due to lack of process.    Having your mind work on something when you're not working on it is well known.  I suspect the neural connects I had was making in the narrative I was writing in my imagination had a good deal to do with it.   

 

This morning I caught an episode of Invisibilia that dives into the subject.  Recommended if you have an interest in narrative in any form.  Slow TV is an hours or days long TV show without plot, characters, or tension.  How Norwegians responded as a shared experience is the most fascinating part

I've done a bit of work in remote audio ambiances.   A few created serendipity.  Here's an excerpt from an old post on one:

 

5:25 am - excellent!

 

I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat.   few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds.  The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench.  A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine.  I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.

 

She's doing an excellent job until - rats.  Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around.  A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds.

 

sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!

 

She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly.  Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55.   Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.

 

And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.

 

A door opens and closes.  The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.

She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields.  A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime.  The bitstream made traveled eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the hall's sound space was created.  We had created a virtual acoustic reality.

 

brain power

your brain runs a 5k every day

 

let me explain:

On a walk a few days ago I found myself thinking about the power people need to live.  A ballpark figure is about one hundred watts of power or, over the course of a day, 2.4 kilowatt-hrs of energy.   A remarkable feature of people is that our brain requires a good deal of this - something like fifteen to twenty percent.

Thinking about at the energy requirements for a few physical activities it struck me that the amount of energy your brain uses in a day is roughly the same as an average person running a 5k.  

I mentioned this to Charlie who asked  the right question.  What is the difference between concentrated and unconcentrated thought?  Some time ago I came across some work that suggested there's little to no difference - at least within the accuracy of measurement.   I checked with a neurology researcher who was aware of more current work.  Serious amateur chess players playing against a computer program where the program was set to play a bit beyond their level represented hard thought.  The same people not focusing was the baseline.  There was a small difference - hard thinking would require a couple of regular (not peanut) M&Ms over an eight hour period.  Mediation appears to be the same as normal thinking.    

(Note:  energy is power times time.  Power is the rate of energy use.)