omenti

playing with popcorn

A minipost

 

Chatting with Sarah the topic of snack foods somehow came up.  She mentioned problems getting all of the popcorn kernels to pop and sometimes there was burning. We wandered to something else, but afterwards it struck me that proper popcorn popping was something I know how to do.  In fact a few scientific papers have been written and it's a good area for home experimentation. But first the recipe:

 

Our next door neighbor when I was in high school, had it down.

° 1/3 cup of fresh popcorn .. he'd keep it in a sealed glass jar.  

°  3 tablespoons of vegetable oil in a 3 quart heavy bottomed sauce pan over medium high head. Add 3 or 4 kernels of popcorn and wait.

° When they pop add the rest of the popcorn and lift the pot away from the heat for about 30 seconds.  Put on the cover and return to heat.   If you can it's a good idea to leave the lid slightly ajar to release some of the steam (his lid had a vent)  When the popping slows to once every second or two, dump the popped corn into a bowl and add salt and melted butter to taste.

I use an inexpensive light olive oil (not a rich or expensive one) and add a bit of salt when the popcorn goes into the oil.  I prefer white popcorn, but your taste may vary. Jolly Time comes in thick plastic bags that are fairly air-tight.  Upscale popcorns come in glass jars, but I'm cheap.  

 

Popcorn is a special variety of corn.  The kernel has a hard thin hull on the outside. Inside is the seed along with enough water and a starchy food to get it sprouting.   The trick is to get the water inside to boil.  The hull is strong enough that it takes quite a bit of pressure to get it to burst. As the starch heats it gelatinizes.  The hull bursts at a weak spot and the gelatinous starch cools and solidifies as it expands outwards. The expansion is asymmetrical starting at the weak spot where the hull burst giving the mass a kick. The sound comes from the expanding gas resonating against the expanding kernel and not the breaking hull. No one figured the sound part out until a couple of years ago.

 

If you have kids or some curiosity on your own you can figure out a few things:

 

Find an oven-safe bowl with a lid and heat your oven to about 190°C (375°F).  Add a small number of kernels - say 20.  You may have to shake the bowl around a bit as it heats.  After the popping stops count successful pops.  Now try it at about 170° C (about 340°F).. your count should be different.  If you like you can find the threshold.  You might need to calibrate your oven.  I use an infrared thermometer.   (180°C seems to be the threshold for fresh Jiffy Pop white).

 

If you have a good scale weigh 20 or 30 kernels and calculate the average weight of a kernel.  Put them in the hotter oven and pop as many as you can.  Weigh the popped kernels and calculate the moisture percentage.  I get close to the 14% moisture content good popcorn is supposed to have.

 

You can try different types and freshnesses of popcorn and find popping yields (percent popped). You can also measure the average size.  Try it at a different altitude if you can or enlist a friend.  Try slicing the kernels and see what that does to the size.  How different are the fancy varieties?  And of course you can try toppings other than butter.

 

While on the subject of snack food. Sarah told me about maple cotton candy.  It isn't easy to find in the US, but I finally did.  Expensive, but very good and addictive.  Be warned.

 

 

 

woodie

an Omenti mini-post

I was shocked and saddened to learn of Woodie Flowers' passing.

 

There's an interesting question you can ask about a school.  Who is the most important person?  Of course it depends on your point of view and what you think a school should be doing.  It might be an administer who has managed to turn the place around,  a remarkable alumni member who does the same, a Nobel Laurette perhaps? and for some it might be a coach who somehow energizes the place.  Is there someone who makes the place special?  Universities mean a lot of things to different people.  But if you asked me about MIT, I'd suggest Woodie Flowers.  He managed to light the spark and inspire more young engineers than you can imagine.  And in light of the current ethical problems ripping apart a school on campus, he was a beacon of ethics for decades.  

 

I was lucky enough to have spent time with him on a few occasions.  He was even more optimistic and even evangelistic than what comes over in this video:

 

 

Woodie was like this in many areas.  He was responsible for developing and promoting the concept of gracious professionalism..  from an email a few years ago:

 

The election has been painful. It reminds me that we have a responsibility to help students become thoughtful citizens. Rational thought blended with empathy seems too rare everywhere.

Personal experience leads me to believe our students would be receptive to hearing us address their obligations to society. Dean Kamen founded FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in 1989. A couple of years later, Dean and I co-founded the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) patterned after the creative design exercises I had been running for many years in the Mechanical Engineering design courses. The “2.70 Contest” was anchored by “gracious professionalism,” a term I coined to celebrate the wonderful behavior prevalent among students in that course. They competed like crazy, but treated one another with respect and took pride in helping and teaching one another.

At the first FRC Kickoff, I used one slide with the term “Gracious Professionalism.” Encouraged by Dean, at the second FRC Kickoff, I used six slides featuring the phrase. Since then, Gracious Professionalism™ has become a powerful part of the ethos of the whole FIRST community. FIRST competitions have grown and have millions of alumni. Scattered over 80 countries, young people have embraced the notion that competition and kindness are compatible. At MIT, 10% of our freshman classes are FIRST alumni.

As we make the transition to digitally-enhanced learning and machine-assisted professions, I believe “uniquely-human” will be a powerful differentiator. Professionals who understand the laws of the universe and also have an emphatic response to others will be the leaders. Those who think science is a la carte will have aspirations that Mother Nature will not tolerate.

MIT students will have an obvious advantage because of their understanding of what is possible. We need to make sure they are also well equipped to manifest creativity, leadership, good judgment, and ethical behavior.

I offer Gracious Professionalism as a convenient label. It blends rigorous adherence to the laws of the universe with the human qualities we hope to see as those laws are applied by our alumni. Giving back with conscience. Blending hard knowledge with soft feelings. Facts, feeling, and fairness. The FIRST community, which includes all ages, have embraced “GP” and actually compete to “out GP” one another.

How might Gracious Professionals have voted?

Woodie Flowers

 

I'm not an engineer, but am amazed what the good ones do.  This is a big loss for MIT, engineering and the world

 

happy bob from finland

Several years ago I met Jutta Haaramo though a bit of serendipity.  We share some interests and it's been great fun talking with her over the years.  A bit over a year ago I learned about her efforts to make a dent in the Universe and do something about juvenile diabetes management.  It's a tough problem that consumes an enormous amount of time and worry on the part of the children and their parents.  It also happens to be an area where technology can be used to help out.  

Jutta is amazing - she put together a team and an iPhone app that uses a bit of machine learning and gamification was born.  This is really great stuff and is just emerging into something that can be used.   So if you have diabetes or know someone who does - or if you're interested in serious medical aids that can run on iPhones and Apple Watches read on as Jutta continues with a guest post.

__________

 

My son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes five years ago when he was just six years old.  In type 1 diabetes (T1D) your pancreas stops producing insulin, so you need to dose it manually to keep blood sugar at a normal level. Keeping blood glucose stable is hard, as everything affects it: insulin, carbohydrate consumption, exercise, stress, other hormones etc.

We started to use continuous glucose monitor (CGM) to follow his sugar level every five minutes. For insulin delivery we use an insulin pump that delivers insulin in small doses throughout the day. Before every meal we calculate the carbs as the insulin is dosed according the amount of carbs eaten

 

 

Diabetes management is really complex. There is a risk of short term complications (severe hypoglycemia i.e. too low blood glucose and hyperglycemia, too high blood glucose), which can both be fatal. But the long term complications, which are caused by elevated blood glucose over time, are as scary. Heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure, blindness, premature death can all be caused by diabetes. Diabetes also takes a huge amount of time: counting every carbohydrate you eat, calculating insulin doses, changing infusion sites and sensors just needs to be done, no matter how tired or overwhelmed you might feel.

No wonder there are many who know the mental burden of diabetes far too well. But being stressed about your condition does not help you to take any better care of yourself.  Rather, we noticed that humour and positivity did help. Noticing the small wins (“oh, your blood glucose was really good at school today - well done!”) made a big difference.  So we wanted to turn that approach into a new way of diabetes management. One that gives insights to future glucose levels and rewards you when you're succeeding in managing on your own.

 

This idea turned into Happy Bob, an app that uses gamification and machine learning to turn health data into rewarding and engaging experiences.
Users can follow their own blood glucose data and there are stars which can be collected when blood sugar is kept within target levels. The star counts are displayed and a user can achieve daily star targets and share scores with others. The app also uses personal blood glucose history data with machine learning to predict the user’s blood glucose up to two hours ahead. The prediction helps to foresee high and low blood sugar before they happen.

The interface is simple and playful.  Happy Bob is also available in the Snarky Bob mode for those with a more sarcastic sense of humour.

 

The app is currently available on iPhone and is used by both children and adults. Users tell us Happy Bob makes diabetes management more fun and helps them to be more aware of own data. Everyone enjoys collecting stars and getting positive feedback. It’s still early but the app retention is really good.

Next we plan to add more health data in the experience, to provide a more holistic health management experience and more ways to be rewarded. Our goal is to help users foresee periods when they should pay extra attention to their blood sugar and health to prevent the risk of complications.  We also want to add ways to use the stars earned, as that’s something many users have been asking for. We believe that by creating a daily, fun habit of good glucose management with Happy Bob, many people with diabetes can have a better life and health.

 

Happy Bob user feedback

 

First check out this video from Happy Bob user T1Swimmer .. she's great!  It should come up for those of you who aren't FB users 

https://www.facebook.com/T1Swimmer/videos/441338936474643/

 

If you are interested in testing out the Happy Bob App, have an iPhone and wear a CGM (continuous glucose monitor), you can download the app in the App Store https://apps.apple.com/app/happy-bob/id1444877516

For any information, please get in touch with me at jutta@happybob.app. You can follow us on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/happybob_app/ or read more at our website https://happybob.app/

 

My three boys. Finland has the world’s highest incidence of type 1 diabetes. Diabetes is on the rise across the globe. With good glucose control most of the complications can be prevented.

 

 

finding the dimensions of play

Minipost

You've probably heard about softball pitcher Jennie Finch striking out major league baseball players. 

 

She's standing about 43 feet from the batter rather than the 60.5 feet seen in major league baseball.  Her fastest pitch is about 70 miles per hour giving a 0.42 second flight time for the ball. What's interesting is human reflexes aren't fast enough to allow even the best batter a hit.  He's not thinking about it, but all of those year playing baseball taught him to read the pitcher and some clues.  Clues up until the time the ball is released and perhaps a very short time afterwards.

 

The fastest fastballs travel about 145 feet per second (apologies to those who use sane units.  Most of the readers here are American).  Human reaction times range run between 0.25 and 0.35 seconds with most of us a tad below 0.30 seconds.¹  Even with superhuman reflexes a the ball has traveled more than halfway to the plate before the batter notes it has left the pitcher's hand.  Real time adjustments are hopeless as Jennie Finch has demonstrated. 

 

That brings up an interesting question.  If you're designing a ball a stick game - a game where a ball is thrown and hit by a stick or an arm - is there a characteristic time of flight that tests the best athletes?  Another way of putting it is "is there an optimal distance for the ball to travel?"

 

For baseball, using 95 mph,  we get 60.5 feet/140 feet per second for men .. that's about 0.42 seconds.  For women the shorter path length and ball speed give the same number.

 

In tennis the maximum length used, neglecting the vertical component, is the diagonal of a 27 by 78 foot court - about 82.5 feet.  The fastest reliably measured serve in the men's game is about 140 mph or 205 feet per second - about 0.40 seconds.²

 

Venturing into cricket we have a pitch that is 66 feet long.  The fastest bowlers are a bit over 100mph - apparently a bit faster than baseball.  The batsman generally stands about three feet in front of the wicket so we have 63/150 or about 0.42 seconds.³

 

Beach volleyball works out much the same for men...  around 0.4 seconds flight time for the fastest serves.

 

four tenths of a second

 

 That's the interesting number for all of these sports and perhaps it tells us something about human capabilities. When you subtract reaction time it emphasizes the importance of reading the other player. 

 

Experiments have been made where baseballs are pitched from 50 feet.  Now flight times are under 0.35 seconds and the game is unplayable.  Once the pitches slow down playability returns.  The numbers here ignore quite a bit, but are probably good to five percent or so.  Some of these games are at the edge of playability and that makes them interesting. 

 

A comment on beach volleyball.  The women's court is the same size as the men's only the net is lower. A fast serve is useful, but like the other sports there is much more going on.  The slower ball speed allows for more strategic play.  About a month ago Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, writing in The Guardian, said:

One of the most significant contributors to the sport’s growing popularity is the dynamic play of the women. Although their games are generally not as explosive as the men’s, they play with greater technique, variety of shots, and chess-like thinking, often making their matches more compelling.

It makes one wonder about interesting physical limits and sweet spots in other sports.

 

__________

¹ Curiously enough MLB players have average reflexes and some of the greats are slower than average.  You can easily test your reaction time with a ruler and a friend. 

² note that I'm ignoring air resistance..  that will add a couple hundredths of a second in tennis and a bit less in baseball.  In tennis the bounce adds a few small amount.

³ the ball bounces off the ground once, but the collision is highly elastic.. many a couple hundreds of a second are lost.

 

mad science

It seems Apple released a new smartphone yesterday. This one has several reasons to make me want to upgrade, but the most drool-worthy is its power as a computational camera.  I'll leave it to other to write the reviews and compare it to Google's efforts - a new iPhone isn't in my budget this year.  But perhaps a few words on computational photography are relevant.

 

Computational photography has been around for over sixty years.¹  In particle physics you slam particles into each other and carefully study the wreckage that emerges from the collision. About sixty years ago bubble chambers came into use.  The idea was to record the wreckage in three dimensions.  A chamber was filled with a transparent liquid like liquid hydrogen, kept just below its boiling point. Just before a fast moving particle entered the chamber a piston at the bottom of the chamber was dropped suddenly causing  the liquid to superheat. The incoming particle collides with a particle in the liquid - usually a proton if the liquid is hydrogen - and charged particles from the collision leave a trail of tiny bubbles in the sensitized superheated liquid.   Three cameras at right angles to each other simultaneously captured three views of the bubble tracks and the piston is moved back into position waiting for the next collision.  

 

A large magnet surrounds the chamber causing the particles to bend one way or another depending on their charge.  The slower a charged particle moves, the more it curls.  The photographic sheets are developed and "girls" - it was considered women's work - would trace the tracks by hand with digitizers creating lists of coordinates for each track that a computer program could use to compute the fundamentals of each collision.²  This type of computing was the most demanding of the day.   In the late sixties and beyond recording the collisions directly in digital form using a variety of "counters" took over and the scale of experiments and necessary computation exploded.

 

By the late 70s people were beginning to categorize medical x-rays and ultrasounds computationally and resonance imaging began to emerge.  The computational requirements were stiff in the day, but your phone could easily handle the computing required for your MRI.  It has been argued that this form of computational photography has had the largest impact on human health of any form of computation.

 

Playing with photographic images from telescopes and microscopes was  necessary in science, but the techniques quickly migrated to computer science labs.  Just as the Utah Teapot was the universal test for 3d imaging, a photo known as Lenna was the ubiquitous test for imaging algorithm research in male dominated CS departments during the 70s and 80s.  It wasn't unusual to see her image appear in several papers in a single journal issue.  Journal images today aren't as sexist.

 

Some of what went into academic image processing made its way into Photoshop in the late eighties.  Photoshop went on to be a preferred platform for creative artists to do computational post-processing of their images.  Take a photo on your camera and play with it on your computer.

 

But what if the camera and computer could be combined into something that could redefine imaging?  I'd argue that took place in science some time ago as the imaging part of telescopes, microscopes and particle detectors had began to require built-in computation.  It's been in the past few years we've seen the emergence of a new type of photography in handheld cameras.  Smartphones, with vast development resources, are leading the way and we're on the verge of an explosion of new techniques and ideas.

 

At this point it would make sense to talk a bit about the basics of 2d fourier transforms to get a sense of how that's done.  Here's a short non-technical introduction that gives a sense of a basic function.

 

 

The computational power of the latest smartphones is staggering and, at least in Apple's case, a good deal of it can be devoted to computational photography.  Currently much of it is used to improve snapshots that would otherwise be unusable.  Noise can be reduced while still keeping important detail - often using psychological models of human perception, the dynamic range of an image can be extended by taking a number of shots and bringing out detail in dark areas and suppressing burned out overexposed regions, realtime video can be overlayed with other information creating a computation synesthesia of sorts, machine learning is becoming useful in many ways,  .. the list goes on and on.  

 

I'll offer one that could appear in about a year with the next generation of smartphones.  Time of flight image sensing is now sort of practical for a smartphone and will probably be a feature in high volume phones like the iPhone next year. Basically a pulse of infrared laser light is sent out to an object and the time it takes to go out and return is used to calculate the distance.  This is done for a somewhat smaller image than your camera takes - a few hundred thousand to a million pixels. But these pixels now have distance information in addition to enough image information that it can be used to create a distance map for the full image from the main sensor.   This could be very useful in augmented reality, but here's one I'd like to see.  Take two or three phones on tripods and point them at a dancer, athlete or someone getting physical therapy.  A very accurate motion capture video could be quickly made and you wouldn't have to spend $50k and up on specialized equipment.  Coaches and physical therapists would be delighted. 

 

A thousand other uses will emerge we haven't thought about. Independent of their platforms there are strong reasons why Apple needs a great computational camera.  What will separate winners from losers will be usefulness, playfulness, and great user interfaces and experiences.  That's the hard part. 

 

For the best photos a good photographer is still required and the tiny lenses and sensors on smartphones are limited by basic physics.  But always having a camera with you and one that can correct basic mistakes is a serious plus.  That and there are emerging capabilities that will take photography in new directions.  

__________

¹ digital computational photography.  I won't go into details here, but optical computation has been around even longer.  If you're interested in the subject realize a lens is an optical computer capable of creating a Fourier transform.

² I like this example as a neutrino slams into a protron bangnig the vacuum hard enough that a D⁺ (d plus meson) appears.  It is composed of two quarks:  charm and anti-down.  I have a fondness for charm quarks:-)  Also this was made during the twilight of bubble chambers in the late 70s. 

 

 

 

fundamentally speaking

 In 1897 J.J. Thomson stood before the Royal Society and made the case for a charged particle a thousand times less massive than the hydrogen atom.  He had discovered the electron.   Initially many in the room didn't believe him.  Atoms were considered the smallest bits of matter and physics and chemistry were concerned with arranging their properties on periodic tables.  But Thomson's work proved solid.  Then a bit more than a decade later Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus. There was something very small with a positive charge at the center of ever atom with electrons zipping around in a large amount of empty space "like a fly in a cathedral".   

 

Much of the revolution in atomic and quantum physics came out of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge - a place that represents one of the greatest inventions of the 19^th century.  It had been set up with funding from the Chancellor of the University - William Cavendish - as something of a reaction to worries about falling behind other institutions that were engaged in understanding telegraphy.  Cavendish did something rather dramatic.  Rather than work on the immediate problem he set up an institution to focus on fundamentals and hired James Clerk Maxwell to run the place.  Maxwell started setting up a laboratory of shared resources and culture, but died not long after.

 

The next director, Lord Rayleigh, brought systematic instruction and further focused on studying the fundamentals rather than applied work.   Maxwell's earlier work sorting out electricity and magnetism was initially unwieldily, but it was clear light was made of electromagnetic waves and people realized wireless communication might be possible.  That would be a big thing - telegraphy without those expensive wires.  Rayleigh was asked to work on it, but suggested it would be far too expensive in terms of equipment they didn't have.  Instead the path would be less expensive explorations trying to stay at the frontier.   Not long afterwards Hertz, working in Germany, discovered how to do wireless communication.  The Cavendish Lab did more impressive work - they set the path for the next century.

 

Hertz was making use of the unification of the electricity and magnetism that Maxwell had figured out two decades before. In Maxwell's model there was an electromagnetic field that allowed waves to propogate through a hypothetical substance called the luminiferous ether.  It wasn't exactly right - ether was shown to not exist, but the notion of fields traveling through nothing persisted.  It gave physics a new way of thinking about influence at a distance.

 

So what is a field?  Usually they're described as a set of values at each point in space. Like temperature, air pressure, wind speed and so on.  Physicists have another way of thinking about a different kind of field that is a bit confusion to those on the outside.  That's the kind of field that's relevant here.  

 

Before Maxwell there was Michael Faraday - perhaps the last of the great non-mathematical physicists.  .  Pick up a couple of magnets and hold them so they're repelling each other - say north pole to north pole.  As you push them together you feel the force increasing.  You can't see it, but Faraday said there's something real there.  He called them lines of force - it later was called the magnetic field. He was first to understand if you move a coil of wire through a magnetic field, a current is induced in the coil.  He had discovered a link between electricity and magnetism.  It stunned audiences at his lectures   Fields were a deep thought ..  it took us about a century and a half to really appreciate the depth.

 

Over the next 150 years a revolution in physics taught us about quantum mechanics.  Rather than getting into the weeds  just note the bottom line is energy comes in discrete lumps rather than being continuous..   The exciting part comes when you combine the discrete nature of quantum mechanics with Faraday's continuous smoothly varying fields.  Quantum field theory tells us the discrete bits of the electromagnetic field come in little chunks we call photons. Skipping over an enormous among of work and a few dozen Nobel Prizes, the  remarkable thing is this general idea applies to every particle in the universe.   For each type of particle there's a field filling the universe ..  for example an electron field.  Little ripples in this fluid get tied into little bundles of energy and, in this case, the bundle of energy is what we call the electron.  All of the electrons in the Universe are just waves in the same electron field - think of it as sort of a fluid - that fills the entire Universe.

 

By 1970 it was known in addition to the electron field are two quark fields.  You may have learned protons and neutrons are each made of two types of quarks:  the proton is two up quarks and a down quark and the neutron is two down quarks and an up quark.¹  In this interpretation there are no particles in the Universe..  just ripples in fields.  Now we have come down from the periodic table with over one hundred elements to something much simpler:  an electron, an up quark, a down quark and something called a neutrino.  Or more fundamentally an electron field, an up quark field, a down quark field and a neutrino field.

 

It's a more fundamental way of thinking about things, but it's also an oversimplification. In the spirit of oversimplification here's the result. For some completely unexplained reason Nature like to repeat ins triplicate.  There are three families of electron like fields, three of up quarkish fields, three of down quarkish fields and three families of of neutrinoish fields.  Add to this four force fields and now there are sixteen fundamental fields .. plus another called the Higgs field which is partly responsible for giving these ripples mass.  (note - the image shows particles .. just think of them as fields)   Collectively this is know as the Standard Model. 

 

The idea of seventeen fundamental fields representing everything on Earth may seem unnatural, but where precision measurements can be made they compare with theory to astounding accuracy - much better than any other theory in any branch of science.  It has also been predictive of things we didn't know existed.   

 

The equation for the Standard Model is somewhat ugly.  It doesn't incorporate gravity.  Many suspect something more fundamental exists, but just because we might want it doesn't mean Nature works that way - maybe it is fundamentally messy.  On top of that the Standard Model describes only describes conventional matter which is only about five percent of the known mass energy of the Universe.  Another twenty seven percent is dark matter - something which we can detect indirectly, but have no real understanding of.²  Even more mysterious is the remaining sixty eight percent that we call dark energy.

 

Perhaps the Standard Model isn't the ultimate description of what we're made of.³    For now it's more fundamental than saying we're made of particles or atoms even though those are usually more convenient ways to deal with anything at the scale we're used to.   But I like to think there's something poetic about seeing each of us as constellations of tiny field disturbances bound together by force fields.  We're part of an enormous family of these constellations that spread through the Universe.    Our personal constellations are conscious and are capable of wondering if other constellations may have similar thoughts..  

__________

Last year I wrote another short piece about fields and what is known as the vacuum.  Both of these are very brief, but perhaps give an idea of the most successful bit of physics - arguably science - to date.

__________

¹ Up and down are just labels and nothing more... other than proof physicists are very poor when it comes to naming things.

² I once calculated about 250 grams of dark matter is streaming through the Earth at any given moment..  roughly a squirrel's worth of dark matter.  Also dark is a bad term..  it doesn't interact with conventional matter so in it's really perfectly transparent matter.

³ There have been a few theories designed, among other things, to add gravity.  Mathematically String Theory is appealing, but so far there are no signs that's how Nature works.  It may well be a cold trail.  

 

giving time a hand

Hold out your palm and point it skyward.  Every second about one muon will strike it.  Muons are the most common remnant of cosmic ray collisions with the upper atmosphere that make it to sea level.  They're responsible for some genetic mutations and even cancers, but the levels are low enough that we really don't have to think or worry about them much.

 

When I was about thirteen I came across a cosmic ray experiment near the summit of Sulphur Mountain in the Canadian Rockies.  I've described the experience before - two young physicists had the patience to explain what they were doing to a kid. When comic rays collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere a lot of debris is produced - mostly in the form of subatomic particles.  Some have very short lifetimes and don't make it far.  Muons live long enough to make it down to sea level.  But there's a twist.  The half life of a muon is about two point two millionths of a second.  Even if it traveled at the speed of light it would have traveled about six hundred and sixty meters.  Most of these collisions take place a few tens of thousands of meters up. The trick is when we look at something moving very fast, time for it appears to run slowly.  The number of muons making it to your hand is a manifestation that time is relative. 

 

My mind was blown

People put up Stonehenge type markers in the prehistory to note seasons and other special dates.  Moving closer to historical times a variety of sundials were developed.  Clouds and night made them problematic and, depending on design and the skill of the observer, they were frequently only good to an hour or so.  Even so the some Romans had no trouble complaining about them forcing a structure on life.  The Romans moved a bit further  timing devices in the form of water clocks and hour glasses.  Water clocks were used to limit debate in the Roman Senate as well as arguments in legal proceedings.  But time was still mostly for special occasions and localized.  Most people relied on an approximate natural rhythm from cues from the sun and stars.

 

The thirteenth century saw the invention most associated with modern time. The mechanical escapement is a bit of cleverness that converts an oscillation into a ratcheted advancement in one direction.  In a clock a pendulum's swing causes a gear to turn one notch at a time.  The first use was in the church with pendulum driven bells to call the monks to prayer.  Several decades went by and dials appeared allowing the visual estimation of time and a key driver of the Industrial Revolution had appeared a few hundred years early.

 

Since then mechanical time managed to penetrate deeper and deeper into society.  The Industrial Revolution demanded workers at factories at certain hours.  Home clocks were affordable to some households, but reliable alarm clocks were still expensive enough that the profession of the knocker-upper - someone you would hire to wake you up by a certain time - persisted in England until the twentieth century.

 

Now we have accurate portable time and increasingly an expectation to make use of our time. And now if clocks were limited to an accuracy of a second every century, much of our modern technology would no longer work.  Sometimes it seems as if we're to be optimizing the time we have.  We're admonished - or we admonish ourselves - against "wasting" time.  For many being bored or having idle thoughts is somehow wrong.

 

Our sense time in our brain is very non-linear and irregular and an active area of study.  Almost certainly there is no master clock.  We seem to have individual interactions.   I find I require a fair amount of idle time to daydream, think and make associations that don't seem to happen when I'm filling my time "slots."  I can only be creative if I'm bored at some level.  

 

When I began to work out of the home I made it a point to take a walk in the woods across the street every day I was around.  You begin to notice the cycle of the seasons, and after a few years other patterns emerge.  It's been about fifteen years now and the experience grows richer with time. Some of this Summer seems to echo with one eleven years ago and other parts seem unique.   There are cycles for the trees, flowers, weeds, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes, bats, weasels and so much more.  You experience some visually, some with sound and some at time and audio scales we normally don't notice (I often take along a microscope or a box that allows me to listen to ultrasound.)

 

Hold your arms out side to side.  Imagine the distance from the furthest tips to be the age of the Earth - something like four point five billion years.  Now take an emery file and take a few swipes from the fingernail that is touching the present.   Now look at that fingernail.   You've completely eliminated the period of human civilization. 

 

I worry that humanity is failing the marshmallow test -  where you give a little kid a marshmallow and tell him there will be two if he can save the one he has for wait for your return.  Many key countries can't visualize the generation or two ahead to confront global warming.  Perhaps we'd be better off if more of us moved a bit away from the forced regulation of our clocks and allowed more opportunity to consider the broader world.

abigail van allen's layer cake - catalyst for the last half of the 20th century

I was in my second year of grad school and had gone to dinner at my advisor's house.  These dinners were always interesting and the deserts were a near match.  That night we had a wonderful homemade cake.  A layer cake rolled in the shape of a log, filled with fresh fruit and coated with a thin layer of bitter chocolate.  One of the guests - James Van Allen - yes the guy the Van Allen belts are named after - remarked on the cake and told us the story about Sputnik starting the space race was all wrong.  The real beginning came years earlier in his living room over his wife's excellent layer cake.  Reality is often more fascinating than the recent history we hear in school.

 

It was around 1953.  Van Allen and a group of physicists were at his home after a formal meeting.  This night a critical step was taken.  After talking about new learnings from balloon and sounding rocket explorations of the ionosphere.  Someone suggested maybe an Earth orbiting satellite would be possible soon.  After all - this von Braun guy was making a lot of noise about space travel being practical.

 

Indeed Wernher von Braun had been trying to popularize space travel.  He had teamed up with science fiction writers and later with Disney and Collier's trying to convince the public. Although von Braun was charismatic, he wasn't taken that seriously.  The only thing the government wanted him for was leading the Army's program to be rockets that could deliver nuclear weapons.

 

Enjoying the excellent cake was someone who could make a difference.  Lloyd Berkner was one of the most respected scientists in the United States.  He had the ear of generals and even the President.  He made an interesting suggestion.  Maybe the way to learn more about near space would be a multination collaboration like one that explored Antarctica.   Given global tensions it could be useful for political reasons and would spread the costs. Larger sounding rockets could be built along with expeditions to the poles.  Maybe even a satellite.   Everyone at the dinner loved the idea and the International Geophysical Year was proposed soon afterwards.  Ultimately dozens of countries and hundreds of scientists were involved.  The target year would be 1957.

 

Van Allen and the other near space guys kept proposing satellites with no luck.  Then, a few years later, Berkner found the key.  President Eisenhower was focused on avoiding WWIII and countering the Soviets.  Something like a satellite for science was nothing but a distraction.  Berkner had used the "it will shock the other side" argument without luck.  Then he changed gears and suggested it could lead to spy satellites.

 

Eisenhower was a general.   Having great surveillance is deeply embedded in military DNA.  Spies on the ground, high altitude aircraft, code breakers .. whatever it took.  The only trick with a satellite, Berkner said, would be to establish Earth orbit as neutral territory.  A small scientific satellite could set a precedent.   Eisenhower agreed and the Navy ultimately won a competition to work on Project Vanguard - a satellite to be instrumented by Van Allen's team. 

 

The Soviet Union's ICBM project was led by a scientist more interested in space flight than ICBMs.  He realized an ICBM would make a dandy satellite launcher and when Khrushchev took power managed to convince him on an ICBM program and added an Earth orbiting satellite would have a great political impact.  Khrushchev agreed, but what he really wanted was a big ICBM.

 

Through the International Geophysical Year interactions it had become clear that the Soviets were building a satellite - indeed that it would launch in the Fall of 1957.  It seemed like a fantastic cap to the year, but the knowledge and excitement didn't go beyond far that group.

 

When Sputnik (fellow traveler) launched it was mostly ignored by the Americans - certainly the government.  The New York Times made a big announcement and people went out to look.  Satellite tracking became almost a hobby for some (that was the genesis for a global positioning system, but that's another story), but America wasn't quaking in fear.

 

The American government was happy - perhaps delighted.  They weren't first, but this little Soviet metal sphere orbited over American territory several times a day.  Precedent had been established. It would take time, but the Americans would get their spy satellites.

 

The story most of us know came from Texas.  Lyndon Banes Johnson worried whoever controlled space could control Earth - an old sci-fi trope.  LBJ also happened to be the Senate Majority Leader.  He gave impassioned speeches about falling behind.  His words resonated with the public and early American rocket failures only increased public anxiety.  

 

And what about Van Allen and the other scientists?  Johnson managed to open the serious money spigot.  It became clear that ICBMs made great satellite launchers with modest changes.  The scientific study of space was a dandy idea to help prove in new rocket technology.    STEM education in the public schools sprang up largely out of Berkeley and MIT.  The world was changing.

 

The Van Allen Belts?  They were discovered using the early Explorer series of satellites in 1958.  The interaction of the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind was beginning to sort out. 

 

So that's the secret .. really good layer cake.

 

the danger of over simplification

In the early 1990s Anders Ericsson of Florida State University went to a music school in Berlin to test an idea about deliberate practice.  The music school had high standards.  Ericsson suspected practice separated the best of the best from the average.  He asked the eighteen year old violin students to think back on how much practicing they did since they took up the instrument.  Then he had the music professors to divide them into three groups - great, good and average.  Those in the great group averaged about 10,000 hours of practice.  The good, about 8,000 and the average practiced around 5,000 hours.  It seemed like a neat result - practice more and you do better.  He published a paper that wasn't exactly rigorous - it lacked statistical measures like ranges and standard deviations and was more of a discussion than a formal paper.  

 

Prof. Ericsson didn't push the result was a bit to the side of his core work and he didn't heavily promote the result.  But others saw a compelling story around that lovely round hour and a work ethic.   One was Malcolm Gladwell.  Gladwell is a great storyteller, but he often oversimplifies and gets things wrong.  The 10,000 hour result has been disproven by more careful studies over and over, but his books and TED talks are enormously popular and have made the idea something of a cultural meme.  

 

Recently I was thinking about something else he said that was misleading. Great storytelling, but misleading.  The more I thought about it, the more damaging it seemed.  It's partly linked to the 10,000 hour story and some unhealthy forms of training. 

 

In Outliers Gladwell talks about a relative age effect.  He uses sports, but it can apply to academics and other areas.  Say the calendar allowing kids to participate in a sport begins on January 1.  Kids born in the first quarter would be  January → March birthdays.  He noticed that ice hockey players born in the first quarter are over-represented and forth quarter kids are  under-represented.  The pattern appeared in several other sports so he set about writing a compelling sounding story.

 

What happens is when  kids are allowed to try out for a sport - say nine or ten years old - many of the first quarter kids are significantly more developed than forth quarter kids.  Most coaches can't tell the difference between maturity and ability and tend to select the kids who perform the task better.  The rate of change at that age is so great that the majority selected will be the older kids. 

 

A problem is the better players get moved to the better coaches and facilities. The talented ones in the chosen pack progress riding a premium training infrastructure.  There may be very talented kids who are later born who miss the advantages of this training and infrastructure who are lost to the system as they miss a chance to develop and are soon left far behind.

 

Combine this with the 10,000 target (as an exercise figure out how many hours a day you need between the age of nine and seventeen to become expert) and you realize specialization needs come early for the better athletes. I'll admit to oversimplification here - this is a fascinating area that has become something of an arms race as, at least in the US, the goal of a college scholarships can force specialization before a kid becomes a teenager.

 

The funny thing is when you look at more carefully you see sixty to seventy percent of the college age players in many sports are first quarter births, but for professional athletes in the same sports the relative age effect almost goes away.  Almost as at the very elite level there's a slight over abundance of third and forth quarter athletes. What appears to be going on is there's a great weeding of talent from college to pro. In many sports late bloomers - kids who got their growth spurt late for example - finally reached parity, but the fact that they had to work harder and learn the sport better ultimately made them better athletes.

 

There are other complexities I won't go into other than mentioning playing a variety of sports rather than concentrating tends to make better elite athletes.  We have a bias when we hear about prodigies like Tiger Woods and tend to assume they're the norm, but it's not. We also tend to forget about the prodigies that never make it.  One estimate is that only about one percent of sports prodigies identified by the media (written up in a magazine) by the time they're teenagers ever make it into the pros.  

 

So the American and some other systems do manage to train a number of elite athletes in many sports and show it internationally in the Olympics.  What about the potentially elite athletes that were never trained?   It turns out some systems cast a much wider net.  The Nordics, notably Norway, push universal recreation and sport for kids as a healthy way to provide fun and lower healthcare costs. Early specialization is discouraged and good facilities are made available to all.   It appears to work very well.

 

I'm far from athletic and am not recommending changing any system (although I think Norway's goal of a healthy population is excellent).  This is an illustration.  Similar issues of pipelining kids exist in music, art and academics.  Broadly speaking STEM education is an example of exclusion and producing a population that isn't as literate as it could be.

 

Back to the storytellers and  oversimplification.  If something isn't important and you just want to get a tough idea across, it might be appropriate, but anything of importance needs an appropriate level of depth. That places serious demands on the author, teacher - anyone trying to communicate.   It's something I struggle with a lot. 

 

 

 

staying upright

minipost

 

Over the weekend many of you probably saw highlights of Simone Biles' extreme athleticism. Gymnastics has a lot of interesting science going on, but balance is a central element.  It's important in many sports.  Athletes need to deal with dynamic situations that place their bodies in positions the rest of us wouldn't be able to recover from.   Here's a little exercise to check your balance and muscle control.   No equations or math.

 

Stand still with one foot in front of the other - the heel of your left foot touching the toe of your right.  With your hands relaxed at your sides shift your weight to one of your feet.   See how well you're doing at thirty seconds and then at a minute. How are your calf muscles doing?  It can be surprisingly difficult.  Spreading your arms out sideways should make it easier.   Arms in again and lean to your left or your right.  Not exactly stable is it?  Try again with your arms out..  An improvement, but probably not by a lot.

 

Try a normal standing position like you are talking to someone .. feet side by side.  Even with your arms at your side, you're much more stable. 

 

Now go back to one foot in front of the other again and crouch down as low as you can.  You'll probably find balancing gets easier the lower you go.

 

I won't do the physics, but when a vertical line through your center of gravity falls outside the base of support created by your feet you're out of equilibrium and your body has to figure out how to compensate or suffer the consequences. As you move your feet further apart you broaden your base of support and become more stable Divers often start their dives by leaning forward and moving their center of gravity away from their standing base of support.

 

You can also increase your inertia by spreading your limbs out.  This slows your wobbling giving your body a better chance of dealing with the situation.  The killer way of doing this is to carry a tightrope walker's pole.  This dramatically increasing their moment of inertia (in one axis) slowing what would be dangerous wobbles to the point where their reflexes can deal with them.

 

A few days ago I saw this.  I'm not a fan of scooters as the physics is wrong for stability,.  At the same time I'd hazard Simone has the balance to handle one.  Not to mention her four foot eight inch frame gives a low center of gravity.   I asked a physical therapist who has to deal with balance about scooters.  The advice: you shouldn't be on one unless you can close your eyes and balance on one foot for thirty seconds.  The ability to do this drops dramatically with age.   I won't say much more about scooters as I'm negative and will get flames, but if you must ride one make sure you wear a helmet and don't go fast.