omenti

happy thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian readers!  

 

It strikes me as a better day for the holiday.  I grew up close to the border and spent time with family friends in Lethbridge, so there's an excuse to celebrate two Thanksgivings in my family.  The Canadians we knew use the three day weekend for being in the mountains and finished with a semi-traditional meal on Monday night.  There was also story-telling and projects for the kids and some of the adults.  Most art, but I tried to offer a little science project.  I still do that on occasion.It made me think of a friend.

 

I've mention Dianna Cowern aka.Physics Girl before.  She has a BS in physics from MIT and got into explaining bits of physics on YouTube.  Her long form videos are seriously better in terms of education, content and enthusiasm than anything on TV. ¹ A bit more than two years ago she came down with Covid shortly after getting married.  She's been dealing with an extreme from of long Covid since to the point of not being able to get out of bed, having constant nausea and brain fog and almost no energy.  Talking with someone for more than a few minutes is too much and her system has responded by making her allergic to many foods. There's a Patreon to help offset the costs so her husband can take care of her full time.  I'm sure any level is appreciated and you'll get roughly monthly updates and a look into long Covid from medical experts.  She's a worthy cause. 

 

Back to Thanksgiving... here are a few simple demonstrations you and your kids can do for the holiday - either now or the American one or some other day if you live somewhere else.

 

 

and one with no explanations.. but it shows the remarkable energy she had.. this is how I remember her. I keep hoping she recovers.  She's an amazing resource and an example for kids - particularly girls. 

 

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¹ It's funny how out of the classroom education and inspiration for sciency kids has changed over time.  In my day it was The Amateur Scientist and Mathematical Games columns in Scientific American and Sky and Telescope magazine. Later on it was Cosmos with Carl Sagan, the Quirks and Quarks radio show (still around and still great!) and some books aimed at curious teens and adults.  Now there are a few excellent YouTubers:  Physics Girl, Three Blue One Brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile. It's still best to work things out for yourself, but these can light up curiosity.

 

 

creating the arrow tips

To start off you need to subscribe (free) to the Crazy Stupid Tech newsletter from Om Malik and Fred Vogelstein.  A couple of paragraphs from their introduction gives a sense of where they're going:

 

Together we have followed Silicon Valley’s innovation engine for decades. We've seen a lot. But one observation stands out: The best ideas - the ones that launch meaningful companies - need to seem crazy and stupid at first.

We get that tech makes many of us more nervous than hopeful right now. But as Silicon Valley’s influence extends deeper into all corners of our economy and lives, there also have never been more interesting, crazy, stupid new and interesting technologies out there. They are not getting enough attention. So our goal is to tell you about them.

 

I've been involved in a variety of technologies from application to tools, but I'm a bit of an outlier.  My background is fundamental physics - something I've been able to mostly keep up since grad school while doing other things and what consumes most of my time these days.  It's non-linear and the payoffs often don't arrive for decades and rarely for those who did the work.  But over time it's where almost all technologies come from as well and a number of powerful tools.  It's difficult to quantify the payoffs, but most numbers exceed one hundred time return in investment after factoring in inflation - and that includes a large number of paths that didn't work out.  It may come as a surprise, but this is a case where the liberal arts win over time.¹

 

A secondary effect is the training.  Get to the point of a postdoc in physics and you begin to think like a physicist.  The same for chemistry and probably many other areas.  Sometimes this ability to 'think different' is useful in more applied areas - particularly when it comes to stepping outside just a bit.  Of course you probably don't want a room full of physicists, chemists and mathematicians working on finance .. well .. unless you happen to be Jim Simons, but he was probably an outlier. 

 

This kind of research, often called curiosity-driven or discovery research, has been increasingly under fire in the US and EU for about thirty years. Funders are much more interested in some kind of payoff - more of an applied research (although that term is used for something else in industry).  This has happened before and I suspect we'll see a swing the other way as China takes over as the leading scientific power.

 

I'm not discounting applied research.. more of it needs to be done and I suspect a better focus is required.  The enormous sums of money and numbers of people going into computer science for gAI strikes me as mis-targeted and wasteful given more pressing challenges around global warming, inequality in healthcare and so on.

Finding the right mix of people and research areas at the fundamental end demands a great deal of good taste.  A few organizations have been very successful: Cambridge was behind in sorting out issues of telegraphy and the likelihood of radio, but decided to work on fundamental issues of thermodynamics.  They managed to assemble some of the best minds and created the modern research laboratory.  They created the spark that launched quantum mechanics which exploded in the 1920s.  In the teens Caltech was a sleepy little engineering school that found itself with a new mandate.  They decided not to work on  the transmission of electricity like everyone else.  By going deeper they managed to become one of the more relevant pure research organizations for the next century.  There are other examples like Bell Labs which had about six decades.  To be fair it was mostly applied research, but there was a core that changed the world.

 

There's an interesting form of teamwork at these places. People tend to talk to each other a lot.  Places like the Perimeter Institute have blackboards in nearly every room and hallway.  Each table in the cafeteria has notepads and pencils to facilitate the discussions that flow across groups and through the building. Setting direction is an art that is often based on a perception of beauty. It's similar, but slower in the experimental laboratories and there's something of a competition and balancing act between theory and experiment.   It may seem like herding cats and it's messier and more inefficient than the so-called scientific process, but it turns out to be the most efficient way to create possible futures.  It's an act of faith that learning more about the Universe is important to humanity.  Of course it takes time along with the insight of people with different skills to turn that into reality and Crazy Stupid Tech will probably give some insight into that direction.

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1 The physical science and math are part of the liberal arts as opposed to professional and technical fields. 

 

 

finding your tools

In the tenth grade I asked for a single Christmas present.  At nearly thirty dollars it would be larger than normal plus there would have to be an upscaling of my sister's present.  I wasn't hopeful, but it actually happened. A Pickett N4-ES slide rule.  I spent an enormous amount of time playing with it.  A few things come with heavy slide rule use:  the ability to do estimates in your head - particularly involving orders of magnitude and an instinctive feeling for how logarithms work. Both of those skills are still with me although I rarely use a slide rule these days.¹  There are other tools that you develop a feeling for through a lot of play - Mathematica and Maple come to mind.

 

 

We all use tools.  They're often connected with and change with technologies although some of the simple good ones never seem to change much.  It's interesting to sit down and make a list rating them on a love/hate scale.  

 

Some of us build our own.  Engineers excel - a good friend was working on a certain class of problem in computer science when he started at Bell Labs.  His director took him aside and suggested maybe he should create a computer language to give himself the tools to work on the other problem.  It turned out building and improving the language became his primary focus and a much richer path than the original problem area.m That language is a tool used by millions of programmers every day.

 

And there are tools that have caused frustrations to millions.  Too many user interfaces are great examples of not understanding fundamental issues. Automotive touch panels are a favorite example of mine. They don't provide feedback and require too much attention from the driver.  I was delighted to learn cars with these interfaces won't get good safety ratings in the EU beginning next year.  Perhaps we'll see a some thoughtful physical interfaces.

 

In physics Feynman diagrams are important. In the late 40s and early 50s he and a few others revolutionized the field with quantum electrodynamics which led to more general field theories.  The most accurate theories in all of science describing much of the universe.  Feynman was disturbed by a few issues and wanted something that felt more Newtonian.   He came up with a way of describing interactions that could be summarized with what looked like doodles. The approach wasn't the right approach, but the diagrams provided a way to make calculations much simpler and to think about underlying processes.  Simple calculations could be done thousands of times faster and more accurately and, more importantly, the technique shifted how people think.  Frank Wilczek wrote an excellent description in Quanta. 

 

Of course computational hardware and software of all types have become important tools individually as well as embedded in complex systems.  We tend to find those tools that suit our own needs.  What you find useful and even delightful may not be on my radar and visa versa.   I tend not to recommend much to people when I don't know their use cases - which leads me to the reason for this post.

 

Several people have asked for primers as well as my take on generative AI (which many simply call AI, although that's inaccurate).  I'll skip the primer - you can find those in a hundred other places, but I've had a bit of experience.  In the past year I've served on two committees that made recommendations on gAI student use in college.  I think we made some good progress, although it's clear there will be changes over time.  I've also used several of the tools - free and subscription - and have formed some initial impressions.  I'll break them down into useful, take it or leave it, and not worth the effort.  

Useful

Non-technical translation. Corresponding with people who don't speak English and reading posts and articles.  There are mistakes, but there's enough context to get the gist of what's going on

 Scraping text and even equations from images.  (the text part is built into OS X and iOS)

Transcription .. some errors, but again context saves you

Entertainment - I've seen people lacking artistic skills have a lot of fun making images.  The same for non-writers looking for frameworks to start.

Some of Apple's local gAI looks useful with the emphasis on local, but that's still a work in progress and I have no experience.

 

So-so

Formatting LaTeX .. it's far from perfect, but save a bit of time. 

Translating literature .. something is lost over a good translator.  There's also a good deal of sexism and racism 

Playing with ideas as a part of learning.  I haven't used this much, but ran into it several times in gAI student use. I'm on the fence, but it might move up to the next level.

 

 

Not so good

Search - what were they smoking?

Technical programming..  it takes more work to debug and integrate with existing software than writing from scratch. 

Summarizing anything technical..  it's often difficult to find the mistakes as it "lies" smoothly

Physics and math problems.  It gets well-known examples, but beyond that is wrong

Re-writing pieces..  some love this, I found it a big fail. 

Some bad experiences with gAI chatbots

A number of ethical and energy use/pollution/privacy issues.  I think there are large risks associated with LLMS . not super intelligence in the guru, but serious risks now.

 

I'm no longer paying for a subscription or actively using services like ChatGPT.  I'll be following along, but I wasn't able to find a tool worth my time on a regular basis .. at least not enough to counter the ethical issues I see.   Of course I recognize everyone will have their own cases.  And back to the slide rule - to find if the tool really fits, you have to spend a lot of time playing with it!

 

I find a few other flavors that come under the heading of AI extremely useful!  I'm very curious how many people will pay serious money for gAI tools?

 

 

__________

¹ I'm of the age where the best things I've owned need to go to close friends and old students.  The slide rule went to a student of mine under the condition that she learn how to use it.  She did and still does. 

choking under pressure

There's this story of a student, having just given his thesis defense talk, freezes at the first question with his chalk describing an arc as he faints.  The same story with different details has been told and retold since the 50s.  But there is real pressure.  It's rare, but some students fail their dissertation defense.   Just last week a friend told me about a failure at the University of Michigan. 

 

Temporary choking is much more common.  I've seen it in at least a third of the defenses I've been to.  Usually it's minor and people recognize it happens.  Questions are rephrased or breaks take place and things come back to normal.  It's just part of a rite of passage for many.

 

Choking is more recognized in sport. People talk about choking and 'the yips' - I'll stick with choking here was it's more common and easier to deal with.¹ I've seen it in several events at the Olympic and National and World Championship levels when a lot is on the line. Recent work published in Neuron shines some light on a neurological basis.  The experimenters monitored the motor cortex in the frontal lobe and watched a simple task requiring manual dexterity when the stakes were low, medium and high.   What they found was a big drop in activity as the stakes went up - the subjects suffered a big performance hit.  The effect was non-linear..  subjects didn't perform well at low reward levels - there was a sweet spot.  It's part of becoming an elite athlete to learn how to deal with the pressure, but it still happens on a regular basis. 

 

I've been interested in what the dynamics are in a team sport - specifically the simplest example with only two  athletes on a team.  Beach volleyball is a textbook example as there isn't a lot of overlap in responsibilities and players need to trust each other.  Over time - say an Olympic run - the best teams tend to have stable partnerships. When one player begins to crumble, it's up to the other to shoulder the load somehow and communicate - often with a few words or a bit of body language like a glance. It's an impressive skill to pick up on this in a couple of seconds in the middle of a point and figure out how to deal with it.   Interestingly there's evidence of sexual dimorphism in both style and success dealing with choking.  Sarah summed it up: men fight to bond, women bond to fight.  On average women may be more effective team players.²  Casual observation tells me this applies outside of sport. 

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¹ Some use the terms interchangeable, but differ in severity and treatment. Choking often occurs when an athlete over focuses on mechanics under pressure and lose the fluidity, grace, ability to analyze etc, that  they've spent their career building. Their effective skill level falls dramatically.   The yips, on the other hand, take place when anxiety is so high that it becomes difficult to execute even simple actions.  It can be chronic requiring help from specialists.

² For this reason I tend to prefer women's team sports to men's.  Men's sports are more athletic, but the women often show superior team tactics and strategies. 

 

 

the passing of a star

I first ran into Dewayne at a wireless community conference in Taos in 1994.  We hit it off and became good friends, sometimes conspiring on odd projects.  His mother is 103, sharp as a tack,  and something of an icon.  One of the first African Americans to integrate a section of Detroit after WWII.  We all figured Dewayne had at least three more decades. Dewayne built on that.  I've never met anyone with a deeper understanding of radio - something he combined with a deep social commitment. 

 

About a month ago he called from a hospital room in Detroit.  Jaundice - the doctors were trying to figure it out.  The next day there was an emergency operation to deal with a blocked bile duct.  Then it was discovered he had stage 4 cancer.  He flew to California for better medical treatment and passed yesterday. The various communities he touched are in shock.  I won't list his remarkable accomplishments other than a Wired article from 2002 (he's done a lot since) and noting he had a large impact on the technical side of the FCC.  He was a great friend.  The last conversation I had was last Monday.  He ended it as he always did when he wanted to make a point - a quote from Battlestar Galactica:  So say we all!

The Wired piece

 

 

 

 

(way) beyond black swans

a mnipost

 

Fundamental change comes from discovery - something that science is wired to do.  The process of science is admittedly messy and a bit inefficient, but it works and has vastly expanded our understanding in so many areas. There's this myth about how it works -  the scientific method kids had to memorize in school is a not very accurate model of how things really operated - at least the areas I know. All of the pieces are there, but they're generally non-linear and can spread out over long periods of time.   What drives people are the rare magical moments.  For most of us they're rather small, but the pleasure in discovery is enormous.  It's very hard work as it's so easy to fool yourself.  Some of the most dramatic discoveries come when you're looking for something else - if you're careful enough to recognize them. 

 

One of my favorite examples is a 24 year old astronomy grad student who fundamentally put a dent in astronomy and physics.  Her discovery involved a huge amount of careful work.  Her advisor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics while she got nothing -after all - she was a woman and a student in the 60s.  I've been lucky enough to have had dinner with her - she sees her lack of the Nobel underscoring how sexist science and the Nobel committee are.  

 

The interview is excellent and something to show to kids for inspiration as well as dealing with the imposter syndrome.  She's done so much for women in science.

 

airship quadball

a minipost

Every field has its special teachers - those who have figured out how to inspire and raise the level of the students. About five years ago I wrote about Woodie Flowers and his passion for teaching.  One of the most playful and play inspiring teachers I know about (the video on the page is a good intro).  

 

Woodie had a famous course for engineering undergrads.  I know of a few other similar, but different flavored, courses - mostly in mechanical engineering.  ME72 a Caltech is one of these focused play classes and the final exam is a competition.  The most recent exam was Airship Quadball.  Here's a description with a cute linked video.

Some schools set up cross departmental collaborations. One physics dept I know matches physics students with creative writing students and art majors to create science fiction graphic novels.  When it works you need students who have an interest in the other two areas.  The original spark was producing physics students who could communicate more clearly, but it turned out to be fun and educational for each group.

 

 

 

creativity in film and beyond

Unburdened by the plastic wrap so common to art books, it was sitting  in the bookstore and was reminded how much I wanted it.  A copy of The Art of WolfWalkers. Ten minutes of delight, but it was too spendy for this trip.  

 

 WolfWalkers is the third in a set devoted to Irish myth from Cartoon Salon - a tiny studio in Kilkenny, Ireland that has won respect from Pixar, Disney Animation and Studio Ghibli.  It's on Apple TV+ if you like amazing animation. 

 

Animation studios and art schools are amazing places.  Years ago they seemed like black boxes that took stories and turned them into animation.  More recently I've been involved with one and am wobbled by the amount of creativity and work play that goes into the most simple moments.  It's always a team effort spread among disciplines and years.  

 

After a few months I finally bought the book. Just wow!   Here's a video of a roundtable the before the film was released.  It was my introduction to the film (although not to the myth or its historical offshoot as Kilkenny is an ancestral home). 

 

It's worth writing about as (a) some of you may enjoy and even love it and, (b) creativity in the era of generative AI  is something I've been spending time on this past year an animation studio and two universities.  Signals have emerged. 

 

The New Yorker published a must-read piece on AI and Art by Ted Chiang.  Given my experience with animation studios, a music conservatory and physics and math, I'm in conditional agreement.  I do see a place as a tool, even in the creative arts, but more as a tool to relieve drudgery rather than become 'thought'.  I use it to organize references in papers as well as to create simple programs that involve freshman level programming for simple but time-consuming tasks.  I stay far away when precision and accuracy are needed and I don't see the creative spark. 

 

Film studios, musicians, and artists worry about wholesale theft of their work in the short term and the potential, if these tools improve, that we'll see more 'art' of lower caliber largely because human-created art is too expensive.  I think the later isn't possible with generative AI - at least not for quality work.  That doesn't mean real art won't be forced out by economic pressures. 

 

As for schools I worry teenagers may take the easy way out in pursuit of easy grades and free time. They'll be cheating themselves.   The world has no need for more high school essays, but that isn't why they're assigned. On the other hand student can learn about tasks these tools can help them with.  That's going to be more important in college.  I've been on two task forces and some schools are developing solid measures as well as the ability to change with time.  The guiding light is "are you teaching them how to think?"  

 

Clearly we're in a fascinating time.  I think we'll see some real carnage in the industry and use cases before signals we probably haven't thought about emerge.  But in the meantime we have beautiful art.   If you haven't seen WolfWalkers, you're in for a treat!

 

 

a legend

Adm Grace Hopper is of the heroes of early computing.  In addition to making fundamental contributions to software, she was one of the few who started to realize what technological change impacted people.  Recently some of the security folks - notably Bruce Schneier and Steve Bellovin - learned about a general talk she gave at the NSA in 1982.  They hounded the NSA to declassify and publish the talks and here they are!  They give a sense of what the world was like then and you can sense her brilliance.   This was a year before ARPANET cutover to TCP/IP, which many consider the real start of the Internet (although it goes back 13 years earlier in one form or another).  Perhaps there's something you can take away.  

Side story: About 12 years ago I found myself spitting into the wind trying to deal with climate deniers who lacked a technical background.  One of her papers gave a good description of what we now call sealioning. It was a good enough argument to convince me to move on and try other channels.  She also wrote about dealing with people like Trump who use bullshit asymmetry - what is known as Brandolini's law these days.  A very wise woman indeed!

 

 

 

playful active learning

A few months ago I had another in what has become a series of chats with a neurology professor.  Both of us are (well) over 60 and, given the two aging presidential candidates at the time,  the subject of preventing dementia came up.  He noted the standard things - exercise is a powerful tool, avoiding inflammation (you really don't want Covid), etc.  There's a genetic component, but that's more in dispute now as it breaks with twin studies - perhaps there's a bad habit component.  But actively learning is important.  

 

It seems scans of mentally sharp people with the sort of neural damage you see in dementia are able to continue to do well as they've created a web of alternate pathways - it's like the original idea for the Internet - route around the damage. Even the elderly can do this.  The trick is working hard at  something that really forces you learn.  Doing puzzles or reading is fine, but doesn't do the neural expansion. Learning a new language, how to build things, how to do something that's very confusing and hard at first creates a novel wiring overlay.

 

I've been known to plunge into new things for the fun of it.  I'm generally untalented, but love the experience of seeing some progress in an area I knew nothing about. My neurologist friend does some of the same. He likes playing board games so he's trying to create one.  It's given him a lot of respect for those that do it.  It's helpful to try something that might be fun as play is a powerful motivator.  If you like music, learn how to write something.  Try writing poetry.  The hardest part may be finding the time - but if you watch tv, perhaps it's the easiest. Turn on the curiosity.  I'd love to hear the projects some of you have.  It may be worse than what ChatGPT can do, but ChatGPT isn't giving you richer neural pathways. And there may be gains in your current level of creativity. 

 

Just now he sent a video that inspired him..  It's Xyla Foxlin.  She graduated from CWRU about five years ago and makes her living taking on unusual projects - (the rocket powered Christmas Tree is a personal favorite) Here she builds a mobius strip violin.  She admits she's not an instrument maker and goes on to use real luthiers for helping her with the bridge and a few other issues. It's a fun video!  And cheers to her for mentioning Hillary Hahn!