omenti

writing the new pages - rules and creativity

It is  December twenty third Nineteen Seventy Two at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The Oakland Raiders had just scored a touchdown with a minute and seventeen seconds to go and the Pittsburg Steelers were trailing seven to six.  Nearly a minute goes by and the Steelers find themselves on their own forty yard line facing a fourth and ten with no time outs.  Fans knew the game was over and were starting to move towards the exits for the warmth of their cars.

 

Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw threw the ball to the Raider’s thirty five yard line towards John Fuqua.   Simultaneously the ball arrived with Jack Tatum of the Raiders and the ball was sent tumbling end over end.  Somehow fullback Franco Harris of the Steelers was in position managing to pluck the falling ball a couple of inches before it would have hit the ground.  He managed to run all the way to the goal and scored a touchdown and the Steelers won the game.

 

This, of course, was nearly impossible and not something that could or would be planned.  A very complex game offered a bit of serendipity to Harris and he seized on it making up the new game as he went along.

 

Many games have similar examples - Wayne Gretzky whacking a high flying puck out of the air and making a goal, a thirteen year old Bobby Fischer giving up his queen but managing to leave the board in such a way that the grandmaster across the board was soon checkmated, Misty May digging an impossibly placed water logged volleyball and positioning it perfectly for Karrie Walsh to crush their stunned opponents, Dick Fosbury  marrying a bit of physics and physiology and reinventing the high jump in the process ....  These are the great moments in games and sport that players and fans live for - the point where the something novel happens.  Something that is not in the book.  An act that writes a new page or even chapter in the book.

 

A good game requires a certain amount of richness for the players and its fans to appreciate.  Simple games like checkers are so limited that all possible moves are cataloged, logical and predictable.  They may be fine for a ten year old just learning the game, but even most ten year olds will lose interest once they figure out the underlying structure.  

 

Rich games offer some complexity that goes beyond our ability to fully understand them .  Chess has vastly more possible games than there are particles in the Universe and Go is even more complex.  There is this wonderful point where the great players are exploring the unknown.  The same can be said for the great sports.  While anyone can enjoy rooting for hometown favorites, cheering for the underdog and getting excited by a winning streak; that is separate from this deeper level. Players and experienced fans revel in that much rarer moment where magic seems to happen.

 

A good game is a combination of rules with the potential for some wild creativity to break the rules a bit.  Mostly it proceeds by the rules, but every now and again creativity changes the nature of the game - sometimes fundamentally.

 

This happens in other fields.  It is one of the driving forces that hooks scientists.  You spend a large amount of your life training and then much more doing very careful work that is anything but the "aha!" moments people imagine scientists frequenting.  All of this is part of the rules - it is the best way we have come up with of asking questions of nature.  The interesting moments are usually not preceded with "aha!" , but rather with "that's strange..."  Something is different and that may be something new.  For a little while you are the only person who has ever known this bit of nature.  You get to write a new page.  And, like a good game, the possibilities are not exhausted.  The answer nature gives may lead to new richer questions which can lead to new chapters that are beyond the imagination of fiction.

 

I’ve been lucky and have touched that place a few times. 

 

This richness exists in business too - perhaps what you do.  These new improbable chapters lead to new ways of thinking. 

 

Young children - say four year olds - are wildly creative creatures.  Their minds conjure up impossibilities that make us laugh and even draw us into their worlds.  But once they are seven or so this changes and they start to think about rules.  The creativity fades a bit, but is still there.  

 

It is this balance between creativity and rules that moves us along and that is worth seeking.  My athlete friend saw her sport as play, but the amount of work required to get to a high enough level was incredible. Some of you practice this to varying degrees in your work and even your lives and watching this can be a pure delight (although not as fun as doing it).

 

I’ve always seen science in terms of a game and the act of doing it as play even though it may be incredibly hard work.  Although I do other things besides science now, I find there are complexities that offer some wonderful insights and those moments that make the effort worthwhile far beyond the monetary reward.  

 

Serendipity is often described as making discoveries by accident, but I don’t buy that.  Horace Walpole wrote a letter to Horace Mann in which he talked about a Persian fairy tale from the land of Serendip (the old name for Sri Lanka) .  He said the heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of..." 

 

There are two important points in this notion.  First you need to be in quest of something and that takes a lot of hard work.  Second is sagacity - you need the foresight and perception to make good judgements and take advantage of the improbability your game has provided.  

 

Play is centrally important!  

 

My advisor in grad school offered a bit of profound advice: act your shoe size.  You need to bring out the child in yourself to be creative and break out of the conventional rules that seem to exist.  Just make sure you are playing in a rich enough game.

 

And speaking of the delight of the unexpected take a look at the beauty of a brainbow.  A bit too technical to puzzle out here, but basically you distinguish individual neurons (or small clusters of neurons) from their neighbors by using fluorescent proteins.  A nice advance in the mapping of neurons plus it happens to be visually beautiful.

 

moving to the other side of the table

Steven Levy, in his 1984 book Hackers, spoke about computer nerds - a newly important class that had been charactered as weird outsiders only a decade before. Early in the book he invoked the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club as a cornerstone of the underlying culture.

 

The Model Railroad Club had two distinct group of members. One group liked to run the trains and the other was more taken with the underside of the table - all of the intricate wiring and control circuitry that could be created.

 

Engineering, at its core, is very much an art of compromise.  Bits and pieces are brought together to create a piece of software or hardware that is as good as possible given a set of constraints that often compete with one another.  Navigating these complexities is not straightforward and a very good solution may be crafted from subelements that are far from optimal by themselves.

 

It is fine and good if the engineer understands all, or at least most, of the constraints.  The problem is that even excellent engineers are often too narrow to realize where and how their creations will be used.  Within their speciality they may be very good at connecting the dots, but ultimately they may be ignoring the global picture.  They can't see the forest for the trees.

 

All of us who are reflecting on Steve Jobs are running the risk of eulogizing him, but there is still something to be said.  One of his skills, and of his team, is not only having a good sense of what technologies are available, but understanding why and how people will use their creations.  They have a good sense of human centered design - something that is poorly known to most engineers.

 

An extremely telling glimpse of this came in the now famous 1997 Apple World Wide Developers Conference.  Jobs was trying to assume Apple developers that there was a future in the platform.  He was in the process of focusing Apple and that meant disbanding a large number of popular projects.  Here he answers a critic.  This is a beautifully crafted answer considering he is doing it in real time.  It is also a viewpoint that fundamentally defines Apple.

 

 

Apple is not afraid to kill technologies as the company changes and grows. Some of those technologies may be much better than competing technologies in a local sense, but may not make sense in the final product.  This totally frustrates a lot of engineers who often become fixated on some arguably great technologies.  

 

Engineering is a great discipline.  I’m not a member of the tribe, but I have great respect for the field.  But engineering along is now insufficient in many product areas.  As some classes of products mature they move beyond the point where improvements on the underside of the table lead to a more desirable product.  Real attention must also be given to the other side of the table and the design should reflect the synthesis.  

 

Some companies try to add human centered design by consulting with a few arguably great firms (IDEO comes to mind).  Such consultations may be extremely helpful for many, but where the competition is ruthless and human centered design is important having to engage these companies is probably a sign of internal weakness and lack of focus.  It is necessary to consider design very early on and there needs to be a solid bridge with the engineering side of the company throughout development.

 

I spent many years at a company that had an interesting human computer interaction department.  It wasn't used directly and was mostly written off as a research expense.  Their core expertise was impressive and could have easily coupled with human centered design and engineering, but there was little appetite for that sort of thing.  The managers were focused ether on core engineering or spreadsheets and weren’t connecting the dots widely outside of their own experience.

 

I came to that department after having done a lot of experimental and applied physics as well as some conventional engineering.  At the time it struck me that many of the problems of the next decade were solvable at the engineering level.  The social level seemed much more difficult and became very interesting.  I needed some schooling.  It turned out to be much more interesting than I had imagined.

 

Apple is by no means perfect - perhaps more interesting than Apple's rise under Steve is how few have figured out there are two sides to the table and the piece not associated with traditional engineering is extremely important.  It *really* isn't rocket science.

_____

 

As an aside I think it is practical and useful to examine products and services and deduce something about the design process.  This is something lost on a lot of tech reviewers who are often in love with certain technologies rather than the utility, functionality, design and elegance of a product - factors that may be much more important to the end user than  processor speed, operating system, number of megapixels of a camera, or any one of a number of other metrics that are useful when refining individual dots.

 

of teapots and hurricanes

With hurricane Irene still in the news there has been quite a bit of talk about the energy packed by hurricane winds - some of it good, but much of it off the wall. To sort out some of the issues join me in the kitchen for a cup of tea. The kettle is just starting to boil now.

 

Water in the kettle comes to a boil and a cloud forms just past the end of the kettle’s spout.  Most of us call the cloud “steam”, but that turns out to be inaccurate.  Looking a bit more closely you notice the the column escaping from the spout is transparent with a cloud starting to form an inch or so out.  The whitish cloud forms showing a lot of turbulence and expands into a more diffuse cloud before fading away (the turbulence has a lot of interesting physics, but we'll skip over that for now).

 

What is in the clear area just in front of the spout?

 

When the water is boiling in the kettle, water vapor at one hundred degrees C (assuming we’re at  sea level and standard atmospheric pressure) is readily formed.  Water vapor is composed of individual water molecules rather than droplets and  happens to be transparent.  It is under a bit of pressure and is shot from the spout.  It instantly begins to mix with the cool air in the kitchen, but for a while the column still consists mostly of the transparent one hundred degree C water vapor.  

 

As  water vapor transfers some of its heat energy to the dry air it undergoes a phase transition, changing from a gas to a liquid.  Billions and billions of tiny water drops are formed in the process.  Tiny in this case means a few microns.  Tiny to us, but large enough compared to the wavelengths of visible light that all of the light is scattered equally making a small white cloud - technically a fog. 

 

You can put your hand in the visible fog.  It is warm - nearly boiling near the point where it becomes visible and closer to room temperature as it expands and mixes with air further on out.  These droplets are generally warmer than your skin and heat is transferred through conduction, but  the among of energy is transferred to your hand is small and you won’t be burned.  Rather your skin will get wet as the fog cloud is saturated with the tiny droplets.

 

But stay away from the transparent part of the steam close to the spout!  Even though the temperature different between the water vapor and the fog nearest the spout is modest, you stand the chance of a serious burn.  It turns out it takes a lot of energy to boil water and that energy must be transferred somewhere when the resulting water vapor condenses back to a liquid form.  Steam condensing on your skin can transfer enough energy to burn.

 

The energy absorbed by water when it changes from its liquid to gaseous form and released when it moves the other way is often called the latent heat of vaporization and is about 2260 kilojoules per kilogram of water.  It takes more than five times as much energy to convert a liquid water at one hundred degrees C to water vapor than it takes to raise the temperature of the same amount of liquid water from the melting point to the boiling point.  Water turns out to be a very remarkable substance and this very large latent heat in such a cheap and common substance turned out to be of fundamental importance to the industrial revolution.  But to the takeaway from the tea kettle.

 

Steam is really dangerous and you can’t see it!  What most of us call “steam” really isn’t steam, but is just a warm fog.  Water's latent heat of vaporization is large.

 

So what does this have to do with hurricanes?

 

There are a lot of numbers floating around about how much power is released by a hurricane. In the fashion of the Internet, most of the numbers I’ve encountered seem to be repeated from other sites without much thought so I tried a few back of the envelope calculations.  I confess these were fueled by hot chocolate rather than tea.

 

When we think of these large storms the focus - or at least that of the weather reports  - is on wind speed.  That is often not the most dangerous part as water causes most of the destruction, but let’s make an estimate anyway.  

 

It turns out most of the power dissipated by a hurricane takes place along the thin boundary between the air and the land or water.  I won’t go into a derivation of the formulae, but remember that power is just the rate at which energy is delivered and for a moving fluid it increases as the cube of the velocity.  A good enough approximation for a storm with sustained category 2 winds (say ninety mph) over a fifty kilometer radius is about a trillion watts.   We don’t have to look much past the core of the storm as the power drops dramatically with windspeed.

 

A trillion watts is a large number - about a thousand large nuclear power stations and about the electric power generating capacity of the United States.

 

Energy released from the condensation of water vapor powers the hurricane and that turns out to be a much larger number.  One way to estimate this is to consider a largish hurricane with a roughly seven hundred kilometer radius. In a twenty four hour period the average rainfall over this area is about  two centimeters (of course it is dramatically higher in the cloud walls near the eye, but this is just an average).  This gives about 2.3 x 10¹⁶ cubic centimeters of rain a day.  A bit of arithmetic using the latent heat of vaporization shows about 5.7 x 10¹⁹ joules are released over the course of a day which, when divided by the seconds in a day to give power, is about 6.6 x 10¹⁴ watts ...  six hundred and sixty terawatts!

 

The power released by precipitation completely dwarves the power of the hurricane’s winds.  Both of these numbers are tiny when compared to the solar energy that strikes Earth and ultimately drives them, but it is interesting to look at the power densities - I'll leave that to you for a bit of fun.

 

Apart from safety warnings about steam and hurricane safety I warn you about lifting heavy objects.  I managed to become a casualty of Irene by being foolish lifting flower pots to safety.  During the process I managed to develop a hernia.  Stupid...