omenti

a 'I really know better than to post this post...'

a minipost

About this time of year I get a request or two to talk to a high school junior or senior about colleges and majors.  I'll give reasons why I'm not the best the person to talk to, but if they persist I'll spend some time listening and talking.  Curiously there have been three so far this year and two suggested I post something.  Perhaps it can spark you into helping some students - many of you have much richer backgrounds.

 

A caveat is that I came from a position of privilege: white male, reasonably good at math, and from a period of time when great positive change seemed possible.  I didn't view college as training for work.  Somehow I knew what I was curious about from the age of twelve, so it was just following a calling.  I knew I could always get work with the friend of the family in back home who had a thriving HVAC and water softener company. This gave me the freedom to follow a somewhat different path than friends who were thinking about what happened after graduation.   This led to good and bad choices.  I double majored, but the fields were too close to each other and I ended up with a narrow undergrad education. Since then I study a few areas on my own, but I didn't take advantage of a broader education back then.  On a more positive note I got to know several professors as friends and mentors. That part was priceless.

 

° Ask yourself why you want to go to college?  What is your drive?  Many answers are correct, but you should know yours.

 

° A 'what color is your parachute-ish' question: are there any kinds of work you would do for nothing or even pay to do? 

 

° Where may or may not be important.  It's a plus in some fields to attend a famous college, but in many cases the quality of education can be as good at state schools - sometimes even better if you're good at making connections and really dive into the courses.  Famous professors often don't have the time to talk to undergrads. 

 

° Spend some time finding out which professors can teach.  

 

° Double major if you can, but in mostly unrelated areas.  Even if you're focused on employment afterwards - a good ROI on college - choose the second major in a field that you might find fascinating.  The humanities can give you great depth and are underrated for turning you into someone who can think differently down the road.  I've mentored students with a variety of double majors: CS-music, CS-art, physics-philosophy, math-paleontology for example. If you're doing a D-I sport, consider that a major by itself.  It can give a rich training that can serve you down the line too.  If not a double major, make sure your minor is very different from the major.

 

° A benefit of getting to know professors and show an interest is you might be able to get in on some of their projects.  This is often in the form of work-study, which can take a bite out of the debt down the road.  I was lucky enough to get in on a few great projects.  The most interesting seemed boring at first and didn't pay, but it was in an area I hadn't thought about and the professor was brilliant.  There was even an opportunity to have a tiny contribution to a bit of history and I still use some of the learnings. 

 

° Remind yourself that you learn best when it's play.  This won't happen all of the time - or even most of the time - but work on it. 

 

° Learn to witness the immediate world around you in some depth.  I recommend basic drawing and field drawing courses.  There are many other paths, but a bit of time focusing on understanding the natural world around you changes the way you think. 

 

That's pretty much it.  I mainly listen to them. Some of the items I've mentioned cause them to react and think about their own situation.  This year I recommended How to be Perfect by Michael Schur.  It's basically a Philosophy 101 short course done in a brilliantly entertaining manner - the way an engaged professor might go at it.  (If you're interested the audiobook is much better than the printed version as Schur has a stage background.) 

 

when not keeping your cool is a virtue

Why are we paying someone to heat parts of our house we aren't in?

 

This was one of my Dad's  deep questions.  Two adults, two kids and three dogs in a small house subject to Montana winters. Cold snaps could be deep and long - a week or more with highs well below 0° F ( -18° C) weren't uncommon.  More impressive were the lows:  -30° F (-35°C) came at least once every Winter and record lows were below -40°.  Dressing for it was a necessary skill.  Inside the home my Dad controlled a powerful technology - the thermostat.

 

When people were around during daytime the thermostat was set to 62°.  The nighttime setting, from 9 PM until the first person got up at about 5:30AM,  was 55°   If people were out of the house  the setting was 52°.   As far as I could tell these were his fundamental constants.  Warm clothing, sweaters, quilts (my parents cheated and had an electric blanket)  made it comfortable and sometimes even too warm.  There was only one thermostat and a few areas of the house were always a bit colder or warmer.  The dogs found the warmest regions at dog level. They also had warm blankets that they'd drag around where needed.

 

Since then I've learned a bit about home heating.  Some of the best information on home energy measurements comes from England.  They found standard modern construction homes see seven to ten percent energy savings for each degree celsius drop between 15°  and 20° C .  Lowering the thermostat setting from 70°  to 61° (21° to 16° C) could translate to 30 to 40% reduction in your heating bill.  It could also make a serious impact in places facing severe gas shortages this coming Winter.  

 

There are other tricks.  A big key is to heat the people and not the airspace where they aren't.  We had a small, partly finished family room in the basement.  We were there a lot during the Winter as it was the warmest room in the house.  Four people and three dogs radiated body heat along with four 150 watt lamps in the ceiling and a small electric heater (pro tip -- if you have a male dog, don't put one of these on the floor).  My Dad had a tendency to drop the thermostat to nighttime levels when we were down there. Most of our books lived there and a long work bench allowed my sister and I to work on homework and hobbies.  There was a TV, but it didn't get used that much.  It's where we told stories.¹  In the Summer the warm rugs on the floor came up and the room was a naturally cool place to escape the heat of the un-airconditioned home.  

 

The English studies I came across note the average English home was heated to 13° C (55° F) in 1970 rising to 20° C by 2000.   Our house wasn't all that different from the average English house. 

 

There are many other tricks for saving energy - insulation, heat pumps and so on, but they won't happen in Europe before this Winter for most people.  Insulation, done improperly, can be a two edged sword.  Forced air heating, the most common type in the US, fills the house with heated air. Insulation keeps as much of the heat as possible inside.  The problem is that often the air is trapped inside.  Stale air can be unhealthy (VoCs, high CO₂ levels, etc.).  There's a simple technology that can help - in fact you needn't look farther than your nose.  Your nose is a heat exchanger.  Cold air comes in and is heated up without releasing much of your body heat when you exhale.  Most industrial buildings and some homes have heat exchangers - they're required by many building codes to keep super insulated homes healthy.  Something to look into if your place is heavily insulated.

 

Localized radiant heat allows you to circulate some air from the outside and still be comfortable - you're heating people rather than the air.  You've probably noticed Scrooge's chair,  in many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, has a high back curved sides.  These were common in the Victorian era.. sit in front of a fireplace and focus the warmth. People have experimented with heated chairs with good results - notably work at Berkeley in the past decade.²  (They also designed and tested cooled chairs for the Summer).  People who live on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō modify the short legged Japanese family tables by putting a blanket over them and a small heater underneath.  I've used one of these visiting a couple from Sapporo when they were living in NY and was amazed how well it worked in their otherwise chilly house.  Teenagers like them for other reasons when their parents aren't home.  

 

In short there are many paths to clever - no silver bullets, but a lot of silver buckshot.  Twenty or thirty percent conversation levels are quite realistic for many people.   I won't mention adventures in an unheated 15 foot trailer with three dogs at -25°F (my mother thought colder temperatures were dangerous)

__________

¹  Nordic families seemed to tell a lot of stories.  Our heritage isn't Nordic, but many of our neighbors were and some of that rubbed off on us. 

² Here's an example and test of a heated/cooled chair. You could make one of these.. I haven't seen anything commercial.

 

 

 

where nobody is average

The first military airplanes designed after WWII began to arrive in the late 1940s.  A number of these early jets were more complicated to fly and the number of incidents and accidents alarmed the military.  Incidents where something went wrong, but the pilot and aircraft came back safely, and accidents were more serious.  As the jets were mechanically more reliable than their piston powered WWII era cousins, it only seemed natural to blame pilot error.

 

A  few remarkable pilots would find themselves in a bad spot, but always manage to get themselves out of trouble - often saving the aircraft.  Chuck Yeager was the legendary master  and was sent to airbases to show pilots how to fly correctly.  But the fact was this was happening to very skilled pilots.  With pilot error and aircraft malfunction seen as less likely root causes, eventually cockpit design was questioned.

 

Military airplane cockpit measurements were based on an average of a few measurements of about a hundred airmen in the mid 1920s. Improved nutrition and larger pilots was suspected as changing the average, so a massive study was undertaken that took 140 measurements of nearly 4,100 pilots.  In theory this would lead to a better average cockpit.

 

Gilbert Daniels joined the medical division at Wright Patterson out of college and was one of the people tasked with making these measurements and coming up with averages.  It turned out he was biased.  In college he did some research trying to find an average hand size and found it impossible.  Sifting through the data he looked at ten measurements deemed most important for the cockpit and calculated an average range for each that included 30 percent of the measurements - a nice wide average.  The surprise was than none of the pilots fell within all ten of the wide averages.  Gilbert found if you picked any three of the ten, less than four percent of the pilots would be average.  No one was average.

 

It shouldn't have been a surprise. Women's clothing designers had known it for awhile - something attributed to women being "different."  Eventually the military believed Gilbert's work and mandated highly adjustable cockpits.  All new aircraft had to be adjustable for males in the 5 to 95 percentiles for each of about ten critical dimensions.  Airplane manufactures balked - "it can't be done",  but finally came around because .. well .. contracts.

 

The fifties saw more adjustability come to automotive interiors, but at a much slower and more incomplete pace than military aviation.  About ten years ago I found myself driving a friend's Japanese sports car on the Pacific Coast Highway.  A lovely car considered one of the best handling in the world, but I didn't fit - there was no way to adjust the seat or steering wheel enough.  I'm not particularly tall, but have short legs and a long torso.  I also have very long feet (in theory the right dimensions for a swimmer, but not my thing).  A few months later I was helping a friend move in a rented truck.  The same problem.  There weren't enough adjustments to prevent my feet from getting caught near the pedals.  And then there's automobile safety.  The instrumented dummies used in crash tests cover less than a quarter of adults bringing into question the tests themselves.  

 

And it's not just physical differences.  'What color is the dress?' became a popular question as people legitimately came to different conclusions.  Tonal language native speakers are much more likely than other populations to have "perfect pitch."  Some people are purely visual thinkers, but most are a mixture of audio and visual.  There are people with very poor stereo vision - I know one who is an animator.   Increasingly "on the spectrum" is a meaningless construct.  Our brains have so many differences - so many dimensions - that it's likely none of us are truly "normal."  This has become an issue in fMRI studies recently. For example studies showing differences between men and women are often in the noise and meaningless. The field will eventually get more rigor.  You really need to know what dimension you're measuring.

 

Finally there's neuroplasticity.  We know that kids undergo huge changes in neural connectivity as they grow and some areas of the brain aren't stable until the mid 20s.  (I have a neurological condition that is believed to have resulted from an incomplete severing of neural connections when I was a baby.  It isn't a big thing, but is different enough to be worthy of study).  One seen as stopping around 30, neuroplasticity is seen throughout life, albeit at different rates.  There are examples of dramatic repurposing of regions of the brain.  Helen Santoro's missing left temporal lobe is one of the more dramatic examples.

 

Differences are a feature.

 

 

 

design for kids and community in japan

a minipost

 

About twenty years ago I was associated with a human computer interface department. A good deal of the work was associated with this nebulous concept of “community”. The term tends to be defined in the mind of the person talking about it .. like the word god. We had a list of about twenty words that needed rigorous contest when we publishing internally or externally .. community was everyone’s first choice for the list, That said most of us default to a warm and fuzzy concept. How people and neighborhoods should interact. The sort of thing Bob Kraut worries about. (to be fair he also thinks about communities like QAnon)

 

A recent 99% Invisible podcast focused on Japanese community of place design.. deign for the six year old Mixed use zoning, very narrow roads, a school house at the center and very independent kids. Some of us worry about urban and suburban design and traffic - how to you minimize the two or three ton vehicle carrying a driver and a bag of groceries? We often look to the Netherlands snd the Nordics for inspiration Indeed they’re excellent examples of moving from 1970s car-centric design to something better for cyclists and pedestrians. Japan offers a different path - one that seems unlikely in the US.

 

Here’s the a link to the audio, a transcript and a few videos

 

A comment .. most of us of a certain age grew up with kids walking and cycling everywhere - starting around six for walking and seven or eight for cycling. It was the only way a kid could deal with the scale of suburban design with fixed zoning and wide roads. That’s the environment the Dutch and Nordics started with rather than doubling down on complete car dependance.

 

clearing the air

a mini-post

A year ago I managed to help out getting a small grant from the state to build a number of Corsi-Rosenthal boxes with the help of two teachers (science and art) and about twenty high school kids.  It took a Saturday morning to build about eighty of the air cleaners.  All but two are still working and, even though the filters are visually ugly and dirty, they're working just as well.   I won't list all of the learnings - get in touch if you want to know more - but a big benefit besides cutting the viral load is dramatically cutting PM 2.5.  Kids and teachers report fewer allergy and allergy problems and toxic particulate from a nearby highway has been cut.  I suspect these would be great for fires and dusty areas (thinking Arizona and Salt Lake City).   In the past year more clever variants have appeared so check out YouTube if you're curious.  Oh - and filter prices drop if you buy 100 at a time:-)  The only downside was I never want to see duct tape again,

 

The motivation for the post was a fun discussion Andy Slavitt had with Richard Corsi and Jim Rosenthal on his In the Bubble Podcast.   Such a fantastic project for kids and adults!  (there are a number of commercials - Andy donates all profits to charities).

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inspirational chindōgu

Every now and again someone asks for advice on educational toys, projects or activities for their kids.  For a number of reasons I'm precisely the wrong person to recommend this or that.  It's not that I don't care .. I worry a lot about kids who enjoy math and science until they're 11 or 13 and then suddenly it becomes hard and boring.  This seems to happen to girls more than boys, which is just wrong.  Too many programs  focus on the top ten percent  and too few on those who could use a different way of seeing things.  I'm not terribly interested in the number of STEM graduates from college.  Rather, it's far more important having a literate society.

 

There are a few excellent motivators on YouTube.  Physics Girl is great, but her level is high school and beyond. For preteen and teenage girls (and many others) Simone Giertz is great.  She's a bit nutty, hyper-enthusiastic and has built a good business inventing useless things.  (She's also Swedish.  I defy you to find that in her accent.) Many of her projects are too advanced for a 13 year old to recreate, but the basics are there and recreating them isn't the point.  She wants to make you think about mechanical things differently.  She fires imagination with her humor.  Finally a huge bonus is that she admits to and highlights her mistakes.

Here's her latest - musical bubblewrap 

 

outward bound!

After two billion seconds on this planet, you tend to think about the time you've occupied and what you may occupy.  Our ability to sense scale is largely limited to what we can sense and the physical and temporal spaces we navigate.  Historians usually work with somewhat larger scales, but I'm guessing they don't have a good feel for - say - what 917 AD actually means.  Science looks at larger and smaller time scales.  I've spent a lot of time worrying about processes shorter than a femtosecond as well as those that are billions of years long.  I write down the scientific notation, but confess I don't have a physical feeling for what it means.

 

I'm particularly interested in what we can do about the future.  Dealing with global warming as a practical matter to mitigate huge biological and financial losses would see to be the big challenge (hopefully we'll see enough progress!).  On the scientific side there are projects that span decades.  Initial work on CERN's Large Hadron Collider began in the late 70s and it should run through at least the mid 2100s. Solar system exploration often looks three or more decades out.  Voyagers 1 and 2 managed to capture the public's imagination early on and they continue to provide amazing results - over 44 years from their launch.  (you can find out how far they are away and how fast they're moving at this JPL site)

 

The genesis of Voyager came when a Caltech grad student was working on a Summer project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1964.  Gary Flandro was studying techniques to send probes to the outer solar system.  Even during the space race the scale of space made this look completely blue sky.  Gary realized an alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would take place in the late 70s and that it might be possible to make a "grand tour" of these planets if you used gravity assist - a mechanism that transfers a bit of the kinetic energy from a planet to a spacecraft - to speed up the journey.  Such alignments are rare on the scale of a human life - about once every two hundred years.  The project was funded and, with help from Carl Sagan, caught the public imagination with a golden record of humanity attached to the spacecraft as well as one of the most iconic images humanity has recorded - the pale blue dot. 

 

Exploration of the planets of the outer solar system was the prime mission. The fly-bys were smashing successes, but the two spacecraft kept working.  Instrumentation was primitive by today's standards and optimized for conditions expected around Jupiter and Saturn, but it was possible to track the solar wind and a few other things.  

 

In 2004 Voyager 1 crossed the boundary of the heliosphere - a huge region surrounding the Sun inflated by the solar wind.  There was celebration as something made by humans had crossed into interplanetary space 94 times as far from the Sun as we are.  There was a shock in 2007 as Voyager 2 traveling in a different direction, crossed the boundary about ten percent closer to us.  The nature of the boundary was also different. It was, and is, a time of delight as so many new questions and hypotheses formed.

 

I'll skip the details, but there are two protective regions that deflect charged particles that help make life as we know it possible on Earth.  The smallest and most important is a comet-shaped region around the Earth generated by our planet's magnetic field.  This magnetosphere deflects charged particles streaming at us from the Sun as well as some cosmic rays from deep space.  Without it much of our atmosphere would have blown away and radiation levels would be high on the Earth's surface.  

 

The much larger heliosphere defects cosmic rays from outer space.   We've learned that the Sun has been traveling through a dust cloud known as the local interstellar cloud for about 60,000 years.  We're currently at an edge and soon we'll be on the outside (this may have already happened!) Then we travel for about 2,000 years before entering another dust cloud called the G cloud.  Depending on its density the heliosphere may shrink.  Cosmic ray fluxes would increase and that raises an interesting set of questions.  

 

[speculation alert]  Between two and three million years ago some crust samples show a lot of Iron-60.  The isotope does not occur naturally on Earth - rather it's the product of supernova explosions.  We may have spent time passing through a cloud laden with the "ash" of these huge explosions.  The heliosphere would have shielded us from charged particle radiation levels that would have done a number on life on Earth, but some would have made it through.  Who knows - perhaps this had an impact on evolution? In any event there are a huge number of questions.

 

A number of fantastic missions to the outer solar system on the drawing board - missions that may find the first extraterestial life.  I probably won't be around to learn about the findings, but am an enthusiastic supporter.  One of the most interesting is a follow-on to the Voyagers - probes that dip their toes into interstellar space. A study project is underway in the US and the Chinese are talking about a mission.  Details on the US proposal are amazing.  It's modern day cathedral building with details that must work forty and fifty years out when most of the designers are probably gone and the world will probably be a different place.  Thinking about it makes the hair on your back stand up. 

 

In addition to the scientific and engineering challenges, there's also a management challenge.  How do you form a cohesive team of experts who will have to excite and train new people along the way?  These projects tend to be small and the loss of one expert can be a disaster.  A great book that covers the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond shows how it can be done:  Chasing New Horizons by Alan Stern and David Grimspoon.

 

 

couplings and friction

a quick minipost

 

Beginning physics students learn about simple coupled systems.  Things like pendulums with a weak spring between them and the like.  Next you look at somewhat more complex systems like a group of pendulums.  Put them on a solid surface and start them in different oscillations and they do their pendulum thing unaffected by their neighbors.  Now add a little communication by putting them on a floor that can transmit a bit of vibration, something interesting happens.

 

The coupling of systems is common in nature covering a very wide range of complexity inducing our brain.  Many of these systems are mathematically fascinating.  Turn up the amount of coupling and they behave as you might expect - at least to a point.  Then, as the comments of the system impose themselves on each other,  there's a dramatic change.  Sometimes these are good from our point of view and sometimes they're disasters.  The point of inflection is often marked by a perturbation - lightning strikes, hurricanes, pandemics, big lies.   The couplings are too strong to allow for anything but a change to a new state.

 

One feature of our society is an increased coupling of systems.  Social media and other targeted messaging, GPS, the Internet of Things, globalization, just in time everything, religion, democracy....  More systems are being connected and the amount of communication is increasing at a terrific rate. These couplings are often introduced to decrease cost and the "friction" parts of the system have with each other.   Many are  too complex to understand well, but the basic math of over coupled systems is clear - these systems can be very unstable. 

 

Building alternate pathways and redundancy into these systems is an answer, but that costs money and clever design.  Another alternative is reducing the coupling of certain important subsystems.  It's something I find myself paying more careful attention to.  Highly coupled or low-friction systems are usually brittle at some point.  I dislike the term "black swan" as real black swans (the bird) are not uncommon in nature.  But we continue to build serious and increasingly effective black swam bait...

 

 

 

31 is the new 35

Andrew Revkin and I had a brief exchange about the power of labels.  Both of us object to the phrase "climate emergency."  Even though it is an emergency that could escalate into an existential threat, people don't respond to labeling longer term threats as emergencies.  I've been suggesting we've entered an adaptation epoch.  Andrew, a much better communicator, is still searching.

 

The past two or three years have taught us short term temperature excursions can be dramatic.  Last year the Pacific Northwest recorded previously unheard of temperatures -  the highest in the area in at least 7,000 years and probably much longer.  This Spring it was South Asia.  Last week record heat came to England and parts of Europe.  These events are probably going to be more common and time goes on and greenhouse gas levels continue increasing. 

 

Wet bulb readings of 35°C (95°F at 100% humidity)  have long been considered unsurvivable.  A person in good physical shape would probably die in a few hours. Such events are extremely rare. Until the past decade they've only been recorded a few times and then only for an hour or so.  They're increasing in frequency and length - mostly in the Indian subcontinent.  Finding cooler spaces for people is a matter of life and death.  

 

It's become clear the 35° number was something of a guess.  Recent careful work shows it's more like 31° for young people in good physical shape.   Older and compromised people have lower limits.  The Tokyo Olympics had periods with wet-bulb temperatures in the upper twenties. Athletic performance during these periods was certainly compromised (I saw it happen to a friend). 

 

What can be done?  Cities suffer from heat island effects.  All of the asphalt and concrete increases the local daytime temperature and holds them at higher levels at night. (hot nights may be harder on the body than hot days).  Air conditioning helps, but it costs money and a power grid that not everyone has access to.  Reducing the amount of asphalt and concrete while planting trees can make a big difference.  It's a great justification for reducing the number of cars and roadways in cities (green spaces are a key motivating reason for the dramatic change currently underway in Paris).  Unfortunately green spaces are usually linked to wealth.  In many places racism and redlining have produced some of the worst heat islands.

 

There are other tricks that are easily implemented.  White paint  on roofs can make a difference. Paint that holds up to temperature and monsoons for the better part of a decade isn't cheap, but is becoming more popular.  In Western countries more reflective shingles are appearing. Some of these look fairly normal, but are highly reflective in the infrared and can make a difference in cooling bills. 

 

And you can send some of the excess heat directly to space.  

 

If you're in a very dry area go outside on a clear night and look up.  Feel the cooling on your face.  Now hold a piece of cardboard between your face and the stars.  You'll notice a warmer feeling.  Remove the cardboard and your face gets cooler. 

 

Your body glows - you've undoubtedly seen infrared photos and videos of people.  We radiate photons at a variety of wavelengths, but it peaks around 9.5 microns - about twenty times longer than visible light.  The  atmosphere is transparent to visible light and also from 8 to 13 microns.  Photons from our bodies can radiate to space.   Deep space is really cold (a bit over 2° above absolute zero) so your face is radiating some of it's heat directly to space - enough that you can feel the cooling.

 

Clever material engineering has produced materials that are good at absorbing the heat around them and then radiating it into space. It's enough to reduce cooling requirements - at least in places with very dry atmospheres.  There's still work lowering costs and making the surfaces last longer, but it's something else to try.

 

Back to the idea of an adaptation epoch. Many things will need to be tried and efforts will stretch for generations.  There's enormous opportunity.  It's both sad and dangerous there's so much 19^th century political inertia, but I'm optimistic more clever people, organizations and governments will finally emerge.  As a species we don't have a choice if we want to survive.

 

just two things..

minipost

Recently I gave a talk to an audience of non-scientists.  During the question and answer section some asked "what's something important you'd leave us with?"

 

Everything you see is in the past.  Light travels about a foot in a billionth of a second, so if you look at your feet, light takes five or six billionths of a second to make it to your eyes.  You see your feet five or six billionths of a second in the past.  The moon you see is one and a quarter seconds in the past, and the Sun about eight and a third minutes.   The Andromeda galaxy, the farthest you can see without aid, about two and a half million years in the past.

 

I was going to point out it's more complex as it takes a few tenths of a second for your brain to register the image and the whole notion of "present" is imprecise, but that would muddy things.

 

Next someone asked for another useful piece of energy.  

 

About a horsepower of solar energy falls on an average sized umbrella on a very clear day with the Sun directly overhead.