omenti

global efficiency and flexibility through local inefficiencies

My sister Corinne has a great love for horses.  Part of it is the beauty of their motion. There are four natural and distinct gaits.  The walk with its left hind, right hind, right front, left front four beat cadence transitions to a two beat gait called the trot as the horse speeds up.  Now its legs are moving in unison in diagonal pairs. It is a very stable gait and the horse’s head is often very steady.  

 

As the horse speeds up the cantor appears.  Now you hear three beats and a pause and then three beats and a pause as one of the rear legs supports the horse as the other three move forward. 

 

As the horse accelerates a four beat gait emerges.  The horse is still pushing off with a rear foot -  for brief moments it has entirely left the ground and is flying.  The full gallop -  as fast as a horse can move.

 

Galloping is not terribly efficient and the horse will tire quickly.  The cantor is more efficient, but not by much.  Walking and trotting, on the other hand, are great paces for a horse if it is to travel long distances.  Horses have very narrow  ranges of optimum speeds.  People can tweak these ranges through breeding altering musculature and leg length, but the horse is a four speed creature with two economy speeds.

 

You might think leg length is an important determinant of the best running speeds in humans, but a look at elite runners - both distance and sprint - show they are mostly of average height.  At six foot five Usain Bolt is a rare exception, but he is the exception in several other metrics.  

 

An examination of the energy used to travel a fixed distance in running is fairly constant over a wide range of speeds - something that is unexpected and very different from horses and other four legged mammals. Adding to the puzzle is the most efficient walking speed.

 

I like to walk and have been on long walks with a variety of people. Most of us are of differing heights, but the average speed we walk at tends to be not that much different from the speed we use when we’re walking along.  Most people walk somewhere between 3.0 and 3.4 miles per hour.  The efficiency of walking is strongly peaked.  If you walk at your own natural cadence you will burn fewer Calories per mile than you would if you were walking at a faster or slower pace.

 

This is very curious as people have very different leg lengths.  At six foot one, but long waisted my 31 inch inseam gives me much shorter legs than six foot seven Colleen’s 40 inch inseam measurement, but her optimal walking speed is only a bit higher than mine and is a small amount lower than another friend who has shorter legs than me.  We give up some efficiency, but it is generally easy for us to adapt our speeds to that of our friends and visa-versa.¹

 

The physics and biology of mammalian location is non-trivial and still under active investigation.  A recent paper that looked into the activity of some skeletal muscles involved in walking and running gives some fascinating insight that paints a picture deeper than the problem at hand.²

 

It turns out it is difficult to directly measure the efficiency of a specific muscle while it is working, but measuring its electrical activity with electromyography is a good proxy and you can estimate efficiency.  Seventeen people were wired up and put on treadmills and asked to move at a variety of paces.  Thirteen muscles were monitored and the muscle activity per distance travel was recorded.

 

 

The results are fascinating.  The plot on the left shows the speed at which a particular muscle was most efficient with walking in black and running in grey.  The plot on the right shows the speed of peak efficiency for each subject for walking and running.

 

Note that the muscle efficiencies don’t peak at the same walking speed - there is quite a bit of variation, particularly in running.  Individually our leg skeletal muscles are not optimally efficient at a single speed. 

 

You might think this is some sort of evolutionary failure, but it is probably the opposite.  We don’t spend our time walking at the same speed even though we do have an optimal walking speed.  We have the need for doing many other activities.  We climb, dance, kick, sprint and have the need to match speeds of others.  These different activities involve each of the muscles in different degrees.  We don’t have the best possible efficiency at our optimal walking speed, but we have a huge amount of flexibility and we have a very wide range of running speeds at ok efficiencies.  Often we are more efficient than the horse - my niece Magi participated in a man vs horse race and dropped all of the horses. 

 

This illustrates something deep.

 

The best general purpose optimization often involves a mixture of non-optimized components.  Making each component as good as it can be by itself and allowing it to operate where it runs best usually results in a larger system that is far from optimal.  This is central to engineering which is the practice of finding and harmonizing a variety of pieces into a whole which is the best compromise.³

 

 

_________

¹ How people communicate the proper walking speed is a fascinating look into the subtle non-verbal ways we communicate with others.

 Note if you are walking for exercise and walk over a fixed distance slowing down or speeding up from your normal pace will burn more energy. Speeding up burns the most and if you are walking for a fixed amount of time - say and hour - the higher speed will usually burn the most energy.  

The relationship between efficiency, performance and physical size is a rich subject area and sport is an excellent lens to illuminate interesting questions.

 

² The musculoskeletal system of humans is not tuned to maximize the economy of locomotion

David R. Carrier, Christoph Anders, and Nadja Shilling

Abstract

Humans are known to have energetically optimal walking and running speeds at which the cost to travel a given distance is minimized. We hypothesized that “optimal” walking and running speeds would also exist at the level of individual locomotor muscles. Additionally, because humans are 60–70% more economical when they walk than when they run, we predicted that the different muscles would exhibit a greater degree of tuning to the energetically optimal speed during walking than during running. To test these hypotheses, we used electromyography to measure the activity of 13 muscles of the back and legs over a range of walking and running speeds in human subjects and calculated the cumulative activity required from each muscle to traverse a kilometer. We found that activity of each of these muscles was minimized at specific walking and running speeds but the different muscles were not tuned to a particular speed in either gait. Although humans are clearly highly specialized for terrestrial locomotion compared with other great apes, the results of this study indicate that our locomotor muscles are not tuned to specific walking or running speeds and, therefore, do not maximize the economy of locomotion. This pattern may have evolved in response to selection to broaden the range of sustainable running speeds, to improve performance in motor behaviors not related to endurance locomotion, or in response to selection for both.

 

 

³ A week or so ago I was in an email conversion where someone noted a Steve Job’s quote and I reacted.  I think Apple is an excellent example of a company that understands not only how to make these engineering compromises, but also that the final product involves more compromises than are possible if you “just” use the discipline of engineering.  Consumer electronics has evolved beyond engineering.

 

[friend quoting Jobs} “When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.” - Steve Jobs

 

[me] Absolutely - and this is *so* different from ordinary engineering and product development. 

 

[friend] How so?

 

[me] This is a *very* long subject so I'll try to just hit a few points.  Engineering is all about finding a compromise among various components to create something that makes specifications.  Great engineers are really good at this and I have enormous respect.  The key point is there is an end point - after all, something has to ship on a certain schedule.  When you are doing this you can only work within a fixed domain.  It can happen that you bump into something new as you work on something, but that is rare and certainly not your job description.  In recent years the goals of a product are specifications and hitting price targets.

 Apple certainly does engineering, but it is a different scale.  Other non-engineering disciplines are involved.  During the design phase there is this tendency to keep going deeper.  Occam's razor is a fundamental driving principal.  You need to simplify wherever possible *even* if you didn't think it was possible at first.  There is also a sense of artistic elegance and pride that comes into the optimization.

All of these competing subcomponents and pieces of software have qualities of their own - along with time dependent evolution curves.  You need to be suboptimal on several to make the global result better.   Much of conventional engineering ignores the fact that real consumers also like to see elegance and a simple UX mixed in too … in fact those may be the defining characteristics of a product.  And the product needs to dance properly with other products in addition to the person who uses it.  Getting these details right is an entirely different skill set and Apple has built an organization that understands this deeply.  Artists get it deeply. 

 Jobs once described himself not as a technologist, but rather as an artist who paints with technologies.    

My heritage and way of looking at the world is through the perspective of science.  Here you are trying to figure out how nature works.  There is an absolute you are working towards, but she tends to reveal herself only when questioned properly and then only a bit at a time as you need to find better questions to progress.  I was not attracted to biology or chemistry as they are so complex.  (they are still very beautiful - but it is a preference of mine)  I found physics to be my sport as it is so simple - you only look at the most simple systems, but you want to go in as deeply as possible. The idea is to find the really fundamental questions.  I find the people who have sensibilities most similar to mine are artists and composers.  

Apple is the company with these sensibilities as they are trying to peel the onion back as they progress.  The analogy isn't great - they are probably closer  to biology as they are working in a complex environment -- Jobs, in a different time and if he would have had academic leanings - may have made a great biologist.

As these products that combine art, electronics and computation progress conventional engineering is going to be an increasing failure as a global solution.  It is a piece of what needs to be done, but the integration with other disciplines is central and, I think, a requirement for success in at least the consumer product environment.   There are so many things that need this approach.  It is terrifically exciting. 

 

apple stores and jc penny

I found myself thinking about Apple Stores the other day...

 

It turns out I know a bit about audio and it occurred to me that I should ask for help in selecting audio gear for a household that has iPhones and iPads given how many manufacturers have entered the market.  How would they steer me?  As there are 11 Apple Stores in NJ and several in Manhattan I would have a chance to get a reasonable sample.  So I went in asking the questions of an average consumer who doesn’t know much about audio ... five stores in about a week and very similar answers at each.

 

All of them, despite the large number of customers, took their time with me and four of them pointed me to the resident expert who knows about audio.  All of them gave an answer that would give me minimal configuration grief, good enough sound quality given my tastes, and a reasonable cost to fit my budget.  In fact three of the audio experts gave excellent advice that would save money encouraging buying kit not in the store.

 

Very different answers than I would have heard at a big box store, a Bose mall store or a dedicated audio shop.  What I got was a pragmatic answer with several viable options.¹

 

Something you couldn’t get at Amazon either as there is far too much noise in the recommendations.

 

Something is working.

 

When I first visited an Apple Store in the early days (my first purchase was the original iPod on the day they were released), it was a place where Mac fans gathered.  Sort of a clubhouse where people went to talk.  The first visit saw me purchase the iPod, but I hung around chatting with other customers and employees enjoying cookies and fruit juice provided by the store.

 

Over the years the cookies and fruit juice disappeared and were replaced by increasing numbers of non-Mac customers.  Curiously those of us who knew something about Macs or iPods would give advice to other people who were waiting for a clerk or just looking.  Showing up a few hours early to buy a new version of OS X or the latest iPhone was a fun experience.  The place was incredibly social.  

 

Some of the stores developed reputations.  Since you could use available Macs for anything as long as you weren’t getting in the way, students would use expensive software to get work done.  It was common to see teens working on video and music projects after school often with help from the store clerks.  The stores started hiring software specialists.

 

The SoHo store in Manhattan developed a reputation as one of the best places to pick up dates for awhile and people in their twenties made trips just to hang around.  A few of the stores, including that one, began to offer live music nights as a part of promoting iTunes music.

 

There has been a constant evolution within the stores, but there is a strong link between the functionality of the product and making the customer happy.  You generally have just enough choices to consider and helpful people - employees or other customers - to guide you through the choices.  Pricing tends to be stable so you don’t have to worry about wading through  another layer of information.  There is some of it that feels very much like Trader Joe’s. ²

 

And now Ron Johnson, the guy who was responsible for Apple Stores, is running JC Penny and they have begun to announce their changes.   Many companies just redesign logos and shuffle management, but I suspect Johnson will go far beyond the new logo and simplified pricing they've announced.

 

Department store retail is as broken as computer stores were and much can be done.  It made me wonder about areas that are ripe for change and what that change might be.  This certainly isn’t advice for Mr Johnson as he has undoubtedly spent a lot of time thinking wrestling with the issues and is a proven expert in retail change, but it is interesting to think through this sort of thing as it will differ widely across companies.  What would you change and what changes would you make in your company or companies you regularly deal with? 

 

JC Penny sells a lot of clothing.  Women are primary customers and there is a lot of research, including my own, that shows the shopping experience is far from optimal.  Sizing is broken, selection is often broken, there is a need for information on what looks good on a person, getting good clerks is often difficult, pricing is confusing and so on...

 

At the same time apparel is a large part of the economy and we all need clothes.  Fashion can be very enjoyable to many as can be an artistic expression and enhancement of self - amplifying good features and hiding the less than good - and is a form of social communication. 

 

I spent some time talking with Sukie and some female friends about this and adding my own thoughts.  So in addition to things like lining up the right brands for the customers and other normal approaches here are a few thoughts from the peanut gallery.  The caveat is obvious if you've ever seen my clothing, but Sukie and some friends have excellent fashion taste and I listen well.

 

° Attack the sizing issue

This will take a long time to get right, but a good start would be to match someone up with clothing that is likely to fit and to concentrate the selection.  Since different lines have roughly consistent sizing within the line it might be possible to take someone’s measurements as well as a list of clothing that mostly fits and make predictions.  If the store is made of of small regions each of which represents a different line, the shopper could then visit areas with much higher probabilities of finding a fit.

 

Have some tailors on hand and take a complete set of measurements a few times a year as part of the experience.  This can be kept on file and used to match people directly with the clothing.  A database of preferences can also be assembled and folded in with current street fashion information.

 

There can be expert advice from the tailors as well as from street fashion experts - sort of a genius bar for fashion.

 

° Get social locally, nationally and internationally

Understand Pinterest.  Have staff members who understand street fashion and get involved in it.  Be able to help customers get social advice and feedback from the segments of the population they want their fashion to communicate with.  You don’t need experts in each branch of fashion at every store, but you might have someone who can bring in these people on video chats.

 

Create social fashion places on the web that the customers can be part of.  Pinterest is a much better potential partner than FaceBook or Google and it may make sense to have a dedicated site if it can be scaled, but getting customer involvement would be a big thing.  

 

Encourage expert street fashion bloggers in different regions.  What is going on in Manhattan vs Chicago?  It would be difficult to find people at the Bill Cunningham level, but they are extremely important.

 

° Teach people more about creating their own look. 

Seminars in store and online.  Don’t worry about bringing in third parties - you might tell someone she would be terrific with something from Etsy for example.  Involve some of your customers in this as advisors and teachers.  Create a Fashion U.  Give several levels of interest reason to visit at least once a month.  

Recognize that fashion can and should be very personal.  It is much more rewarding for the wearer if she participates in the act.  That may be putting a wardrobe together completely from store purchased pieces or it may be more customized than that, but the final result can be special and may even be unique.  Fashion is meant to be an ephemeral expression and the creativity and participation of the wearer must be considered and respected.  You are not merely selling clothing, you are providing the raw materials of expression.  Perhaps the best service you can provide is to figure out how to enable her craft.  How does she collaborate, what inspires her and how does she create?

In many ways this may have come under the "get social" bullet

 

° Curate collections - emulate Trader Joe’s

Give customers concentrated selections of what they are likely to want.  This may be very regional and street fashion may inform you better than the ready-to-wear Fashion Week designers.  Channel Bill Cunningham locally.

 

° Improve the fitting experience

Solve issues of fitting and understanding what clothing will look like you under different lighting and with other types of clothing.  There are several technical solutions ranging from trivial to leading edge.  There is great opportunity to innovate and lead.

 

° Work towards the future - mass customization/made-to-measure

Move towards manufacturing made-to-measure clothing.  Even if you are matching people more closely with clothing there is still a frustration that not all interesting choices can be made to fit or are in the right color or style.  Reasonably priced made-to-measure is the disruptive future.  You can lead.

 

There are many other departments within Penny’s, but better apparel solutions would make a huge dent in the problem.  Beyond fair and square pricing and store design and functionality it will be fascinating to see where Johnson goes.³

 

How would you change a telco?  a movie company?  a restaurant chain? ...  your company?

________

¹ Drop a note if you are interested in comments and suggestions on inexpensive and low hassle room stereo solutions for AirPlay enabled devices. It was fascinating hearing what the Apple Store employees said and squaring that with my own recommendations.

² If  you are a fan of the store you know what I mean.  They do many things correctly and don't follow.  It certainly wouldn't hurt to have Trader Joes's or Apple Store calliber employees.  This part of the TJ's Fortune link is telling:

... "In the early days we never tried to be the neighborhood store," says a former employee. They didn't have to: Trader Joe's was the neighborhood store. And yet walk into the Chelsea location on a busy weekday night and you'll see something you almost never see in Manhattan: strangers chatting with one another. Veteran customers tell newbies what products they absolutely have to try, and serious cooks share tips on how to spike sauces and semi-prepared foods to make them even tastier.

³ Some good information from the horse's mouth here

 

 

 

 

tools for the mind

Much of the playing around with ideas that I do relies on visual thinking and drawing diagrams and just sketching an extremely important tool for me.  So important that I wish I had taken formal art classes.  Paper and pencil are great, but for standing or collaborating with others in a room I can think at a whiteboard, but a quality slate blackboard and good chalk “feels” better to me.

 

In the mid 90s AT&T split into AT&T and Lucent.  I had been working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ but my move to AT&T Research meant a move to Florham Park, NJ.  The new location was a nice building in a very nice setting and a lot of attention was given to making us comfortable.  We had a lot of choice when it came to our office furnishings and - to me - the most important choice was slate vs whiteboard.¹

 

My first office had a great view and an even better piece of slate on the wall.  Bliss.  All was well with the world, but  and all was well with the world but a year later I moved to a different office with - shudder - a white board.  A bit of after-hours reconnaissance turned up a few slightly damaged slate boards in the basement and a Ben Franklin slipped to the head maintenance guy with my help at 6 am caused the white board to disappear and be replaced by the slate.  The chalk wasn’t great, but I knew where to buy the good stuff.

 

Sadly I’m no longer there - a loss of several fine minds and that big piece of slate.  As it happens one of the readers of this blog is now occupies that room enjoying “my” old slate.  Tom, I hope it is as good for you as it was for me. 

 

I use computers for sketching ideas, but the interface is not just as nice as the physical world   I use a Wacom tablet and SketchBook Pro on my Mac - good enough, but not great.  Better yet is Procreate on an iPad.  A third party pressure sensitive pen will be out in a few months and, if the iPad 3 appears, I may cave and make the purchase.

 

But for working something out nothing comes close to pencil and paper.  I constantly doodle and sketch as part of thinking and manipulate a lot of equations by hand. Pencils and paper are a wonderful technology for this purpose.²   But they begin to fall apart when you start to worry about authoring and making work, probably more polished work, available to others.

 

In many settings - particularly education - books still rule although many of them are appearing on ebook readers of one form or another.  I’m of the opinion that technology can be used as a supporting tool that can be used to help revolutionize education. It should not be central and arguably a revolution can take place without technology - my path was reasonably computer-free until I was in college and might be considered revolutionary by today’s standards.  But I think it is important to rethink the interaction between teacher and student as well as among students and rethink what a book is.  Augmented books show a lot of promise and may fit into some rethinking of education, although it will take decades to really sort out what works and what doesn’t - but for the time being there is a large authoring problem.

 

 

ebook authoring tools basically suck and there are a variety of standards.  Without waking up that dragon I note that Apple’s iBook Author and iTunes U announcement represents the first easy to use authoring tool for next generation ebooks.  There are any number of issues and the program is in its infancy.  Hopefully others will compete and hopefully they’ll create human usable tools.  I do worry that it may take a for profit company to play this game as the open source community has a poor track record when usability is involved. 

 

________ 

 

I spent the morning playing with Apple’s program and sent this note to some folks who are interested in education.  Any comments about this class of learning are appreciated - if anyone wants to talk about such things.  This was a quickly written email that was just capturing my immediate thoughts.  They’ve advanced a bit since then, but this captures what struck me at the time

 

I like playing with tools and product rather than reading reports, so when I found myself with three spare hours this morning I decided to spend it with iBooks Author - the free iBook authoring tool Apple announced yesterday along with the expansion of iTunes U and iBooks 2.  It gave a few answers and opened many more questions.

 

To first order Author is a mixture of Pages and Keynote - since I don't use MS Office I'm reasonably skilled in both of these and my learning curve was small. For test content I tried a few chapters of the energy book I had been writing with my volleyball friend Colleen as well as a couple of chapters I had contributed to a technical book (astrophysics) a few years ago.

 

There is a huge need for a good ePub3 authoring tool and I was hoping for just that.  It is not a generic tool for any sort of publication.  The EULA restricts you to selling through Apple if you want money - you can put it up for free and (presumably) publish in other places.  Of course Amazon (unlike everyone else) doesn't support ePub3, so that is another issue.

 

Author can't handle technical formatting.  Equations are mostly laid out in LaTeX these days and it just doesn't work with that.  In theory you can use a third party app that allows you to render and put LaTeX into Pages and then import, but those tools are not very good and the one that sort of works costs about $60 for an academic license. This is a big hole for any middle school or beyond science text or any math book.  I tried to import a Pages document that had embedded LaTeX, but there were issues with the rendering and it was not possible to make changes in Author.  A big lose for me…

 

If you are adding multimedia, photos, slide presentations - etc - the process borders on being trivial.  The tool seems to be set up for fairly complex books - textbooks - with chapters, sections, subsections, appendices, glossaries and so on.  You could, in principle, create simpler books using it, but there is way too much stuff getting in your way.  I was hoping for something that I could just important a Pages document and use it for adding bits and pieces rather than getting involved in a major project.  This isn't it.  This is so much easier to use than Adobe or other standard authoring tools that there just isn't any comparison.  It is also $0 vs $a lot.  Of course you don't have many options if you want to make money.

 

It seems very well suited for largish projects that a textbook maker might do.  It also seems excellent for the sort of publications that some teachers might produce as their Summer projects  - it is almost tailor made for that.  

 

Well - almost well suited I should add.  There are no provisions for collaboration and none for automation - both seriously important if you have more than one person involved and if you plan on regular updates or perhaps a serialization.  Of course this is 1.0 and *every* 1.0 Apple product has been an outline of what eventually rolls out.  Perhaps Apple wants to get people used to the simple tool rather than overwhelming them (how un-MS and un-Adobe!)

 

The iBooks 2 app, and I didn't get to play with it much as Sukie owns the family iPad, in conjunction with iTunes U strikes me more as a course syllabus tool rather than a simple book reader.  You can, in theory, do a lot with it and it is much cheaper (free) than Blackboard which is a somewhat ugly and expensive, but nearly ubiquitous tool at many Universities.  Apple may have something here for HSs and Universities - but I would wait for comments from the edu crowd before commenting more than I have.

 

Apple tends to start small and then grow products.  There is a huge need for a simpler tool (yes - Pages can output ePub, but it isn't a real authoring tool for a book).  It would probably be too much for Apple to just announce something like that now - plus the people who would benefit are those who are motivated to sell on Amazon.  I suspect something will happen - perhaps it will be Pages '12 when that is finally announced.  It isn't a great leap to see Apple doing this.

 

They need to add bits and pieces that would make this a better technical tool. That means LaTeX or similar support.  They might also do something with Wolfram (a trusted source told me they have recently looked at buying Wolfram, but I have no idea what the status of that is - it certainly makes sense as it links in with Siri)

 

In the end Apple wants to sell hardware.  I can't see many k12 schools jumping with the current book selection and shoes have to drop for that to improve.  Maybe a year from now. I can imagine a boatload of teachers creating content for it this Summer though and that may be important. If I was making ebook textbook content I would certainly consider a branch and the basic port would be easy … making it dance much more difficult.

 

The iTunes U part is potentially big and college students would be the ones buying the iPads rather than school districts.  There is a chance for some disruption here and the price of college texts is high enough that an iPad would pay for itself if you could get half of your books this way.    The openness of iTunes U and the universities offering free courseware is such that it would be very attractive for lifelong learners - I will certainly be using this part of it.

 

The K12 piece requires a cheaper iPad.  It appears that the iPad2 will continue to be sold - and that would be Apples standard pattern - iPods and iOS devices traditionally see version 2 models sold at a lower price point when version 3 is announced. If history is a guide I would expect a $349 price..  Apple may also add a stripper with limited memory (the additional memory isn't expensive, but it is an easy way to create a bump) or possible not having the camera - for $249 or $299.   If it was featureless enough - say 8 GB RAM and no camera, the $349 regular iPad 2 would still sell well along with the $499 iPad 3 (picking arbitrary numbers).  Of course pure speculation - but Apple needs to announce a cheap edu model and the announcement has to fit the k12 procurement cycle.

 

It strikes me this could be a powerful tool for eMagazines.  Not what currently exists, but the basic bits and pieces are there.  

 

There is a lot of promise, but there are some big holes that need filling before it is a real offering.  My guess is the holes are not there out of cluelessness….

 

___________

 

I welcome what Apple has done.  They are doing it primarily to make money, but it may ignite a competition to come up with something - one of the basic cogs of education - that better.  That is exciting.

 

And if you want to make a difference in your own visual thinking as well as that of your kids or students I strongly recommend learning a bit of art - just basic sketching.  Mine is self taught and crude, but has proven to be enormously powerful.  I frequently use it as a repeatable entry point for achieving “flow”.  It is a shame that art and music (also very important for thinking - more on that in a post to come) are not taught much these days. These are important tools for learning how to “connect the dots”.

 

_____

¹ I talked to the guy who runs the company that made the slate boards.  The last of the breed in the US and most of their business came from math and physics departments.  I assume if I hadn’t discovered the feel of a good piece of slate as an undergrad I would have come to love white boards and the smell of magic markers.

² Paper and pencils are a very personal thing.  Mostly I use art sketchpads, but I also love bound notebooks from Field Notes.  They have fine pencils too, but you need some sharpening technique.  pencilrevolution is  good resource for all things pencil.

 

electric car 101

A question came up yesterday about electric cars and it is clear there is a lot of confusion about some of the fundamentals.  Here is a one minute primer.

 

First you need to think about the difference between power and energy.  It isn't technically an accurate definition but think of energy as a storage system that you can draw on to move things. You may choose to use it quickly or slowly.  The rate at which it is used is power.

 

Think of energy as gasoline and power as what you control with the accelerator.

 

There are any number of labels to measure energy and power and this serves to confuse people.  Energy is just energy and power is just power, so the trick is to pick a unit that is appropriate for the task.  For the automotive world kilowatts (kW) is a good choice for power and kilowatt hours (kWh) for energy.  Remember that power is the rate of energy "used" in a given time so this make sense kWh/h = kW.¹

 

A gallon of gasoline represents about 36.6 kWh of chemical energy that can be liberated when it is burned.  You can put this into a lawn mower and run it for hours or a Ferrari and use it in a few minutes if you can find a road that can handle 200 mph.

 

The battery in a Chevy Volt can store about 16 kWh of electrical energy.  Batteries are large, heavy and expensive compared to the equivalent amount of energy.  So the Volt stores about the same amount of energy as a half gallon of gasoline. A Nissan Leaf stores the equivalent of three quarters of a gallon and the Tesla Roadster about one and a half gallons.

 

It may seem like a lost cause, but the energy must be turned into motion.  An electric car does that with about an 80% efficiency and a gasoline car about 20% - the electric car will go four times as far on an equivalent amount of energy.  And if you compare either with muscle power it quickly becomes apparent why the Industrial Revolution was so significant.

 

So the Volt has about the range that two gallons of gasoline will give in an equivalent sized car and the Tesla has a seven gallon equivalent.²

 

The energy storage numbers may seem small, but they are in the ballpark for commuting.  This is the first time batteries have been good enough to be useful in a 3,500 pound car.  You could make them much more useful by lowering the weight of the car and/or increasing the amount of energy that can be stored in the battery.

 

As for power the battery pack on the Volt can easily delivery energy at a rate to produce up to 111 kW in the car's electric motor - this works out to 149 horsepower.  The Tesla is rated at about 215 kW, which is 288 horsepower.  Automotive scale battery packs that can deliver much more power can be assembled, but the car's range is very low at those rates.  But the bottom line is conventional lithium-ion battery packs can supply enough power to provide gasoline car-like accelerations and cruising speeds.

 

Sorting out the economics is another issue.  10 kWh of electricity is sufficient for 40 miles of driving in a Volt.  At average American utility rates that costs about $1.30 (perhaps under $1.00 if delivered off-peak).  That same 40 miles might require $5 of gasoline in a similar class vehicle.  

 

Of course there is this little matter of battery cost...

 

A Volt battery pack may cost as much as $10,000.  It has some specialized electronics along with the battery and a shielded crash proof casing.   This compares to about $1,000 for the gas tank and fuel handling components of a conventional gasoline powered car. Pure electric cars like the Leaf have lower power train costs and are likely to have much lower maintenance costs over the life of the vehicle.  

 

Currently it is difficult to justify a pure electric car without the $7,500 (or more) subsidy that partly bridges the cost of the energy storage component of the vehicle.  If cars weighed half as much as they do the break-even point would be much closer.  But there is that nagging issue of range.

 

The Department of energy has a variety of programs aimed at doubling the amount of energy that can be stored in a kilogram of a production battery by 2020.   Other goals would reduce the price of a Volt scale pack to under $2,000 by the end of this decade -something that appears to be feasible. An exotic type of battery, a rechargeable metal air battery, could conceivably improve this energy density by a factor of twenty. 

 

Ultimately electrics win as the factor of four in efficiency is too great and battery costs will fall and, with the right upstream energy source, electrics can be very clean.  My best guess is subcompacts will be at parity in price around 2020.  Driving range will not be at parity though.  You will be able to buy 300 mile range pure electrics, but there will be a penalty in purchase price.

 

Real change may occur late in North America.  The real game for the car makers is the "megacity car" - small low range vehicles for the emerging middle class in China, India and other very high growth areas.  The economics of smaller cars may make electric power trains likely in massive scales in the next decade or two.

 

In the meantime there is much you can do in the present to dramatically increase your effective travel efficiency - make your driving more efficient and eliminate it where possible.  

_________

¹ In working through physics problems it is convenient to do a quick check to make sure you have the units right.  If you don't there is an error - it would be nice if the media understood this.  Major pieces appearing in the papers and on TV often fail.

² Although the battery can store 16 kWh, only 10.4 kWh is tapped to allow the battery pack to have a long life.  So the useful equivalent is about 0.3 gallons of gasoline and the range is about the same as 1.2 gallons when you factor in the improved efficiency of the electric drive train.

studying other weather systems...

If you want to learn more about how weather works on Earth, it is useful to study it on other planets ...

 

With a few others I've been spending a bit of time thinking about how to motivate people to respond to global warming and to "do the right thing" (whatever that is).   I've visited the problem before and can list some bad approaches, so some of time has been spent looking at how people deal with other issues.

 

One of them is obesity.  I'm familiar with some of the issues and have been interested in the energy flow of food and exercise, but the societal problem is significant and most top down public efforts to deal with it have been failures.   Most of the approaches are far too simplistic and seem to rely on trying to scare people.  Diets are difficult and mostly are failures if you look at results a year after the diet began.¹  Combine scare tactics with non-workable approaches and you have a bad recipe for change.  Thanks in large part to several friends who read this - Colleen, Jheri, Juliette and Sukie - I found an approach that works for one person.  It has left me with the sense that more global solutions will be very difficult demanding top down and grass root approaches.

 

It is understandable why people use the sensationalist approach, but there are a class of problems that don't respond.  Our wiring simply isn't well suited to long term efforts where change is subtle.  During this morning's rowing session I was going through some podcasts on the subject and came across a Yale Rudd Center interview of Samantha Thomas of Monash University. (mp3 - about 24 minutes - highly recommended if you are interested in this sort of thing).  She notes approaches need to be more positive in nature and current approaches are not just unworkable, but are often counterproductive. 

 

One of the learnings I've had over the past several years is people don't respond to number and the use of logic.  Such an approach may work with some and it is natural for anyone with a scientific background, but it won't sway most people and can be counterproductive.   It is also open to attack by pseudoscience and the ensuing argument can create a numbing cloud of confusion.  The pseudoscience tactic worked very well for the tobacco industry and it seems to be working well now.

 

A few years ago I gave a series of talks on the subject that mostly failed.  I think I could do a better job now, but probably not a great job.  A very useful book (although I'm not in complete agreement) is Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson.  Randy has a Ph.D. and had a tenured position in marine biology at UNH.  His midlife crises was to quit and become a Hollywood filmmaker.  His approach is to concentrate on messages that might communicate.  A fascinating book and very different from the standard sciencey approach.  A few others practice other interesting approaches - Neil deGrasse Tyson and E.O. Wilson for example.

 

For the time being I'm still looking around. A friend, Belinda Nnoka,  has just written a book on bullying - another interesting problem that certainly occurs with heavy people.  I've seen a draft and found it interesting how she breaks down a very complex problem and looks at grass root approaches to solving the problem - at least locally.  There are some similarities in some approaches used in weight loss and bullying.

 

Some of you have serious marketing chops.  If anyone has any interesting ideas, I'd love to listen ...  let's have a conversation.

 

But all of this is just mechanics - figuring out a way to begin to motivate people to do something about global warming or having a society become less obese.  The point of this note is the importance of studying other systems - those other worlds that happen to have weather systems that might spark a bit of insight.  It turns out you meet some interesting and passionate people and perhaps both of you gain something as a result.  It can be enormous fun.

_______

¹ Much has been written on this, but a great introduction is Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss - the Myths and Realities of Weight Loss by Gina Kolata (one of the better science writers out there).  Most of the studies are too short term to see if approaches fail or not and most are funded by companies who are pushing a product.  This amounts to really bad science - failing for decades and still trying the same approach over and over.

 

the paganini strad...

I have a great fondness for artists and musicians.  For me their approach to work is very similar to some of the most enjoyable aspects of science.  Engineering and the natural sciences may be tied by a common mathematical language, but the approaches to the two sports are quite different - again for me, but I know others who share this view.  It is neither here nor there and variety in approaches to disciplines is important.  Others may find different kindred spirits and approaches - it is a fun area to ponder...

 

It turns out I’m a terrible musician.  The cello is my favorite instrument, so my gift to the world is refraining from playing.  I content myself with a bit of theremin building and fooling around with a strumstick - one is obscure enough that no one cares and the other simple enough that even I can achieve a bit of music.

 

But I love being around real musicians - from serious students to the masters.  Stony Brook, where I did my Ph.D., had a good music program.  They were particularly strong in the stringed instruments and the flute.  The Beaux Arts Trio was resident there creating some wonderful concerts and it was possible to find good music several times a week.  

 

There are  lot of fond memories from the music at that place.  As a grad student I co-founded a classical music series at Stony Brook that still exists to this day.  We were able to book the Beaux Arts Trio.  They offered a good price (I think it was about $4,000) as the trio was in residence at the school.  I had a friend who was a cello grad student and Professor  Greenhouse used to let me sit in on classes and master classes - he said it was critically important to connect with the audience, so why not.  

 

The D Major Suite

 

There was an amazing night when he was showing something to Amy (my friend) - something out of the Bach 6^th suite.¹  He played it a few ways, had her play it, play it another way and sighed - "this won't do" ..  then he performed the entire suite from beginning to end.  Sublime is not an adequate description.  Time simply ceased to exist for me and I think everyone else in the room.

 

He was still performing at the highest levels and teaching well into his 90s and only stopped playing about three weeks before he died.

 

Such an amazing person.

 

His favorite cello was the Paganini Cello - more properly known as the Countess of Stainlein Cello.  One of the few Stradivarius cellos and considered the best example of the breed.²  He started playing and time stopped until the last note had faded and we were all jarred back to Earth.

 

He was not a young man at the time.  He died last year at 95 - still playing almost until the end.  I have been lucky enough to have broken bread with Yo-Yo Ma a few times and he maintained a good cellist lacks the chops to do a really great job on the Bach Suites until he has the perspective of age.  He said he felt he could seriously attempt them for real when he is about 70.  Bernard was probably near the height of his powers when I heard him play. 

 

I know this cello well.  It surprised me to see an article in about it appear in this week's NY Times Magazine.   A great instrument is looking for a great caretaker for several more generations before it will be passed down through time.

 

Greenhouse died at 95 early last May - here is the NPR remembrance.  I feel lucky to have known him.  Such an incredible sense of humor and playfulness.  Cellists tell me he was a natural teacher - he was certainly a natural performer.  

 

sigh ..

 

Time is such a funny thing.  My world line has wandered through time and space and somehow managed to intersect with his world line on several occasions.  Those intersections became wonderfully colorful bits of thread for me.  You live for those colorful and lyrical threads that make up your path and they can even bring life to the fabric of spacetime.   I often feel my life is charmed and special.

 

Imagine the 305 year old world line of that cello as it embarks upon yet another segment.

 

____________

 

Recipe time.  Several people have encouraged me to continue with recipes.  This is something I have been doing for breakfasts for the past few weeks.  Basically whole wheat with scallions and a bit of olive oil and soy sauce.  It is really excellent and holds me well until lunch.  Use whatever ratios you like - I prepared a batch and measured for a guide.  I also like to use khorasan wheat which has a large kernel.  Kamut is the variety I like - mine is from Montana although it also grows in Alberta.  You can use any good olive oil, but I find rosemary infused oils add quite a bit - you can make your own, but start with a good olive oil.  I like Sciabica’s as I know where it is coming from in California and it is excellent - as good as any fine oil I’ve tried.  You pay a lot for good olive oils, but they are worth it is you care about your food.  Here is their rosemary evoo.  We've been using them for about 15 years now and find them to be very friendly with great service.

 

° 150 grams of whole wheat kernels

° 4 scallions - chopped

° 25 grams of rosemary infused olive oil 

° 30 grams pecans - chopped

° soy sauce to taste

° a finishing salt like Maldon (optional)

 

° Simmer the whole wheat for about 90 minutes in “enough” water.  I use a crock pot and enough water is something like 350 grams.  It should still have some texture when finished. 

 ° Drain the wheat and mix in the pecans and scallions. Mix in the olive oil and add soy sauce to taste.  I like to get it almost salty enough and then add a bit of Maldon salt at the end.

 

This makes about two servings.  Scale it as you like 

___________

¹ I can't make a recommendation for a single best set of Bach Cello Suites.  I just did the survey and find I have seven on vinyl, one reel to reel tape and four CDs ....  It is important, when you really love a piece of music like this, to hear as many great interpretations as you can.

² Yes - I realize that new great instruments may be as good as the old greats even to the performer - although I was not terribly impressed by the methodology of the paper.  Even if it is true,  there is a real magic of sorts being in the presence of musical history.

 

 

occident flies!

When we first moved to New Jersey I was taking a walk in an area known as The Great Swamp - a place where it is possible to get a mile or so away from other people if you pick a quiet time and a very beautiful and peaceful place.  About two miles in I found a guy intently studying a flower from behind the view glass of a beautiful wooden frame four by five inch view camera.  He had lugged in an enormous tripod, the camera and quite a bit of kit. Very impressive as he was not a very large person.   Normally I would stop and ask questions, but he was intensely into the moment and I was enjoying my walk too much.

 

I continued for a few hours and turned around finally coming back to the meadow and the photographer.  He was still at it, now working on an old fallen piece of tree.  This time he was hunting for something in a gear bag, so I stopped and chatted for awhile.  It turned out he had taken three photos and his goal was five or six for the day.  For someone who was used to a much smaller camera that lacked the control of a view camera I was amazed as he showed me what he could do.

 

Recently Om started me thinking about images again in one of his blog posts.  I’m strongly taken with motion as well as still photography - but for very different reasons.  

 

I have tried some video, but it generally is very much youtube friends waving at the camera work.  My still photography is better and I’m more comfortable thinking about an image and setting it up than shooting and editing segments of video.  Both can be the basis for good stories and I’m in awe of people who can do both.

 

For recreation I love to draw.  Some of you - Nancy, Jessica and my sister Corinne - are much better artistically than I will ever be, but I enjoy losing myself in an image.  A moment of time can stretch into hours and I frequently achieve flow.  When I do physics I tend to be visual and much of the early stages of work are playful with me drawing or imagining drawing images in my mind’s eye.¹  

 

When flow occurs time seems to move at a different rate.

 

Time

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about it in the past two weeks as it is the subject of my mini-sabbatical.  How do relate to time and how has that changed over time?  How important is it to change itself?  My suspicion is that we are living in a period of change where our current notions of time are outmoded and we’re inventing new conventions and relationships even now.  

 

We think we have a good view of our natural world through our senses, but in reality they are very limited.  We only hear a fraction of the sounds around us - much of it is too quiet and much of it has wavelengths too long or too short for us to perceive and much of what we might see is far too dim.  Our sense of smell is limited compared to other animals.  Our vision only covers a very narrow fraction of the electro-magnetic spectrum.  What we do have is still very impressive as animals go, even though some overtake us in one or more of them, and have served us well.  But science exploded when we started to build tools that allowed us to extend our senses.  We found a much larger and richer Universe and improvements on these sensory extensions continue to drive the sport.

 

We also live in a world defined by time.  A mountain range may take millions of years to push up, a flower takes hours to bloom, a bullet striking a balloon leaves a rich record of the collision.  We see the results of these processes, but the details are lost to us unless we build tools to somehow live in their time.

 

Leland Stanford was into race horses in a big way and was particularly proud of his trotter Occident.  Stanford had a real interest in studying the motion of horses so as to improve breeding and training techniques but a better, albeit manufactured, story is that he bet John Isaac $25,000 that Occident always had at least one foot on the ground at all times.

 

In other words - there may be horseflies, but horses do not fly...

 

Stanford was approximately richer than god and hired Eadweard Muybridge (a most unusual name and not a spelling error) to create a photographic record of the behavior of the horse.  He used a dozen cameras spaced 21 inches apart.  Each camera had a shutter speed of a 1/1000^th of a second and the shutter was connected to a trip wire.  The horse effectively had a series of closely spaced slices of time created at different portions of its stride.

 

As you can easily see, horses do fly...

 

If you arranged the photos in a pack and flipped through them at the right speed - the lag between images being about the time it takes the horse to travel 21 inches from camera to camera - your mind stitches the still images into a reasonably smooth motion and we perceive the flow of time.  One of the earliest forms of the movie...³

 

There is a lot to talk about the perception of time and I will, but I want to keep this post short.  Movies and video are all about the illusion of combining still slices of time.  

 

Oddly we all live a tiny bit in the past -  our perception of now is inaccurate, but it works for our biology and most of the interactions with our world that helped chart our evolutionary path. 

 

We worked very hard to synchronize time over the years.  First for relating to nature and agriculture, then for studying the stars and prayer.  Time was critical to sorting out the sky and navigation and later we found ourselves synchronizing ourself to its flow for work and travel.  

 

Time is everywhere and as we find our way through the fabric of space and time we have a sense that there must be a master clock of sorts - that time must be universal.

 

Except it isn’t.  With high school geometry and algebra and the knowledge that light has a fixed speed you can convince yourself that time is relative.   Walk down the street and the clocks in the buildings along the way tick at a slightly different rate than your watch - an act that gives me great pleasure at times when I am on a long walk in Manhattan.

 

It turns out athletes - the really good ones - are expert at shutting off much of the thought in their minds that is extraneous to the task at hand,  They can quickly put together solutions to the kinetic problems they face a few tenths of a second earlier than the rest of us as a result.  An artifact is that they become immersed in a state of psychological flow - that Csíkszentmihályian flow that is so addictive that I find sketching and doing physics and a few other things.²  Athletes also seem to create mental movies of the likely future - “forward models.”  A volleyball player notices the position of the other players and gets a sense of how the ball will be returned so she can position and launch herself with timing good to the hundredth of a second.  There are midcourse corrections to these movies that take into account the spin on the ball and local wind conditions.  These predictions are consistent with Bayesian decision theory that combines previous experience with a stream of new information.  The brain gets to focus on sorting out what is likely and telling the muscles to act on it appropriate.  It is not a simple lookup mechanism and the magic in sport often arrises when the mind comes to a novel solution and gives the ok to try it.  Elite athletes are sometimes good at finding these novel solutions for interacting with a complex situation as time flows.

 

And my encounter with the photographer in the Great Swamp years ago?  It turns out he worked for Bell Labs too and we became friends fifteen years later.  A few years ago we worked on a project that required us to watch for a motion that we knew was happening, but was too fleeting to observe.  We rented time on a camera that took video at 8000 frames per second - sort of faster than the roughly 30 frames per second our vision uses.

 

Here is some popcorn popping at 6200 frames per second - the motion  is "slowed" down a bit over 200 times ...

 

What fun! 

 

______

¹ Well - sort of visual.  I have synesthesia and vision for me is a mixture of images and sounds - or sound is a mixture of vision and sound. I can’t cleanly separate them and would love to feel what it must be like to have cleanly orthogonal senses.  You begin to understand why it isn't terribly common as many synesthetes are uncoördinated.

² ok - I know what you're thinking.  It is mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee-an

³ At least the photographic form of movie. Earlier experiments and toys played with the persistance of vision too.  Roget published the first paper on the subject in the mid 1820s and neat machines like this appeared shortly afterwards.  Yup - that's the same Roget who did the Thesarus.

 

science and nutrition

This is the time of year when people are making resolutions about their eating and exercise habits - usually aimed at weight loss.  There are some tragically wrong concepts floating around in popular culture - things like "cleansings" - along with diets that  cause immediate weight loss, but may also be counterproductive to your overall health.

 

Looking at the literature and talking to experts one quickly comes to appreciate the complexity of the problem.  Silver bullets are probably very rare and one keeps coming back to some basic fundamentals that we have known for a long time and, as a society, mostly ignore.   Get lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, limit meat and full fat dairy. Don't overeat and get a lot of exercise and stay properly hydrated.  Very simple and proven.

 

There are indulgences that, in moderation, don't seem to be bad for you.  If you take in very little saturated fat, a small amount of dark chocolate is not a terrible thing nutritionally.  I tend to take in less than 10 grams of saturated fat a day not counting chocolate, so I don't worry about the load from an ounce of a fine piece of chocolate a day - another 7 grams or so.   This gives me an excuse to concentrate on the good stuff - really wonderful chocolate like the product from the artisans at Mast Brothers and other fantastic shops along with the occasional truffle.

 

But to the point of nutrition research being difficult and the trigger for this point.  The Science Talk podcast from Scientific American had an interview with Hagen Schroeter, director of fundamental health and nutrition research at Mars, Inc.  It is different from what you might expect from a food company and I strongly recommend it as an introduction to understanding a bit about nutrition research.  If you don't subscribe to the SciAm podcast an mp3 version is here - well worth the half hour of your time..  And if you haven't had a bit of chocolate today, feel free to indulge.

from the big bang theory to how to teach understanding

I’m afraid I don’t follow television very much and only saw “The Big Bang Theory” recently at the insistence of a friend.  For those who are as unaware as I was it is largely about issues of social interaction with a mostly geekish and socially maladroit cast of characters who mostly work at Caltech.¹

 

The reason I was asked to watch was to comment on the jokes and equations on the whiteboards.   They are real - although there are some pretty funny parodies on the boards at times.  The jargon is pretty good - they must have a physicist as a consultant. You can pretty much tell the subfield of physics or astronomy by looking at someone’s blackboard (note - slate blackboards are still common in physics departments) - it is sort of like a Rorschach test.

 

There are certainly people like that, but it isn’t common among the scientists I know.  You can find characters like that among the undergrads at a place like Caltech, but undergrads everywhere tend to be immature.  This isn’t what you would find among professors.

 

So even though the show is supposedly about an older crowd, it got me thinking about physics undergrads and that lead to thinking about education again.

 

The lecture as a mechanism for teaching is broken.  It goes back to the days when books were scarce and often is little more than a mechanical transcription from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notebook.  But it can be seductive for the lecturer and I’ve fallen into that trap.  The students often seem to be paying attention and very few complain - after all - you are grading them. 

 

But lecturing isn’t very good at teaching deep concepts.

 

A few years ago I gave a large public lecture on global warming to a few mixed audiences.  Although not as polished, most of it was similar to Al Gore’s style - a superficial deluge of facts and figures.  There were some great Q&A sessions afterwards, but they were mostly unconnected with the talk.  They did seem to center on a short two minute section where I managed to engage people’s minds - in my mind almost a throwaway piece of filler that was self obvious.

 

What I realize in retrospect is that piece was self-obvious -- to a physicist who has been thinking about the subject for much of his life.  It caused me to wonder how much non-majors had learned about math or physics - even at the good Ivy League schools.  Worse - it made me wonder how much I had learned in courses outside my major and passion.

 

I tried a little experiment.  As past of my consulting I found myself talking with many CTOs.  Most of them had backgrounds in computer science, although there were some from biology and the physical sciences.  In talking with them I would subtly check to see if they knew the difference between energy and power.  Out of nine CTOs only two seemed to and both had science Ph.D.s.

 

At the time I was trying to learn a bit about the physics of volleyball to better appreciate the passion of a friend who was a professional beach volleyball player at the time.  In the process I found a nice metaphor to talk about energy and power and she quickly mastered enough of it that she understood more than most of the CTOs.  

 

By then I recognized the problem of knowing too much physics to engage an audience of more than one person who was interesting in learning about energy.  To really learn something you have to play around with and even struggle with ideas.  You test them, throw out some, modify others and - well - understand it.  I talked my athlete friend into co-authoring a book on how we use energy.

 

The project produced a few drafts in our copious spare time, but I’m not a writer and it is now on hold.  She did manage to come up with some great insight in how people think about some of these things and, in turn, that led me to bits of insight.  

 

Physics is a lovely area to consider this question of rote and shallow learning vs understanding and most of us have a view of the how the world works that we have acquired by simply living.  Many of these mental models are good enough to get by with, but turn out to be incorrect under close examination.  You can sort out what is understood and what isn’t. 

 

Others have realized this and have done great work.  My favorite is Eric Mazur of Harvard.  He discovered that his classes were getting good grades and enjoying his lectures, but they were failing to understand the concept.  He experimented and introduced some remarkable changes.  

 

A few days ago I sent a link to a video of Eric talking about his learnings to a few friends who are interesting in the process of education.  Kelly noted her favorite part was when he said “You can forget facts, but you cannot forget understanding”

 

This is great stuff and, even though it isn’t short anyone who is interested in education should watch it. 

 

I'm still puzzled,worried and curious about this at several levels and am very interested in discussions.

 

Hopefully my talks are a bit better now and perhaps there will be enough inspiration to finish the energy book at some point - at the moment I lack the understanding of how to make it good enough that people will actually understand what is being said.  That is a very difficult challenge.  

 

I'm left with a huge hole in my education - areas where my understanding is very shallow.   But I've learned how to learn and understand, so I have the tools to tackle these areas as I have the time, need and curiosity to do so.  

 

At the moment I'm taking a break from such an attack.  I give myself the gift of two weeks of time at the beginning of the year to look into something without interruptions. These tend to be new areas for me and it is great fun.  You can't do much in a hundred hours or so, but at least you get to the point where you can form some intelligent questions and that is a proper beginning.

_____

¹ Caltech is a reasonably intense place.  MIT is sometimes referred to as "that place where they do humanities..."

 

 

 

on size and composition

We live a bit in the past.  Light strikes our eyes and it takes a bit of time for the signal to process and an image to form in our brain.  We stub our toe and it takes some time for the signal to propagate along a neural pathway and finally register.  Different signals arrive at somewhat different times, but but we tend to have a concept of now that synchronizes some of our perceptual signals.  A very tall person lives a tiny bit more in the past than someone who has shorter neural pathways.

 

It makes you wonder about the optimal size of a cognizant being.  A curious observation is that our brains are about midway between the size of an atom and that of the Earth.

 

You need enough molecules to support some type of processing, but there is a point where the communication time between elements becomes so long that further growth becomes counterproductive.  WIth our evolution a few kilograms of brain is close to being optimal, but it seems likely that other intelligent beings wouldn’t be terribly different in scale - sort of between a small dog and a whale.  It would be odd to imagine a flea sized intelligent being or one the size of a planet. 

 

But you have to being that brain out of something.

 

Hydrogen makes up about 75% of the observable mass of the universe and helium is next at around 24%.¹  The rest of the elements quickly trail off.  We, on the other hand, have a very different makeup.  I weigh about 70 kilograms, so along with the percentages of mass and atoms for some of the common elements that make us up, I add  my mass and number of atoms by element.

 

 

	% mass	% atoms	mass(kg)	number of atoms
oxygen	65	24	43	1.61 * 1027
carbon	18	12	16	8.03 * 1026
hydrogen	10	63	7	4.22 * 1027
nitrogen	3	0.58	1.8	3.8 * 1025
calcium	1.4	0.24	1.0	1.6 * 1025
phosphorus	1.1	0.14	0.78	9.6 * 1024
potassium	0.25	0.033	0.14	2.2 * 1024
sulfur	0.25	0.038	0.14	2.6 * 1024
sodium	0.15	0.037	0.10	2.5 * 1024
chlorine	0.15	0.024	0.095	1.6 * 1024
magnesium	0.05	0.007	0.019	4.7 * 1024
iron	0.006	0.00067	0.0042	4.5 * 1024
...

 

 

Since a lot of me is water, a good number of my atoms are hydrogen, but since hydrogen is very light only about ten percent of my mass is that common element.  All of the other stuff was forged in the center of stars.  Most of it came from a few supernova explosions that took place before the formation of our solar system

 

I am - we are - made of stardust.

 

 I find it difficult to imagine a more beautiful origin.

 

It turns out all of the other elements that make us up other than hydrogen are rare in the Universe - add them up and you get less than one ten thousandth of a percent of the Universe’s elemental mass.  We happen to live on the surface of a planet that happens to be extremely concentrated with very rare elements.

 

As the real estate agents suggest location is very important.

 

Happy New Year!

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¹ Although hydrogen makes up most of the mass of the known matter in the universe, something less than five percent of the Universe’s mass can be accounted for by “normal” matter.  Dark matter accounts for about 25% and dark energy about 70%.  The evidence for dark matter and dark energy is overwhelming, but the fundamental nature of each is unknown at this time and lurks at the frontiers of physics.