omenti

moving from noun to verb

About a week ago Apple announced its latest Watch.  While it isn't a major leap, Horace and Om wrote great pieces about something more significant - namely what it does.¹  The first few iterations were a bit muddled - now it has become a wearable assistive technology.  That's significant.

 

Assistive technology invokes images of wheelchairs, braces, crutches and so on..  adaptations to make life easier for those people with physical problems.  It's a mistake to think that way.  All of us use these technologies  (I'll ignore the distinction between assistive and adaptive) ..  utensils, chairs, shoes, door knobs, screw drivers - all of these count.  Many of us wear eye glasses - a technology that compensates for a deficiency that would be a serious handicap if not corrected.  Some people have artificial joints and pacemakers - implantable assistive technologies that are always worn.   It begs the question of who gets to be called normal and who makes the decision.  I've written about that, so back to the Apple Watch.

 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century town clocks were an adaptive technology that gave people in emerging industrial cities a sense of common time to allow for synchronized work.  Less expensive models for the home became a necessity for workers who could afford them.  People who couldn't employed a variety of other techniques including "knocker-uppers" - people you would pay to make sure you got up in time.  Towards the end of the century the need for standards and a more global time synchronization emerged - railroads were the first big driver.

 

Railroad time is to the time of the future. The Sun is no longer to boss the job. People—all 55,000,000 of them—must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time—banks will open and close by railroad time—in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree… . We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.
—Indianapolis Sentinel, 21 November 1883

 

Synchronizing clocks turns out to be an interesting technical problem. A Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein specialized in clock synchronization patents by day while thinking about time more deeply after hours.  

 

With atomic clocks - some orbiting in GPS satellites - we now have very accurate time synchronization available anywhere on Earth.  It's available in your smartphone and your Apple Watch with much better accuracy than the display requires .. very accurate time is much more central to communication and location determination. 

 

So just how important is a watch as something you wear to tell you the time - the watch as a simple noun?

 

There are still synchronizations for connecting with people, transport, broadcasts and so on.  Some of that requires less synchronization.  Some of the most creative work is poorly synchronized much of the time.  Television has become streaming video at your convenience and much of radio has turned into podcasts and streaming audio.  So why wear a thick $400 piece of hardware on your wrist?

 

You wear it because it is becoming a verb.  It's stuffed full of sensors and watches you.  A growing list of health, exercise and motivation related functions.  Complex computations turn thousands of dollar of tech in a doctor's office or researcher's lab into a few one dollar sensors and software.  And all of this can be networked.  I'll mention Happy Bob - a Type 1 Diabetes app by one of you (Jutta) that is making the lives of thousands of diabetics easier.   This is only the beginning.    The Watch overlaps a bit with the iPhone, but they mostly fill very different functions - wearable is a big deal.  It's important to note the Watch still has a lot of headroom for growth. 

 

We humans have been expanding and augmenting the basic human body for over ten thousand years and the process is accelerating.   It's exciting, but we should be thinking more deeply about what it means as well as who is normal and who decides.

__________

¹ Oxygen saturation wasn't difficult to add - it exists elsewhere.  What is important is the watch can keep a record.  A General Practitioner friend is currently testing one. If it takes good readings he's going to recommend it to patients who are in the at risk categories for Covid-19 - cheap insurance. 

That said I think the major improvement was the addition of an ultra-wideband chip. I wouldn't buy a device just for that as this is preliminary work for something that could be very big, but it's good to know new iPhones and Apple Watches have the capability now.

scribbler moon

Margaret Atwood

David Mitchell

Elif Shafak

Han Kang

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Ocean Vuong

 

Each of these authors has taken a walk through Nordmarka Forest in Norway to place a their manuscript in a special room in the Deichman Library.  Ninety four more will follow.  The authors are specially chosen for their imagination and the stories are to based on the themes of imagination and time.  No one other than the authors will see their words until 2114.   In that year someone who doesn't exist now will take each of the 100 manuscripts from their containers and prepare them for printing on paper made from 1,000 one hundred year old Norwegian spruces that were planted just before the Margret Atwood took the first walk through the forest. 

 

The Future Library project was created to stir the imagination and give hope.  A century is a good time period - just outside an average human lifespan, but not so long as to be unimaginable. What will be around? Will people care?  

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors - Jonas Salk

 

We live with a number of legacies - a written language, medicine, science, religion, weapons, slavery, pollution. ... some good and some bad. Mostly we live in the present and don't think much about the leverage we have in creating future legacies. Some legacies happen by default.  Humans are one of the few species with a sense of the future.  Projects like the Future Library spark wonder and perhaps give us hope that maybe we can make a difference.  Perhaps a trick is to think about time scales and what we might accomplish.

 

You can do something for yourself on a smaller scale. Here's one of mine:   My thesis advisor gave me his favorite slide rule when I received my Ph.D. It had been given to him by his advisor when he received his.  It became my favorite.  I used it regularly and wondered about the legacy of calculations that were used to build conjectures and hypothesis through their careers.  Every now and again I wondered what I'd do with it.  About twenty years ago a very unusual Summer student came along.  Art and computer science, she ended up at an animation company.  In slide rule had been used for a certain type of story telling..  small corners of the fundamentals of Nature.  I gave it to her some time ago so I could enjoy the link between the past and the future.  One type of story telling changing into another.  She says it's very special to her and gets use for calculations used in making films that tell stories.  Wondering who she gives it to and what path and stories it might inspire gives me pleasure and hope.

 

In my work I have to think of a variety of time scales.  Some events at the subatomic level take place in a under a billionth of a billionth of a second.  At the scale of the Universe some things have been around for billions of years and will be around much much longer.  These times so foreign as to be abstract.  A few weeks ago one of you sent a note from the Grand Canyon that was filled with wonder inspired by that slow geological process that created it.  Wonderful experiences to stir the imagination.  We should seek out these experiences, but I find staying in human time scales and thinking about and building legacies lets me live in a slightly better future and gives me hope.    Set your mind some distance in the future and think of something good you'd like to see there or something bad you'd like to change.  With a target maybe you can imagine a path and help work towards it.  It gives us a way to not discount future people and their world.

 

Scribbler Moon?  That's the title of Margaret Atwood's book you won't read, but maybe your great great grandkid will..

 

normal?

About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal.  That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them,  who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that.  Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.

 

Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy.   We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve -  "normal" distributions.  Height is the usual example.   A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall.  This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails.   Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short.  A few readers happen to be very tall.   Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary.  It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.

 

In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly.  The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit.  Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified.  Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster.  Skilled pilots were making lethal errors.    A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist.  Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation.  Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements.  Not a single real pilot was average.   The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.  

 

Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies.  All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies.  Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats -  I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools"  We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success. 

 

Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or  running shoes?  Why are some people excluded from the made world?   Who makes the designs?  What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough?   Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?

 

"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve.  The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is. 

 

What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others.  Some are forgotten and even warehoused.  How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues.  I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience.   Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct?  With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid.  Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction.   Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many.  How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity? 

 

 

how big is switzerland?

Rey-k-javík

The big test was would come at the end of May.  Sixth grade and we had to identify countries and their capitals on a world map.  That meant spelling everything correctly and adding some countries not on the list for extra credit.   I wasn't good at spelling then and it seems to have gone downhill since, but the unit was fun as our teacher had been around Europe and was a good story teller.  She also wanted to make the point that maps lie - that various projections color our impressions and even doing something simple like measuring an area on a Mercator projection was difficult.  A few weeks later the question came that I kept visiting for a few decades. 

 

How is the area of a country measured?  Is it considered a flat surface, or do you measure it on a sphere (I didn't know about the shape of the Earth then), or what about uneven ground?  What do you do about tides?  Shared lakes (like some of the Great Lakes)?  How do you measure a coastline? 

 

My parents tolerated this for awhile and then it was off to the library.  There wasn't much on this, but visits to libraries are never wasted. 

 

Over the years bits and pieces came when I wasn't looking. I first encountered fractals in Scientific American and followed up with Mandelbrot's paper . The measure of a coastline became finally became clear. There was an inherent fuzziness and you had to choose a scale.  And he had developed some beautiful mathematics that got at the heart of the matter - what is a fractional dimension?

 

A countries area is usually defined as the outline of the country projected onto the Earth's geoid or ellipsoid (there isn't standardization, but using the ellipsoid is probably good enough). In other words the so-of spherical nature of the Earth is used.  High tide marks boundaries, interior bodies of water are included in the area, but uneven terrain isn't accounted for.  The terrain bit made me want to see what the impact would be.   About ten years ago I found a dataset of terrain altitudes for the planet on a 100 meter grid. I used these with some detailed country outline data and looked at a few countries.  The Netherlands only gains a tiny bit of area.  The US grows by almost two percent, but Switzerland was slightly more than seven percent larger.  That's big enough to make Switzerland larger than Denmark and the Netherlands.   I didn't have good data for places like Nepal and Bhutan - they'd be spectacular.  And imagine looking at Manhattan with a one meter grid...  Its area would grow enormously.  

 

One of those questions a kid can wonder about that gets quite involved and requires standards be set. 

 

_________

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

For many of us this is peak tomato season.  In late August years ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish. The tomatoes were in chucks and not really cooked. It would only work if they were perfect so I gave it a try. Here is about what I did. This would be enough for two hungry people or four people if served as a side course.  It's more of a narration than a conventional recipe. 

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great flavor. If you can, go with heirloom tomatoes as the new ones have so much goodness bred out of them. My guess is I had maybe about one and a half pounds of tomato. Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a bowl making sure to recover some of the juice left on the cutting board.

Pour to glugs of a good extra virgin olive oil over the tomatoes.  Sprinkle on a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper before gently stirring to mix.  Set the bowl aside. 

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in. Cheap salt of course

Now chop a strong red onion into slivers. Maybe about a quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula

Cook about a half pound of pasta (I like a quality thick spaghetti for this, but pick your favorite) and try to stay away from the marinating tomatoes

Layer the onions on top of the tomatoes and then make a layer of arugula choppings

Dump the cooked pasta onto the layered mixture in the bowl and give it two or three minutes to heat up a bit. To deal with the frustration grate some parmesan for a topping. (I prefer it cheeseless, but most people probably want it). The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath, just barely, but perfectly enough.

Gently mix and serve.

 

how to speak

minipost

Some of you are amazing speakers.  I'm not.  Thankfully I'm not teaching anything this year - Zoom lecturing was a disaster for me for a number of reasons.  Rather than a post mortem, here's something useful.

 

This is from the 'how to speak' course that Patrick Winston gave for years at MIT. Not all of it will be applicable, but you may find a few bits of useful information. 

companies that care

Recently a heard a podcast on what it means for a company, or employee, to be a steward.  It could be any number of things - relationships, society, the environment. All good, but not many large companies seem to exemplify this beyond PR efforts.  But some smaller organizations are good at this.  I'll mention one - you can probably think of a few on your own. 

 

I'm not athletic but enjoy rowing as an exercise.  In the early 90s I found myself with a used Concept 2 model B rowing ergometer. It had been abused and needed a serious clearing and a few replacement parts.  Calling the company I found myself talking to the product engineer responsible for its design.  He asked some questions and said he'd send a parts list.  A few days later a box arrived with very clear repair sheets and the parts.  The bill of sale said $0.00.  I started the repair, but one of the old parts was bent and I was afraid of damaging the unit.  Another call and he talked me through the repair.  I asked what the parts cost and was told that wasn't a big deal, he was just happy to see one of his old machines being used. 

 

The old model B still works well.  It was made in 1986 and has seen more or less daily use since the repair in  1995.  I've had to buy some parts for standard wear and tear over the years.  They aren't expensive and the company stocks parts for every machine they've made.  The phone support is always friendly and free. 

 

Their ergs work well and I've probably generated a half dozen sales - word of mouth and gym experience are their big referrals. They're the standard erg in college rowing programs and the sport of competitive erg rowing has grown organically within the user base.  They also make most of the oars used in Olympic class competitions.  A combination of design, execution, support and general friendliness makes them one of my favorite companies.   Here's a piece about them from twenty years ago.

 

(the image is of an ancient model B like mine - newer ones look different, but are functionally about the same)

 

Feel free to write about your favorite in the comments section.  Are there any that will be making people happy and the world a better place fifty years down the road?  How about any that are publicly traded?  Is there a size ceiling? 

 

 

 

the small things that make you happy

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

 

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

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

Then nothing…

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

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

 

 

why are plants green rather than black?

minipost

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

there is a season

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

smart cities aren't

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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