omenti

spoken, written, and semi-spoken language

a minipost

My wife thinks it's funny when I'm talking with a native-speaking Montanan. After about fifteen minutes my accent shifts towards my almost hidden native accent.  It's still there,  buried under so many years living out of the state.  The funny thing is neither I nor my Montanan friend notice what's happening.  Similarly I can code-switch and fit into the culture of my parents church - at least over the phone as my beard and dress don't conform with the standards. 

 

In high school I spent a lot of time in Alberta and became fascinated by Canadian English.  I didn't realize Albertan, like the Montanan, was a dialect of its own.  There were the obvious Canadianisms comedians emphasize, but my attempts at using them were unconvincing.  Canadians tend to be unusually polite, but deep down inside they know your attempts are clueless. In college I ran into people from all over the world and quickly got to the point where many of the "rules" of spoken English didn't bother me like they did my k-12 teachers.  

 

A friend happens to be a computational linguist specializing in the rhythm and sound of a language - the prosody of language. Getting this part right - good enough to begin to add the meaning in speech that's often missing in text - is one of those hard problems.  I've read a few  of the papers in her field and find them jargon laden and bewildering.  Still, there's something very important that we just do naturally.  There's another branch of linguistics that's more accessible.  Sociolinguists studies how society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context impacts language.   The good stuff all of us use and misuse. Aalthough nothing like earlier changes in the language, there's constant change. The Gen Z meaning of wholesome comes to mind as a  recent shift in progress.

 

One of my most dramatic experiences with the sociology of language came as I was finishing my graduate work. A Chinese professor who didn't speak English was visiting the physics department. Not really an issue as there were several native-born professors and graduate students.  I was working something out on a blackboard and didn't realize he was watching.  He walked up, took a piece of chalk (yes -- we had lovely chalk back then), and gave me a look that asked permission to annotate what I was doing. It turned out he was interested in the same area.  We went back and forth using drawings and equations that were part of the culture we shared and had a lovely conversation for about fifteen minutes.  It occurred to me afterwards that we were relying on facial expressions and posture along with the chalk marks and never spoke a word.  Afterwards I reproduced what remained on the blackboard in my lab notebook.  Not that it was profound, but rather that it was such a nice chat.  He was only around for a few more days, but there were grins every time we saw each other.

 

Two weeks ago a linguist (not the prosody expert) gave me a beginner's tour of sociolinguistics by Valerie Fridland: Like, Literally, Dude  Arguing for the Good in Bad English.   It's great fun! Learn where change in language comes from (hint - it's not upperclass/educated males), how text messaging is entirely different for teens and their 35 year old parents, why ums and uhs in speech are beneficial and much more.   I'd go for the audiobook as she gives acoustic examples.  I'm not good at communication, but now at least I'm a bit more aware.   

 

 

there's no cow on the ice

A close friend and I have been exchanging emails several times a week for nearly thirty years.  I hadn't heard from him in a week, so I asked if everything was alright.   He replied with a single line:

Der er ingen ko på isen.

He's very Danish and, although I'm barely read-only in that tongue, I knew immediately there was nothing to worry about.  The idiom means there's no cow on the ice.   Danes happen to be a practical people. If your cow was on the ice, you'd have something to worry about. 

 

Idioms mean more than the words that make them up are a wonderful window into a culture.  They can come from different periods, subcultures, age groups, common experiences and so on.   And they can hold on well past the time they were coined. 'Hun stikker ikke op for bollemælk' means 'she doesn't stick up for milk dumplings' and is still in use even though the farming references are lost on almost everyone.

 

Courtesy of a couple of Danish friends, I keep a list of Danish idioms and think I understand where they came from a bit more.¹  I'm sure they don't think about where they come from, just didn't think about 'it's raining cats and dogs', until I heard the Danish equivalent which translates to 'it's raining shoemaker's apprentices'.  We're like the fish who doesn't realize it's swimming in water. 

 

A few years ago I started wondering about quantum leap/quantum jump - the idiom that is entirely different from what quantum [anything] means in physics and chemistry. Of course it's so wired in popular culture that it's completely displaced the original meaning. 

 

Pulling out my tiny text two volume OED with its magnifying glass, I find an early use in 1649 referred to a share or allotment: “Poverty is her portion, and her quantum is but food and raiment.”  In about 1870 it was first used in physics to describe the the smallest quantity of electric fluid. At the turn of the century Planck and Einstein started using it in the sense that light consists of small and measurable pieces of energy.  Something very small. In the 20s as quantum mechanics developed the energy change in an atom or molecule was discrete - it was quantized.  In physics and chemistry a quantum jump or leap represents a tiny amount of energy.

 

Quantum mechanics is the study of this tiny world that has properties that are counter to what we're used to experiencing.  It includes particle/wave duality, superposition, entanglement and so on.  By the 50s a deeper understanding had emerged.  It was becoming clear the subatomic world could be more accurately described by fields rather than just particles and forces.   That's what I think about when I hear quantum.  To shift gears to  culture outside of physics I must 'at sluge en kamel' - swallow the camel.

 

According to the OED (I had to resort to the electronic version in the library as my copy is too old) the first use of 'quantum leap' to mean 'very large' came in a 1956 document describing the US-Soviet balance of power:

“The enormous multiplication of power, the ‘quantum leap’ to a new order of magnitude of destruction.”

 It had been used as its opposite and somehow it caught on.  This isn't uncommon with words and phrases..  smart, nice, awful, awesome and many others have been turned around.  There's probably a term for this.

 

I was going to write something the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment as it has also become an idiom, but that can wait as it's fascinating for other reasons.

 

Så er den ged barberet

__________

¹ Note that I use English idioms to explain some of them

At stå op før fanden får sko på -- "get up before the devil puts on his shoes"

Spis lige brød til -- "have some bread with that" (telling someone to calm down)

Hold da helt ferie -- "take a whole holiday"  (no way!)

Lokummet brænder -- "the toilet is burning" (there are big problems)

Der er ugler i mosen -- "there are owls in the bog" (something suspicious is going on)

Man kan ikke både blæse og have mel i munden -- "you can't blow and have flour in your mouth at the same time" (you have to choose)

Skægget i postkassen "beard in the mailbox" (caught red handed)

At gå som katten om den varme grød "To walk like a cat around hot porridge" (to beat around the bush)

Så er den ged barberet "The goat is shaved"  (done with a big task .. big enough for a celebration)

 

 

manpo-kei, gold plated teaspoons and home runs

A friend had been struggling to find regular physical activity for a few years.  She complained enough about a lack of motivation that her brother gave her a low-end Fitbit for Christmas.  Somehow the pedometer function clicked for her.  Being able to see the numbers of steps was as motivating for her as filling in circles on an Apple Watch is for other people.  On top of this she'd heard about the magic 10,000 step number.  Initially the goal was beyond her, but she was motivated and within a couple of weeks she was there.  She's kept it up and regularly does 15,000 a day along with increasing her speed.  Her blood pressure is down from last year's number and she feels healthier.

 

In the 60s a Japanese company marketed a pedometer known as the Manpo-kei - which translates to the ten thousand step meter.  The pedometer became a fad and somehow the 10,000 step goal was enshrined in popular culture.  There's no reason why the number means anything other than being something like five miles of walking for most people.  That's over an hour of walking and good exercise. So people who aim for the number are getting a good benefit because the general direction of walking a lot is healthy rather than the number being the "right" target. 

 

The NY Times recently ran an article on some inaccuracies in smart watches.  It doesn't surprise me.  I've been around Olympic programs and athletes for a few years and know some horror stories about the over-reliance of data when you don't know it's accuracy or the context of the measurement or its use.  Like anything else with data, you need to know why, what and how you're measuring, manipulating, and finally interpreting and using the information.  In sport that turns out to be difficult.  There are a number of interesting approaches to deal with the issues, but that's another post. 

 

The NY Times piece and elite training experience suggest broad trends over time are much more important than local accuracy and precision  If you're trying to improve your fitness level or play amateur level sports, the motivation from a smartwatch can make a big difference.  If you're an elite athlete there are many other things to consider and it's likely you're taking advantage of them.

 

The notion of broad trend over local accuracy has utility in many areas.  One that frustrates me is building  carbon dioxide removal technology.  It's something of a delaying tactic being cheerleaded by the petrochemical and coal industries.  In reality it's extremely expensive, requires a large amount of energy and diverts funding from much more effective technologies and behaviors.  Currently four 1 million ton  class plants are on the drawing board.  With luck each could remove a million tons of carbon from the atmosphere by 2030 or so with a projected cost of about a billion dollars each.  So how much of an impact is that?

 

A million tons of carbon dioxide is about 1/40,000 of current yearly emissions.  That's roughly the same ratio as a teaspoon to a bathtub full of water.  Imagine running the tub and in the time it takes to fill it, you can remove a teaspoon of water.  The bathtub keeps running..  in the time another tub of water comes out of the spigot, you can remove a second teaspoon.  And then a third, forth and so on.  

 

We currently have many deployable technologies and behaviors that will turn the tap down much more than a teaspoon worth for far less money.  When we're finally down to the point where we're only putting a gallon or so of water into the tub each year, then it might make sense to deploy a number of teaspoons to make a difference for where it's difficult to turn the tap (aviation and shipping for example) 

 

Spend some money and talent learning how to improve the process, but don't count on it in the near term as it isn't, and will never be,  a silver bullet.  Nothing it.  all we can hope for is silver buckshot and using as much as we can possibly afford.  It makes sense to use the buckshot with the greatest cost/benefit ratio - things like wind, solar, better power grids, efficient transportation (full sized EVs don't count!), and any number of energy thrifty behaviors. 

 

And finally home runs and climate change.  Recently a paper made the major news outlets with projections that climate change will have an impact on Major League Baseball home runs: "Several hundred additional home runs per season are projected due to future warming."  The paper is poorly done .. basically a sensitivity analysis based on a single variable. I won't give it the credibility of a link.  Something that doesn't work in the real world with something as complex as baseball.  I have a some expertise in the fluid dynamics of balls flying through the air and would argue the effect is small.  In fact they note the same thing, but word the conclusion to make it appear there is an effect and climate change impacts everything.  This is pure clickbait for news organizations and probably has the impact of diverting attention from much more serious issues associated with global warming.  It's trivial to see the home run impact is insignificant, but a poorly done analysis can lead to fuzzy thinking and even harm.

 

the other dick fosbury

A few years ago I was having fun of  thinking about the fluid dynamics of a ball moving through the air.  The main focus was  beach volleyball, but also several other sports that use roughly spherical balls. Of these, the two with the most curious motions are table tennis and beach volleyball.   It came as a surprise as soccer (football in most of the world) has dramatic movements and baseball can be tricky, but they're not in the league of these two other sports.  People found it fun so I decided expand it into a college level class - a one semester physics of sport course for non-majors.

 

It was a very interactive affair,.  After a few weeks a few coaches and their assistants turned up,  offering things to think about.  After going through the Fosbury flop, one of the track and field coaches mentioned there had been a similar innovation in long jump, but it had been outlawed as too dangerous.  He pointed out you lose a lot of energy at takeoff by leaning back at takeoff.  The innovation was to halt the loss doing a forward somersault.  He couldn't remember the name of the athlete who did it, but thought it was in the mid 70s with World Athletics quickly banning it.

 

That evening I took pencil to paper and came to the conclusion it could increase distance traveled by as much as ten percent.  Ten percent is a change in sport where people will try crazy things for fractions of a percent.  Eventually around I found the athlete - a student from New Zealand who would have had the world record on his first attempt if he had slightly better form.  There were a few still images, but no video.  

 

With the recent passing and celebration of the life of Dick Fosbury I decided to look again.  Two years ago  an interview with a video of the jump was posted.  Long jump records would probably be over ten meters if it hadn't been banned.  The physics is simple - the leap was realizing you didn't have to lean back.

something deeply profound

David Epstein mentioned Hillel Einhorn's epiphany about happiness - something triggered by a fortune cookie.

beyond the equal sign

 

 

 

About ten years ago I devoted a good deal of time to learning a bit of category theory - an area of abstract mathematics that's become important to physics.  It deals with relationships rather than objects, abstractions and analogies, context, sameness, equivalence rather than equality, how you see patterns, and much more.  It can impact thinking in many areas beyond mathematics. It provides a rigorous framework that gives choice in how problems are approached and take you beyond  putting things in boxes that don't always make sense.

 

It's very technical, but Eugenia Cheng has written an excellent non-major freshman level book with the goal of getting art students to think about the world differently.  I suspect it will work for many other people - particularly those who have to deal with complexity and seeing curious patterns that are otherwise missed.  The Joy of Abstraction is one of those rare books that can change how you see the world.  I'd recommend getting a physical version and doing the exercises. (I don't buy books from Amazon and recommend you support local bookstores)

 

Steve Strogatz chatted with her on this episode of his Joy of Wh(y) podcast.  Listen even if the book doesn't strike you as interesting!

 

 

a celebration of homophones

For those who use the American mm/dd/yyyy,  it suggests 3.14   With an error of about 0.05%, it’s a good enough approximation for many uses.  And those who use the more common dd/mm/yyyy notion can wait for the 22nd of July for 22/7. At  0.04% from the mark, this one's a slightly better approximation. 

 

But just how much Pi do you really need? Eight digits is overkill for most engineering tasks. NASA uses 16 digits .. 15 to the right of the decimal .. to navigate around the solar system going beyond Pluto. The most I can imagine would be to construct a high quality circle the radius of the known universe, about 46 billion light years, to the diameter of a hydrogen atom,. You’d need 38 significant digits for the task.

 

xkcd has a piece on approximations that’s painfully true. For some back of the envelope calculations in astrophysics and cosmology you can get by with crude approximations.

 

 

It’s also Einstein’s birthday. Pie, being a homophone of Pi, seems to the a good bet for the day. I have it on good authority he loved cherry pie and ice cream, so there you go.

 

He’s one of a dozen or so people who have quotes improperly ascribed to them.  He was a joker and much of what he did say is often taken out of context.  But here's a real one I love. Shortly before his death he was asked to offer advice to young people.  His reply was published in Life Magazine.

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."   A. Einstein 1955

 

physics isn't about looking for some grand truth

 

It turns out we make it up as we go along and that's a foundational piece of why it's been so successful.

 

Apparently there's been some discussion about the connection of physics and some quest for an ultimate truth on a social media site I gave up.  A few people reached out and asked my opinion.  Starting down the path as a teenager, I thought science was after some deep and ultimate truth.  Some grand and beautiful underpinning of the Universe.  I was wrong.  It took time, but finally as a grad student I had come to know better.

 

What physics does is build mathematical models that describe observations. (why math works so well is another discussion - but it just does)  The hypothesis models that are robust enough to survive different experimental techniques and are predictive become accepted theory.   It's very much an iterative process and the models get progressively better with more predictive models coming into use as appropriate.  The Standard Model is the best we have for particle physics.  It has some warts, but it's far and away the most accurate theory devised.  General Relativity is the benchmark for gravity.  Both are under constant study and that study has led to radically different views of the Universe and how it has and will evolve. 

 

But to the question from the birdsite.  What is real?  Is a proton real and what is it made of?  What about the spin of a particle?  Is dark matter or the dark force real?  For the electron and the quarks and gluons that make up protons and neutrons, the most accurate and way to think about them is as excitations in fields that spread throughout the universe.  You, the computer screen you're looking at, your dog and your lunch are vast assemblages of field excitations.  It's far from intuition and these models are rarely taught until the junior year and that's usually at a high level as the math is a bit intense.  It may seem weird, but it's much more predictive than anything else. And gravity being spacetime that changes it's curvature around mass and mass that responds to the curvature of spacetime isn't exactly Newton's falling apples.  

 

Current accepted theory addresses serious flaws in earlier work. The earlier work was good enough given the sophistication of measurements, but tools improve with time.   It turns out most  (but not all!) of applied physics and engineering doesn't have to worry about these deeper descriptions as these are fields that usually apply to things roughly our size moving a low speeds.  There's an interesting notion called complementarity that tells you it's okay to use less precise, but easier to understand, models when you don't need extreme accuracy.  We live in a world where models with a Newtonian underpinning are usually valid.  

 

In a way it's how we perceive things. We only sense a tiny amount of the electromagnetic spectrum, our hearing misses quite a bit, our sense of time misses large and small intervals and our size is roughly between that of the Sun and a hydrogen atom.  We don't perceive much of the reality around us - we have to use our imaginations to figure out how to ask the right questions and see more deeply.

 

So we build models.  We don't work out the equations of motion, but we walk, throw balls, drive cars and so one. We have a fair amount of information for these simple actions.   Physical models quickly get more difficult.   How do you predict an earthquake and its severity?  When and where tornadoes will do damage?  We build approximations, but that's all they are.  Better models will come using the scientific process. Even if it's a messy undertaking, it's proven to be the best approach we have.  And there's a foundational principle you have to deal with  - one that Feynman famously articulated:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

More complex and social sciences come into play. Predicting markets and economic models don't have the twelve digit accuracy seen in the Standard Model .. they generally don't make it past the decimal point.  They're also a stab at reality.    Social models are often poorly constructed with bad data and analysis - a major "AI" issue these days.  And how we understand each other as people.   We all build models.  Hopefully they're good enough.

 

For a long time I believed you could change minds about the causes and threat of global warming through education.Silly me -  it turns out to be a fool's errand. We all have different views of reality.  We can witness an event and see differing realities.  These lenses can be very different and culturally driven.  Quite a bit of work has been done trying to understand how this works.  Recently a podcast chat with  psychologist Jer Clifton was recommended by Corinne.  I give it two thumbs up and recommend it to anyone who has to deal with other people in almost any capacity.  It may even make you think twice about how you interact with others.

 

revisiting eliza the next generation

a minipost

With all the talk about large language models and applications like ChatGPT,  I recalled a post from about two and a half years ago:  eliza the next generation.  I'd say much the same now - some of the predictions have come about.  Of course it's only been a short while and I played with prototypes, so there's that:-)

 

It was high pandemic and I was spending quite a bit of time talking with friends who were working on interesting things.  Among other things I started to become aware of progress in large language models.  While many who work in AI (a poor label, but you get the idea without me having to talk about a variety of fields and subfields as well as what's unrelated), believed them a diversion, there was progress in LLMs and some interesting applications were emerging.  We chatted about where it could go and what techno-social issues might arise. (disclaimer: I'm not a techno-solutionist)  About the time I posted, Emily Bender at the University of Washington wrote a terrific paper on issues with natural language understanding and if we can believe what comes out of LLMs.  Recently an article on her work appeared in The Intelligencer.  It's a necessary read if only to understand her octopus analogy. 

 

This morning Gregg Vesonder and I exchanged some text messages. He's a serious AI guy with decades of experience and is someone who thinks deeply about social technical issues.  One of his comments:

We’ve seen this scene before, blinded by the hype. My concern this time is that explicit or inadvertent bias in the data can mask some nasty behavior that can subtly or not so subtly mask really tragic manipulations.

Aka speech acts. 

I hadn't thought about speech acts much before.  The definition and examples given in the link are excellent tools for thinking about these things. 

 

I'm not against LLMs and there are some useful applications beyond writing horoscopes in white bro-speak, but the dimensionality of the space for abuse strikes me as large.  As Suw Charman-Anderson notes, we're already seeing it in publishing. 

 

'AI' is a very large and diffuse collection.  Some areas are useful and potentially revolutionary.  Others are potentially dangerous.  We really need to think about these things rather than just trying them out and seeing what breaks.  The things that break may be far too valuable. 

 

 

befrending the imposter syndrome

[A minipost from my reply to Pip Coburn on his recent piece on student-mindedness]

 

The lesson came as I prepared for my thesis defense.  The Stony Brook physics department has three examiners:  two physicists - a theorist and an experimentalist (one is your advisor)  - and someone external to the department who is outside your field.  How I found mine is a long story, but the choice made a huge difference. He was a surgery professor and an accomplished violinist, which seemed reasonably remote from the semileptonic decay mode of charmed particles. The committee members get a draft of the thesis a few months before the defense. Ideally that's when major issues generally uncovered. I thought the surgeon wouldn’t have much to say, but he *really* wanted to understand what it was about.  He was a serious and intensely curious student, with a range far beyond medicine. His particle physics was about on par with my surgical skills, so I had to describe my work to extremely bright student who had a very different background. Spread over two months we spent at least twenty hours together.  His "dumb" (the label he chose) questions gifted me with a deeper insight into what I'd done.  There was so much I hadn’t thought deeply enough about.  

 

Over a good meal one night he said he used to be intimidated by experts outside his field until he discovered they were often intimidated by him. If you feel intimidated it’s a sign there's something to learn and perhaps you can learn something.  Over those two months I learned a bit about surgery and Bach violin sonatas, but the real learning was to to welcome and appreciate the imposter syndrome (I didn’t know to term until much later). Also I learned something about communication.  What I didn’t learn was how to effectively communicate the work to high school students - but that’s another story.

 

Since then I’ve been on a number of defense committees. Only one was physics. The rest have been all over the place and have been fantastic opportunities to learn and get a bit of insight from a developing expert. Hopefully some of my dumb questions help them as much as my surgeon friend's dumb questions helped me.