omenti

the small things that make you happy

Pip Coburn and his circle have a practice of sharing "anti pet peeves" - those little things that bring a smile and a bit of happiness. It's a good practice these days.  I had one today and sent it to him and Om Malik.  Om suggested I post it.   Feel free to add your own reason to smile in the comment section.

 

We live next to a large piece of undeveloped swampland. It’s full of deer paths and a mixture of heavily wooded and open areas. For about seventeen years I’ve taken a ninety minute walk around noon when I’m working from home. Today is worth writing about - my vulture returned!

About six years ago a female turkey vulture began to accompany me. She’d wait on a telephone pole where the woods cleared or sometimes she’d spiral down from the sky. For nearly a kilometer I’d walk through a large open area and she’d follow along, making short flights from telephone pole to telephone pole. . Then I’d disappear into a heavily wooded around for about thirty minutes before coming back to the clearing. She’d be waiting and together we’d make our way through the open space - regular partners for nearly four seasons.

Then nothing…

I kept looking and even got in touch with the Raptor Trust in case they had taken in an injured vulture, but after a month assumed she had left the area. Hopefully by her own choice.

Today - mirabile dictu - she reappeared. She only followed me one way, but it was so nice to see an old friend.

 

 

why are plants green rather than black?

minipost

 

It turns out they use red and blue light for photosynthesis and reflect green light. But why? That wastes an enormous amount of energy - why didn’t plants evolve to look black?

 

There have been any number of conjectures and they tend to be unsatisfying. Here’s something central to life on Earth and we can’t answer a simple question of efficiency. And recently Astrobiologists worry about such things as they like about lyfe (a more general form of life that has the life we know as a subset)

 

Recently a paper appear in Science that offers a neat hypothesis (hypotheses are much more important in science than conjectures) .. that the collectors on plants have very erratic power outputs locally .. wind blows a leaf partly away from the sun, etc. .. and the downstream biochemical processes from the initial photon conversion have serious problems with too much fluctuating energy. The investigators turned the problem into a network problem and asked the question what colors of the spectrum would be best for these noisy inputs. The answer is red and blue.

 

I’ve been meaning to write about it, but yesterday Pip mentioned efficiency and resiliency in a news letter. Nature is full of resilient systems that are so because, among other things, they don’t try to optimize efficiency. In biology you might not judge something resilient unless it can go thousands of life cycles. There aren’t many man made systems that can say the same. Today, going through Quanta, I found a piece on the green plant work that is much better written than anything I’d do, so enjoy!

 

Oh.. and the sky isn’t blue either. it’s just a mostly transparent stage upon which all the colors dance. It just turns out blue is a bit of a ham.

there is a season

The wheels appear to be coming off the Major League Baseball season.  The NBA basketball may have built a tight enough bubble, but at great cost. And I'll bet a fair amount that NFL and college football will be disasters if they take place.  Some sports and associated logistics may too difficult to handle given the poorly controlled pandemic situation in the US.  There is some truth in what Sean Doolittle said:  "Sports are like the reward of a functioning society."

 

There are examples of carefully executed seasons even in the US. Before getting an example there's a more interesting question:  Why do people care about sports?  I'm not terribly coordinated but am a fan of and advisor to one of the Olympic sports.  The science of sport is deep and fascinating.  I've dabbled a little and have found it's a way to connect dots and gain insight in areas I hadn't considered.  Unexpectedly it became a gateway to learning about neurology and metabolism and a good way to teach introductory physics.  And that's just the beginning.  Sport is one of those interesting lenses for looking at the world. Not to mention sports are a form of rich story-telling that take can even create a community identity.

 

BBC's The Why Factor had an episode asking "why people care about games". (23 minutes audio) It touches on some psychology and cognitive neurology among other things. 

 

As I write the last day of the AVP beach volleyball season is about to begin in Long Beach, California.  The athletes saw the international and American schedules evaporate along with the Olympics. The center of gravity for North Americans is Southern California - specially the South Bay region of Los Angeles. The AVP decided they could pull together a three tournament schedule spread over three weeks and finally managed to find a venue - the parking lot of the Long Beach Convention Center - and a few sponsors.   Amazon PrimeVideo handles the video.  It was an intense effort - a bit of the story appeared here before the tournaments began. 

 

Some of the teams are a bit rusty, but the intensity of play is very high.  Beach volleyball is not a wealthy sport - only a handful make enough to do as their only job and this was the only money available.  More importantly this is the only serious competition available.  There is a lot of covid testing with one and two day turn-around times.  A positive and you and your partner are out for the season.  The players were told to not use indoor gyms for training.  The players quarantined before hand and only a limited number of media, officials and players are allowed on site. They're keeping things clean, but they recognize airborne transmission is probably more important so everyone but the players is masked and isolated.   Of course no spectators are allowed.

 

The game play has been excellent.  Rather than fake crowd noise the AVP and Amazon decided enhance the fan's experience with the court's sound field.  Twenty microphones are scattered around the main court and more installed in the player's time-out corners.   It worked brilliantly but after the first tournament PrimeVideo had to run a content warning click-through to the tournaments.  It seems some of the players have foul mouths when they're excited. 

 

The AVP consulted with a infectious disease experts from local universities. The plans for what to do if something goes wrong are much more detailed than the already complex operational plans.  It make me wonder what kinds of plans schools and universities have for when something goes wrong.

 

PrimeVideo streams and archives the tournaments here if you're interested.

 

 

smart cities aren't

The chocolate chip cookie recipe arrived at my office a few weeks after I left Orlando.  I baked a batch a few days later - they were exactly like the ones I had in the board room.  Incredible.  And then there was the room's Coca Cola machine.  Not only did it have a knob to adjust the syrup percentage, but the crystal glasses were already iced.  It was my first visit to a Disney theme park - not that I hadn't been given an opportunity.

 

My twelfth birthday present was tagging along with my father to a training session in Los Angeles.  Friends and relatives had my time all mapped out - Disneyland, Hollywood, and so on - but were disappointed when I turned all of it down.  Somehow I had talked them into letting me visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the planetarium at Griffith Park, and the museum at the La Brea tarpits.  Disney just didn't seem to have much to offer.  And somehow, a few few decades later, I found myself spending time visiting major customers of our company to listen to their problems.  Disney was a big customer.

 

Disney was designing the Town of Celebration and were looking for "cool" technologies.  We were interested in it as a test bed and potential showcase. Over the course of about a dozen visits I ran into a good deal of technological  and social cluelessness along with smatterings of seriously interesting ideas.  The Disney Imagineers were great and through them I met Randy Pausch of CMU who was also asking questions about Celebration. (If you haven't heard about Randy, check out his last lecture.  It's the best thing you'll do today.)  The executive class wasn't in the same league.

 

A few projects took flight, but most on their list weren't available or practical (sensing someone's health via their toilet:-).  Celebration was supposed to be a model of the New Urbanism movement, which sounds like a good idea on the surface, but you need social glue to make it work and that didn't exist.  So a town was developed and Disney exited as political problems surfaced.  On the other hand I had a preview of what was to come from an anthropologist who was studying the project.  I also learned that Waffle Houses aren't very vegetarian friendly. 

 

A call from an old friend who disappeared to Googleland years ago brought all of this back. He had been with Sidewalk Labs - Google's urban technology arm.  Their goal is to somehow improve life using Google technology.  It sounded like an underpants gnome affair. 

 

The first project was going to be sited on Toronto's waterfront.  In addition to high tech offices there would be residences with Jetsonish features like pneumatic tube trash collection, heated streets to melt snow,  autonomous vehicles, and a digital panopticon to measure and project as much as they could about everyone and everything.   Some rather intense local opposition developed. Who knew Canadians might worry about digital privacy, data ownership and the monopolistic nature of the design.  Opposition increased as it became clear Google would be the main beneficiary until the corona virus appeared giving Google an excuse to exit. (for those interested in an analysis this paper by Teresa Scassa of U Ottawa is excellent.)

 

For about two decades a few large corporations have been interested in the "smart" city.  It's a rich topic to think about.  How is information gathered, who owns it, who processes it and who owns the processed information? How does the information interact with people?  (I was told Google wanted to predict potential criminality in conjunction with the police). Who defines benefits?  Who decides what makes people "happy"

 

I suspect top down approaches are doomed to failure - modern day versions of the company town where you're always being watched.  A more interesting question is what is possible from the ground up and what is possible that isn't data oriented?  We're going to see an explosion in sensor technology with a lot of rich companies pushing to exploit opportunities.  Thinking deeply about the evolution of cities and suburbs is more important than ever.  This place may be interesting as it isn't so top down and its technology is more distributed.  

 

A final comment. My gut feeling is one of the best ways to improve urban life involves removing cars and moving to active and public transportation as much as possible. It's a different use of the term "smart", but I think some Nordics are moving in that direction.   Some tech is involved, but it's mostly physical  infrastructure, laws, public education.  But that's just one person's opinion.

 

lightning in a bottle

Last week I had my first face to face group meeting since early March. Seven of us set up lawn chairs in a distanced circle on a beautiful lawn.  Apart from not being able to hear each other without speaking up and needing something better to draw on, it was wonderful.  I could talk about the out of band signals that face ot face conversation has, but something else struck me.  Our group tells stories and listens.  We have a real dialog - our group is smarter than the smartest individual. 

 

Dialog was one of the terms the social science group I was associated with banned.  Many people equate dialog with debate.  My favorite way to communicate with small groups (often one other person) is to have a dialog.  We tell stories and listen to each other discovering and learning about each other and ourselves along the way. Both of us can be smarter than each of us as individuals.   Debate - where one person says something and the other challenges  - is the opposite of dialog.  It attempts to convince.  When people with different strongly held opinions engage in debate both parties are dragged into the mud.  Debate fuels emotion and happens to be easy to jump into and highly addictive.   It's a form of communication that is easily weaponized with the aid of machine learning to promote engagement and sell advertising. 

 

Social media platforms focus on social comparison, competition, competition, unsupervised debate and so on. Some allow isolated groups where learning and dialog can place, but tools rarely support that and these groups depend on excellent moderation to survive. 

 

Zoom and other conversation tools have a lot of warts, but allow open conversation that can be turned into dialog. They tend to use subscription models.  People have speculated on the design of real dialog platforms, but I suspect much of the magic is in the same category of picking the perfect members of a team.  My friends tend to be those I can have interesting dialogs with - those who I can learn from.  i only hope our conversations are half as useful to them.

 

There's a special kind of dialog.  The face to face meeting I mentioned had little breadth in educational background.  We get things done, but I've found a lot of creativity seems to happen after talking to or working with someone who is smart, but in a very different field.  The process of learning from them seems to populate and connect parts of your mind that had never connected. Two weeks ago I had a long conversation - a dialog - with someone who is very different.  Over the next week new thoughts came almost daily and one gave me insight into something I've been thinking about for over a decade.  Lightning in a bottle dialogs.  Are there ways to support them?  I suspect the answer won't come from technology.

 

 

 

 

 

how does the virus get in and how to block it

A useful discussion of how the virus gets into the body and how to block it. 

 

In this Covid-19 Medical Grand Rounds (July 16, 2020), three world experts discuss a variety of issues surrounding how the coronavirus moves from person to person, how best to block viral spread, and the potential that mask-wearing may not only prevent infection but also lead to a milder clinical course. The questions regarding aerosol vs. droplet transmission and the value of wearing masks and/or face shields are central to formulating public health strategies as well as to informing the personal decisions that each of us makes every day. The session is hosted by UCSF Department of Medicine chair Bob Wachter.

 

 

 

wear your masks!!

 

 

take it outside

a minipost

 

Other than the new graduate student, most of us have worked together for a few years.  This morning we carried our folding chairs across the large lawn struck by the novelty of seeing each other without glass, silicon and coordinated electrical signals getting in the way. It was our first face to face meeting since late February.

 

It would have happened earlier if we didn't believe the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus couldn't be effectively carried by aerosols, but there's too much evidence to the contrary.  Aerosol clouds move and disperse quickly outdoors, so here we were with our face masks and some distance from each other.  Someone brought an easel with large sheets of paper and a few markers and we were off.  

 

A few things cropped up right away.   It gets hot sitting in the Sun for any length of time (you'd think we'd have more sense, but my type generally lacks it).  It was difficult hearing each other.  I can imagine a smartphone app that could take care of that - a local audio conference cloud.  (Gregg - this would be a good student project - I can think of several ways to do it).  One could also imagine iPad screen sharing, but I don't think it would work as well for our discussions - your mileage may vary.

 

We did manage to get a lot done - much more than the Zoom calls we've had.  There's a lot of "out of band" communication that takes place when you're face to face. 

 

I doubt that many would do this on a regular basis, but it raises an interesting point.  Indoors plus an aerosol transmission vector are a bad combination.  To make indoors work you need good fresh air exchange - perhaps a room volume every few minutes.  (Exactly how thoroughly and quickly isn't well-known yet.  This isn't anywhere as bad as measles for example.) Opening windows and doors using fans can do it.  The same with a properly balanced HVAC system .. but that can be difficult and expensive.  Most building systems recirculate air.  You can pass the air through a high-spec HEPA filter (note - HEPA is not a type of filter, but rather a standard).  Unfortunately they restrict airflow and it takes a lot of power to push air enough through.  I'd bet a fair amount of money most classrooms and offices aren't up to the task.

 

I jokingly suggested perfume, cigarette smoke, or incense smoke as a test to someone who studies aerosol physics.  They said it was a good idea.  You shouldn't be able to smell these kind of sources in a properly ventilated room unless you're very close.  Another test is CO₂ level.  A classroom full of people shouldn't register over 800ppm after an hour has gone by.  Building managers are often equipped to test CO₂ and volatile gas levels (you shouldn't be able to smell the carpet either). 

 

In many countries this won't be a big deal.  They've managed to get a handle on the situation with the ability to find and isolate hotspots.  How safe it is to have k-12 kids in schoolrooms is likely to be an experiment we'll see played out.  Colleges, restaurants and bars are probably a clearer call. Such decisions are well beyond my pay grade. 

 

 

stories and star support

Watching the latest Physicsgirl video made me think of a couple of things, but first take a look.

Combining her almost reckless enthusiasm with a serious work ethic, Dianna is my candidate for the best visual physics explainer around. It's one thing to describe something with high production videos or stories, but quite another to fun educational demos that actually work.  These days she has a couple of people working with her and perhaps a dozen physicists who volunteer suggestions, but these still take several weeks of hard work to get right.  Her brilliance is making them look easy while being clear.  Trust me - that's hard.

 

Some types of educational story telling are a team effort.

 

It made me think of my first chemistry class in college - the basic inorganic class most people take.  I was just sitting down in the large lecture room when we heard and felt a large bang coming from the front of the room.  A cloud of chalk dust rose from the slate black board and the right quarter of the board crashed to the floor. Dr Spicer, the chemistry prof, rushed towards an opening door to the left of the slate.  As it opened Jerry and a cloud of acrid smoke poured out.   Coughing, Jerry pointed to the exists.   Our dispatch wasn't exactly orderly.

 

Jerry was a lab tech and in charge of the department's demos.  He was preparing something for a pchem class when the explosion happened.  It convinced me that pchem must be interesting.  

 

Good demos are hard to get right.  A teacher usually isn't the right person to create one.  You need someone with the inclination and time to devote to what needs to be a memorable visual story that the professor can embellish with words and equations. Often you need a someone with serious maker skills. This is true for real experiments too.  

 

I learned my lesson a few years later teaching a lab section of a physics for premeds class.  Two of us co-taught  two sections with forty students each.  The lab was a third of their grade so they paid attention.  (I didn't realize it at the time, but having power over a grade in a competitive class gives the instructor an inflated opinion of their teaching skills as the students are overly attentive.)  We hauled out an old Van de Graff generator - something that must have been made in before WWII.   A big one can generate a formidable amount of static electricity. We had demonstrated how the charge was enough to burn a hole through a piece of cardboard. The other grad student had an insulated copper wire running from his finger tip, inside his shirt, down his pants and connected to the room's electrical ground.   Since the students were interested in medicine, we reasoned they'd see this as dangerous and pay attention and learn why grounding is important.

 

The generator was at maximum power as he approached the terminal.  What neither of us realized was his connection to ground had come off.  The spark jumped about twenty centimeters and knocked him over.  I realized what had happened and yelled in anyone knew CPR.  They thought it was a stunt and started applauding.  Fortunately he wasn't hurt badly.  The sparked burned him a bit, but mostly he was startled, causing him to fall over.  At least it was memorable.

 

Another path to is memorable storytelling.  Ideally it isn't a solo effort as the audience should be involved. That's what I aspire to these days, but I'm not very good at it.   The other day we were talking about patents when I remembered Feynman's patent story.  It was one of his favorites, so I checked to see if there was recording.  Note he has an audience.  My own experience is that this kind of story telling is much easier with an audience - for me a very small one. In an odd way it becomes a collaboration.

 

rewiring your tardis

In the past few days three friends have been through a lot of stress.  Times like these make me think about where I've been and the paths I've taken.  I recognize too few people have had the freedom and privilege to make choices like I have.  At times like these I wonder about certain turning points that have been important - points that often seemed unimportant from others at the time.  More and more I'm drawn to thinking about events in space-time rather than in just time or space.

 

Studied closely neither time or space hold up on their own.  They seem to, but it's just an illusion that comes from the fact we move around on the Earth at tiny fractions of the speed of light. Space-time, with it’s four dimensions, gives a deeper way to sort out reality.

 

Since it's difficult thinking about anything with more than three dimensions it’s convenient to think of a three shadow of space-time with space as a two dimensioned plane and time running off at a right angle. If you think of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun as a 2d circle in space, we don’t come back to the spot every year in space-time.¹ Instead it's more like a helical slinky with about  four and a half billion equally spaced turns growing by another turn every year. Your birthdays are a long distance from each other.  A minute ago is a huge distance away too .. there's no way you can get back to it. 

 

Not going into detail, but the realization that paths are much more important than destinations was one that escaped me until I was about thirty.  Friendship, curiosity, serendipity ..  there are many things that turned out to be much more important to me than goals.  I like to think about these paths we take through space-time.  From a distance they look like spirals that ultimately might make eighty or ninety turns.  Zoom in on a short section and you realize there's a lot of jagged movement perpendicular to the flow of time. Other people and animals have their own jagged spirals sometimes coming very close or even touching yours.  Those times we're in the presence of each other.  At the scale of that expanding slinky we travel on around the Sun they're such rare events.

 

I've been having more intense dreams during the pandemic.  These ephemeral "realities" sometimes create alternate space-times that never could exist. Places and times that could never exist in the same real space-time.  During her final years my mother spend a lot of time in this place - even when she was awake.

 

For her last four years my mother had dementia.  It came in the form of small strokes.  She'd have one and then find herself with parts of her memory missing.  Between then and the next stroke her mind tried to make sense of the world.  How do you make reality square with what your mind can now connect to.  The brain does as much as it can and the mind now has a new reality to deal with.  

 

She never seemed to realize she had dementia and was usually very happy. Some memories - smell and music - seemed very robust.  But now her best friends might be someone from when she was fourteen and someone else from her forties.  One from Brigham City, Utah and the other from Great Falls, Montana.  She'd have conversations with them and sometimes complained that they didn't quite seem to see eye-to-eye.  The conversations must have been very real to her and overlapped directly into the world the rest of us perceived as real.  It was like watching someone walking along hearing half of their cellphone conversation.  

 

All of this was powerful to watch. Her mind, as it rewired itself, became a TARDIS of sorts that granted her a dream-like freedom from the rigid constraints of space-time.²  She was bringing some of those jagged microsections of the big helix of her life together.  And she seemed to love it.  It made me ask "who am I to judge the happiness of others."

__________
¹ it’s really an ellipse, but to make the argument a bit clearer I use a circle.

² On basic principles I won't define what a TARDIS is.

 

 

making obsolete tech sing and beyond

Over the past few weeks I've been playing around trying to repurpose old hardware. Mostly CD and DVD drives and they're chock full of useful parts - lasers, motors, lenses and so on...  That and a bit of Arduino prototyping to come come up with a bag of junk that could be sent to undergrads next year.   Motivation came from the COVID-19 teaching experience.  At least in physics online classes proved difficult and labs unworkable.  Some folks at Caltech suggested a different lab experience where the student assembles or even invents a piece of  experimental apparatus to use to make some measurements.   The fact that most students have smartphones - basically computers with a number of interesting sensors and a network connection - makes this even more appealing.  It probably isn't appropriate for 101 non-major courses, but it may make a better lab experience for more advanced physics and engineering students.  The potential for real learning rather mechanically following directions is great - assuming you have good instruction to go along with it.  There's also the possibility of creating inexpensive lab kits for high schools.  High school lab experiments are ridiculously expensive and inflexible.  There are a number of interesting directions.  It's been fun and several of us are in exploration mode.

 

I need to add I'm a privileged white male with the ability to take a bit of time and focus on this kind of craziness during an epidemic.  Too many people aren't in that position.  

 

The project reminded me of some attempts to help my mother when she was dealing with dementia.  She became forgetful, so we'd make lists.  Then she lost the ability to read so picturegrams.  All along the way glasses, remote controls, almost anything that wasn't nailed down managed to get misplaced.  And then there was medication.  She went into a managed care facility. Life was less stressful, but she was constantly misplacing things and forgetting how to operate the style telephone and TV remote.  I started building gadgets to help out, but by the time one sort of worked, she had lost more capability.  

 

I've thought about it a fair amount since. The facilities are expensive - at least $80,000 a year and usually more.  What could you change to allow someone stay at home a few years longer?  Even if it cost ten or twenty thousand dollars, it could save a lot of money and be better psychologically.  (Greg Vesonder has done thinking along these lines)

 

Om and I were talking about where the local and personal application of "intelligence" is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing, for Apple going forward.   With their sensors and local connectivity outside of the cloud, the iPhone and Apple watch have great senior citizen potential. The iPhone has machine learning hardware.  Combine this with ultrawideband location and a dozen applications immediately leap to mind.¹   Fertile ground indeed.

 

Of course the trick is to stay healthy and sharp as you get older.  It turns out there's a wonder drug which, taken regularly, doesn't have negative side effects.  The AMA now considers physical exercise a powerful drug -  often with superior results than conventional drugs. It has been shown effective in lowering the probability of several types of cancer, heart diseases, many forms of dementia, and is even associated with "happiness". You don't need a lot. Walking enough counts and you get it for free if you use a bicycle.  But you have to do it. 

 

Many people use smartphones , watches or dedicated fitbit type devices for motivation.It turns devices aren't universally motivating over time, but if they work for you it's money well-spent.  The sensors and processing can be useful for athletes training at the amateur level, but not at the elite level. That's a separate and fascinating story at the frontier of sports science these days.

 

Finally it's becoming clar that certain types of mental stimulation help push back the onset of dementia.  Forget the memory games marketed for the purpose - they've been shown to be ineffective.  What you want is something that challenges you - something you've never done that you have really work at.  Anecdotally creatives who constantly push boundaries are in good shape.  I suspect it doesn't matter how creative you are - just the fact that you're forcing a lot of new neural connections.  The brain stays plastic for a long time.

_________

¹ Current generation iPhones have the U1 ultrawideband chip.  They haven't done much with it, but it makes a lot of sense for augmented reality, ID verification and object location.  I wrote a bit on UWB a few months ago.