omenti

frogs, pots of water and the slow application of heat

A few weeks ago Om posted a piece on Apple's new laptop based on their M1 chip.  It's one of those huge transitions that gives Apple a much higher starting point  for desktop and laptop machines - machines that are still very important to many of us. They've been working on this for at least ten years as part of their smartphone silicon effort. People like Horace Dediu and Om (and even a non-technologist like me) have noted the progression of Apple silicon and wondered if it would be deadly to Intel.  For me the biggest surprise has been the software effort - writing was all over the place for on the silicon side. 

 

Zoom's emergence represents a pot that had been slowly warming for decades coming to a sudden boil with pandemic-fueled heat.  It's frustrating with a terrible UX and UI, is iffy on highly asymmetrical networks, causes enormous frustration for many, but it's better than other tools and works well enough.  Last week I described it as the modern equivalent of the <blink> markup in html during the early days of web browsers like Mosaic.  People think it's cool at the time, but it will be laughably primitive down the road.   

 

Remote video tools will get better and may change some habits. At the same time others are recognizing the importance of face to face. One university I work with just completed a survey that found 0% of 1600 students said they'd prefer in-class instruction to remote leaning when the pandemic quiets down.  Already there's a lot of experimentation on campuses and in some businesses.  An animation company saw productivity crater and is working on a better than Zoom suite of tools for internal use. The university I mentioned has found messaging apps like Discord excel in spaces that Zoom handles poorly.  And perhaps we'll get better Internet connectivity.  Price to performance in the US is abysmal, 5G is a largely marketing joke, cable modems are too asymmetrical (upstream is slow) to support serious video conferencing, and the digital divide has widened the already huge education gap.  There's a lot to fix.  It's like cycling - you need to sort out infrastructure and culture along with adding bikes.  

 

I'm confident tool improvements will come but serious leaps need to be taken and I don't have great confidence in the major players.  What I'm more worried about, at least in the US and Canada, is infrastructure. A friend is moving from Colorado to North Carolina and needs a very solid Internet connection.  The only advice I could give was to find cities that offered good fiber connections that we're from telcos.  That mostly narrowed it down to Ting, which left only a few cities. The movement of people from cities to rural and suburban areas is constrained by many forces - this is one. 

 

On to something else..

 

I've argued that virtual reality wasn't very important and augmented reality meant much more than projecting information in your field of view - and that Apple had just introduced their first AR product. 

 

In a way glasses are AR devices - they help you see more than you normally would. The same for microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes, I have built bat detectors that let me augment my world by adding a bit of theirs, ... the list is long.  But back to my comment about Apple.   I have to admit I was wrong.  Apple's first AR product was the Apple watch, although they didn't know it at the time.  At first it was more of a fashion statement with a weird assortment of apps.  After a few years they learned what it was for.  People saw it as something for improving their health and fitness. Exercise, heart monitoring, and even the state of your body. Jutta has an app that interfaces with other hardware for diabetes management.  We're talking about life altering AR.   The area is growing rapidly and we won't even think of it as AR because we're used to its Hollywood manifestation.  Of course Alexa, Siri and other voice driven interfaces are AR.  They augment our local information space.  Apple's EarPods are just a portal you wear.  There's still a place to visual AR, but the pot's already boiling.  AR is here now.

 

Of course we should think about how these things fit into our lives. That's a serious area I'm not terribly confident about - at least if tech is making the design choices.

 

 

measurement grounded activity recommendations

A minipost on staying healthy

 

For the last twenty years or so it's been increasingly clear that exercise is a powerful drug large benefits and few if any downsides.  Recommendations for how much across wide ranges of populations are improving, but historically have been educated guesses and extrapolations based on inadequately sized studies.  Fitbits, Apple watches and other wearables that measure and record movement are revolutionizing how the science is done.  Study sizes and data quality have increased dramatically and are being correlated with real measures of health from physicals and other widespread measures.  New targeted recommendations based on the improved studies are emerging with recommendations for various age groups and differing physical abilities and medical conditions, acceptable sedentary behavior, a better understanding of the depression-fighting power of physical movement and so on.  

 

The British Journal of Sports Medicine has dedicated their latest issue to the new device-grounded WHO physical activity recommendations and has posted it outside their paywall. Perhaps most important is the WHO 2020 Guidelines article, but most of the articles are interesting and written for the non-specialist.  They also posted an informative twenty minute podcast episode:

BMJ talk medicine · The 2020 WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity with Prof Fiona Bull and Dr Juana Willumsen. Ep #456

 

If you're looking for some serious strength and conditioning exercises, Sarah has put together a few on her YouTube page. They're aimed more at those already in good shape who don't have access to a gym.  Just look for those labeled strengthening and conditioning - the rest are aimed at beginning volleyball players.  At the other end of the scale walking is an excellent exercise.

And a simple recommendation from me.  Getting out in the cold weather away from people is an excellent way to get exercise.  As a native Montanan I offer one bit of advice on dressing for the cold: layered clothing.  It can make the difference between a pleasant bit of outdoor activity and being cold, wet and miserable. 

 

 

 

chindōgu

a minipost

Several people have written asking for educational projects to occupy their kids during the pandemic.  I've answered with a number of ideas, but it hit me chindōgu could be the perfect ticket for many.  It's the absurd Japanese art of useless inventions aimed at solving everyday problems with roots in Rube Goldberg machines and the art of the kludge - a clever but inelegant solution to a problem.   A number of good examples are shown here.  I've recommended this approach to a number of middle and high school teachers.  At least one has had a lot of fun with it making a "how to program things" module more fun.  It's also become a recreational art form at an animation studio you've heard about.

 

Thinking that way can be unexpected powerful.  It cuts through barriers combining critical thinking and play with the goal of humor.  Failure is fine and can be a powerful learning experience. Simone Giertz has been credited with getting more teenage girls interested in engineering than other person or program.  She's famous for useless robots - "shitty robots" as she calls them.   Here's her TED talk (one of the few useful TED talks I've seen).  

 Here's her YouTube channel.  Earlier pieces may be more accessible to beginners as she's become more sophisticated in her craziness.  And she has done much of this with brain cancer.  A remarkable inspiration. 

 

So start off small with supplies around the house and just have fun.  There aren't any downsides and you can spend as much or as little as you want.  You're only limited by your imagination and sense of humor.  And if you are building them, you can draw or write about them.   

 

 

good tide-ings

Jheri asked a good question about the tides.  First you need to watch Henry Reich's piece on the subject.  (His goal is to move quickly so you might have to stop every now and again and rewatch a segment.)

Basically differential gravity - the water on the side of the Earth closest to the Moon is attracted to the Moon. So is the Earth, but the Earth acts as a solid body so you can abstract it as a mass at it's center.  Since the center of the rigid Earth is farther from the Moon than the near-side water, the whole Earth moves a bit less towards the Moon than the near-side water. In other words the water level closest to the Moon rises.   The water away from the Moon is even further away than the center of the Earth, so the Earth is effective moved closer to the Moon than the water.  This gives the tidal bulges on either side.   Henry goes on with some other things including the tidal effect of a black hole (known as in the trade as spaghettification:) 

 

Jheri's question gets at something deeper.  "Why aren't there tides on ponds and lakes? Or in my coffee cup?"

 

That's a great observation  - one that never occurred to me until I was working on a homework problem in college.  There were three parts - describe the effect in simple terms, derive a formula for the tidal gravitational potential, and finally calculate the average high tide in the center of the ocean.  I answered the first part like Henry did.  The second part wasn't difficult - it was just Newtonian physics and I thought I did it properly.  Then the third part..  the numbers just didn't make sense.  I was getting sub-millimeter sized tides, but I couldn't find the flaw.  

 

Finally the answer came. The expression I derived was correct, but the my model wasn't.  Jheri is right..  If the Earth is rigid why wasn't the coffee in a cup rising?  Why wasn't I rising?  I'm not going to do the model here, but the trick is considering each point on the oceans and integrating the vector components of the forces.

 

 Imagine the Earth covered with water and the Moon orbiting over the equator.  A glob of water at the poles would be attracted to the center of the Moon.  Draw lines from the center of the Moon to these globs and you see they form an angle.  If you work out the vector components every glob of water not on the equator would have a small force pointed towards the equator.   If you add up all of these forces - do the integral - the total force is substantial.  Since water is fluid it is getting squeezed a bit.  Although each bit is small, the oceans are huge and all of those little bits add up to the tides we observe.

 

The same squeezing happens on the solid Earth, but our planet is rigid enough that the effect is small.  A tide exists in the coffee in a cup, but the total force is small enough to make them microscopic.  A large lake like Lake Michigan might build a few centimeters of tide, but you don't notice it with normal waves and wind.

 

The example in the video is sort of right - there really is differential gravity. The problem is it's about ten million times weaker than the surface gravity on Earth.  It's also an example of failure when a model is too simple and seems to be good enough.  Fortunately people like Jheri notice something's wrong which means you need a better model. 

 

claw your way to insight

Over the weekend I caught a segment on wallaby sightings in Britain.  It seems they've been zoos and private collections since the 1930s.  They're talented escape artists and many were turned out to the countryside during WWII.  Over the years there would be sightings for a year or two and then the individual would vanish.  In recent years a change has taken place and sightings are more common.  An attempt to make a census suggests there may be two breeding populations.  Momma wallabies with joeys in their pouches... 

 

In the past twenty years Britain's climate taken a major shift.   Indeed the South of England is climatically similar to wallaby-rich Tasmania.  British wallabies have few natural predators and Brits tend to love cute furry animals. It looks like they have a shot at success. 

 

Climate change.  The impact has been making marks in places we haven't thought about as well as the obvious ones we have. This one isn't too big, but it's an easy to understand example.  There are millions of others that quickly get to wicked complexity.  Mass migration, pandemics (loss of habitat is probably partly responsible for some epidemics and clearly pandemics are possible), the list of possibilities is huge.   So how do you begin to think about this class of problem?

 

The high level physics is straightforward and known at a coarse level for about fifty years.  Thirty years ago it became clear global warming was a serious threat although it was difficult to gauge the impact.  Since then the science has become much more refined - essentially settled - and many of us became alarmed.  My conversion was about twenty years ago.  At the time I thought education would be a powerful tool and titled at those windmills for about eight years.  I didn't realize how interconnected  and nonlinear social and economic issues were. How do you communicate, how do you change minds, what is important to people?  Next regions are all different. Mix in how our brains are wired and an existential problem candidate becomes difficult to make meaningful headway on.   

 

How do you work on fundamentally difficult problems - those that are complex and non-linear?  People in my field deal with problems that tend to be much simpler, but are often too difficult to approach directly.  Early on you try to make the problem as simple as possible.  Very rough calculations often done mostly in your head or maybe a few scribbles with a stick of chalk.  The idea is to throw out a lot of bad approaches and find a few that make sense. It's playful and even exhilarating with the right people. Then you see if you can break the problem in components. It only works if the problem is decomposable with weakly interacting components.   Many problems aren't like that - the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.   There are Nobel Prizes that have been awarded to people who have figured out clever hacks so you know how and when simple approximations can be made.  

 

Moving up to the next level of difficulty often makes careful study prone to error or even impossible.  Sometimes a way forward is possible.  A rough out of focus answer may give you the information you need to move forward. This type of integrated thinking, Murray Gell-Mann called it a coarse look at the whole or CLAW, is rare.  I've been part of three studies that used the approach.  Getting a diverse mix of people who are known to have the ability to listen to each other is important.  You need a few core experts and a mixture of generalists who recognize and build connections.  One group had a historian, psychologist, two sociologists, mathematician, two climate experts, a meteorologist, a rabbi, two computer scientists, a forestry expert, two oceanographers, a poet  and a few others including myself. (we needed a musician and chef :-) The project required two days a week face to face for two months with lots of homework. I think we had some important insights even if they were fuzzier than most of us were accustomed to.

 

There aren't many places with the structure to do this kind of coarsely focused work.  Those that do may not be as diverse as they need to be.   That said I think this can be done on a smaller scale - even with just two or three people.  Perhaps companies, government organizations and NGOs might think about tapping the power of internal diversity.  The warning is that you don't want to build internal think tanks (or even hire external ones) as that has problems of it's own. (lots of horror stories from a couple of companies I know.) 

 

A few notes from the groups I've been part of.  Counterfactuals are extremely important.  Looking at low probability, but desirable outcomes may give some insight into how to make them happen.  They can also reveal landmines you hadn't considered.   The diversity of metrics used by others can help inform your own work later on.   Picking the right people is difficult.  The success of the effort depends on it as much as anything. Understanding a bit of history can be very important. And finally a comment on simplification - the coarse graining. It needs to be discovered than imposed and that takes awhile.  A few days of conventional "brainstorming" isn't going to cut it.

 

 

 

place and time

There was a bowl of M&Ms for after the oral exams  Our grades were based on homework assignments and three oral exams. Four of us would take our turn at the blackboard. The professor had this natural ability to ask question you hadn't thought about, but should be able to solve.

 

Mr Crandall:  Does a clock at the center of the Earth run faster or slower than one on the surface?  If so how big is the difference since the Earth was formed?

(It wasn't as bad as that might sound - he was nothing like John Houseman.)

 

First a little diversion is in order.  You've probably heard the Global Positioning System needs to account for relativity.  Two effects are going on.  In one the satellites are moving with respect to GPS receiver on the ground.  Each satellite has a very stable atomic clock that is synchronized with the other GPS satellites.  Your receiver look at position and time information from at least four satellites to determine your position.  To get the necessary level of accuracy the system needs to account for the effects of both special and general relativity.   

 

Special relativity tells us moving clock appears to run a bit slower than one at rest.  Almost everything around us moves too slowly for this to be important , but a clock on a GPS satellite would lose about seven microseconds a day.  That may not seem like much, but that's enough to cause a position error that increases by about two kilometers a day. 

 

The curvature of spacetime is the bigger problem.   A result of general relativity is the direction where time runs more slowly.¹ The further a clock is from a mass, the faster it runs.  Clocks on orbiting GPS satellites gain about forty six microseconds a day.  Add the special and general relativistic effects and the satellite clocks gain a bit under thirty nine microseconds a day. Left uncorrected the system would be useless in a few minutes and the error would increase by  over seven miles in a day.   The satellites correct for both of these effects before the signal is transmitted.

 

All of this is key to the original question.  Time at the center of the Earth will pass more slowly.  The question is how much?

 

The purpose of these oral exams was not so much to test if you had learned the course material, but to encourage you to quickly frame a problem and come up with a ballpark estimate.  In the spirt of the type of education pioneered by Comenius it was  supposed to be playful and even fun.  This type of thinking with a piece of chalk is core to thinking through new ideas and working with others on certain stages of problems.  A few marks of chalk might represent dozens of pages of calculations if done in detail.  Unfortunately its protrayal on television and in movies can make the field seem artificially difficult to outsiders.

 

A quick calculation showed the center of the Earth is about 1.4 years "younger" than the surface.²  Long lived radioactive elements at the core decay slightly less than their counterparts at the surface. I can still remember the "wow" in my mind as took a handful of M&Ms. A not very great fountain of youth is under your feet. Since then I've learned exercise and eating right are better approaches to aging.

 

Since then I've done a more accurate calculation.  The inner Earth isn't homogeneous.  I found an estimate of how density changes and came up with about 2.5 years.  The initial estimate was ten or fifteen minutes with a piece of chalk vs at least a day's worth of work.   In the process I found  time dilation due to special relativity was a thousand times smaller and reasonable to ignore.  Moving to the Sun I got about 30,000 years with the simple estimate for the Sun's density.

 

The more important point is many fields develop mechanisms for dealing with either too much or too little data by coming up with simple ways to reframe and think about the task.  I've seen it in math, art and sports and assume it's a common approach to playful problem solving - probably so common you don't think about it.  The playful and fun part is key.  That's a space where you can be creative. 

 

__________

¹ You can learn special relativity with high school math and a bit of logic.  It's not at all difficult.  General relativity, on the other hand, requires much deeper math.  And a tip.  "Down is the direction where time runs more slowly" on a t-shirt is a good way to find other physicists in a crowd.

The effect is known as gravitational redshift as you usually measure this by looking at frequency shifts.  Atomic clocks are so good these days that you can measure the effect in a lab by raising one a few meters.  

2 If you want the details send me a note. First derive an equation for the gravitational potential inside a homogeneous sphere.  Next think about the frequency of a photon in a gravitation well to get change as a function of change in gravitational potential.  Then it's just remembering some constants to get the number. 

 

 

 

green flight

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency reported aviation accounted for about three percent of the nation's CO₂ emissions, or about twelve percent of transportation.  The international figure is about two point five percent.  These may not seem huge, but they've been growing steadily and, post pandemic, should continue their growth.  Making matters worse is the global warming contribution from the cloud-like contrails produced by the jet engines at altitude.   It's difficult to study, but indications are the contribution may double the global warming impact. 

 

A number of approaches have been suggested and are in various stages of testing.  Moving to bio-fuels isn't the greatest solution as growing and producing biofuels has issues and you're still producing contrails.  In the short term some airlines will move to it, but that may be part a PR and carbon credits game as much as anything. 

 

Electric airplanes exist and there are even a few (very) sort haul commercial flights.  The problem is the specific energy of the battery - how heavy is a battery per unit of energy storage.   Turbine fuel stores about eighty times as much energy as a safe lithium-ion battery of the same weight.  Airplanes frequently carry large amounts of fuel - the weight of fuel burned on a cross country trip is greater than that of the the passengers and crew.  The range of a battery powered airplane is severely limited even after accounting for the great efficiency of an electric motor.   We could get a lot closer with exotic batteries that aren't anywhere close to reality, but even then you're talking about a propeller driven (slower) aircraft. 

 

Hydrogen often comes up as the perfect clean fuel - the combustion product is just water.   Although it's the most common element in the universe and accounts for most of your body's atoms, we need hydrogen gas and that's extremely rare on Earth.  Hydrogen gas (H₂) must to be produced and it takes a lot of energy to create it - more than you can get out of it.  Most of it is produced from a petrochemical process that involves carbon emissions.  This is called black or grey hydrogen and, if you manage to capture most of the carbon emissions it's called blue hydrogen.  What you want is green hydrogen - hydrogen produced using electrolysis with electricity from wind, solar or nuclear power.  That seems like a nice use of excess intermittent power. 

 

It's important to think of hydrogen as an energy storage medium - a non-rechargeable battery of sorts.  It has a very low - essentially unusable energy density at atmospheric pressure.  You'd need impossibly large tanks (think about Hindenburg sized tanks) or you can compress it or liquify it and shrink your tanks to something more manageable.  In gas form at a very high but probably safe pressure it needs about five to ten times the volume of  jet fuel. Liquid hydrogen gets you down to about three and a half times the volume.  

 

Engineering is all about finding an optimal solution to several problems that generally interact.  You could convert a turboprop or turbofan to burn hydrogen and see where that takes you.  Turboprops seem to be workable on short haul routes (1,000 km or less) with small passenger loads (under 100 passengers).  They'd be slow and fly at lower altitudes than today's jets.  Turbofans present a number of problems - at altitude they're making contrails and the range and payload isn't great.  One needs to think a bit out of the box.   

 

You might use a hybrid jet fuel/hydrogen engine that climbs to cruising altitude on jet fuel as fuel consumption is much greater in that phase. Then the switch to hydrogen fuel is made when the engines are throttled back at cruise altitude.  You could also design a lifting body aircraft that has a lot of internal volume for liquid hydrogen fuel tanks without being too large for conventional airports.  Tricks might get you across the US with a few hundred passengers, but flights across the Atlantic or Pacific would require something more. 

 

The prop-driven airplanes present other opportunities. A fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity and electric motors are more efficient that jet engines.  There are a number of little problems that can be overcome, but a fuel cell propeller airliner may just be a short to medium range solution.

 

I didn't go into the NOx problem.  The high heat of combustion in a jet engine creates nitrous oxides when the nitrogen in the air is heated to high temperatures.  That's a problem - particularly at the high altitudes jets fly at and burning hydrogen won't fix it.  The way around it is to use fuel cells and electric motors, but that's for lower altitudes and slower speeds.  There isn't an ideal solution - you just hope to reduce as much as you can.  

 

Airbus is working on the problem - or at least they were before the pandemic.  I can believe the target date for the propeller aircraft, the lifting body is probably more than fifteen years out.

There may be a near term niche for hydrogen powered flying vehicles.  Agricultural and inspection drones are much larger than hobbyist drones.  They're limited to half hour flight times with batteries, but new fuel cell drones with small high pressure hydrogen tanks have appeared in Korea.  They can fly for hours and that may be the first practical opening for aerial hydrogen.

 

why you can watch I Love Lucy

A few days ago Om and I were talking about some technologies.  I mentioned I sort of predicted one with reasonable confidence about twenty years out.  It seemed a bit too scifi on the surface, but other people in research agreed it could happen if a lot of money was spent.  It seemed desirable, so why not?  There was only one major roadblock and that turned out not to be roadblock at all.  It needed a much better battery than anything we knew about.  A lithium-ion battery was in the ball park at the time, but we had no idea Sony was playing with the technology at the time. We were equally unaware of the fundamental work in university labs two decades before.  

 

It's interesting to think about areas of technology under rapid development and the importance of missing technologies. Television is a great example.

 

Television has been around for a long time.  Philo Farnsworth's all electronic television in the 20s was probably the most important breakthrough.   The lens of a camera focued an image on a photosensitive plate while an electron beam was scanned row by row across the imaged area.  A signal of strength that varied with the brightness of the region the beam was on would be transmitted as a radio signal to a television receiver.  The receiver had a cathode ray tube that, in lock-step with the beam in the camera,  scanned a piece of glass coated with a phosphor that would glow when the beam hit it with a brightness that changed as with the signal the camera was sending. All of this was done at about thirty frames a second - good enough that your mind perceives motion.

 

Television was such a great name - viewing a moving scene at a distance as it happened.  Shortly after WWII a few television networks sent their television signals between cities and then across the country.  Even though the receivers were expensive it quickly caught on and the networks were spending serious money on production. But there was this problem with time zone.  You put a program on at 6 PM in New York City and the television receivers in Los Angeles would display the image at 3 PM.  Not exactly good for creating the largest potential audiences.

 

Electronic recording would fix the problem, but wire and tape recorders were just getting good enough for audio and television signals had about a thousand times as much information.  It just wasn't possible.   The solution seems a bit crazy now - point a film camera at a television monitor and immediately develop the film. Eastern and Central time zones were live, Mountain and Pacific were delayed by two hours.

 

At first these kinescopes used  16mm film.  Once used most of the film was thrown away it degrades and is a fire hazard..  By 1954 television kinescope delayed broadcast became the largest consumer of movie film eclipsing Hollywood and the home movie markets combined. A bit before  I Love Lucy became a huge hit show.  Lucile Ball demanded higher quality so a switch was made to 35mm.    The larger format was so expensive and had to be stored in newly constructed fireproof facilities.  An archive began to emerge. 

 

A few years passed and Ampex came out with a video recorder able to handle the flood of information. - a monster that used two inch wide tape.  An expensive and initially temperamental monster that used two inch tape, but dirt cheap compared to the  kinescope process.  It quickly became the standard for time zone delay. The curious thing is that the television people didn't see tape as an archive medium.  For a few years none of the tape delayed shows remain as the expensive tapes were reused until they wore out.  No one thought long term storage was important.

 

The last part is interesting.  We don't think of television as remote viewing - rather it's a video stream that might be live, time delayed, manipulated,  archived, or all of these. 

 

Oh .. the prediction from 1993?   You will take a flat piece of glass out of your pocket and have a video conversation with a relative in India and the "call" won't cost anything.  We knew how to code video, mobile radio would easily have the bandwidth in 15 or 20 years, multi-touch screens were in the labs, lcd color screens and lcd cameras were only going to get better, the price of bandwidth was going to crater (our corporate management didn't like that message) ... Moore's law on everything but the battery.   Note:  I've made a few good predictions, but looking back at my old lab books can be an embarrassment - you tend to forget the dead ends.  

 

 

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

in praise of techs

mini post

1874 saw the opening of the most important inventions of the 19^th century - The Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.  Serious science began to take off in the 1850s in universities.  It was mostly applied and work aimed at solving the problems of the day - railroads and telegraph.  Cambridge was late to the game, but their approach was revolutionary.  Apparatus and expertise were concentrated at one location.  Research cultures emerged. Not only was this cost effective, it freed up researchers to explore new classes of problems - not only hypothesis based and applied work, but true exploration.  That turned out to be the fuel of scientific and technological change in the following century. 

 

The model spread and by the 1890s and areas of deep expertise began to appear.  A dramatic example is the race to zero - how experimentalists tried to achieve the lowest possible temperatures.  Three institutions were deep into the game, but success and failure came down to who had the best apparatus and laboratory technicians. The experiments had become so difficult that expert technicians who built, understood and modified the experimental apparatus made all the difference. 

 

The public often sees science as the quirky theorist standing at her slate board and, chalk in hand and on her shirt and pants,  having deep thoughts. In fact most of it is very careful labor that can consume a small army of people for years to get a result that something didn't exist (that's as important as finding something!)  The Nobels celebrate the principal scientists and praise is warranted, but it often misses the supporting staff. (I think the Nobels have their place as they tend to focus on the frontier rather than hypothesis driven work.  I wish they were more inclusive, but another story)

 

Here's a short video on a tech at EGO-Virgo - the gravity wave observatory near Pisa, Italy.  Three such instruments exist with a forth coming online in Japan soon and a fifth under construction in India.  Able to measure distortions more than ten thousand times smaller than the diameter of a proton, these are far and away the most precise instruments ever built.  The technicians responsible for various bits and running them made it all possible.  I've worked with people like this - they're among the greatest craftsmen and women in the world.