omenti

trees falling in the woods and surfer music

If a tree falls in the forrest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

 

It all depends on definitions. 

 

If sound is a mechanical wave that is a periodic compression and rarefaction of pressure that travels through a medium like a solid, liquid, gas or plasma  a sound is indeed made.  An observer is unnecessary.  But most of us restrict sound to a range of frequencies that can be detected (usually by us) and are given meaning in the brain.  We are surrounded by an extremely complex field of these waves of mechanical energy that are interacting with each other and their surroundings.  Our ears turn these pressure waves into electrical impulses that are conducted to our brain which manages to make sense of all of this.  We hear crashing trees, crickets chirping in the evening, the distant bark of a dog and music.  A neuroscientist might use a definition of sound that is information processed by and listened to by our brains.  With this definition we need an observer and a brain.

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about music today.  I’m a terrible musician, but that doesn’t diminish my enjoyment and the question of perception is fascinating.  Perception is central to digital music compression¹, but and you find your self wading into territory that is still being explored.

 

Our silvermitt ferret Telemna loved music.  Some how we gave her a little toy piano and found she loved to make sounds by striking its keys.  A week or so saw her progress from random notes to strings that were more musical.  Soon she was only playing what we called music.  We got her an eight key piano and she quickly figured out how to make what we heard as music on it. I would play an unresolved chord and she would run up and play the "right" note.  An astonishing talent.

 

Telemna was fascinated by any music in the house and loved loud Ethel Merman types who could belt Broadway tunes.  She would hear something and later would play up to about eight notes of what she must have liked.  

 

Stephen Pinker of Harvard believes music is an accident of evolution - it serves no purpose, but it is nice to have around.  For him it probably only exists in humans.  A few years ago I read Daniel Levitin’s  delightful This is Your Brain on Music.  (If you haven’t read it take a break and order a copy. While you're at it pick up a copy of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.)  Levitin suggests it is deeper and more important.  I sent this video of Telmena working out a tune (pardon the messy room and the low quality Flip video):

 

his reply:   “In your face Stephen Pinker!”

 

Unlike sound, music is clearly a construct of the brain.  A stereo left playing in the woods sans audience is not producing music.  Some of us can read sheet music and “hear” it in our heads.  Most of us can listen to memories of music and a few can even create new music - starting in our heads, but then translated to something that produces the bits of acoustic energy that make up sound. 

 

The emotional power of music can be enormous.  Today I was reminded of this directly.  On Friday I will be in a high stress situation and have been reaching out to friends.  A very close friend told me she would spend time meditating with some music - specifically some wonderful surf music by the Duo Tones².

 

I give an enthusiastic recommendation to the group.  Two master guitar players and some amazing performances.  She had no way of knowing that I was familiar with them as they are a bit obscure, but she knew enough about me to know what type of music would be appropriate.  The choice of music is important as it covers a terrifically wide emotional range.  The niches filled by recommenders and DJs are important and the gift of a playlist can be rich and important.

 

Music is a component of how I handle stress.  As an undergrad in Pasadena I rarely made it to the beach, but somehow I relaxed with pieces ranging from surfer music to piano trios.  My technique was to spend the day before an intense event (say a major test) by listening to music and taking long walks or bike rides rather than last minute cramming.  The matching of music to the task was important and surfer music  works well for quantum field theory and particle physics and the Duo Tones offer the purest performances I've encountered.  Why they also are perfect for my current issue is a mystery to me, but she sorted it out and recommended them without any knowledge of my history with the genre.  I took a walk in the dark chill of the evening is a sea of swilling colors from performances nearly a decade ago by these masters and as I walked knowing she was doing the same knowing it would support me I was struck by how moving and beautiful this gift of suggestion and action was.  I suspect music is a common glue for many of us as we communicate beyond the limits of speech with others.

 

There is so many things to yet learn about music.  An anthropologist friend and I were looking into this a decade ago. She observed that all known cultures in the world had percussive music and all but a tiny handful had singing.  We thought it would be fascinating to learn enough to compile a book On Music that would be similar in Sontag’s On Photography. Of course we were far to naive on our part.  Even so there were a series of real epiphanies and I'll probably write about a few as time goes on.³

 

So find a nice chair, sit down and carefully listen to a favorite piece or three of music today.  If you are lucky perhaps you will make some new discoveries as I managed with Wipeout tonight.

________

¹ If you are worried about compressing CD quality music using Apple's AAC codec anything over 256 kilobits per second is overkill and if you are over forty anything over 160 is overkill - trust me on that one ...  The subject of what accurate audio reproduction is happens to be a rich subject and CD quality stereo isn't a great match, but is pretty good for most of us.

² Highly recommended is their acoustic album Surf Music.  Their electric work is also amazing, but you also need their purely acoustic music.

³ A good example is that the enjoyment of music often is decoupled with the quality of reproduction.  I was in a classic restored Mustang near Cleveland with the head recording engineer from Telarc Records and a seriously good musician from the Oberlin Conservatory.  We were talking about where music reproduction might go with sound field reconstruction and dramatically more information than CDs could provide when a favorite Beatles tune came up on the 8 track (gasp! - it was an authentically restored Mustang).  The volume came up and the two of them were soon singing along to the music in pure delight.  There is something transcendent about the music - even with the awful reproduction in that noisy environment.  This taught me home stereos might die if we could only give people good enough music that was always with them.  Portable music players with cheap headphones would be good enough.

There were also many cultural learnings.  Music does not exist in a vacuum and there is a rich and fascinating interplay of music and culture.  

why fashion models are tall, thin and white ...

... and what does culture have to do with "the look"?

 

And can we learn anything from the music business?

 

In the mid 90s a few of us published an internal Bell Labs memo that predicted the demise of the recording industry.  It was written out of frustration with our dealings with major music companies.  They had been visiting the Labs, and later AT&T Research, on the technical direction music might take in a networked world along with trying to sort out partnerships and business deals.  But mostly they were focused on how they could fit the new evolving technologies into their model of discovery, production, distribution and promotion.  They were about to be blindsided and didn't realize it.

 

They believed people would only buy the best audio quality - in fact they had been experiencing an enormous increase in sales for about a decade as people converted their home music libraries to "higher quality" CDs.  As it became clear that it would become easy for anyone to rip a clear text CD  and move it over a network at almost not cost, they resorted to Ptolemaic thinking creating an unnatural complex vision of the future. Their vision of their own future depended on the business equivalent of epicycles.  In their eyes complete control of the ecosystem with robust digital rights management backed by legal threats would protect and dramatically grow a very profitable business model.  Working with them caused a schism in my lab as some came to believe the strict DRM model and others felt we were witnessing an unstoppable cultural change that could easily route around a new set of poorly reasoned barriers.

 

We even built a prototype music business to test some ideas.

 

In the end culture damaged their business allowing the emergence of a new model that broke some of their control. The experience taught me not to bet against culture and pay more attention to the intersection of culture and technology. Technology by itself is fun, but working only with it is too isolating and can damage your ability to predict plausible futures.

 

About the same time I became involved with fashion as a hobby and found myself helping out with an emerging black women's fashion magazine.  When you're spending time in an alternate universe you tend to learn much more than you originally imagined.  I thought I would be honing my art, but in the eighteen month the magazine lasted I found myself asking questions.  How does fashion work?, who decided it?, where does a "look" come from?, what is the difference between the commercial and editorial world?, why are most of the models impossibly thin and white and why do some have such unusual appearances?, and so on..  The business stuck me as an extremely inefficient and hyper-conservative world, but I assumed this may be an artifact of my lack of knowledge - after all - the apparel market dwarfs the entertainment world.

 

As my fashion magazine art editor life ended along came a project for the Army that studied how to make uniforms fit soldiers and, with that, a new set of questions that pointed out more inefficiencies.  

 

In the past year or so I've been re-examining all of this approaching the problem culturally and trying to imagine some alternate paths of how design is created, becomes physical, is marketed and the underlying logistics.  There are several interesting possibilities, but most of them don't square with the current way the apparel business seems to work. A few companies are using somewhat different business models ranging from Apple Store-like experiences to a variety of techniques that provide greater customization in design and fit.  A few are trying listen carefully to culture.

 

For those of you interested in the cultural questions - and I think they are far and away the most important questions to be asking at this point - a new book by Ashley Mears has recently been published. Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model examines why models look the way they do, how and why they and the clients they serve are branded, sexism and racism in fashion, the cultural and economic differences between the commercial and editorial worlds, and the deep cultural component of the markets.  

 

Dr. Mears is a sociologist who worked as a fashion model for awhile.  She spent some of her student years doing field work modeling for two major agencies and conducting extensive interviews with a large number of people in that part of the industry.  The concentration is on on culture, image making and branding - areas where there hasn't been much in the way of solid research.  A recommended read - the style is a bit repetitive, but it is accessible and there is enough material and thinking that anyone interested in culture and fashion should read it.   Her discussion on why body type is important, the embarrassing level of racism (quick - look at the website of your favorite brand and see if the percentage of non-white models matches the makeup of your country)  in the industry, and the cultural economics of fashion are particularly illuminating. 

 

One has to wonder how the business is likely to change.  It is ignoring street fashion and new information paths that are forming along with new businesses that have the potential of routing around the current manufacturing, distribution and marketing structures. 

 

Music and fashion are vastly different, but I have the sense fashion is as inefficient, conservative, hubric and tone deaf to culture as the music industry was.  Odd as both are clearly parts of culture.

 

This is mostly a hobby activity at this point and the question list is expanding at a faster rate than I'm finding answers.  Unlike the music industry, isn't at all clear how quickly changes will come and which parts of the industry will change first, but I expect major innovation as well as some interesting carnage.

 

 

slinky physics

When I was a grad student I taught an undergrad 101 level physics class.  On one of the early tests I stopped the class 10 minutes before the end of the period I climbed on the lecture table and held one end of a slinky as high as I could reach, letting the other end dangle.  I told them this was the last question on the test and they were to predict what would happen and describe the forces.  About a third of them got it right.  As the tests were being collected I climbed on the table again, held up the slinky and released it to a combination of applause and groans.  

The week afterwards I showed them how to calculate the speed of light to reasonable accuracy with a microwave oven and a few bars of chocolate, but that is another story.

Here are two delightful videos with excellent photography.  The first sets up the problem and the second shows the resolution:

 

It is all about critical thinking.

It is sad physics is taught the way it is.  Waiting until the students have a bit of mathematical sophistication and then boring them to death starting out with static forces. But add a bit of motion and suddenly the world gets interesting.  With the pre-meds it was fun to point out that doing something like holding a brick at arm's length and attempting to keep it still may mean that no work is being done on the brick, but if you examine what is going on in your muscles a good deal of work is taking place and it can be extremely fatiguing.  

 

 

may they ever dance across the prairies in the moonlight

Hope is a wonderful thing.  Here is an example:

Thirty years ago today a  Black Footed Ferret,  assumed to be extinct, was found near Meeteetse, Wyoming.  The colony was on the verge of extinction and the few remaining ferrets were captured for a captive breeding program.  Slowly - sometimes eight steps backwards and nine forward - progress towards re-establishing these amazingly playful critters has been made.  

Watching one of them dance across the prairie in its freedom is one of those experiences that electrifies your soul. Perhaps they will be able to survive without our help in my lifetime - that would be sweet.  

Ferrets are part of our family.  Not the Black Footed variety, but domesticated close relations.  One of our was named Meeteetse and she was mentioned on NPR's All Things Considered a few times - including a sweet obituary.  It seems she  had a fascination for certain voices and would come running whenever Richard Harris - an NPR science reporter - was on the air.

Oddly enough the plural collective noun for ferrets is business.  If you want to probe the Oxford English Dictionary gives a bit of illumination where the term business came from and it is entirely appropriate to link it to a group of ferrets.

 

 

 

building things yourself

I'm far from being a craftsman, but I'm a big fan of building things.  As a kid I built my old eight inch Newtonian telescope, a spectrometer, several amateur radio transmitters and receivers, model airplanes and a few rocket motors and rockets along with bookshelves and other items for around the house.  Not elegant stuff, but great learning experiences that have given me an appreciation for those who know what they are doing along with a deeper understanding of how items are designed and made.

Amateur radio and astronomy were very good vehicles for learning some physics and engineering without realizing it.  Not textbook learning, but rather a good practical sense of how to play with light, understand how radio works (what I picked up there turns out to be deeper than a few engineers I've met), as well as what it takes to move a project from dream to completion on an extremely limited budget.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that most physics graduate schools mandate a shop class. I took metal shop and glass blowing.  After demonstrating competence you were given a shop key and the run of the place as long as you didn't break yourself or the tools.  It was a great playground.  For fun I designed a small two cylinder stirling engine and fabricated it out of aluminum, brass and stainless steel.  It only developed about 100 watts at about 5000 rpm, but was a great project.

These days schools seem to have eliminated shop - an enormous loss I think as this is the only place many kids are exposed to building and tools.  On a more positive note the maker movement is alive with people pooling resources and sharing equipment, spaces and expertise in several cities (there must be a dozen shared spaces in Brooklyn).  Ideally more experienced people will be able to mentor beginners and this can grow.  Unless you have access to a good enough shop, this can't be don't remotely and some of the mentoring is best done face to face.  Other programs like Dean Kamen's FIRST are wonderful for some kids, but more are needed.

Every few years I sit on a committee that looks for interesting young people to invite to a very well-known science college.  Even though this is one of the most competitive schools in the country, it is still important for them to actively search for talented and driven students who might not otherwise apply.  The most important criteria is how much amateur science they've done as teenagers. Much of this involves building apparatus (when looking for the diamonds in the rough we don't look for those from elite schools with established corporate mentors - those students already have a large advantage).  There are some amazing teenagers with great fire out there and this is a delightful task.

What triggered this piece was a video link noted by a friend.  I  built water rockets as a kid, but fifty feet was an impressive altitude for my designs.  The video is much more impressive and might spark a teen to think about the physics, engineering and design - perhaps enough to build something even better.

 

These days I no longer have regular access to a good shop and have to look around.  When something nice has to be made I either restrict myself to very small items that I can handle at home.  

If you have a teen or pre-teen who is interested in how things and nature works I strongly recommend they learn how to make things and perhaps they'll get to the point where they understand and can design.  Not all of them will take a science or engineering route.  Some may mix it up with art or music and explore other wonderful areas - I've had the discussion with Jony Ive and a fashion designer and found both were passionate about building and understanding as teens.  

Of course there is no reason not to take this up as an adult - I should think it very important if your business is trying to understand consumers and design and it is never too late deepen your education.

 

 

 

faster than light claims

I've had a lot of email asking for comments on the news of observations of faster than light neutrinos.  (the paper is up on arXiv for those of you who have a bit of physics - it isn't overly technical as physics papers go, probably they realized it would be of great interest to the general public)

Carl Sagan's comment from Cosmos is appropriate:

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

The speed of light is a hard speed limit in physics.  Faster than light observations have been made many times, but each case has been knocked down after the careful analysis that comes from intensive and brutal scientific scrutiny. Such is the nature of science which turns out to be something of a contact sport.  It is likely that this observation has problems too, but should it survive it would be fantastic.  Independent confirmation, of course, is required.  The result must be repeatable.

If this holds, it would point out a fundamental flaw in our understanding of nature and force a dramatic rethinking.  It may not impact how physics works on an everyday level - after all - Newtonian physics works just fine for most of what we observe (although your gps wouldn't work without an understanding general and special relativity) and most of us don't need to worry about quantum mechanics when we measure things in the kitchen.  The impact would be at a deeper level of understanding nature.   So this is a very long shot, but such events are not unknown and it would be thrilling..

There is a larger issue.  The public may interpret this as physics being overturned, while physicists see this as an exciting long shot - the game is afoot, but is likely to take a long time before there is clarity.  

Many news outlets report any number of studies without any background on how robust they are and where they fit in the scheme of understanding nature.  Have they been verified and do the majority of experts in the field agree?  Do they lead to verifiable predictions?  Evolution is very settled science and has driven biology and medicine for decades.  That human activity has been responsible for much of global warming is robust and accepted science - but the media and politicians give space for views of - well - very bad science and non-science.  Any number of medical results are reported and people change behavior based on very unverified science.  The role of certain foods and compounds in diet is often overblown based on single low quality studies with questionable funding sources.  Vaccines and autism ... the list of these things is long.  There are serious issues with the communication of science.

 - nature always has the final word

 

and a joke - should this be called c++? ...  Bjarne would not be pleased.

 

 

the art of timing and explaining change

How is your floppy drive working?

Technological change is unavoidable, but there can be serious timing and strategy issues for those charged with making it happen.  It is easy to see a "better" future, but getting there is anything but trivial.  How do you convince your customers, customers who may be very happy at the moment, to move to something new that may not be perceived as being as good as what they currently have?  How do you show them this is ultimately better?

In the past two days I've had several emails from friends complaining about Netflix.  Only one complained about the separate DVD and download plans announced earlier in the year, but the announcement Sunday night and , perhaps more import, the explanation/apology, has triggered a reaction from people I didn't realize were Netflix customers. It has even triggered cartoons (tip of the hat to John for pointing out the Oatmeal)

Renting DVDs from physical stores annoyed many of us but Netflix came up with a great alternative and many of us signed on.  It wasn't perfect - there was a lag between ordering and receiving, but there weren't any late fees or rushed trips to stores in snowstorms.  It changed our perceptions of what was possible and represented a great value.  Some of us even gave subscriptions as gifts to people who were technologically challenged.

But physical video content delivery is a doomed service.  In theory many of us have good enough broadband service and a reasonable way to view streamed or downloaded content.  In practice there are some issues, but technology and the infrastructure is moving in that direction.  The ability to select any movie you want when you want to watch it and, assuming the rental is fairly priced and of high enough quality should be very attractive.

Currently there are a few problems.  Steaming quality is not universally excellent or even good in North America.  Many people have to resort to a network TV quality stream (or lower) complete with image breakups during an hour and a half movie.  The depth of the streaming library is, in a word, shallow.  Not everyone can watch the stream they have rented on their favorite screen and, some of us - particularly in Canada - have extreme bandwidth caps that limit how much we can stream in a month.

Many find real value in the current Netflix offering, but many others find the change a step down.  Netflix needs to dramatically improve the depth of their library and Internet Service Providers need to offer more robust and unfettered bandwidth (although a discussion of the ISP end will get heated depending on your point of view and may involve additional carriage fees from the ISP in the future).

It isn't clear how this will play out, but it is a good example of  an interesting society and technology challenge:  "how and when do you migrate your existing customers to a new product?"   Microsoft's answer is usually - "don't worry - we'll keep things backwards compatible for a very long time"  Apple regularly kills technologies, but they seem to have a fantastic sense of timing knowing when they can get away with it.  Many other companies have been killed by these transitions.

Netflix pretty much owned the physical DVD rental market with their incredible logistics and deep enough library, but they are not without competition in the streaming world.   They see a clear need to move to a streaming only business, but haven't clearly articulated the value of this change to many of their customers and have not (yet) offered a service that offers at least DVD quality in the average home from a large library.  

Some would say these missteps are damaging their brand, but it is probably too early to tell.  They certainly could have done a better job listening and talking to their subscribers...

Will anyone care in a year?  What quality level is necessary?¹  How big and current does a streaming library have to be in order to be attractive?  How will their competitors respond and what is in this for the ISPs and studios (some of which are competitors)? What are the new price points that will work?

Leading successful change demands a deep knowledge of the technologies and how they are used.  This can injure or even fatally wound some companies while others move on to better things leaving the complaints from their customers a distant memory in the process.  Some companies have built it into the internal process and even their brand.   

You probably don't miss that old floppy drive...

_____

¹ I have worked on the perception of audio and video quality for years and have a bit of clue on this as a separate question.  The answer is not straight-forward.  A short answer is people will tolerate lower resolution to a point and then the image becomes unwatchable.  Video breakups are much more difficult to tolerate with audio and video components behaving differently.  It is also a function of screen size as well as the subject matter and expectations of the video.

I've also been studying how twenty somethings consume audio and video for over a decade, but that only represents one segment - albeit one that is often a leading edge. Pieces that fit into a larger puzzle that has a few wildcards.  Hopefully Netflix has a deep enough understanding is several disciplines to understand the likely scenarios.

the materials problem and an unprintable soup

This past week I've been thinking a lot about materials and fabrication.

 

I spent some time with a small company that is working on its flavor of 3d printing.  They are doing some clever things, but many of these remind me either of specialized pieces of industrial kit or early pre-Apple II personal computers.

 

The promise of 3d printing is great - throw some raw materials in a machine along with a digital pattern, push a button,  and an object emerges eventually - usually as a stack of thin layers of a plastic material.  The printers have been falling in price and for the last ten years there have been forecasts that this will ignite just like desktop publishing in the eighties - just give it a few years.  

 

Printers have dropped in cost and printing objects is much faster, but the process is still slow and expensive compared with normal manufacturing processes.  The best uses to date are prototyping parts that ultimately will see conventional mass production and making models and jewelry for hobbyists.  Its usefulness in prototyping can't be underestimated, but the jump to the mainstream is enormous.

 

A large problem is the limited palate of materials available.  In the real world we have millions of materials available to us and people who make things are able to find the appropriate material for a task.

 

I like to use bicycles as an example as they are conceptually simple, but the engineering is anything but simple.  Materials are a central issue with bikes.  Modern frames can be made of steel, aluminum, titanium, steel, and carbon fiber - and each of these has man variations.   Colleen's handmade bike has an extremely tall frame and the engineer in charge of the project quickly came to the conclusion that an exotic stainless steel was required.  Exotic enough that only two speciality companies on the planet can make anything like it and it has only existed for five years. Paint hides the fancy steel, but conventional materials were not up to the task and its riding qualities would have been severely compromised.  Your car, phone, soft drink can - almost everything you buy has seen some serious thought and hard material choices were made.

 

3d printing removes most material choices - it will work for some classes of objects, but the range is low.  Very useful in niches, but ...

 

Later in the week I  spent a few days doing a bit of amateur anthropology watching and listening to street fashion people at Fashion Week as well as talking to a few designers. Apparel that fits and is individually customized  is possible with techniques techniques that are emerging and are adaptable to mass production.  Critically this can be done with the current palate of materials as well as many that haven't been used.  The industry is likely to see serious change - hence my interest in understanding a bit about fashion and especially its information flow.  I was left with many more questions than I originally had - a very good sign!

 

While I was doing this, I saw a news piece noting progress in 3d food printing.   Th author speculated about  3d food printers that would revolutionize commercial and home cooking.  

 

hmm ..  

 

Cooking strikes me as an artistic interplay of ingredients (materials) and technique that usually involves chemical reactions and phase changes.  Printing food strikes me as an even more difficult problem than the objects that usually come to mind in a 3d printing conversation.  Perhaps it can be used to shape some curious components that are used along with other techniques, but serious progress would have to be made to produce anything someone might say is "delicious..."   It reminds me of the futurist forecasts that suggested by the year 2000 we would eat our food in the form of a few concentrated pills so we could avoid the time and efforts of preparing and consuming a meal.  Sort of a painless version of an IV and about as appetizing.

 

On the way home from the city I found a nice celery root at the market.  Celery root can rock a soup, so it found its way into the evening's main course.  The result was spectacular and fairly simple.  Since we're on the subject of making things, I offer what I did.  Pardon the poorly lit phone photography... And if you see any improvements please add a comment or send an email!

 

There is no technology that can print a soup - hence this is an unprintable soup.

 

 

Mushroom Celeriac Vegetable Soup

 

The first trick was to make a vegetable broth using a pressure cooker for speed.  The reasoning is soy sauce goes well with mushrooms and sherry is good in a broth - nothing like going for broke when you need umami.  

The measurements are very approximate so use what makes sense and you have on hand.

a bit more than a pound of sliced button mushrooms

one sliced medium yellow onion

a bit more than a half cup of sherry (I used a dry sherry)

about six tablespoons of soy sauce -  I used a low salt soy sauce as I was worried about being able to adjust the salt level later, but you should be able to use the regular blend

peel a boatload of garlic.about a dozen cloves .. don't worry about cutting them up

enough water - in my case a bit shy of five cups

These went into a six liter pressure cooker and were at high pressure (15 psi)  for fifteen minutes.  Take the pressure cooker off the heat and let it come to atmospheric pressure by itself.  When it is ready, strain out the solids.  The broth looks and smells incredible at this point.  This is seriously better than any vegetable broth you can buy and is one of the best homemade broths I've tasted.

OK  now on to the soup proper.  Again the measurements are approximate and feel free to substitute. 

sauté in a few tablespoons of olive oil:

one large yellow onion chopped

two finely minced cloves of garlic (given the broth this is not a soup for vampires)

one large carrot chopped

As this browns add sea salt , pepper and

one medium celeriac chopped - you have to cut off the ugly outer skin, but that is no big deal once you get into it.  Just be sure you wash all of the dirt out.

about a half pound of sliced button mushrooms

When the mushrooms are well cooked, add the vegetable stock and adjust salt and pepper and season with thyme - I had fresh thyme.

Bring to a simmer and cover.  Continue the simmer for about a half hour if you can - less time if the aroma gets to you first.

Cut the heat, stir in a quarter  cup of heavy cream and serve.  Depending on how civilized you are you may want to garnish it and serve it with a good crusty bread.

I tried some of it as is and another portion puréed with a blending stick.  Both were excellent.

 

just stick a fork in it...

Quick - what operating system does your car run?  It is likely to have a few dozen microprocessors controlling the engine, transmission, stability control, interior climate, the entertainment system and so on.  There may well be a few operating systems, but you probably don't know or care.

 

Perhaps that question is a bit too difficult.  Try this one.  What operating system does your kindle use?  Do you care?

 

The Kindle is a very specialized device that happens to be a pretty good ebook reading platform that pretty much fails at nearly everything else.  It also happens to be very successful for Amazon - a vending machine for books in your hands with a very convenient mechanism for buying and reading books.  It has been changing what many of us think of when we read a "book".

 

People are reporting that Amazon will release a Kindle tablet soon and a few people claim have even played with advanced pre-production models and reported.  A not too fantastic 7”color screen, 6 GB of memory, a nice interface for access to some Amazon store functions and inexpensive at a rumored $250. 

 

Oh - and it runs Android

 

The last statement, combined with Amazon’s success with the black and white Kindle, and the device's low price has people projecting this is the end of the iPad’s reign. 

 

Perhaps it makes sense to take a deeper look.

 

The caveat is that I haven’t played with a Kindle tablet.  I do have a lot of experience with a black and white Kindle, Amazon, iOS devices and Apple.  

 

First it is reasonable to think about what a tablet is - or perhaps what it isn’t.  Apple and Microsoft started serious work on tablet more than a decade ago.  The Microsoft version was basically a Windows machine with a pen based interface that was mostly frustrating.  In theory it was enormously capable, but it failed badly and only saw use in a few niche markets.  I tried to use a few over the years and found the user experience to be terrible.

 

Apple waited a decade before they felt their tablet was ready. Along the way they saw the opportunity to make a phone, but technology wasn't ready for their version of a tablet. Compared to a PC the iPad lacks flexibility for some, but it has a good user interface as well as a good user experience.  The interface is good enough that there is a strong illusion that you are manipulating physical objects on the screen with your fingers.  Battery life is good, the price is good enough for many people, there is a rich and easy to use application market along with thousands and thousands of inexpensive applications and it is a very nice portable platform for personally viewed video and audio.  It also has a best in class web browser and a nice email client.   Some, but not all, people are finding it has become their primary platform. The combination of its features make it more flexible than a PC for these folks. 

 

An amazing feature of Apple as a company, and one that few engineering companies share, is their omission of  features from a device.  Simplicity is valued and the user experience is their gold standard.

 

Apple also controls a good deal of the hardware and software in their devices.  Getting the user experience right, at least at this point in technology, demands an intimate marriage of hardware and software.  This approach greatly limits variation in hardware and software as some of the software is extremely hardware dependent.  Other competing approaches sometimes abstract the hardware using the idea of a process virtual machine, but this introduces inefficiency which means you need more powerful and power hungry processors to do a task.  If you have to pay attention to battery life and it means the user experience is often lacking.

 

Amazon has taken a relatively early version of Android and “forked it” - they take a copy of it and then build and modify it making it their own.  It is unlikely they would do this again for a later version of Android and none of the newer features of Android will work on it.  The important thing is Amazon probably doesn’t care.  They probably will only have a few versions of their tablet at most and this allows them to tightly control the hardware and software.  The device appears to be fairly limited, so it should be possible to provide a good user experience at a low price.  And who will care what operating system it runs anyway?

 

A major question is what this means for third parties.  In many ways the Amazon Kindle is even more of a walled garden than Apple’s iOS devices.  I’m very curious to see if Amazon allows third party bookstores, music stores and app stores on the Kindle Tablet. Will they provide a robust software development kit for third party developers?  Will the developers have deep access to the device?  Will Amazon change their policy of setting prices and writing descriptions for Android apps for Kindle apps..? The list goes on and on.

 

If they do allow third party apps there may be a major disruption of the Android market - at least the tablet market.  There are currently a large number of Android phones in user's hands, and essentially no tablets. Few people are making  a profit on Android apps.  The variation in Android hardware and software has introduced a fragmentation into the ecosystem.  It is difficult and often expensive to write a piece of non-trivial software and ensure that it runs well on most of the devices. There is software that only runs a few devices.  There is also the issue that Android users have a history of not spending very much money for an application.

 

If Amazon sells a boatload of Kindles - a $250 color book reader that also is good for streaming Amazon video and music is likely to be very popular - and if they support software development, app development shops will have to ask the question if they will support another version of Android - one that is very different from current versions.  Perhaps what they will really be considering if this becomes very successful is do they support this and forget Android tablets.  

 

Let me rephrase that

 

The Kindle tablet effectively runs a different operating system from any of the Android tablets - at least as far as developers are concerned.  The early fork ensured that.  There is a historical connection - it is like the family tree for humans - considerable evolution has taken place.

 

iOS is OSX which is based on BSD Unix and the Mach kernel.  I can make a program that will compile and run on a vanilla BSD machine and it will also compile and run on Macbook, but this will be a very primitive program that would interest almost no one.  

 

What Amazon has done is fascinating.  They aren’t competing with the Android hardware makers trying to create a tablet that will somehow out iPad the iPad.  What they have done is to make something that leverages their own platform.  This is a Kindle that is a vastly improved vending machine of Amazon services and happens to be inexpensive and perhaps good enough that you’ll want one for yourself.  It also has the potential of gathering a lot of information for Amazon, but that remains to be seen.

 

You’ll probably also want an iPad - they are going to be vastly different niches of the space of possible tablets.  The successful ones will include much more beyond hardware and software.  There will be a rich ecosystem attached to them.

 

Hardware manufactures who don’t recognize this and can’t participate in a desirable ecosystem will probably beat each other up in the race to the bottom - just like the Wintel world.

 

Amazon and Apple may well be competing, but it is unlikely at the tablet level.

 

Yeah - I can't play Angry Birds on my Audi's ECS either ...

 

 

 

tp-ing your teacher's house in the 21st century

How would a pack of eighth graders virtually TP their English teacher’s house?

 

About twelve years ago Steve Greenspan and I found ourselves asking questions like that. We were thinking about the social interactions of teenagers and how wireless computation might be used as mobile devices became more powerful.  We observed and talked to a lot of teens.  We needed to build a prototype system to answer some of the more interesting questions.

 

One technique for answering questions like this is to build a “wizard of oz” system.  You somehow convince users they are using a real system when in fact they are just playing with a simulation (there is someone behind the curtain).  We quickly discarded the idea.  We wanted something we could give to teens and watch how they used it in the wild.  We needed to roll up our sleeves and build a prototype or two.

 

Neither of us are engineers by training - Steve is an experimental psychologist -, but that didn’t stop us.  Soon we were puzzling out architectures, designing interfaces, sorting out appropriate technologies, and inventing along the way.   It was a nice engineering research project and we made considerable headway over the course of a few months before we added Wayzen Lin, an excellent programmer just out of Columbia, to the team.  Wayzen could spend all of his time on the project (Steve and I were about a third time) and the pace picked up considerably.  Others (hi Jessica, Dave and Gregg) contributed seriouly interesting ideas that were more than a decade ahead of their time.  Soon we had a throw-away prototype and were fleshing out location mapping inside a building, creating geocaches for time dependent information and messages and seeing what worked and what didn’t.

There was also the little matter of a name ..  thinking about the eighth graders we called it Air Graffiti.

 

Over the next nine months a more serous system emerged with an extendible architecture, a more robust messaging protocol, and a brick like hardware prototype consisting of a Compaq iPaq running Linux connected to a GPS and even a head’s up display worn on glasses.  Another more useable prototype was just a laptop that we carried up and down the corridors.

 

The dog and pony shows were the best I've ever seen.  Internal and external visitors loved it.  Air Graffiti was one of those rare projects that engaged the imagination.  Soon we learned to forget about giving long talks describing the technology and our inventions and would just hand people the laptop or Compaq and walk with them.  They would invariably start dreaming up uses for it inventing on the fly.  I’ve been around many technology prototypes and have never seen such a strong reaction.

 

A few other researchers became involved and the system grew.  Nancy Mintz even created an overlay based on the game engine from Zork.  You could interact with the real world and multiple virtual worlds simultaneously.  We had all been playing, but now part of it had become a real game.

 

We started building a version that focused on how machines might make machine to machine communications without people assuming one of the machines was moving.  Essentially what does it mean to have a mobile device write a blog.

 

Of course there were a few flies in the ointment.  The company we worked for was in near free fall and was downsizing.  The business unit guys could not see a way to make money with the concept and, in truth, it really needed something like an iPhone as a user device.  I projected good enough consumer devices would exist in about five years (it took the iPhone six years from the time that projection was made), but that was far too long.  Well over a dozen patents were written up, but we soon were out of the company as our laboratory was disbanded and the company stopped pursuing the patents and halted work on the project.

 

The reaction was probably right given the circumstances, but it is interesting to note the long lead times associated with many of the technologies we use today. I remember playing with multitouch screens around 1990.  Five years is a short period - ten or fifteen are fairly common.

 

Engineering is about working with constraints and creating something that solves a problem.  We were looking at social behavior and trying to invent a bit of a possible future.  Air Graffiti was a fine vehicle for that, but it was too much of a leap to anything commercial.  

 

It turns out the project has risen from the ashes a few years ago at the same company.  I’m very curious to see how it will fit in with the plethora of location services out there today.  There is still a good deal of room for doing new things with something like Air Graffiti ...  more than half of the areas of interest we identified having been touched by anyone to my knowledge.

 

There are places that are hotbeds for inventing the future.  Xerox PARC and the old Bell Labs, and Watson Labs are classic examples, but they have largely faded.  Academia and the national labs still do it and DARPA cheerleads and funds bits of it for the military. But there is often a leap from the original glimmers of ideas to the companies that end up making them practical.  Companies like Apple are excellent examples of those who deeply understand technology and bring in what is appropriate at nearly the right time.  

 

But for now I’m waiting to see if a few really neat features from our discussions nearly a dozen years ago turn up on my iPhone.  I’ve seen a few of them already and it feels great to see someone do it elegantly.  

One of these days ...

______

notes

It took more than 100 grams of a high quality chocolate to dream up the name Air Graffiti....

We subsequently abandoned looking at teens and computationally mediated social change.  the 18 to 30 year old bracket turns out to be more interesting.

______

 

As an addendum I note our department also was worried about out of band communications.  We may communicate mostly in words when we are face to face, but there are gestures, physical feelings and even odors that can be very important.  As you might imagine some of this gets strange as the proxies may miss the mark, but it is fun stuff. Asking questions is frequently very playful.  It also convinced me that face to face is still very subtle and useful - where it is appropriate happens to spawn another set of fascinating questions.

 

Here is Fabian Memmert showing some of the work he is currently doing:-)