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.
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!
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!
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!
There's a common signal that emerges when you talk to elite athletes about how they feel about their final position. Universally they say bronze medals feel better than silvers and fourth place is the worst in single elimination play with quarter and semifinals.
Sarah, in particular, has gone into detail. She notes the goal, given the depth in her sport, is a podium finish, Just missing feels awful. If you're eliminated before that, you tend to move on towards the next tournament. Taking third means that you've redeemed an earlier loss by winning. Second means - "if only..."
While there's variation in measuring how athletes feel and well as variation among athletes, several studies confirm this ordering. Explanations generally boil down to counterfactual thinking. In one type, known as ex post counterfactuals, you think about alternate pasts. "if I had only delayed my block by a quarter of a second, we could have won" or "if it wasn't for them serving into the net we could have lost." The other type, known as ex ante counterfactuals, is described by dwelling on what was expected to be: "everyone thought we'd take gold, but we failed or "no one thought we'd qualify and look how far we got."
A silver medalist tends to focus on the negative ex post counterfactual. It's even worse when there's a negative ex ante counterfactual - an expectation of taking gold. Fourth place follows a similar pattern plus you don't even get to stand on the podium. Athletes really hate fourths.
Of course counterfactual thinking, positive and negative, exists in many other places.
a minipost - an important podcast episode that could have a large impact on your health
Eric Topol does cardiology and genomics at Scripps. He's also an excellent communicators and was one of a half dozen voices during the pandemic offering translations of the rapidly evolving results from research and practice into language the general public can understand He has interests that go beyond those areas an recently hosted Euan Ashley of Stanford on his podcast. The title is provocative: Exercise may be the single most potent medical intervention known. (audio and transcripts with links) highly recommended. The amount of sexual dimorphism in response is remarkable - but it's all heathly.
A couple of nits - noting I'm far from being an expert, but have read a fair amount in this area.. Ashley mentions the one minute five minute rule. My understanding nothing supports this as a quantitative statement, but the qualitative direction is probably right. Also Ashley mentions a company he's involved in that tries to optimize exercise for professional and serious amateur athletes. At the professional level much of this work is noise at this point - particularly the "AI" approach (and and LLM is clearly not the path), at the serious amateur level it may well be useful as anything is useful even though it may not be optimal. Research from the study Ashley talks about could lead to big improvements in this area.
What the podcast highlights is the release of data and some results from a large body of research. The research solidly confirms earlier work that points to how important exercise is as a medicine.
Here's the link to the data release site. It has additional information - some aimed at the general public.
Om has mentioned several - often a fine pen, ink and paper. My sister's creative artwork often starts with the right paper and pencils.
One of the things you'll notice about top math and physics departments is the nearly exclusive use of high quality slate boards. There's something about the feeling of the motion of a good chalk against slate. A few days ago I saw someone with a t-shirt that said:
HAGOROMO 羽衣ファインタッチ
A member of the faith!
"math or physics?" "number theory", she replied. The tool is deservedly legendary. A mathematical introduced me to it in the early 90s and I've been a user ever since. It's really quite amazing.
I was a hoarder in the day. Thankfully the new chalk is just as good
The next few days are national celebrations. Canada Day on the first and US Independence on the fourth. No fireworks, but rather I'll pick up on something from a recent post and mention a real beginning - the beginning of structure in the Universe.
About 380,000 years after the beginning the hot dense plasma that filled the universe had cooled to the point where electrons combined with protons and the universe started to become transparent. It was a thermal glow - sort of an orangish color. We can see and map this surface. It's the most ancient time we can directly see. It's so far back in time and the universe has expanded so much, that the light has been redshifted into the microwave region.
By the mid 90s observation techniques had become good enough to map structure in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background). It looks sort of splotchy. The colors are arbitrary, here the reddish ones represent denser regions. In reality the blotches are very nearly the same.. the temperature difference between the reddest reds and the bluest blues is about one part in one hundred thousand.
The denser regions attracted more mass than the less dense regions and kept growing in mass. Ultimately they became enormous clusters of galaxies. There's a weblike structure, defined by gravity and density that spreads through parts of the universe. It's like clusters of galaxies are tiny dew drops on a huge spider webs. The splotchy picture allows us to measure this structure. Think of the vertical axis as some measure of density and the horizontal axis the angular area of the sky. There's a peak around 1° - a region about twice the apparent width of the Moon. It corresponds to the size of these enormous clusters of galaxies. There's finer structure, of course, but the measurements are more difficult.
A bit on the plot - there are a large number of measurements using three different instruments. The red curve is the best fit to the experimental data. The grey region is the best theoretical prediction so far. Each of the points has an error bar.. notice that many are so good they're almost invisible!
These slight differences in temperature and density, along with the fact that hydrogen and helium were made in the first two minutes of the universe, are one of the reasons why you're here. And another thing to celebrate. Carl Sagan noted we're all stardust. But about 62 percent of your atoms are hydrogen that were forged in the first two minutes of the Universe. Most of your atoms are primordial - as old as the Universe itself! Much of you is Hot Big Bang dust!
And on that spiderwebish cosmic web of galaxies -- here's a computer simulation from the Virgo Consortium. The small bright blobs are clusters of millions of galaxies. There are huge voids with very little.
Oddly enough the period from two minutes after the beginning until the surface of first scattering about 380,000 years later isn't terribly exciting. But the first two minutes represent the most jaw dropping physics I know.
It's wrong to hold a Summer Olympics in Tokyo in late July through early August. The right time for the Summer Games in many climates would be the Fall, but television schedules force the Summer. The combination of temperature and humidity can be dangerous. Endurance events, tennis and beach volleyball take place outdoors and can place athletes and spectators at risk. With Covid Tokyo didn't risk spectators as there weren't any, but some of the events took place in borderline insane conditions. The top Canadian team played one of their matches with a wet bulb globe temperature of about 40° C.1 Sarah texted photos of herself sitting in baths of ice water to bring her core temperature down to safe levels. Four hours at 35° C is considered potentially lethal for a young person in good physical shape. A new standard suggests the limit for any outdoor activity should be about 32° for this cohort and 28°C for anyone over 60, under 8, or anyone with any number of medical conditions
There is a good chance Paris could be worse this year. The Olympic Village is not air conditioned. To meet certain green goals it uses passive geothermal cooling, which is great, but doesn't work well in extreme conditions. Team USA, Canada, Australia and probably many others will install portable air conditioners in athlete housing and indoor training rooms. Spectators are on their own. Paris is not a heat-friendly city.
When you do any kind of physical work like staying alive or exercising, about eighty percent of the energy you take in is converted to heat. Some of that raising your body temperature above the environment around you, the rest is waste heat. A moderately fast bike ride can require about 200 watts so you have 800 watts of waste heat that has to go somewhere. Sarah, in an intense match, averages about hour hundred watts with higher peaks. She has to get rid of two kilowatts. Evaporating liquid water takes quite a bit of energy and our bodies are wonderfully set up to do this. Sweat is your friend. It works well in dry heat, but becomes more difficult as the humidity goes up and impossible when the the wet bulb temperature is above a certain value (in fact trying to use a fan can make matters worse).
One can imagine an event being postposed due to extreme conditions, but the fact that Tokyo had events suggests training your body to sweat better - heat conditioning - makes sense. You can become a better sweaters by making your body to handle electrolytes differently, sweating earlier and more, having more dilute sweat and a few other biochemical tricks that enhance your ability to deal with the heat. One can train in hot and humid areas - places like the American Southeast and parts of Southeast Asia and South Asia. That's not practical for many and not controllable so other techniques have emerged. Some use a stationary bike in a heated chamber, but sauna therapy works as well or better. You sit in a 80° to 90°C sauna for about 45 minutes in 15 minute shifts with 15 minute breaks every day for about two weeks. After that you can maintain an enhanced level doing this two or three times a week. Not fun, but it works. In some events medals may well be decided by who has had better heat preparation.
Much of the rest of the world is on its own dealing with heat. Some are suggesting air conditioning should be a human right. To say there are major challenges is an understatement - one that the first world mostly ignores and will probably continue to ignore until events like two or three day power outages turn off AC in heatwaves.
__________
1 A wet bulb globe temperature is more detailed than a heat index or "feels like" temperature. It takes into account temperature, humidity, water evaporation and sun exposure. Calibrated instruments start at around $500 and go up so it's generally not reported. Standard "feels like" temperature is an ok starting point and much better than regular temperature for decision making.
I have a long history of chatting with storytellers and found myself talking with a group of four today. Someone asked me to describe what fills me with awe. Somany possibilities, but I went with the early evolution of the universe. There are rough spots, but quite a bit is known from the first hundred billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second from the beginning to the emergence of much of physics at around twenty picoseconds, elementary particles around a microsecond and then hydrogen and helium around two minutes. A very busy time, but the first bit that can be directly detected by us (so far) took place about 380,000 years after the beginning. In the trade it's called the surface of last scattering.
One stopped me - what a great title for a book or film! I gave a bit of an explanation, but it hit me there's something similar all of us have seen - it rises in the morning and sets at night. Nuclear fusion takes place in depths of the Sun. Energy is released in the from of photons which fly off to bump into other bits of plasma. They follow a complicated path pinball path. Energy in the form of light slowly makes progress towards the surface. Even though it's traveling at the speed of light, it takes roughly 10,000 years for energy from fusion at the Sun's core to reach the glowing "surface" we see. Once free from bouncing about it takes a bit more than eight minutes for light to travel the distance to Earth. This glowing region - the photosphere - is the last stop before light can leave the Sun. It's a surface of last scattering.
Many names in science aren't clever or poetic, but this one has a certain beauty. And in the early universe it marks the time where the glow from the hot plasma can be seen and measured by us.
Another feature of solar physics is fusion proceeds so slowly that the power per unit area (sometimes called the power density a bit confusingly) is roughly the same as the metabolism of a lizard or about a quarter of your metabolism. Of course there's a lot of Sun - a good thing as it's been able to last long enough for life to emerge on Earth and evolve to the point where you exist. Life as we know it is not based on run fast and break things stars.
__________
I'd venture a guess that many lines of work have bits and pieces of internal poetry that you tend not to think about. What's yours?
tools for serious thinking
Om has mentioned several - often a fine pen, ink and paper. My sister's creative artwork often starts with the right paper and pencils.
One of the things you'll notice about top math and physics departments is the nearly exclusive use of high quality slate boards. There's something about the feeling of the motion of a good chalk against slate. A few days ago I saw someone with a t-shirt that said:
HAGOROMO
羽衣ファインタッチ
A member of the faith!
"math or physics?" "number theory", she replied. The tool is deservedly legendary. A mathematical introduced me to it in the early 90s and I've been a user ever since. It's really quite amazing.
I was a hoarder in the day. Thankfully the new chalk is just as good
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