omenti

a thanksgiving for tiny asymmetries

Soon American Thanksgiving arrives and a change to note a few things I'm thankful for. This year I'll pick two examples that celebrate tiny asymmetries in nature: our existence and women's sports.

 

First the universe as we know it.  There are several asymmetries in physics that allow us to exist. Two important ones are the amount of antimatter and matter produced in the very early universe and the mass difference between up and down quarks.  The matter-antimatter imbalance is easy to think about, but is still one of those fundamental unsolved problems.  During the first fractions of a second after everything started particle-anti-particle pairs would be popping in and out of existence at a furious rate. As the universe expanded all that would be left would be pure energy.  But something interesting happened.  This oscillation slightly favored these oscillating particles to decay as matter particles than antimatter.  The asymmetry isn't huge - a part in a billion or so - but we wouldn't be here without it.  There are a number of conjectures about the mechanism, but nothing solid.

 

So the early universe favored matter. Things like electrons and quarks that make up atoms.  The neutron has two down and one up quark, the proton two up and one down.¹ It turns out down quarks are slightly more massive than up quarks.  That means the neutron is more massive - about a tenth of a percent than the proton.  On its own the neutron is unstable, decaying into a proton, electron and antineutrino in about fifteen minutes.  If the proton was more massive it could decay into a neutron, positron and neutrino.  In the heavier proton universe everything would quickly be just neutrons, electrons and neutrinos..  It would be impossible for atoms to form ..  no stars, no planets, no us..

 

What about the radioactive free neutrons in our universe?  There's the strong interaction - an interaction resulting from another asymmetry that binds neutrons and protons together at very close ranges. The binding energy prevents the neutron from decaying so we can have atoms that are more complex than hydrogen..

 

So onto another asymmetry that occurred over thirteen billion years from the beginning - the genetic difference between males and females. Within any given species the differences are very small.  They turn out to be profound.  Male and female humans have some important differences that can be described as a small asymmetry.  This results in two sexes (with some mostly rare differences).  There are also a number of genders which aren't related to the genetic asymmetry.  Some societies tend equate sex and gender but others, like some North American First Nation Peoples, recognize well over a dozen.  I'm solidly with the later group and believe there shouldn't be unfair discrimination.   

 

This is where Title IX is important.  A major result of the law was an explosive growth in women's sports in the US. Now fifty years in, the strength of women's sport in American schools has fundamentally changed women's sports globally.  Women's sport should be protected category. Biological males receive enormous physical advantages during puberty largely from the hormone testosterone.  Biological males that have their testosterone levels reduced to near zero after puberty still have almost all the performance advantage (70 to well over 90 percent) an untreated biological male would have. 

 

A good friend is an Olympian and I've become more familiar with some parts of elite women's sport. A number of biological males are declaring themselves to be trans women.² While this may or may not be entirely gender identification, these biological males have an advantage over biological females in the vast majority of sports.  In sport there three fundamentals people talk about:  safety, fairness and inclusivity.  Using that order is protective of biological females. Unfortunately some sports and people argue inclusivity and remove fairness and safety.³ The result has been second rate biologically male athletes denying biologically female athletes medals and scholarships and, in some cases, increased injury rates.  There's also some intimidation from sponsors to prevent women from speaking up.  

 

But in each category - male and female -you can find what makes sport exciting.

 

 

Asymmetries are why we're here.  They can also produce social challenges.

__________

¹ I've taken some license here:-)

² Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has made several podcasts on this that make a good introduction to the biology. The first 35 minutes or so of this podcast episode offer one of the best explanations of the Caster Semenya affair. 

³ Some argue that there are women taller and stronger than many men.  The argument doesn't hold water. Consider age and weight categories in many sports. They exist to promote fairness and safety. While Sarah stands 196 cm and can lift more than twice her body weight, elite male volleyball players have a strong physical advantage over her.   There are male and female distributions for height, weight, strength, lung capacity, blood flow, endurance, etc.   In fact, in the longest ultra endurance events - ultra-marthons over 100 miles - women turn out to have an endurance advantage that becomes more significant by 150 miles. If these became popular there should probably be different categories for biological males and biological females. 

And on the game I know.  Male and female volleyball at the elite level have developed different strategies and tactics as a result of the physical differences.  In my mind the women's game involves more finesse, tactics and strategy, while the men's game is more powerful. 

 

comments on a pin

I was asked for to comment on the Humane Ai Pin (omitting punctuation), so a quick minipost.   I have no experience with this device, but have a bit of experience in the area so a bit of background is in order.  

 

For the decade from 1992 to 2002 I spent a good deal of time working on a variety of Internet access schemes as well as spending a lot of time with a human computer interaction group. People in carpetland were interested so we did a number of dog and pony shows as well as wizard-of-oz demos.¹   I'm not good at predicting the future - no one is - but I believe you can construct plausible scenarios and get a sense of some of the possibility space.  You end up remembering the few home runs.  In 93 or 94 I said you'd be able to have a conversation in full color with a relative on the other side of the globe and wouldn't have to pay long distance fee.  Both of you would use a piece of glass with embedded electronics and radio that you'd hold in your hand. Technically it was certainly possible - the main technical rub was the battery.  I hadn't appreciated advances in lithium-ion chemistry at the time.  The other two roadblocks were monopoly carriers and about a half trillion in infrastructure.  I didn't see either of those as being insurmountable - a feeling that was shared by several colleges.  Ten or years may seem like a long time for device predictions, but the foundational technologies are usually on even longer horizons.. it's mostly seeing how they might converge.  The who and how are more difficult. 

 

As the decade went on we began to focus on music over the Internet. We even showed a prototypes to player Steve Jobs at Apple in an attempt to gain support for our music codec (AAC) a few years before the iPod.  Our design wasn't that clever, but the recognition that portable music was important resonated for a few years.   We were also working on other communication concepts - some were just concepts ten or twenty years out.  There was the iCane - sort of a smartphone in the form of a cane, something like Google's eyeglasses, an infrastructure called AirGraffiti that, while basically a good idea, required a billion dollars or so a year to make fly (Google and Apple Maps are sophisticated examples), and so on.. We even looked at brooches and Star Trek communicators.

 

Smartwatches seemed so obvious we didn't spend much time other than being able to generate prompts by snapping or rubbing your fingers together (coming later this year on Apple's watch).  The watch is a wonderful piece of jewelry that can be as inconspicuous as you need it while still signaling personal style - one of the few pieces of jewelry men wear. 

Like a few other research groups, we wondered about other forms. Perhaps something on the belt would come earlier as putting the electronics in a phone seemed ten years off at least and five more for a watch.  Taking with sociologists and anthropologists it was clear that people love images and video.  The phone seemed like a wonderful platform IF you could pull it off.  My piece of glass on steriods, but now only ten years off.  We were beginning to see it as a computational platform rather than simply a videophone.  

 

There were video projectors that could work on slanted and even arbitrary surfaces.. they were really crappy for a number of reasons. They don't and won't compete with a smartphone screen for a long time. Also remember your smartphone weighs about 200 to 300 grams plus or minus.  Try hanging that on your clothes somewhere with properly positioned so you can put a surface in front of it. Also add some weight to run the projector for any length of time. 

 

There's the notion of 'voice first".  Folks who study human communication note that what we think of as voice is only a small part of spoken conversation.  In addition to expressions and postures there are several types of context:  the context of who, of place, of history, etc..  Voice alone is a relatively small, albeit important, part of spoken communication. To get it close right you probably have to give up a lot of privacy,   

 

I claim video is so addictive to so many that the smartphone in their pocket will rule for some time.  Earbuds, if you need audio, will talk to the phone in your pocket or your watch, which is in a position to take more meaningful biodata than something on your shirt.  I asked an animator friend (she was a student at our place twenty years ago and she regularly looks at designs from her sister who is a high end jewelry designer) to make some sketches of a wearable for clothing that would be about half the volume of an iPhone.  She made a few sketches  and said it would be very dorky.. probably like something from the Victorian era.²

 

These are things you wear..  they say something about you and your person style.  They offer only serious constraints. 

 

There are more technical reasons I can give, but I'm guessing the Ai Pin will fade rather quickly in most social groups.  But then again this is not my area and I'm frequently wrong.   Also in 1993, when Kip told me they were going to get a gravity wave detector working in twenty years, I believed him.  The technology is probably the most advanced on the planet plus they didn't have to deal with really hard problems like style and fashion.  Maybe in ten years, but I'm not one to bet against quality video.  

__________

¹ The label we gave to the C-level floor as the carpet was nearly thick enough to impede walking.

² Applying similar reasoning one of the anthropologists in the department pronounced the hugely promoted Segway a social faux pas as it implied 'totalitarian dorkishness'.

 

 

stalking breadth and serendipity

Randall Munroe has this wonderful way of stating depth. (via his wonderful xkcd)

 

It's been fashionable to talk about information overload for some time, but the amount of information we and our machines make is almost infinitesimally small next to the amount information in the natural world. We don't directly experience the world. Rather we rely on heavily filtered senses to feed models our mind creates.  Even the stand types of information we rely on - images and sound - represent only a tiny bit of what's out there. 

 

We've become adept in building models to understand what's going on.  In the late 19th century a few physicists developed statistical mechanics - a mathematical construction that allows you to consider enormous numbers of objects (say the air molecules in a room) and be able to accurately describe what's going on as well as well as what will happen.  It was an enormous leap in thought that directly led to the development of quantum mechanics a few decades later. Here's one of the best introductions to a field I've seen in a textbook: from States of Matter - a sophomore/junior level text by David Goodstein. (image grabbed from the ebook)

 

Science has given us tools and techniques to extend our vision beyond our senses.  The development of lenses for microscopes and telescopes, judged by the avalanche of knowledge they led to, may be the most important invention of the past millennia.

 

We have a difficult time sorting out information we and other people produce.  Generally we use a combination of active and passive filters. These filters change with both experience and technology.  We often find ourselves cutting out more than we should. We often live and work in 'echo chambers', surrounding ourselves with information from similars.  Some sociologists refer to this as cocooning,  a term I prefer. Machine learning produced cocooning is very real and an active area of study.

 

A trick is to create active filters that provide breadth.  The one I practice is regularly read and talk to interesting people outside my area.  There are a lot of smart people out there who are willing to share, but there are a couple of tricks.  First you need to describe what you do in a manner that they can get a good-enough understanding.  They have to do the same.  This can be very difficult - it's like teaching an introductory course or writing a book and often, as a by-product, sharpens your understanding of what you do.  Second you need to develop a working understanding.  I find offering whatever I can bring to work on their problem to be both fascinating and useful. It's one of the main reasons why I tithe my time to 'help' others.  In fact it's a type of homemade university I've created.

 

These conversations or library ramblings sometimes break down.  The secret weapon, should you be lucky enough to know one, is a human impedance match.¹  The rare ability to ensure a good-enough two way information transfer.  I know of two (there may be more) on this list and feel lucky to know them. 

 

Sometimes you can put together a serendipity machine.  I've been around two - possibly three - so far.  A small group of people with a very wide range of backgrounds who know, understand and respect each other and their differences.  Put them in a comfortable place - face to face is important as a good deal of out of channel communication goes on - and let them range. The topics may be concerned with an engineering issue, but somehow jump to 13th century Sicily and that jump, realized a few months later, was the productive insight.  That group was in the spirit of Ted Lasso's Diamond Dogs, although it usually met on Friday afternoons with meetings the ran from four to ten hours.  It isn't terribly efficient, but can be fun and produce very interesting ideas and understandings. 

__________

Finally Pip talked about the need to communicate something positive as a counterpoint to the negative news and social  media message we usually get.   So here goes - a short story of great fun and imagination. Chivalry by Neil Gaiman. It must be listened to rather than read from the page. Only a half hour, the performance I recommend is from the Selected Shorts series with Christina Pickles doing the honors. Simply wonderful! About $3 at the Apple Bookstore and probably the same at Amazon.

__________

¹ I first came across electronic impedance matches as a teenage amateur radio builder and operator. Without going into detail,  a signal in the form of an alternating current usually has different values in different "boxes".  If  a signal goes from one box to another of differing impedance, there is a loss of signal.  An impedance match minimizes the loss of signal.  The example I fought as a kid was making sure the impedance of my transmitter matched that of my antenna.   (the same analogy works for power transmission)

A human impedance match often probes the two people figuring out what questions to ask and clarifications to add to increase the level of understanding on both ends.  It's a skill I work on, but still lack after all these years.

 

 

 

beyond david mackay?

a minipost

David MacCay was a remarkable fellow.  Curious and cross-disciplinary, he worked in applied math, physics and engineering research at Cambridge.  Passionate about doing something about global warming, he happened to be a great communicator.  I had a few interactions with him: first about thirty years ago playing with neural networks and later in the mid 2000s as he was putting together Sustainable energy – Without the Hot Air - probably the clearest book written on energy production and demand.  You can still buy the book and  proceeds go to support some good charities.  David updated the book online until his early death in 2016.  It's free online, but the printed version is a better experience.

 

The book is written at two levels - one for folks without a mathematical background and a somewhat deeper version that assumes an understanding of high school physics. David goes into depth building easy to understand models and then plugs in numbers from past and present technologies.  The last step is where the book is flawed.  Enormous advances have been made in solar and wind power technology and prices have fallen dramatically.  A few of David's conclusions relevant ten years ago are now dated.  For example he shows that wind power and solar are insufficient for the UK, even in an ideal world without existing infrastructure and bureaucratic inertias. The last two roadblocks still exist almost everywhere, but the underlying story has changed.

 

Brian O'Callaghan's group at THAT other English university have published an updated look at solar and wind energy in the UK and come to the conclusion that they are practical and nearly sufficient at scale.  Here's the summary of their policy paper.  Their technical papers are solid and thorough.   I suspect Sir David would be proud.

 

In addition to getting an important  update, there's an important lesson here.  When describing current and future technology scenarios it's extremely important to lay down some clear thinking that is largely independent of current and future inputs.  The basis of this type of scenario is really just a solid foundation that's waiting for inputs.   It's rare to see ones that work twenty or  more years in the future.   David's did and does... it just needed updated inputs.

 

 

 

gains and loses - should we have a choice?

In the mid 70s a young researcher at Waterloo named Janet Starkes had an insight that changed ideas about why good athletes are good.  It led to a a good deal of work on the acquisition of expertise. She had been a volleyball player as an undergrad and her familiarity with the sport led to her testing perceptual cognitive skills of volleyball players.  In the process she invented the occlusion test.    She showed players on the Canadian National Team brief flashes - sixteen thousandths of a second - of volleyball matches.  Some had the ball in the frame while it had just exited the frame in others.  The players had to say if the ball was visible or not.  Unskilled observers find the task is impossible - all you see is a brief flash of light.  Even studying the image for longer is difficult as the there's a confusion of visual information.  

 

The players were able to correctly score the images at a much greater rate than chance.  A few saw even more.  In indoor volleyball the setter is the person who directs how the play will proceed.   Good setters have what is often called court sense. Elite players seem to know where the players who are important to the developing play are and how they're moving.  This court sense has been measured in elite players in other sports like basketball, soccer, hockey, and cricket.

 

The occlusion experiments  have been repeated in sports like tennis and baseball to understand when a player knows what the near future may bring. They explain why Jenny Finch was able to strike out the best major league baseball players. They didn't understand her pitch and how the ball was moving - even though it was only traveling at 60 to 70 miles per hour. They were reduced to reacting to the moving ball - something that doesn't work in baseball. The elite players generally make their decisions on how to hit the ball around the time the pitcher releases it - sometimes just before.  Much of the information they use comes from observing motions that lead up to and are part of the pitch.  

 

Experiments with chess players show elite players can understand the board and how play is proceeding in a very short time even though, in theory, there are an enormous number of potential moves ahead.  When experimenters then displayed images of boards with impossible or extremely unlikely arrangements of pieces, the elites were reduced to the level of raw beginners.  Just like the major league baseball players facing Jenny Finch.   The view is the chess players and elite athletes break information down into something of a mental shorthand - "chucks" of information.  When they are presented with a chunk or series of chunks they're familiar with they know, usually without thinking,  how to proceed.  

 

The brain is "plastic."  It takes a good deal of time and effort to develop relevant neural libraries of these chunks..  sometimes a childhood of playing and learning at a variety of levels in many activities.  London cabbies are  interesting example.  It may not be the case now with GPS navigation, but cabbies had to pass an extremely difficult test of their knowledge of the city's streets that usually requires over a year of study. MRI scans show the cab drivers have a much larger portion of their hippocampus - an enlargement that came from that study.  Musicians show enlarged regions as do people who learn multiple languages at an early age.   It turns out early music and language skills are useful for certain types of reasoning, so perhaps it's good to encourage these skills.  Or maybe not.  

 

What does it mean when we don't develop certain mental skills - when we don't build the pathways.  It's clear I'll never play, or even react to volleyball at an elite level..  the wiring isn't there even if I had the physical skills.   But what if I had never learned how to navigate using maps and looking for signs in nature where I don't have maps.  There's some evidence those skills are very useful for grappling with geometry - particularly the more abstract kind math and physics majors see in college.  Will an over reliance on GPS damage certain types of abstract thinking?  Does it matter?  

 

As various forms of "AI" take over tasks will it free us for other forms of thinking, or will it damage our ability to excel in some areas?  It's speculation at this point, but given how difficult it is to get good at something and  that getting good at one thing can be useful in other areas, it strikes me as an interesting area of study.  Some technologies may enhance, others may handicap. 

 

And in some areas this chunking of information can get you into trouble when a novel approach is called for.  That's when broad and seemingly unrelated connections become important.  The folks who excel at this are deep enough library of chunks that they recognize this takes something else and manage to patch together something novel.    But that's another story.

 

 

 

wonderful inefficiency

Today the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman.  Richly deserved, their work has saved millions of lives and has created new pathways.

 

Each one had a key piece to the puzzle.  Normally they wouldn't have crossed paths, but working copy machines were a limited resource on their campus.  Katalin (her career path is amazing NY Times gifted) had the habit of reading very old papers and wanted to copy something when she ran into Drew who was also waiting for the machine. 

They talked

I can't begin to list how many collaborations and information transfers have taken place when disciplines physically collide.  Bell Labs was great at this in the day .. the Murray Hill cafeteria was a rich source as were the walking paths around the campus and the byzantine architecture of the place that randomly collided people with each other.  All wonderfully inefficient by many standards.  By design the main buildings at Pixar have a single large restroom that collides disciplines.  Many research organizations have slate blackboards (important if you have mathematicians and/or physicists) or whiteboards everywhere - restrooms, walking paths, along the walls -  for impromptu discussions. The disorganization of Building 20 at MIT is often cited as a founding example of this, but there are many earlier examples.

 

Creativity requires friction. People need a chance to bump into each other.  I suspect this is true for many disciplines as creativity evaporates when people avoid each other for whatever reason.  With all of the remote work these days it's important to think about, and make time, the create interesting connections. Arturo Casadevall at John Hopkins tells his people to read something or talk with someone outside their field every day.¹

“And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

But back to today's prize and a comment on the Katalin. Her daughter Zsuzsanna Francia won gold in Rowing Eights in the 2008 and 2012 Olympic games.  There are other notables.  Harold Bohr was on the Danish Football team where he won silver in the 1908 Olympics. He was the mathematician bother of physics laureate Niels, who was solid amateur athlete.  And Olivia Newton-John was the granddaughter of physics laureate Max Born. 

__________

¹ a tip of the hat to David Epstein

 

on communication

a minipost

Last night I was thinking about something a favorite teacher taught me about communication.  I was lucky enough to have had two excellent teachers in high school.  I had one of them, Joe Wolff, in three classes: world history, the history of religion, and western philosophy.  I visited him on my trips back to Great Falls when I was in college and would talk with him and his wife until the small hours of the morning. So many learnings, but one still keeps me thinking.

 

Widely read, he said there were any number of bad communicators. but you could break the good ones into three categories:

The explainers  The good ones make the subject clear and easy to understand. It's a high bar - something I think I can do every now and again.  It's the domain of very good textbooks.

The elucidators  Everything good explainers are, but they manage to transport the reader (or listener or viewer) to a much deeper place. An understanding.  They connect ideas and information from far and wide to illuminate the subject.  They challenge you to think and connect.  They inspire. They also happen to be rarer than good explainers and their value is much greater. I aspire to be one, but fall short.

The enchanters  They possess the skills of the first two have, but communicate with a brilliance that gives you a deep insight almost as if by magic while making it look easy. They provide a sense of what it is to think deeply and discover a bit of something both deep and exciting. They offer an integration of thought that goes beyond inspiration. They are so rare!

There are examples in many fields including (perhaps especially including) art and music.  All three require thought and work on the part of their audience, but they inspire you to dig in.

I'm not going to list examples - that's a task I leave for you to think about.

 

 

 

 

 

as far as the eye can see

The first time a policeman pulled me over was far and away the best.  I was sixteen and had my new driver's license in my wallet and my homemade f5.6 eight inch Newtonian reflector in the back of my parent's car.   It was about three am on Highwood Road about twenty miles East of Great Falls, Montana when I noticed a pair of flashing lights of a highway patrol car behind me.  I got out of the car and went through a sobriety tests and document check.  Shining his light around,  he noticed a blanket covered cylindrical object about a foot in diameter and six feet long in back of the old Ford station wagon. His hand was on his service revolver as he marched me to the back of the car and ordered me to open the tailgate. I was trying to explain it was a telescope when he ripped the blanket off, but his focus was elsewhere.  The poor guy was probably frustrated it wasn't anything more dramatic. I explained I had to slow to about fifteen miles per hour on corners because they were crowned (to allow snow and ice to slide off in sunlight) and the telescope was delicate.  He gave me a warning to drive faster and muttered something like "damn kid" on the way back to his cruiser. 

 

Unfortunately most of us live in heavily light polluted areas and it keeps getting worse.  A few years ago a friend took a cross country trip and found herself in Zion National Park around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower in August.  It was one of the better showers at around two hundred per hour, but seeing the Milky Way in its glory from a wonderfully dark area was the high point of the trip.

 

It's Fall in the Northern Hemisphere and a great time to spot the most distant object you can normally see with unaided eyes is well-placed.  At about two and a half million light years away, it's the nearest major galaxy.   It's huge - about a hundred and fifty thousand light years in diameter with a mass of about a trillion of our Suns.  Six full moons wide, it's an impressive sight in a clear moonless sky away from light pollution and even better with binoculars.  And seeing light from that long ago can conjure feelings of awe and wonder.

 

You've undoubtely noticed it takes awhile for your vision to adapt to the dark.  There's folklore why pirates wore an eye patch - to keep one eye dark adapted for when they had to go below deck around gun powder.  At least that's what I read as a kid and it was enough for me to wear a patch at night.  I've written about night walking and how to experiment with color night vision and see the colors of some of the planets and brightest stars.  Seeing the color of a bright star is impressive, but there's that period a few minutes in length where your rods sensitize and all the stars suddenly come out as your eyes become about ten thousand times more sensitive.  It's special-effects level dramatic and most people have never experienced it.

 

Back to the stars.  With binoculars you can see dramatic color in a few stars. Betelgeuse is red, Rigal is a beautiful blue, Capella is yellow and Antares is somewhere between red and orange. There are dozens to look for, but you won't see green.  Perceived stellar color is  an artifact of the range of light stars produce and the fact we only have three types of cones.  The color of a star is determined by its surface temperature. If you know a bit about blackbody radiation and the overlapping sensitivity ranges of your cones you can work out the puzzle of a sky devoid of green stars. 

 

Om likes to talk about computational photography (as do I), but there have been dramatic developments beond smartphones and conventional cameras.  Over the past twenty years computational amateur astrophotography has matured to the point where it's easy to use and not prohibitively expensive.  It can make the sky much more accessible than using a conventional telescopes with your eye.  While very dark areas are preferable, it is possible to observe from semi-dark suburban areas. Perhaps we can talk Tammy into a guest post on her experiences one of these days.

 

when there is elsewhere

There haven't been any extensive use reports of the Apple Vision Pro, but most of the people who had a brief introduction walked away impressed giving a sense that this really is something new.  It's spendy by many measures, but supplies will apparently be heavily constrained as some components are both expensive and very low yield. But with its visual and sound field reconstruction capabilities, one set of use cases may involve real-time remote presence.  A court-side seat at a NBA game or something from a Taylor Swift concert come to mind.

 

But there are questions. Horace is one of the best Apple analysts out there as well as an all-around really smart guy. (If you're interested in tech or micromobility, you need to follow his podcasts, posts and live events.) He recently posted some thoughts on the value of remote presence and how it might be one of the  drivers for Apple's new device.  I would be really surprised if folks at Apple aren't thinking along these lines.

 

I sent a note to him that offered a little pushback that wasn't really pushback..  it's more that value of being there varies a lot and the same for quality of experience.  Sports and music are two very interesting cases.

 

Last night an indoor women's volleyball match between Nebraska and Oklahoma set the attendance record for any women's sporting event.  Normally NCAA games are held indoors in places that rarely seat more than 8,000.  High school and college women's volleyball has the greatest participation of any women's team sport in the US.  This wasn't an important match - Nebraska has a much higher ranking than Oklahoma and it's preseason, but it's an event.  There's a strong passion is that part of the country - one of you is well aware of it.¹ So 92,003 paying fans filled more than the seats.. about 10,000 had to stand as the football stadium was too small.  The view of action was probably terrible for most of the fans, but that wasn't the point.  All of those people in the same place sharing the same passion and seeing it roll out at the same time.

Here's the walkout video for a sense of scale

I'm a beach volleyball fan and regularly find myself waking up at two or three in the morning to follow a match with a player I know or a team I care about on the other side planet. The streaming is sometimes poor and costs $80 a year. Tickets aren't terribly expensive, but travel is so I haven't been to a large number of events.  The sport is extremely friendly, probably because there isn't much money in it, and talking to players and other spectators is at least half of it..  going to dinner with a couple of gold medalists isn't exactly an everyday event.  I wanted to go to Tokyo and had been invited as a friend of a Canadian team, but Covid.  Perhaps Paris. 

 

The BBC had a nice piece on why people care about games. It's a short and worthwhile listen.

 

So would I use an Apple Vision Pro if a steam that offered a court side view with good commentary existed?  Sure!  Well - maybe. How much would I pay?  That's an interesting question.  It would largely rest on how much the streaming experience was improved. It can't replace the physical experience of being part of an event.  It's interesting that American soccer (football to the rest of the world) sometimes go to bars to find a critical mass of likeminded fans when their team is playing.  And there are Super Bowl parties.  For a couple of hours what people do for a living, religion, political  views and so on don't matter.  There's a distributed group bonding.  Do products like the Apple Vision Pro augment or replace that form of interaction?  I don't think so, but I don't have a working crystal ball.

 

And there's music. These days it mostly falls into live streaming, on demand streaming, in person concerts and a small (but growing again) amount of collecting physical media.  The streaming experiences aren't great, but they're cheap with large (for popular genres) catalogs.²  I prefer small live music events. Not only do the musicians connect with each other and the audience, but the audience often connects with the musicians and that can be magical. Depending on the event the interactions within the audience can be important..  Taylor Swift concerts are a prime example, but many other musicians have similar or better "magic", albeit at a smaller scale. (I'd offer Yo-Yo Ma as an example).   

 

There's a scale for each person and each event on the importance of various aspects of these different takes on interaction and consumption. Radio and then television changed the values as did the expansion and, in some cases, contraction of live events. Streaming has made a difference, but it has so many rough edges.  I suspect Apple's new product may offer something very different that will once again bring some change, but probably not for some time.  I'm guessing we'll have a better idea around the time Apple Vision Pro 3 or 4 is announced, You'll know it when you can get NBA games through Apple Vision Pro + service for $20 a month:-)

 

But if anyone wants my reaction next Spring, just buy one for me and I'll review it:-)

 

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¹ Nebraska had two legendary players in the 2000 → 2010 era.  Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan.  Here's Sarah's college record  and when her number was retired.  Both of them went on to illustrious indoor careers overseas and Jordan has been a key player on the US Olympic Team.  Sarah eventually switched to beach volleyball has had many honors including world champion and two time Olympian.  One of Sarah's awards was the Honda Cup in 2007  - the best college female athlete in any sport that year.  Shortly before the Tokyo Olympics the organization that presented the award interviewed her as part of their podcast series.

² In 1994 two of us probably hold the first time record for streaming non-trivial, live music at reasonable quality over the Internet.  A Utah Phillips concert from the Folk Project in New Jersey at 96 kbps stereo by bonded ISDN lines to a hub in Princeton where it went to the Net where a few people with AAC players could listen.  So I guess I'm familiar with streaming.  It was good, though (for those of you who get the reference:-)

 

 

non-neutral technologies and a book recommendation

I’m of the opinion that almost every technology that touches, directly or indirectly, society is not neutral. This may not be apparent at first to users at large even though some of the risks are known early on. A case in point is coal in the industrial revolution. Tyndall and even Fourier recognized the climate changing potential of pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere. A larger number of people recognized the health issues from pollution in the air and water. And there was an enormous economic displacement that took a few generations to iron out (pardon the pun). So what was the major problem from the point of view of governments (especially the military branches) and industry? That coal could run out in as little as 50 years.

 

We’re in an age of running fast and breaking things and well as laws. ‘AI’ has emerged as something seen as an existential threat by some (a diversionary tactic largely for castle wall-building imho) and direct harm that is taking place now by others. I put ‘AI’ in scare quotes as it covers so many very different technologies. Now generative pre-trained transformers - LLMs - like ChatGPT are hot. It has a few lovely uses, but there’s a good deal of misapplication, legal issues and cases of direct harm. Machine learning is another branch (although it’s used in the GPTs) with it’s own shiny wins and pitfalls. And there are embedded bits in the devices, programs and services we use all the time.

 

So how do you navigate these and potentially avoid mistakes? Very few people can hope keep up on with the technical side.

 

Juliette Powell (caveat - a close friend of mine) has a new book out on Tuesday co-written with her business partner, Art Kleiner. The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is a distillation of s her work at Columbia. The first part is a non-technical look at the systems and how they might be improved to minimize harm. The next part focuses on what uses - businesses, etc - can do to minimize risks to themselves and others.

 

A number of people from the tech and society and tech world have seen it and given enthusiastic thumbs up signals. People ranging from Ester Dyson, who wrote the forward, to deep legal and social thinker Brett Frischmann. I’ve been involved in building a few systems that have some severe constraints - mostly machine learning in astrophysics and cosmology. I’m clearly not a technologist or social scientist, but I actively follow those who are trying to understand these systems more deeply.

 

I followed her work at Columbia and this is a nice summary and extension. Thumbs up!!

 

If you prefer audio books, Juliette took on the narration task. She has an excellent reading voice.