omenti

resolutions and such

As a rule I'm not the sort of person who makes New Year's resolutions, but last year was an exception.  For a variety of reasons I decided to lose some weight and, mirabile dictu, found success.   Now I find myself making another resolution - namely to stay within a "good enough" weight range and to eat a healthier diet while doing so.  A recent post mentioned the weight loss and several people got in touch asking for tips.  Oddly enough my family physician also asked for tips. While I'm not an expert by any means, but here are some comments.

 

I kept track of everything I ate as well as how much I exercised and compared this to a baseline to make sure I was six to eight hundred Calories below my normal daily requirement.  The idea was to lose about five pounds a month - a slow and steady rate that hopefully would be maintainable.  Some estimates were required (restaurant food) and I found the need to weigh what I ate when possible.  Staying motivated was a big issue for me and access to an exercise coach was central to my success.  The basic technique with product recommendations is here.

 

The type of food and even the timing of meals and food types became important.  I found it necessary to track fat, saturated fat (for safety), protein and carbohydrates.  In general I became very hungry by dinner if I didn't have at least 15% of my breakfast and lunch Calories from protein.  As a lacto-vegetarian I need to carefully monitor protein anyway so at least I was paying attention.¹  Very low fat meals caused a similar problem.  What seemed to work best was aiming for about 20% of my Calories from protein and 20% from fat (as little saturated fat as possible).   Much of the fat came from tree nuts like cashews, pecans, walnuts and pistachios. I tried to eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains as they are generally agreed to be important parts of a healthy diet.  

 

I found allowing for some treats was very important.  For me this usually means a bit of chocolate.  I was able to only have four days this past year when I was over target and only two of those were feasts.  Quality food was important.  I found preparing most of my meals myself allowed me to track what was in them and gave me more satisfying meals.  I recommend anything by Mark Bittman as a a starting point for recipes.  He is committed to a quality diet and most of his dishes are very easy to make and delicious. He has about ten books in print, but since I'm a vegetarian I relied on his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.²   

 

As I progressed I was able to hone in on my daily energy requirement before exercise.  It was a bit different from the published values, but was stable and gave me a baseline for planning.  Of course as I lost weight it changed as did the exercise numbers.   While a lot of people have success by just eating less, I found journaling to be very important.  If you use this approach, do yourself a favor and use software.

 

Here is the result for the year - January 2 through today.

 

Now my goal is to stay between the 155 and 165 pounds, which is medically my healthy weight range as I'm 6'1.  It turns out if you have been heavy the body will modify metabolism, hormone signals and even muscle type and percentage. The net effect is roughly a ten percent decrease in requirements.  If a person at, say 160 pounds, requires 2,000 Calories a day to maintain weight, a similar person who had been significantly heavier but is now 160 only needs about 1,800 Calories.   The hunger signals remain at, or even above, the 2,000 Calorie a day level - it becomes easy to overeat.   This is probably the reason why people gain weight after a diet, so the challenge is to eat less, eat better and add exercise.  It appears this is not a short term change - that it may take a decade or more for the body to move back to their earlier normal level.³  We are very well evolved to store energy for lean times.

 

At the suggestion of my doctor I tried to avoid sustained monthly weight drops that exceed three percent.  There is evidence that drops in excess of five percent are dangerous and damage hormone signaling to the point where long term stability at a healthy weight is nearly impossible.

 

A few months ago I began to approach my target range and, hoping for a smooth transition,  I adjusted the slope of the curve to decrease my monthly loss.  I'm where I should be now, but left to myself I would eat enough to gain weight.  It is clear I need long term monitoring.  So I find myself on the eve of another resolution - namely to stay within a weight range.  Some long term studies suggest I may need to do this for a decade.  Keeping it off will be a big challenge.  Sorting out a healthier diet is also important.  

 

So if you are planning a weight loss resolution my suggestions are:

 

° Go slowly!  Plan on losses under three percent of your body weight per month.

 

° Find a safe and balanced diet. Talk to your doctor and ignore pulp magazines andTV infomercials with their quick and easy fixes.  Fad diets are generally bad news. Also remember that if you have problems taking off weight, it is going to be even harder keeping it off, so find something that can work for you as well as a long-term transition diet.

 

° Monitor and journal everything you eat. 

 

° Use a good food scale that reads accurate to the nearest gram.

 

° If you don't cook for yourself, learn.  Hire a personal chef for a few lessons or go to an adult education course.  A culinary student or off-duty chef will sometimes provide a few hours of hands-on training for a very low price.

 

° Find a way to have some treats every now and then and allow for a few days when you eat by the old rules (Thanksgiving for example). 

 

° Find an exercise coach as well as exercises you like - or at least don't actively dislike.

 

° Plan a long term (years) maintenance strategy.

 

° If you have your own tips, post them in the comments section

 

A downside to all of this is that none of my clothing fits anymore.  I can get away with the tshirts, but jeans and slacks are a different matter.   I'm slowly buying new togs, but currently a belt is certainly a safety requirement as I've gone from a 36 to 38 inch waist to 31 to 32 inches.

 

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¹ Anyone with a non-standard diet - vegetarians and vegans for example - should consult with a physician before taking on a challenge like this.

² The $4.99 iPhone version is particularly useful when you are in a store in need of inspiration.  I recommend his blog for his views about food and society.  I'm in general agreement - certainly more than I am with Michael Pollan.

³ Quite a bit of research has been done on metabolic shifts and a bit is mentioned in this recent NY Times Magazine article.  It is clear that keeping weight off is an enormous challenge - greater than taking it off - so the diet industry may be the perfect business with lots of repeat customers.  There has also been interesting work that indicates liposuction may be counterproductive - that the weight comes back and, no matter where it was initially removed, it tends to concentrate in the abdomen - medically the most dangerous location.

 

flies, cathedrals, springs and finding nature

Ok - it is nearly the new year, so let's have a bit of fun.  

 

Find a somewhat elastic cord or a spring.  Something that can stretch out to perhaps 15 feet or so.  You need something that can be stretched fairly tight.  You'll also need a wall to attach it to or, better yet a friend and some cookies.  I'll assume you are going with cookies and a friend.

 

Have a few cookies to get in the right mood and in an open space each grab and end and walk backwards until the spring is fairly taunt.  With a bit of wrist action start shaking your end up and down a bit.  The goal is to have each end mostly fixed in space but shaking just a bit to get the spring moving.  You'll see a lot of chaotic motion.  

 

Good.  Now pump a bit more and you find a rhythm where the middle of the spring is going up and down with the ends still mostly fixed.  Something like this:

The mostly fixed endpoints are nodes and the point with the maximum longitudinal motion, cleverly, the antinode.  Now, and this is where having another person and some sugar fuel comes in handy, pump a bit more.  

 

The spring becomes chaotic agin for awhile, but suddenly a new pattern emerges.  Three nodes and two antinodes.  Like this:

Pushing on keep increasing the frequency of your pumping. Calling out a rhythm can be useful and laughter - a lot of it - is a an ever-present and real danger.  Chaos returns, but if you are good at it another pattern will emerge - four nodes and three antinodes:

If this came easy why not push on? The next pattern is a bit difficult unless you have a nice spring, but you should be able to get to five nodes and four antinodes.  Keep going if you like.  The best I've done is five antinodes and about five minutes of solid hyperventilation.

 

This turns out to be a standing wave. You and your friend are adding energy to the spring, but the constraints of the fixed endpoints conspire to allow only a few stable patterns.  Put a wave in a box, nail the ends down, and it responds to added energy in very discrete levels.  The only acceptable levels are discretely spaced - one antinode, two antinodes, three antinodes and so on ...

 

It turns out this is a nice way to think about atoms.  Think about the simplest case - the hydrogen atom with a proton at the nucleus and one electron.  The positive charge of the nucleus effectively traps the negatively charged electron in a tiny (at least to us) atomic sized box about three tenths of a nanometer across.¹  

 

In the early part of the 20th century it was discovered that matter, at a very tiny scale, behaved like a particle and a wave.  It may seem a bit strange at first, but that's the way nature is and it is one of the most solid scientific results ever. Much of our modern world is built on it.

 

Assume the electron behaves like a wave.  It is trapped in this tiny little box defined by the electric field produced by the nucleus.  Since it is trapped it can't move at the edges of the box and standing waves are the only acceptable wave forms it can make.  They turn out to be more complex than the spring example, but they are just standing ways.  If you add energy to the system the atom can only accept certain amounts of energy.  The energy is "quantized".    It can only give off discrete amounts of energy too.  Getting energy in and out is usually done with particles of light.  So light of a certain fixed energy can be absorbed by the hydrogen atom and light of certain fixed energies can be emitted.  This turns out to be really useful!  

 

If you have made it this far you have learned a fundamental bit of quantum mechanics with no math or equations.

 

But the title mentions flies and cathedrals...  

 

One of the early experimenters, Ernest Rutherford, discovered that atoms are mostly nothing inside - that the nucleus is tiny and electrons are tiny.  He poetically said the nucleus is like a fly in a cathedral.²  It turns out the size of the standing wave - that three tens of a nanometer box - is about a quarter of a million times larger than the nucleus of the atom.  The atom isn't truly empty as the electron that is spread throughout it with a low density at any given point.  But it is still a pretty empty space.

 

There are so many interesting directions to go from here.  I'll leave you with the thought that you never really touch anything.  The electric fields from the electron "clouds" of your atoms repel the electric fields of whatever you are "touching".  They get very strong as the distance gets close, but never really touch.  So if you fall out of a plane you never really hit the ground.  But the close approach deforms both you and the ground.

 

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¹ A rough number.  A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.  It is really difficult to appreciate the scale of this, but a thin blonde human hair is about fifty microns in diameter and somewhat difficult for us to see clearly.  This is fifty thousand nanometers in diameter.  If you were two nanometers tall (probably a bit more than a billionth of your height) the hydrogen atom would be about the size of a volleyball to you and the thin hair would be nearly thirty one miles in diameter.

The model of an atom that most of us were taught in K12 of electrons orbiting a nucleus is horribly wrong.  It is amazing it is still taught nearly 100 years after it was solidly disproven - less correct than the notion of a flat Earth (which has some semblance to reality at a certain scale ... there is no scale where the solar system model of the atom works)

² This may be a misquote.  Napier writes:

According to Faust in Copenhagen by Gino Segre (p.25) and The Fly in the Cathedral by Brian Cathcart (p.6) Rutherford did NOT himself call it a "fly in the cathedral" but "a gnat in the Albert Hall"

That turns out to be a more accurate description of the ratio of sizes

 

 

just past the solstice and nearing the sun

Happy Holidays to all!

 

I hope you have a great set of holidays with friends, family and nature and find some peaceful time for reflection and deep thought.

 

Thank you for all of the comments and suggestions for this blog.  A few very interesting conversations have taken place and some are still developing.   Any ideas, thoughts and criticisms are most welcome.

 

I've been spending a lot of time outside during the past few days.  One of the pleasures of working out of the home is that I take an hour walk every day at around noon.  After awhile the subtle changes of nature begin to dominate your thoughts and you escape the smaller issues of your own life and work.  These normally roll out over several days, but there are dramatic periods when a few hours makes an incredible different.  

 

We're nearing the quietest stage in the local woods.  The maple trees are about halfway through the period where they stopped converting sunlight into sugar and where their sap will begin to flow in mid February.  Last year the Winter was severe and the flow was delayed by nearly two weeks.  

 

The crows have been very active.  This happens around now and I don't know why, but it is welcome.  I need to track an ornithologist down one of these days, but there are so many other questions that need to be answered.

 

The divisions between night and are are particularly wonderful and focus your attention on the sky.  Sundogs, pillars and any number of wonderful things concentrate in the periods an hour or so from sunrise and sunset.

 

 

The Winter sky at night is a wonderful place and tomorrow you can watch a pretty conjunction of the Moon and Venus starting just before sunset and becoming dramatic as the sky darkens.  The other planet visible is Jupiter which is currently in Pisces.  A few days ago we had the "shortest" day - the least amount of daylight.  For most of us the earliest sunset came some days earlier and the latest sunrise is still to come  (in Basking Ridge New Jersey the earliest sunset  was on December  8 and the latest sunrise will fall on January 4) - our planet's tilt and elliptical orbit conspire to create the shift.

 

While all of this is happening, we are rushing towards our closest encounter with the Sun on January 5 at about 01 hours Universal Time (January 4th for folks in North America).  We'll get to about 147.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is elliptical will find us furthest away on July 5 at 04 hours UT (July 4 for most of us) at 152.1 million kilometers.  Our orbit is nearly circular (the eccentricity is currently about 0.0167) but the  difference is significant enough to easily be measured if you are looking for a fun project.

 

Our elliptical orbit means the lengths of the seasons are not equal as our orbital velocity changes depending on where we are - we're moving fastest as we're nearest the Sun.¹  As a result Winter is shorter than Summer in the Northern Hemisphere by about 4.7 days.

 

With a bit of high school physics you can easily work out how fast we're going at our closest and furthest approaches to the Sun - 30,300 meters/sec in early January and we slow down to a mere 29,300 in early July.² 

 

There is great beauty in nature - a poetry that is much deeper than anything we can create.  While I love the arts, looking at nature and trying to understand a bit of it is so much more satisfying.  Feynman says it beautifully here:

 

 

Get out and walk with nature a bit over the holidays.  I guarantee it will beat any television you can find.

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Last night I made a simple sour cherry tart with some excellent canned pie cherries from Oregon Fruit Products.  The tart was the simple shortbread recipe presented here recently:

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

130 grams all purpose flour

35 grams powdered sugar

 a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

For the filling I just made a simple tart cherry filling.  There are many variations, but this was quick:

 

Tart Cherry Filling

1 can part pie cherries - approximately 15 ounces - drain cherries and reserve the juice

100 grams granulated white sugar

15 grams cornstarch

1/2 tsp almond extract

 

Procedure

° Cook cherry juice, sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan over medium heat stirring constantly until the mixture thickens - about ten minutes

° Remove from heat, add cherries and almond extract.  Cool to room temperature or below

 

When the tart and cherries are at room temperature sprinkle about 30 grams of finely crushed almonds on the tart and pour in the cherry mixture.

 

This is fantastic with ice cream.  I made a rich homemade vanilla with tahitian vanilla beans.  I've had some incredible cherry pies with chocolate ice cream too - so go ahead Nancy.

 

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¹ Kepler worked this out - an amazing piece of thinking

² You can easily derive the relation v = sqrt[G*M*(2/r - 1/a)] . Here G is the gravitational constant, M is the Sun's mass, r is the Earth's distance from the Sun and a is our semi-major axis - about 1.496*10¹¹meters. At perihelion our distance is a(1-e) and at aphelion it is a(1+e). 

new years resolutions from woody guthrie

1942

Woody Guthrie's 1943 "New Years Rulin's." Found in one of his journals dated January 31st, 1942. Woody Guthrie Archives Notebook Series 1, Item 13, Pages 36-37.

two triplets of choice and truly massive change

Recently I entered a conversation with an organization that is working on a better understanding of how people might respond to global warming and what are the elements that can impact our choices for change.

 

The subject is enormously complex and multi-disciplinary.  In some parts of the world, notably the US, it has also become politically charged.  But human caused global warming clearly exists and there will be increasing impacts.  That makes it a fantastic problem - perhaps the most important change problem over the next few generations.

 

I like to think about our response to it in terms of admixtures of choices that come in triplets.  The first triplet is how we deal with it.  The choices are mitigation, adaptation and suffering.  Most analyses show mitigation - reducing the impact of the change by working on decreasing its scale before it becomes severe - to be far and away the most cost effective choice.  The costs are still viewed as high relative to other societal costs and most people don’t see the threat as immediate and severe enough to warrant serious efforts.  

 

But even if we could do something dramatic there is something of a flywheel effect from greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  We will see an increase in average temperature even if we were to cut our emissions to nearly zero and we’ll have to deal with the consequences as nature adapts - after all, many of us and our children will be around for the ride.  We can control the amount of adaptation either through mitigation or by simply ignoring mitigation and adaptation.  

 

Doing nothing will result in increased human suffering.  The uneven distribution of wealth and resources to people will create pockets of losers and these may be enormous.  A few years ago I spent some time in a group thinking about some of these issues and was left deeply troubled - the sort of thing that wakes you up in the middle of the night with awful nightmares.  Some of these it is probably taking place now, although currently one can only look at these events statistically.  

 

The average world temperature is increasing and that is beginning to have a measurable impact.  Most of us think in terms of sea level and shrinking ice caps, but changing climates are probably a larger issue.  The Earth has seen higher and lower temperatures, but these changes generally have occurred over time scales that have allowed evolution to adapt.  The current changes we are seeing are taking place at a time scale that is much faster than the capacity of evolution to respond.¹

 

Most of our energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels - essentially carbon that has been stored over millions of years.  Traditionally there is a balance in the carbon cycle with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere being more or less regulated at about 275 parts per million (ppm) in recent times.  At least until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Now we could burn coal, petroleum, and natural gas.  All of these were formed by storing carbon that was fixed in photosynthesis over millions of years in a very short amount of time.  Nature is incapable of regulating the increase at the pre-Industrial Revolution level and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to creep up to a bit more than 390 ppm  this year.  It should pass 400 ppm by 2015 at the current rate of increase and much larger numbers seem almost certain.  

 

If we were getting most of our energy - say more than 90% -  from non-carbon sources there would be no global warming issue.  We don't, but we have the capacity for change and that brings me to the second triplet. 

 

You can lower the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere by using some admixture of conservation, efficiency, and new types of production.

 

Conservation should be a no-brainer, but convincing people to change their usage patterns can be difficult.  Conservation seems to require motivation, a perceived ability to do something and a trigger that prompts action.  Putting this together rarely happens automatically.

 

At a personal level we were able to decrease the amount of gasoline burned in our car from about 650 gallons per year ten years ago to around 200 gallons per year now.  A bit over 20% of that was from improved efficiency in my driving technique and tweaks to the car itself, but most of the reduction came from simple conservation - careful trip planning and the elimination of unnecessary driving.  The steps are simple, but cars are so convenient that it is difficult getting people to make the efficiency or conservation choice.  For many of us efficiency seems to only be considered when a car is traded. 

 

President Carter famously ran into political problems when he suggested people conserve energy at home and even more when a 55 mph speed limit was introduced (although one can argue that is an efficiency step).  Since then politicians seem to work under the assumption that the American voter is lazy and incapable of serious sacrifice even if sacrifice now may lead to a better future.   They seem to believe we are only capable of responding to the immediate.

 

Efficiency is interesting as more efficient devices can those that use more energy and the user is not left with the conscious decision that conservation requires.  An unsung hero of the efficiency game is Art Rosenfeld of LBL - I strongly recommend a talk he gave a few years ago:

 

 

You do have to be a bit careful implementing efficiency.  A car that is five percent more efficient than what you have may be appealing and it probably makes sense to move to more efficient cars when you trade, but moving just based on efficiency neglects the energy required to build the car in the first place - a figure that is often the equivalent of a year’s worth of driving.  On that basis there may be no energy payback from a small efficiency improvement.  On the other hand there may be enormous opportunities that you are overlooking.

 

Some people suggest that improve efficiency leads to greater energy use and imply that it doesn’t make sense to make our energy using devices more efficient.  The Jervons Paradox is usually invoked in their arguments. In 1865 William Jervons published The Coal Question which argued that producing goods with less energy would not result in an energy savings, but rather would encourage so many new goods that ultimately more energy would be used.   The paradox is also called rebound and, where increased consumption trumps the savings from efficiency, backfire.

 

In the December 20, 2010 edition of The New Yorker David Owen published a popular piece on this under the title “The Efficiency Dilemma”.  Unfortunately his analysis doesn’t hold up under careful examination.  It is the result of careful cherry picking that distorts a larger view of the issues involved.² The net result of smokescreens like this is there is a lot of pushback on the move to increase efficiency even though dramatic improvements have been made since the OPEC embargoes and we are seeing the potential for even more.  There can be an enormous bang for the buck here - but, of course - the payback is not immediate and many organizations are not equipped to perform the analysis required to uncover choices that will help them do more with less.

 

New sources of energy production are sexy for the engineer as well as the investor and ultimately we have to move much of our energy production to low or no carbon sources.³  As new power plants are required it makes sense to move away from high carbon sources, but costs are the driving issue.  Hydrocarbons and the machines that convert their stored energy into more useful forms are very inexpensive - particularly as their economics rarely involve the costs of their carbon emissions.  Working at this level, for small and large scale operations,  often involves government policy as these plants are expensed over very long periods of time.  

 

Most people tend to concentrate on new sources of energy as that appears to require the least change on their part.  You can simply use your stuff and don’t need to change your lifestyle assuming the price changes are sufficiently small.  It is a nice way to avoid thinking about the more complex problem.

 

In summary conservation can be immediate and very inexpensive.  Efficiency improvements take more time and generally have a cost associated with them, but often (not always!) have a greater impact than conservation for the average user.  Moving to new sources of energy is sexy and tends to be expensive (at least over the short term). It offers the least bang for the buck, but it is centrally important over the long term.  All of these can be very inexpensive if applied to mitigation, but people usually neglect the proper analysis of including externalities in their calculations.

 

Going back to the first triplet, mitigation is probably the best and least expensive approach, but the train has left the station and we will be forced to adapt to some change that is inevitable.  How much is an open question and we will have some control over that.  Suffering will also occur - mitigation and adaptation can minimize that, but all of this is expensive, political and off the radar of most of us.

 

The holidays are traditionally a time of hope - after all, the Winter Solstice marks a point where we can now look forward to ever increasing amounts of light.  I don’t mean for this to be a bleak and troubling piece, but rather note we are still at a point where we have choices and much can be done.  The difference one person can make is not necessarily insignificant - look at what Art managed to do - but even if you only make changes in your own life and that of your family, that is progress.  And maybe you will be rewarded with a different perspective for looking at the world.

 

If you try something that you hope will impact others recognize that it may well fail and learn from it.  I spent about a year working with a friend on her plan to promote gardening and biking among children in Southern California.  The ride was bumpy and the program ultimately failed, but it wasn't terribly expensive and we learned a lot from the experience.  Hopefully enough to make the next effort - or the efforts of others - more positive.  And even a failed project is much more rewarding than watching television. 

 

I’m very excited to be working with this small group as they are very serious about trying to move the needle on changing the attitude of people.  This is something that is required if we are going to minimize suffering of our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and beyond.⁴

 

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¹ At least one of the six great extinctions - the Permian-Triassic event - may have taken place in under 1000 years, so there may be a precedent for something as swift as what we are now witnessing. It is important to note that the real issue is not the absolute temperature change, but rather the rate of change - dT/dt, where T is temperature.  As humans 30 to 100 years seems like a long time and is something we generally don’t plan for, but anything under a few thousand years is a twinkling for natural responses.  We have a huge mismatch.

² It is way beyond the scope of a small posting to get deeply into this, but Owen argues that rebound effects are often in the 10 to 30 percent range and can exceed 100%.  In reality they are usually in the small single digits where they exist at all.  Most devices have relatively modest energy costs that few people respond to.  Responding saved energy costs does lead to indirect energy use, but from 1986 to 2006 only about six to eight percent. Furthermore no saved money can buy more than 100% of the energy in that was originally saved (at least not unless you change to a different type of energy with dramatically different costs).  Most people don’t understand the energy costs of their home furnace or air conditioner and don’t use it more because it is cheaper to operate.  Future energy savings are diluted by capital costs and generally heavily discounted.  Owen improperly neglects other contributing factors to economic growth.  His article is intellectually very fuzzy and lacks rigor and proper logic.

³ Production is an inappropriate term that all of us use.  We don’t “produce” energy, but rather convert it from one from to another as physics tells us energy can’t be created or destroyed and is always conserved.  When we burn coal we are turning energy stored in chemical bonds within the coal into thermal energy and this thermal energy generally produces steam that drives a turbine converting thermal energy into mechanical energy.  The turbine spins a generator converting mechanical energy into electrical energy which is a form we can easily distribute and use.  We think of coal as a fundamental energy source as we mine it, but it is really stored solar energy that was captured by plants usually millions of years ago.

⁴ Sukie and I don’t have children.  Many of the scientists I know who study the impact of global warming - particularly the effects on the ecosystem - seem to have lower fertility rates.  I can understand why as there is a great amount of pessimism that suffering can be avoided.  I’m cautiously optimistic, but doubt we’ll do anything close to optimal.  I may not have children, but I do have younger friends I love and what they may have to deal with deeply disturbs me.

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The drawing is from the extremely skilled pen of Gary Zamchick who created it for Colleen Smith.  Gary is a great guy for involving art in the process of innovation.  I've worked with him and give him two thumbs up:-)

 

dealing with incomplete models - understanding nutritional energy balances

What happens when you are trying to modify your behavior with information that comes from measurements that can be difficult that feed into models that are fundamentally inaccurate even though the you may not suspect the models are flawed?  How do you understand this well enough to get a useful signal in a very noisy environment?

 

For many of us the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year involves way too much food. I’m trying to maintain my weight after a serious ten month diet and this means measuring and tracking what I eat as well as my exercise. 

 

It should be simple - after all, energy is always conserved.  Food is just a way to store energy.  If you eat as much as you require to stay alive, your weight should be stable.  Eat a bit less and/or do a bit more physical work and you should lose weight. Take in more than you need and your body tries to hold onto the extra energy by turning it into a energy stored in you - body fat.

 

But to do this simple calculation requires you have to know how much of the energy in food is accessible to your body, how much energy your body uses to run itself and how much energy it takes for you to do any kind of physical work.  All of these are difficult to know to a good degree of precision.  We have published guidelines, but few of us consider the error bars on the underlying measurements and calculations and some of the pieces are still being discovered by basic research.   

 

We tend to assume food nutrition labels are accurate, but it turns out they are based on a technique that is about one hundred years old.  That system, the Atwater System, has known flaws, but nothing has been found to be easy to use and more accurate.

 

Wilber Olin Atwater was a professor at Wesleyan University and a central figure in understanding modern nutrition.  By the mid 1800s people had worked out that proteins, fats and carbohydrates were major components in human nutrition and estimates were made of how much energy was available from each through metabolism.  

 

Atwater spurred the creation of an American nutrition research enterprise - one of the first examples of government funded big science outside of the military - and calculated how much metabolisable energy was available in proteins, fats and carbohydrates accounting for the efficiencies of digestion.  It became possible to measure the chemical energy in food  components and predict how much we could use.  You could simply measure the amount of protein, fat and carbohydrates in a food and determine how much energy the human body would extract.¹

 

The current standard used in the US and many other countries takes into account a few other nutrition sources and food labels are based on the following conversions:

 

	kJ/g	kcal/g
fats	37	9
proteins	17	4
carbohydrates	17	4
fiber	8	2
ethanol (alcohol)	29	7
organic acids	13	3
polyols	10	2.4

 

It turns out this is only a general approximation and to first order you can get away with just looking at the fats, proteins, carbohydrates and alcohol figures if you are creating your own recipes.

 

But your efficiency at absorbing food varies.  New work that looks at how the food was prepared suggests that food that is mechanically made into smaller bits is more efficiency absorbed and food that is cooked is absorbed even more metabolised.²  The largest effect is cooking.  Muscle proteins, sugars in starches and other energy laden molecules are physically opened up allowing digestive enzymes to attack their amino acid chains more effectively.  Food that is cooked gets more of its energy into your system than food that isn’t.  The science is still developing, but some researchers speculate cooked foods provide at least 10% more energy than raw foods and the number may be higher than 25% - I wouldn't be surprised given some of the preliminary results. 

 

The effect of cooking is not accounted for by nutrition labels.  So if you want to lose a bit of weight you might try increasing the raw food component of your diet.

 

The energy balance for your body has four general components: energy intake from eating, energy expended keeping your body running, energy spend doing physical work, and energy spent in thermogenesis (shivering for example).  Physical work comprises about  20% of the average person's energy budget, thermogenesis is usually under 10%.  Most of the energy we use goes into keeping our bodies functioning - our  Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).³

 

Once you have an idea what your BMR is you can add up all of the physical activity during a day and have a fair idea what your intake should be - assuming you have a good idea of how much energy your body is getting from food.  This gets tough, so most people who worry about this talk in terms of basic activity levels that range from 1.2 for sedentary office workers to around 2.0 for people with physically active lives.⁴

 

My BMR approximation is 1,583 kcal a day by the basic calculation.  Colleen’s is 1,724, but her real figure is higher as she is very athletic.⁵

 

If you exercise regularly you can calculate the energy spent during exercise and add that to your BMR for a rough approximation - a lower limit as you move around doing other things during the day and there is some thermogenesis.  Unfortunately energy spent during exercise is only an approximation as our efficiencies vary person to person for various exercises.  That said you can probably get 80 to 90% accuracy using tools like this one.⁶

 

If you have made it this far the act of journaling your calories and exercise appear to be a futile effort as there is a huge amount of underlying complexity.  But you can get around that.

 

Keep track of your weight too.  If you plot the results you can get an idea of what your measurements for activity and eating mean assuming the types of food you eat and the activities you do don’t vary dramatically.  The numbers may not match what you would measure in a lab, but getting the bottom up numbers to match the top down results is extremely difficult even in that setting.

 

Absolute numbers are very difficult to measure in this case, but it is possible to come by a stable relative measure, and that is all most of us need for this purpose.

 

My goal was to lose about 5 pounds a month while dieting.  Using the rough figure that a pound of fat (what I wanted to lose) is about 3,500 Calories, I aimed at an average daily deficit of about 625 Calories through a combination of exercise and eating less food.  It worked and I was able to maintain a fairly constant rate until near the end when I wanted to gracefully transition to an exercise/eating routine that might be sustainable.⁷

 

Even though we have flawed models for how much energy we absorb from our food and how efficient our bodies are, the models are sufficient - with a bit of analysis - to effectively use as a tool for losing and maintaing weight.  It is easy to imagine local refinements - I’ve created a tool that helped me understand my own information flow and ultimately how that translates into weight - and it is likely that activity monitors like accelerometers can help, but in the end simple willpower rules.  I suspect many monitoring and computational aids will ultimately fail unless they can impact our basic urges.  To control something you need to combine motivation, the ability to make a change and some triggering event.  I’ve worked that out for myself.  Building a general tool seems difficult.

 

Perhaps what we really need to do is find the levels of eating and activity that evolution assumes.  Up until the Industrial Age people appear to have been self regulating in weight.  Now foods tend to be more plentiful, have greater energy densities and perhaps are even more palatable.  At the same time many of us are less active.  The balance is thrown and many of us gain weight easily.  Finding the right balance is tricky as evolution did not design us for a long and healthy life - basically we get to the point where we have been able to reproduce and then things begin to fall apart.  So the full nutrition offered by earlier diets may be very suspect even if the energy balance is good.  There is probably quite a bit to learn here.  Some of us (not me) are fortunate enough to have bodies that are great at self regulation.  Exactly how that happens is a very interesting question.

 

_________________

 

So now we shift gears and present a few deadly recipes:-)

 

No one seems to be complaining about the recipes and three people have asked for more, so here are two rich desserts - a banana cream pie and a lemon tart.  Both use the same shortbread crust.    

 

I think of baking and cooking as two very different arts and suspect few really outstanding cooks are also outstanding bakers.  Cooking demands knowing the state of the food and how flavors link up - there is a lot of improvisation that occurs as you cook so measurements are just a guide.  Baking, at least for me, demands careful measurements for ingredients and cooking, so I use weights rather than volumes.  I have a great $25 scale that measures accurately to the gram and recommend something like this to anyone who bakes.  I’ll leave the conversions to you if you bake using volumes.  

 

Both of these are very easy, delicious and something you should only eat sparingly.  They were part of Sukie’s birthday present a few days ago.

 

The shortbread pastry crust is really simple and no rolling is required.  Just put a few ingredients into a food processor, pulse a few times, and press into a tart pan.  I do recommend very fresh ingredients for baking.  Sugar or flour that has been opened and sitting around for a month or so pick up a funny taste.

 

Shortbread Pastry Crust

 

130 grams all purpose flour

35 grams powdered sugar

 a pinch of fine sea salt (too small for my scale - I’m guessing about 1/8tsp).  Note that iodized salt picks up a strange flavor when baking, so I use a fine grain un-iodized sea salt

 1 stick of cold unsalted butter - about 115 grams

 

 procedure

 

° heat oven to 425°F with the rack in a center position

° butter or lightly spray with a nonstick neutral vegetable oil cooking spray an 8” tart pan with a removable bottom. 9” would probably work too.

° cut the butter into chunks and put all of the ingredients in a food processor 

° pulse the food processor until the pastry starts to form into pea sized clumps - about 30 seconds for me.  don’t let it grow into larger pieces if you can.

° press the dough into the pan and pat as evenly as you can

° pierce the bottom of the crust with a fork to prevent it from puffing up too much during baking.

° Cover the pastry with plastic wrap and put it in the freezer for 15 minutes - this is a really neat trick that prevents the crust from shrinking when it bakes.

° Bake until the crust is golden brown - about 15 minutes for me.  Cool on a wire rack.  You can cover the crust and store it for a day in the refrigerator f you want. 

 

Lemon Tart

3 large eggs at room temperature

150 grams granulated white sugar

80 grams fresh lemon juice (about 3 lemons)

a half stick of butter - about 56 grams - at room temperature - cut into chunks

4 grams of lemon zest (be careful to only get the yellow part!)  I prefer a microplane for doing this

shortbread pastry

30 grams finely chopped almonds

blueberries and maple syrup - thawed frozen blueberries are fine

 

procedure

° In a double boiler over simmering water whisk the eggs, sugar and lemon juice together

° Cook, whisking or stirring with a spatula, constantly until the mixture becomes pale and thick - about 160°F.  This takes about 10 minutes

° Remove from the heat and strain to remove lumps.  

° Whisk the butter into the mixture until melted and add the lemon zest.

° Cover with a plastic sheet pressed to the surface of the lemon curd to prevent a skin from forming and let it cool to room temperature before filling the crust.

° Assemble covering the inside of the crust with finely chopped almond bits and then pour in the lemon curd.  Even out with the back of a spoon or a pastry knife.

° Separate the pie from the pan - just carefully push from the bottom

° Add maple syrup to the blueberries and spoon on to individual pies of the pie when you serve.  Sweeten as much or as little as you like.  

 

 

Banana Creme Pie

 

300 grams whole milk

half a  vanilla bean (you could use a good vanilla extract - maybe about a half tablespoon)

 3 large egg yolks at room temperature

 50 grams granulated white sugar

 20 grams all purpose flour

 20 grams corn starch

 3 large ripe bananas

 40 grams shredded coconut

 whipped cream (recipe at the bottom)

 

procedure

 

° Score the vanilla bean and add to milk in a saucepan and start heating at a medium heat

 ° While this is cooking mix the sugar and egg yolks together. then sift the cornstarch and flour into the egg/sugar mixture to make a thick paste.  Don’t let this sit around as it gets very lumpy if you do.  

 °Stir the warming milk.  Take it off the heat when it begins to foam and remove the vanilla bean.  Slowly add the hot milk to the paste whisking constantly.  

 ° Scrape out the seeds from the bean and add to the mixture.  If you use vanilla extract instead, now is the time to add it.

 °Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and heat over medium heat until it begins to boil and thicken.  

 ° Pour the mixture into a clean bowl and press plastic wrap to the top surface to prevent a skin from forming.  Let it cool to room temperature.

 ° Slice the bananas and fold two in with the cooked mixture along with the shredded coconut.  Pour into the pasty.

 ° Top with whipped cream and carefully release the pie from the pan side ring

 

 

Whipped Cream

 

120 grams heavy cream chilled

 15 grams powdered sugar

 1/2 tsp almond extract

 

procedure

 

° Chill a mixing bowl and beater from an electric mixer in the freezer for about 5 minutes.  You can also get good results with a whisk and copper mixing bowl, but that takes some elbow grease.

 ° Pour the cream, sugar and almond extract into the bowl and beat until peaks form.  

 

 

____________

¹ Atwater showed about 4 nutritional Calories (kcal) were available from carbohydrates, 4 from proteins and 9 from fat. 

² There has been a lot of speculation here, but now serious science is being done that supports the notion that cooking makes more energy available.  A paper by Rachel Carmody and Richard Wrangham in the Journal of Human Evolution is a good example.  Another study found that cooking gelatinizes starch meaning amylopectin and amylose are released and exposed to enzymes making more energy available.  Cooked starches have more available Calories than those that are raw.

 People have known for a long time that people who eat mostly raw food tend to be very thin compared with the general population, but serious studies on those populations are recent and the results spurred a deeper look into the more general question of food processing and available energy.  Women on a purely raw food diet regularly lack the energy to have a functioning menstrual cycle even though they are eating what should be a high quality diet.  The available Calories just aren’t there - we have based our food recommendations on cooked food and our bodies seem to have a body regulation mechanism that is based on cooked food - this may even be a short term evolutionary response, but that is currently speculation waiting on the verdict of science.

³ BMR is difficult to measure directly as it requires the measurement be made while the person is at rest for a long period.  A more common technique is to measure a person’s resting metabolic rate (RMR).  They turn out to be closely related and similar under most conditions.

A frequently used approximation is from Mifflin et. al. (1990):

BMR = 10*weight + 6.25*height -5*age +s  

where weight is in kilograms, height is in centimeters, age is in years and s is +5 for males and -161 for females.  

If you know your lean body mass in kilograms the Katch-McArdle approximation is probably more accurate.

BMR= 370 + (21.6 * lean body mass)

BMR in both of these approximations is in kcal (nutritional Calories)

⁴ One approximation is the Harris Benedict formula:  

sedentary office workers use BMR *1.2 Calories

light exercise 1-3 days a week use BMR * 1.375 Calories

moderate exercise 3-5 days a week use BMR * 1.55 Calories

hard exercise 6-7 days a week use BMR * 1.725 Calories

very hard physical labor use BMR * 2.0 Calories

This is very approximate.  Athletes in training can use incredible amounts.  Colleen was in the 5,000 to 6,000 Calorie a day range when training - easily blowing through the approximation for very hard physical labor.

⁵ Normally men have higher BMRs than women even when they are the same height and weight. Men, on average, tend to have a higher percentage of lean muscle.  Colleen is a bit heavier than me and, at 200 cm, quite a bit taller. She is also younger - all of this is enough to give her a higher BMR.  Since she is thin and athletic you really need to use a different approximation as her body fat is low at around 10%.  The Katch-McArdle formula gives a better BMR estimate of 1,925 kcal

Some unit notes:  Energy is just energy.  kilocalories (kcal) are the same as nutritional calories (Calories).  Converting 1,925 Calories to watt-hours we see Colleen’s BMR is about 2,239 watt-hours a day.  You can divide this by time to get her average power expenditure from BMR -- a bit over 93 watts.

In an inactive office worker mode she would need about 1.2 * BMR or 2,310 Calories a day - a figure that would cause a smaller person, even someone who is fairly active, to gain weight.  Of course a very heavy person would have a very high BMR and their weight loss in pounds per month can be very high.

⁶ Note that this is energy used above and beyond your BMR.  Often people assume the exercise figures are a person's total requirements during the exercise period.

⁷ I strongly recommend a good piece of software for logging exercise and meals.

Now I can deduce my daily requirements to be about 2,190 Calories per day.  This is consistent with my calculated BMR times a factor of about 1.4 for my normal daily activity.  It sort of makes sense.

 

shchedryk

A traditional Ukrainian New Year's Carol telling the story of a swallow that flies into a house at New Years to let the people know of the wealth that will come with the Spring.  Somehow it became adapted as a Christmas carol, but there has been a lot of repurposing when it comes to Christmas.  The title is associated with plenty - not a bad thing to dream about in January.

I really like Kitka's performance (track 19)¹, but this little duet is nice.  It sounds much better in Ukrainian ...

 

 

Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka;
A little swallow flew
and started to twitter,
to summon the master:
"Come out, come out, O master,
look at the sheep pen, 
there the ewes are nestling
and the lambkin have been born
Your livestock are great,
you will have a lot of money, 


if not money, then chaff: 
you have a beautiful wife."
Shchedryk, shchedryk, a shchedrivka,
A little swallow flew.

________

¹ If you live in the Bay Area, track Kitka down and go to a performance.  They are amazing live!

 

 

 

losing the training wheels

People are sometimes surprised to learn that I sketch for recreation.  My pieces aren’t very good as I have never focused and developed technique, but it is a way to express yourself and, more important, it is a way to think.  

 

It turns out sketching is much more important to me than just recreation.

 

Much of my thinking is visual.  It helps me observe and explore.  When I’m exploring new ideas there is quite a bit of play taking place. Lots of little experiments with most of them failing, but you tend to learn from each one.  Seeing what is going on is a terrific advantage.  Sometimes you use computer programs to think visually¹ , but there are even more times when creating a model in your head is faster and more powerful.²  The act of sketching can be powerful tools for getting to those mental models - almost like keyframes that allow you to easily assemble an animation that you can manipulate.  A serious tool for quickly constructing and testing mental models and a tool that happens to be fundamentally playful.

 

I find some tools that support sketching to be very important - a sketchpad with the right paper, the right pencil, a proper slate blackboard and good chalk, a shared visual space with collaborators and so on..  More recently I’ve been using art creation applications on the the iPhone and iPad - two devices that have the fundamental ability to become immersive creative tools.

 

Among other things Autodesk makes high-end sketching tools.  A few years ago they announced a $100 program called SketchBook Pro that ran on Macs and PCs.  It had a powerful interface and seemed to be designed for serious art professionals who wanted to make sketches that could form the basis of more refined pieces.  Using it required a Wacom drawing tablet - you can find one for under $100, but a tablet good enough for most purposes started at three times as much.  

 

I had a good Wacom tablet, so I ponied up the cash and began to play.  Although it was a very capable program, it was complex enough that it got in my way and I fell back to using other tools.³

 

A few years later they released a version of  SketchBook for the iPhone.  To say the least I was very skeptical, but it was only a few dollars a piece by Jorge Colombo had recently graced the cover of the New Yorker.

 

Somehow everything was different.  Although the screen was tiny and the controls more limited, I was directly manipulating the objects just under the glass.

 

I was drawing.

 

I found myself using it to play with ideas and found myself recommending iPod Touches and iPhones to friends who have integrated sketching into their way of thinking.

 

A much more dramatic development came with SketchBook Pro for the iPad.  Suddenly the interface was about the size of a piece of paper you might find in a physical sketchbook and interaction with your art could be completely immersive.  For anyone who thinks visually and uses sketching as a tool this is reason enough to buy an iPad.  The same is true for a kid who is learning how to think visually.  Even, perhaps especially, if the kid has a mathematical and scientific bent, encourage playing with art and get them an iPad.⁴  

 

 

Tools like SketchPad on an iPad have been disruptive for AutoDesk .  The company now has a vastly expanded user base and many of them are finding use for sketches in their professional work and, I’m sure, as a playful tool to sharpen their thinking.

 

AutoDesk is having great success, but there are a variety of programs. I find my current favorite, Procreate,  to have an even more natural interface.  

 

All of these are inexpensive, so try a few of them and spend a few hours playing with them to see which works best for you.

 

Even the original iPad is still a very powerful and far from a mere consumption device if you are clever enough to approach it as a blank slate.  It frees you up and helps your mind glide through playful thought.

 

Truly a bicycle for the mind.

 

_________

¹ Maple and Mathematica are both extremely powerful and useful tools that should be part of your playful thinking arsenal even if you have a modest background in math.  Both are spendy in their professional versions, but the home version of Mathematica is under $300 and student versions of Maple range from $100 to $200.  A regular reader of this blog is a fashion model who happens to have a serious interest in forest ecology.  She has done some nice work using Mathematica as a modeling tool for exploration.

² The creative arts are very important subjects and can form the basis for powerful tools for people who are expected to do “creative” work.  De-emphasizing them in the schools is a tragic mistake.  Even though my skills are limited, my ability to do a bit of art and music has given me a powerful advantage in the playful portion of creative thought.

³ Oddly enough Adobe's Photoshop can be immersive.  I use it for exploration as well as what amounts to my own flavor of art.  I don't know that I would recommend it as a general playful exploration tool though...

Find the tools that fit your needs and don't worry about the latest and greatest.  But at the same time be aware of potentially game changing tools.  I'm currently curious about the Wacom Inkling, but it is vaporware at the moment.

Some tools can be unusual and very individual. I find a bit of fine chocolate, particularly when working with collaborators, is very useful when used sparingly.  A good Lindt is fine, but my favorite is from Mast Brothers.

⁴ You can find used original model iPads that are more than good enough in the $200 range.

 

a quick and easy sweet potato offering

Fast, easy and delicious - this is enough for two people.

peel and cut a largish sweet potato into chunks.  

heat a bit of olive oil to medium high and add a finely chopped garlic clove - cook until it starts to brown

add some vegetable broth (about a cup for a 10 oz sweet potato), the sweet potato and a bit of salt and pepper.

cut the heat back to a simmer, cover the pan and cook until most of the liquid has evaporated or is absorbed

remove the cover, crank up the heat to medium high and cook until the pieces brown on each side

salt and pepper if necessary

 

from wash towels to exploring new worlds...

My grandmother had a most curious way of dealing with things medical.  Folk remedies were a speciality.  Colds and the flu were treated with hot mustard plasters on your chest - something so unpleasant that I remember being thankful that the flu came after she had returned to her home after a long visit.  Warts were to be subdued by stealing a wash towel from a neighbor, washing the wart with the cloth and burying the cloth under moonlight.  Within a month the wart was supposed to disappear. 

 

She was horrified when she learned that I was going to study physics.  To her physic took on an older meaning - a medicine that purges - she thought I wanted to be a proctologist.  

 

A visit to the dermatologist to deal with a stubborn wart reminded me of her.   Liquid nitrogen and scalpels rather than towels from unsuspecting neighbors.  While there I had a few suspicious moles examined.  It turns out the tool used was neat enough that I wanted one.

 

Basically a small hand-held low power microscope with a built-in digital camera, it had wifi and was linked to an iPad where the image was displayed and analyzed.  A biopsy was done on one, but the software and large image gave her a high degree of confidence that nothing was wrong.

 

The ProScope comes in models that are tethered to a laptop or desktop computer as well as the wireless portable model for iPads and iPhones.  They are a bit spendy, but the quality seems good and they are used in police labs and by medical professionals.  I suspect the wireless model and an iPad would be enormous fun in the woods.

 

A few days ago I wrote about getting into amateur astronomy.  Looking at the world differently can teach you a lot and lead to insight.  The slightly too small to see well is fantastic and is all around us.  So if you prefer the daylight and are inclined to the stuff of biology, a microscope can be a fantastic tool.

 

The problem, as is true with telescopes, is the low end models are poorly made and getting or giving one can be counterproductive.  Like telescopes power is the usually advertising point with 1000x or more being commonly advertised.

 

Don’t believe it.  A sub $200 microscope is probably a toy and anything with more than 400x magnifying power is probably going to cost well over $500 to deliver a good image.  It is possible to pick up used microscopes, but finding a good one that has been well maintained is difficult.  Amateur microscopy does not have the following amateur astronomy does, so it is difficult (but not impossible) to find a helpful mentor.

 

It makes sense to understand what you want to look at.  For most purposes I like low power microscopes that you can easily carry into the field.  Stereo microscopes can give a nice 3d images.  We have a neat little Nikon field microscope that fills the bill well.  Twenty power, a lovely image for the price and very rugged.  You can throw it in a pack and bring it out when you are curious.  They have a higher end model that allows you to attach a camera although you can do it on this one by finding a lens adapter.  This will open up an even more interesting world as you can collect and digitally analyze what you find.  There is a slightly less inexpensive model without an illuminator that is aimed more at kids - for the curious sort of kid who is strongly into getting dirty and watching nature this could be an amazing gift.  

 

If you get more serious you have to think about what sort of microscope you want and do you want to get into sample preparation. Higher powers are usually found by looking through the sample - which can require sectioning and staining the sample.  No big deal if you have some lab experience and certainly the results can be amazing, but your interests might lie in somewhat larger specimens.¹  There is so much that will be new and possibly a revelation.  Even the simple Nikon field microscope we have had led to many hours of wonderful exploration. The intricate structure of tiny flowers, the structure of a seed, even the detail on a piece of paper money.

 

You can do other things.  Pixar spent quite a bit of time exploring the world from the point of view of an ant.  Imagine walking through a lawn with blades of grass towering over you. They build specialized optics that a camera was attached to giving a view we normally don’t access.  Some areas became exotic tropical forests.  There is no reason an amateur couldn’t build something to do the same thing.  

 

You can also explore different time scales.  Many cameras have settings that allow you to take exposures at a regular interval.  The exposures can be combined into the frames of a video at video rate of 24 or about 30 frames a second to give the illusion of smooth motion.  Nature speeded up!  The inexpensive GoPro HD Hero2 cameras do this well - a friend has been shooting fascinating videos and sending links nearly every weekend. 

 

To look at short lived events you tend to need more exotic apparatus, but it can be very rewarding.  Drop a note if you are seriously interested in doing this and I can send pointers - there are many directions and it wouldn’t be productive to write twenty or more pages trying to cover something that is probably of narrow interest.  

 

Telescopes, microscopes and other tools are accessible to the hobbyist and expand your view into different scales, spaces and even timescales.  Doing it on your own rather than just reading about it is not time wasted.  You will discover many things for yourself and perhaps make a real discovery by yourself.²  I suspect the soil around a long decayed wash towel would offer many fascinating things to study at twenty power.

 

Nature is a great partner to play with.

________

¹ There are many good vendors. I have used Martin Microscope for lab and student microscopes and B&H Camera (for Nikon field microscopes).  If you are mechanical and understand optics there are great bargains on eBay, but stay away unless you know what you are doing.

² And you can make connections with other areas.  The physics of rainbows and other natural phenomena were heavily studied a hundred years ago, but only sporadically since.  Discoveries are still possible.  It turns out most of the old models assume raindrops are spherical to make calculations easy enough.  It is a good enough assumption most of the time, but real raindrops are hambuger bun or parachute shaped.  Recently some computer science types performed more realistic calculations and discovered a bit more about how the world works.