omenti

clues to the mind and the mind-body connection

We're all aware of cute optical illusions.  Some play tricks with our perception of color, size, or motion ...   This particularly beautiful example plays with our perception of brightness - both turn out to be equally bright inside and out.

 

 

Optical illusions are an interesting tool to study how our brain puts together sensory input sent by the eye and there have been some major surprises and there have been revelations that address the question of how much of reality do we sample through our senses as we observe the world.  To what degree are we sampling reality?

 

I stumbled across this example in a PNAS paper by Bruno Laeng and Tor Endestad of the University of Norway in Oslo.   The illusion is well known, but they looked at something else - how the pupil responded.  

 

If you look at something bright your pupils constrict to adjust to the new brightness level.  This takes place in about a tenth of a second - reasonably fast on our level of perception - and it was thought to be a pure reflex that helps protect the retina from damage.  Reflex mechanisms should be fast to prevent as much damage as possible and this one was thought to occur in in a few dedicated cells in lower brain structures.¹  What is curious with this illusion is our pupils contract even though there is no real brightness - the reflex is in response to what we think we see rather than what really exists! 

 

This is fantastic.  Perceptual errors behave more liked learned phenomena and may be adaptations.  Perhaps evolution has made us more adroit at encountering our environment.  

 

A lot of visual information is ambivalent and noisy.  Perhaps there is some contextual processing going on to construct a "reality" that is more useful.  Maybe the reality our mind assembles is a bit better for our functioning that what really exists in nature.

 

The same goes for other senses - particularly hearing, but taste also comes to mind.²

 

As I am writing this it occurs to me that there are many other evolutionary tricks that help us to deal with how we relate to the environment.   We read stories of animal athletes - cheetahs that can sprint to 70 mph, our cats and dogs that can make jumps that appear amazing - and sometimes think humans must be unathletic in the scheme of things.  But we are amazingly good at endurance running.  We probably evolved to this as our ancestors may have had to run down prey in order to get close enough to dispatch it, but whatever the reason we are wonderful aerobic machines.³

 

Many people report a "runner's high" after exertion.  I find it around the sixty minute mark with my rowing and, if I make it that far the resulting rush is enough to encourage me to continue for as long as an extra half hour.  It is a feeling of real euphoria.

 

It turns out the body under heavy aerobic load produces endocannabinoids which are substances that act as neurotransmitters.  The name probably rings a bell - endocannabinoids are chemically very similar to the active ingredient in cannabis.  

 

The runner's high is the real thing and the euphoria can be an excellent reward.

 

Recently it has been learned that a few mammals that are good aerobic athletes(humans and dogs) produce serious amounts of endocannabinoids during aerobic exercise while other mammals that aren't aerobic athletes (ferrets) don't.  It may be we have evolved a reward system to encourage this type of activity - I know it is one of the few things that keeps me on the rowing machine for lengthy periods.   Colleen is more geared towards bursts of power, but she notes that she loved the feeling of euphoria that came over her after an hour or so of intense training and the reward was enough to encourage her to go on for several hours more. 

 

My niece Magi is a runner.  A remarkable runner.  She is a single mom with two very little kids and is struggling with raising them, working a couple of jobs and going to nursing school.  A few years ago she took up running and found it came naturally.  She's done several marathons and does respectable three hour times - not bad for someone who can't run every day and rarely more than an hour at a time and also lacks the money to get coaching - shoes are a major expense for her.

 

She lives in the Phoenix area and has always been comfortable in the mountains.  A few races were in the back country and she found she really liked them.  Also she learned that she's good with distance. Her quarter times on the Boston Marathon were all within a minute with the last quarter being the fastest.   About a year ago she started trying the longer distances and did very well in several fifty mile runs.  

 

With those under her belt it was time to get serious.  Last Saturday she ran the Zane Grey - not a race for the faint of heart.  Rather than writing about it, I'll print the email she sent and add a few images.  Do read the links from the race director and another runner for more color...  like

...

The course runs along the base of the Mogollon Rim, constantly dropping in and out of the little canyons and crossing multiple creeks and streams.  The route is entirely single track trail and is extremely rugged.  Despite a ton of work our volunteers have done on the course, entrants will have to navigate over or under fallen trees, through thick wickets of Manzanita bushes, and over very rocky terrain.  There are also sections where the trail just disappears and route finding can be challenging.  The middle section of the course, known as the “burn area” had the trees burned down from the Dude Fire in the early 90’s. Runners are exposed to the heat of the Arizona sun and have to travel as far as 11 miles between some aid stations.  An unprepared runner can sometimes run out of fluids in these long hot stretches.

 Not easy terrain down there. The Mogollon Rim is rough, tough and relentlessly difficult

...

 

with that, Magi's email:

 

Here is my first race report. I apologize in advance if you do not want to read this much about me, nevertheless this was an incredible experience and I am really excited to share it!

 

The Zane Grey 50 has earned a reputation for being one of the most grueling ultras out there. I had spoken with friends who had completed the race and the consensus was I could expect to add about 2 hours onto my avg 50M time (if there is such an avg) prepare to trip, get scratched, sprained, dislocated, lost, broken, etc.,, this all sounds like adventure right?! The race was a bit of a blur so I am sorry for the lack of detailed trail accounts.

 

 April 21st 2012 was the big day of the notorious race, in anticipation of this I had prepared with all sorts of hot, hilly, long, and really fun desert mountain runs. Emmet was prepared to crew for me race day, this made a huge difference. Knowing that someone 100% reliable is waiting for you at designated aid stations on the course with water and nutrition refills, sunblock, an icy towel to wipe down with, words of encouragement, and anything else you may possibly need is beyond words. I say this because when you are running 50 miles through some of the most unpredictable Arizona terrain, your entire life is narrowed down to the steps it takes to get your butt from aid station to aid station. Emmet has accompanied me on many training runs so he knows my pace, my weaknesses, my strengths, and he also knows how to tell me what I need when I may not realize it, this is important. The weather was predicted to be 90 degrees, I wasn't to concerned about this, by default I have to train in the heat and have learned to be very smart about hydration and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately the heat was by far the biggest hazard on the course that day for many of the runners, out of 126 starters only 84 finished.

 

this link is an interview with the race director

 

 

this link is by a runner, he has great pics of the course in his blog

 

 

In the two days prior to the race I have a total of 5 hours sleep, this was the only stimulus for self-doubt weighing in my head. The night of the race I was lying in bed with the "I want to cry but I'm so mad I can't" feeling. The alarm clock went off at 3:15 am and all that nonsense turned into baloney, it was race day, wheee! We arrived at the start 4:30am, just enough time to hit the bathroom, check in with race officials, and stay warm in the car until just before the 5:00am race start. And just like that the race started, off we went into the woods, all 126 of us with our headlamps beaming in the dark. Actually mine was lightly beaming, I think the batteries died just as the sun rose enough to see without it, lucky me! It was 8 miles to the first aid station, I was equipped with all the nutrition and water I would need to get me to the second aid station (mile 17) where Emmet was planned to meet me, the first 8 miles flew by, it took about 3 miles for the runners to spread out and about 40 minutes for the sun to rise. Running with a headlamp is really fun, the small illumination for your footfalls on new terrain makes me feel like a little kid exploring with a flashlight. Admittedly it really slows me down as the few falls I have had in the past all occurred while running in the dark, thus I now go a little slower. The logic is I'd rather be 5 minutes slower than broken. As we came into the 8 mile aid station we were greeted with cheers, and even better Emmet was there to make sure I was doing OK, (I had started the race with a new hydration pack and he wanted to make sure that it wasn't leaking) I ran through the station on my way to mile 17.

 

 

Miles 8-17 were beautiful, the morning was cool and this portion of the trail was through pine forest ascending to views of the Mogollon rim, I was on fresh legs and trying my best to hold back for the many many hills and miles to come. There were numerous river crossings over precarious rocks that really added to the adventure feeling, the course at this point was on an easy to follow single-track trail, well marked with yellow tape and glow sticks. Coming up on mile 17 I could hear the cheers as runners came into the aid station, this was so encouraging I cried a little! Emmet had prepared an area with everything I could possibly need, I quickly toweled off the crusty salt-sweat, exchanged my hydration pack for a freshly packed one, took 2 ibuprofen to help ward off inflammation and set off again----DANG IT! I didn't take my sunglasses, I was running without a visor on purpose as I didn't want to risk missing any trail markers in my periphery, the trail was now becoming more treacherous and it is very easy to get lost. Many experienced ZG runners have lost hours going in the wrong direction.

 

Mile 17-33 was brutal, I was told to expect the worst during this part, the majority of the trail is an old exposed burn area. Tons of direct sunlight (grrr no sunglasses) lots of elevation to climb, and lucky you if you don't get lost as you have to be super aware of trail markers. This part of the trail has to recover from a harsh winter so the area has a ton of dead tree fall, new dry grass/shrubby growth, and lots of crumbly unsteady soft red rock. At mile 23 there is an aid station only assessed by the official race crew, this aid station is an oasis---it's called Hell's Gate from mile 23-33-- as I ascended into the station the volunteer shouted out "Welcome to Hell, how you doin'? I was doing pretty good considering all the runners were in the same hot boat, I was conditioned for the heat so I knew as long as I kept hydrated I would have no problems. I filled up my pack with water, chugged another few cups of water, and threw a handful of ice down the back of my shirt, off I went into Hell. At this point in the race runners were beginning to drop, many people started out to fast, spent their energy, and were not prepared for the heat. I was not really going to fast but I managed to pass many people during this stretch. The race is organized so that there are rescue workers stationed on the course about every 7 miles with radios, their job is to account for each runner as they pass and make sure nobody goes missing. About mile 25 I came up on a man who had passed me around mile 20, he was hunched over on the side of the trail, he was obviously unprepared with not enough water or calories, as I was offering him some of my water he vomited, nothing I could do for this guy except for run on ahead to tell the next rescue crew they had a runner in trouble. There were some pats of trail during this leg where I would think to myself "seriously?? I am supposed to run this?" and other parts where I had to remind myself that I had trained to go faster and harder, hiking was the only option for many parts of the trail, however dragging my feet was not. My head needed to be reminded to move my feet!

 

Whoo-hoo I made it to mile 33 aid station! The delirium sets in completely about this point, as I came into the station Emmet was yelling "go this way, now go this way, now this way" leading me from the check in to the car where all my gear was. This is where it makes a difference for someone who knows your habits to intervene, I was spot-on for nutrition and hydration but with the heat every ones sweat factor was major--Emmet made sure to impose upon me the importance of taking saltstick caps--these are electrolyte tabs to swallow--if you had seen all the salt crusted on my face/shirt/body it's pretty obvious I was depleted, I now swear by these caps! Seriously, all I could tell you at this point was which way is up or down. My brain was only focused on watching my footfall to not trip and keeping a keen eye on trail markers. A funny note here, about a week prior Max had told me in his cutie voice "Good job Mommy" when I pointed out a local peak I ran to during a training run. During the race I had his cute little voice in my head rewarding me with a "Good Job Mommy!" every time I came upon a trail marker!

 

 

So onto miles 33-44, Emmet loaded me up with 2L of water on my back, 32oz in my hands, about 800 calories in my pack (all of which I would use) and I was on my way! This was serious fun, the trail was about 60% run-able so now I know I need to improve my hiking skillz, other than this I was focused on the next 11 miles of adventure. I think my most proud accomplishment for this race was not falling once, I don't fall often but still this terrain is really 'trippy' (funny right?) so now blur blur blur, hill, hill, up , up , up , and I arrive at mile 44!

 

 

The crowd is cheering all the runners as we descend into the station, Emmet leads me to the car and preps me for the last 6 miles. Hmmm 6 miles, how long might this take...try 1 hour and 40 minutes...uuuuuffffff. This last 6 miles was long and exhilarating, and hard. The terrain was pretty pine forest but my legs were shot, there was spot about mile 42 where some thin ice patches were still frozen on the ground, it just made sense to me to come to a stand still stop to look at them and contemplate lying down on one--I chose to keep on trucking but now I was day dreaming of cold pools to dip in and icy drinks. After what seemed like an endless stretch of trail I rounded a corner and was in earshot of the finish, what a rush! I picked up the pace as best I could and finished strong, the 35th finisher and 8th female to be exact. The whole race took me 12:40 minutes and every second was great!

 

 

I will definitely do this race again, it was a total adventure! Thank you so much for all the encouragement

For many reasons I'm very proud of Magi:-)  Today - a week later - she's running a regular marathon "for fun"

She obviously is mostly slow twitch or red muscle.  This comes from both sides of her family, who tend to be gracile and endurance/non-sprinter types.  I'm really slow and a terrible jumper, but I can go for a long time.  In college I would regularly ride "centuries" (100 mile bike rides) on most weekends and never had any exhaustion problems.  Even now when rowing I specialize on going for an hour to an hour and a half rather than intense five minute intervals of burst effort.

________

¹ This is similar to what happens when you burn your finger. Your finger touches a red hot burner and a signal races towards the closest area that can make a decision - the spinal cord in the case of the finger.  A response is quickly generated and sent back causing the muscles to jerk your finger out of the way.  This happens "reflexively" - long before signal can be processed by the brain and long before pain is even felt.

² By taste I am referring to flavor which really isn't the conventional five tastes on the tongue, but the mixture of taste, touch and smell that generates "flavor" in our mind.

Also color is generated in the mind as is music.

³ This is one of the reasons why our bodies respond so well to aerobic exercise and why we tend to fall apart when we become sedentary.  At risk of sounding preachy, your body and brain with greatly benefit from regular aerobic exercise so find an excuse to just do it.

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A Very Simple Simple Pea Soup

 

Ingredients

° 2 tbl unsalted butter

° 1 diced medium sweet onion

° 1 clove garlic, sliced

° Kosher salt to taste

° 2 c thawed frozen sweet peas (fresh only if picked on the same day!!)

° 1/2 c lightly packed fresh tarragon leaves

 

Technique

° Melt butter over medium low heat.  When it foams add onion, garlic and salt. Cover and cook until the onions are soft, but don't brown!  Stir frequently - not a walk away and forget it stage

° Add a quart of water and bring to a boil. Add peas and tarragon and cook 'til tender - a few minutes

° take off heat, purée and strain.  

° Reheat if necessary and serve.  I like to garnish with a few whole raw peas and a bit of plain greek yogurt

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bonus non-recipe

After 80 or 90 minutes of hard rowing I'm soaking with perspiration and am in need of something cold with a lot of protein.  Here is my current favorite - not vegan friendly though.  "Shake" is tongue in cheek - I can make a quality milkshakes.  Ask if you visit and we'll do one.

Berry Yogurt "Thickshake" with Nuts and Chocolate

Ingredients

° A good handful (about 100g) of slightly thawed frozen blueberrys or raspberries

° About 200g plain greek yogurt - I like to use 2%

° a half frozen banana - I remove the skins on very ripe bananas and tightly wrap them in plastic wrap and freeze.  A great way to deal with ripe bananas

° 2% or whole milk.  Start with 100g and adjust

° something sweet - maple syrup, honey, sugar

° 15 to 30g of dark chocolate broken into small bits

° 15 g broken pecans

Technique

° Blend banana, fruit, and about 50g of milk.

° Add the yogurt and milk as necessary to get a good enough consistency.  Add sweetner if necessary

° Pour into a serving glass or bowl depending on thickness.  Stir in pecans and chocolate

 

 

the beauty of two triangles

This morning I overheard a few people fuming about the price of gasoline.  I wonder if they have considered how inefficient their cars really are?

 

The chemical bonds in hydrocarbons are a great way to store energy.  Millions of years ago green plants used the energy in sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.  The hydrogen was then combined with carbon dioxide from the air forming glucose molecules and giving off a byproduct called oxygen that we've managed to use in other ways.¹  The neat thing is when you burn the glucose,  energy stored in its chemical bonds is released along with water and carbon dioxide.  Glucose is essentially a energy storage battery.  Plants turn it into other hydrocarbon-based substances largely leaving intact the chemical bonds that contain the stored solar energy.  They tap some of the energy for their own purposes and animals eat the plants harvesting the stored solar energy through metabolism - another form of oxidation - releasing the same energy and byproducts as burning.

 

It is wonderful to realize you are really solar powered.

 

Most of the solar energy that powers our bodies fell on the Earth recently - usually within the past year.   It turns out plants aren't terribly efficient - usually less than one percent for those directly in our food chain - but a lot of land is devoted to the cultivation of suitable plants.² 

 

We can have some fun with some numbers.  An average person requires about 2,000 Calories a day.  Calories are a unit of energy so you can divide by time to find the average power requirement.  Doing this and converting to watts, it turns out we need about 100 watts on average.  Lower at night when we're sleeping and much higher when we're doing something athletic, but 100 watts a person is a nice number to remember for quick mental calculations.

 

The sun delivers an average of a bit more than 1,360 watts per meter² to the Earth.³ Absorption in the atmosphere, the Earth's roughy spherical shape, inclination, day and night and cloud cover reduces this to something usually between 50 and 200 watts/m² - let's pick 100 for a quick back of the envelope.  Average food crops stores solar energy into those chemical bonds with at about a half percent efficiency so their power rating is about 0.5 watts/m².  If we could harvest and process these crops with perfect efficiency it would take about 200 square meters of land to supply one of us with food.  Given seasonal growing issues and various inefficiencies in the chain, a more reasonable number is closer to 1,000 square meters of farmland under cultuivation for every person on the planet.⁴

 

So what does this have to do with the beauty of triangles?

 

Hang on - we're getting there.  This is taking a bit more time to flesh out than I thought so I'm breaking my one hour rule.

 

The Industrial Revolution came in several phases, but at its core it allowed us to effectivvely tap the relatively vast amounts of energy stored in hydrocarbons like coal, petroleum and natural gas.  Up until that time most of what we could do was limited to muscle power - from us or domestic animals.  A good rule of thumb is an adult male in good physical shape can produce about a kilowatt-hour of mechanical work a day ..  100 watts of additional power in a ten hour shift.⁵  A horse may provide about four or five times as much.  This proved to be a very low and limiting barrier to growing the civilizations - many people spend all of their time dealing only with food production and available energy for other activities was very limited. 

 

Coal, petroleum, and natural gas formed over many tens of thousands of years millions of years ago.  The efficiency of their formation was not great and local geologic conditions dictated where they are and how much exists.  But many tens of thousands of years often dominates the low efficiencies and large amounts of energy were stored.  We are mining sunlight from our distant past.

 

Most of the gasoline in our cars comes from petroleum which, in turn comes from dead algae and zooplankton that became trapped under sedimentary rock and "cooked" under great pressure and heat for ages.  At about 36 kilowatt-hours per gallon it is almost an ideal fuel for transportation, it can be stored at room temperature, is relatively safe and easy to handle and transport, and we have had engines that burn it directly since the late 19^th century.⁶

 

The ease and low cost of mining, transporting, processing and using this very old reservoir of stored solar energy has produced an extremely inefficient transportation infrastructure - the automobile.  But early on there was so much oil that inefficiency didn't matter very much.

 

Cars are great for moving us long distances at speeds that give us practical commuting ranges on the order of fifty miles or thereabouts and one day trips ten times that distance.  But internal combustion engines are heat engines and, despite more than one and a half centuries of refinement, only about a quarter of the gasoline you buy is used to turn the wheels of your car.  The majority of it escapes out the tail pipe or heats the engine block.  Improvements have been made and will continue, but they are increasingly expensive and we aren't that far from the limits for a flexible use vehicle.

 

There are other issues like cost and pollution, but let's focus on efficiency and ask a fundamental question.

 

What are we really moving?

Usually just a person or two and perhaps a few bags of groceries - a few hundred pounds at most.  The average car weighs nearly 4,000 pounds.  It takes a lot of energy to accelerate its mass to speed, so a good metric to consider is payload divided by vehicle weight plus payload.  Let's say you and your groceries weigh 200 pounds and your car weighs 3,800 pounds.  Only five percent of what is moving around really needs to be moved around.

 

For short trips bicycles make sense.  I've done some calculations based on Colleen and her bike.  She weighs about 170 pounds and her bike weighs 30 pounds.  Fully 85% of what is moving around is useful payload and that number can increase a bit as she carries groceries on the bike.  She gets the equivalent of 1,000 miles per gallon of gasoline.  Her bike is great for speeds up to about 15 mph and trips generally under a five or six miles each way - basically almost any commute in a town or city.  Much longer trips and/or higher speeds or heavy payloads require something like a car - but for short and slow trips Colleen "wins" using a bike largely by not having to carry around all of that extra weight.  We can and should reduce the weight of cars as it is the next area for large (factor of two) improvements in fuel use efficiency, but bicycles are extremely low hanging fruit where practical.

 

In the late eighteen hundreds the biycle, like the automobile, was undergoing change.  The safety bike was developed revolutionizing bike design and safety and giving us a very simple and extremely strong lightweight  structure. It roughly onsists of two triangles fused together.  Bicycle design has progressed, but this basic geometry hasn't changed very much since then.

 

A person on a bike is very efficient - about three or four times as efficient as a walker and more efficient than mamalian locomotion.  Bikes are optimized for urban scale trips and payloads associated with perhaps 80%+ of human trips less than five miles.

 

I sometimes characterize a bicycle as "a human sweat amplifier fashioned of a diamond shaped geometry fashioned from a pair of fused triangles"...  But there is something deeper to it.   Building one can be straightforward - if you like you can even make one using bamboo as a primary frame material.⁷ 

 

Refinements, on the other hand, can be technically demanding and leading edge bike design is a convenient laboratory to material development and fabrication research and development.  The aerospace industryhas been an early driver of carbon fiber use, but bicycle frames have been proven an important vehicle for perfecting less expensive fabrication technologies that are now being applied in a variety of industries.  

 

China has used bicycle manufacture as a mechanism for learning and scaling manufacturing technologies. Beginning with aluminum bike frames in the late 1980sthey have managed to drop the price of an aluminum bike frame by nearly a factor of fifteen.  For about a decade they have been working with carbon filber nad mahve made prie reductions on the order of five with eight or ten looking likely soon.   The resulting techniques have driven wind turbine carbon fiber fabrication along with parts of their aerospace industry.  If they can achieve success in automotive carbon fiber on the order of what they've done with bicycles, the carbon fiber automobile becomes practical and we have a fundamental revolution in the industry.  It would be possible to make a 2,000 pound safe four passenger car and that would translate into much greater fuel efficiency.

 

But bikes may be another subtle, but potentially powerful driver of change.

 

It turns out there are a lot of electric bikes in China - currently 150 million with an annual production that should reach about 70 million around 2015.  Most of these are very unsophisticated - a heavy bike with a small fairly inefficient electric motor and heavy lead acid battery.  

 

Bike batteries don't have to be large and expensive.  We found that Colleen required about 31 Calories to travel a mile making her about 34 times as energy efficient as a 30 mpg car.  31 nutritional Calories is about 36 watt-hours, so a 10 mile roundtrip commute requires about 360 watt-hours.  But Colleen happens to be human and her efficiency at turning food energy into mechanical work at the pedal is about 20% while the battery, controller and motor in state of the art ebike exceeds 80%.  So she could get a comfortable 40 mile range with a 500 watt-hour battery and pedal along a bit to increase the range even more as well as getting some exercise while she's at it.

 

A 500 watt-hour battery pack is about ten times the capacity of the average laptop computer battery.  Currently most lithum-ion ebikes use several laptop batteries, but newer designs use repurposed automotive batteries.  China appears to be encouraging ebike makers to move to lithium-ion designs.  Seventy million lithium-ion ebikes would require 35 million kilowatt-hours worth of batteries.  Smaller electric vehicles use batteries in the 25 to 35 kilowatt-hour range.  eBike production would be equivalent to about a million new electric cars a year and may be an important bridge towards the massive production scales required.

 

There is also an indication that city planners are beginning to rethink the design of new megacities moving more towards a mixture of small cars (mostly electric), ebikes, bicycles, pedestrian traffic and mass transit - much like parts of Northern Europe.  This type of design is much more efficient in energy use and may be less expensive in the long run.   

 

Just two triangles joined into a diamond, but they may be giving us a hint of a possible future.

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¹ Atmospheric oxygen tends to react with a lot of things and doesn't stay around very long on its own - a few thousand years at most.  Its presence indicates something has produced it recently and, at least on Earth, it is an indicator that photosynthesis is working away.

² Sadly there is starvation, but this is a distribution problem.  Green plants provide enough energy for the world's population - but we appear to be within about a factor of two of a fairly harsh limit.

³ 1,366 watts/m² is an accepted number that averages over our orbit and solar cycles, but the last cycle has been very quiet and the recent number is somewhat lower - perhaps about 1,361.  

⁴ This is for diets where we consume plants.  It turns out we eat meat too and making meat is inefficient.  Usually under ten percent, although some meats like industrial poultry can be as high as twenty percent.

⁵ I use a rowing machine to exercise and measure my output directly.  My normal sessions are at an average power level of 150 watts and run 60 to 80 minutes.  A one hour session would represent 150 watt-hours of work.  Since I'm about 20% efficient, that means I need about 600 watt-hours of food above and beyond my normal metabolic needs to support the exercise. That's about 516 Calories (nutritional - there are several types of calories).  People can work at much more intense levels for short periods and expert athletes can work at about three times my level for similar periods.  I note some of that in another post.

⁶ Unfortunately there are some nasty byproducts and side effects.  Incomplete combustion produces numerous toxic chemicals and an enormous amount of carbon dioxide is released as a direct combustion byproduct even if we had complete combustion - approximately 20 pounds of carbon dioxide for every gallon of gasoline burned. This is from carbon that had been captured for thousands of years and sequestered for millions of years. This rapid desequestration is a  root cause of the human caused global warming.

⁷ Bicycle frames are usually fabricated from aluminum, but steel is also frequently used along with the emergence of carbon fiber and, more rarely, titanium.   I'm a big fan of steel as newer alloys are fairly lightweight while offering an outstanding "road feel" Steel can also be easily adapted to bespoke designs where a frame is custom tailored to the rider.  My old Raleigh Pro was built in the mid 1970s using Reynolds 531 - a then exotic alloy that only one company in the world could make.  One of the most exotic steels is a maraging stainless steel called Reynolds 953.  The tube wall thicknesses are so thin - down to about 0.3 mm -  that frames approach the weight of carbon fiber bikes. Colleen is over 6'6" tall and that dictated an unusal frame geometry that required Reynolds 953 and some careful selection of tube diameters, wall thicknesses and buttings to get it "right" ... a fair amount of numerical simulation.

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Recipe   Not re-frieds

I tend to approach cooking on hunches and have my share of failures.  This is a nice success.  I like re-fries, but rather than sautèing the aromatics with the cooked beans I wanted to sautè them first and then cook them with the beans in a pressure cooker to infuse the flavor. I used a mixture of pinto and cranberry beans because that's all I had at the time.  I assume you could use any similar bean and get great results.   A huge key to success with dried beans is to never use anything more than about six months old.

The quantities are approximate as I didn't carefully measure.  I'll use mostly volume measurements even though that is bad form.

Ingredients

° 1 tbl vegetable oil

° 1 medium onion chopped

° 1 bunch cilantro stems and leaves separated and chopped

° 1/2 tsp chipotle powder - use more or less for to vary the flavor

° 1/2 tsp cumin

° 2 cups dried beans.  I used a mixture of pinto and cranberry beans soaked overnight in water - borlotti would be great too

° 2 cups water

° 1 tsp kosher salt

 

Technique

° Heat your pressure cooker with the top off over medium heat and add the oil. Sautè the onion, cilantro stems and spices (not the salt yet) until the onion starts to soften. Don't let it brown. Add the beans and water.

° Close the lid, crank heat to high and lower heat once you reach full pressure (15 psi setting).  Cook about 10 minutes and move to a cold burner allowing the pressure to drop on its own before opening. 

° Reserve a few of the beans for a garnish, add salt to the rest and mash.  

° Serve garnished with the whole beans, sour cream and the cilantro leaves.

 I prefer whole milk greek yogurt (Fage Total) to sour cream, but your mileage may vary.  Sour cream is the classic.  Also I imagine parsley would be a great substitute for cilantro, but I really like cilantro.

 

 

the equal sign

=

 

Equations are profoundly simple in concept - two calculations (one of them may reduce to something trivial like a statement) that may seem quite unrelated that have the same meaning. The "=" sign makes the connection.  Oddly enough, even though mathematics is very old, the symbol has been around for less than 500 years.  

To avoide the deiouse repetition of these woordes: is equalle to: I will sette as I doe often in woorke use, a paire of paralleles, or gemowe lines of one lengthe: =, bicause noe .2. thynges, can be moare equalle. 

Robert Recorde coined it as a shorthand for "is equal to" when he wrote The Whetstone of Witte in 1557.  The OED says gemowe means something like twin.  It proved useful and stuck.

 

In math the meaning of the equal sign is usually rigorous.  In science and many other disciplines it is often more nuanced whether we appreciate it or not.

 

One of the profoundly curious things about Nature is that so much of her can be approximately described using the language of mathematics.  A theory is often stated as a formula and extensions are sometimes made using rigorous mathematical extensions that turn out to describe something previously unseen.  At the very least these formulae give a powerful mechanism for playing with Nature and trying to understand a bit more deeply.  

 

It is dangerous to become too enamored with these relationships as they can fall apart when you are in new territory or if you are in a bit past your own understanding.  In fact this can be precisely where life gets interesting.  You think your measurement of something will give a certain result, but a careful experiment gives a slightly different result. No one has ever made a measurement quite this carefully.  You suspect something is wrong with your experimental apparatus or the steps you used to process the calculation and painstakingly eliminate any potential mistake.  At some point you become convinced that your result is correct and submit your result for peer review.  Ultimately the piece is published and the world takes notice and attempts to replicate your result. When they do it is time to recognize we need a richer description. Theorists may have constructions that immediately work or there may be nothing for years.  You have learned something about Nature at a more fundamental level than anyone else.  It can be an electric moment - the profound discoveries in science are not "aha!" moments, but rather usually begin with "that's odd..."

 

Imagine the discoveries you would make if your measurement tool had been a black and white camera and you suddenly were able to see the world in color.

 

This is why  improved tools that allow you to measure Nature in previously unexplored areas and at better accuracy are important.  Our senses, which turn out to be much more powerful than those of most animals, turn out to have dramatic limits.  Hearing only gives access to a tiny portion of the world of acoustic sound, our vision only explores a tiny section of the electromagnetic spectrum 

 

But the old equation still works for any measurement less accurate than yours and it still may be very useful to people.  You may only be thinking at the leading edge preferring the delightful ignorance you have just uncovered, but most of the rest of the world may be built on the earlier theory.  

 

Many of us build models of one type or another.  It is centrally important to construct an appropriate model.  It may be simple or complex, but it should be appropriate.  There are times when what you are interested in may be too difficult to measure, but a simple model may allow you to easily set an upper and/or lower limit that gives you insight.  And you have to avoid bias and not wed yourself to a model or the conclusion that an inappropriate model or calculation might give.¹  Unless you are doing math it is critical to remember that the sweet little notation that Mr Recorde gave us may only give an approximation and you really need to calculate a confidence level to make your result strictly accurate.

 

Our models usually don't need to be perfect, but they are an important mechanism to find answers and sometimes a bit of insight.  But remember that a they are never perfect representations and learn where they break down.  So much of what we do is really grey rather than black and white.

 

A Danish friend who happens to be a great Lego fan pointed out this fascinating Marvin Minsky interview where he speculates that mechanical engineers who grew up with legos may be more limited than those who grew up with Tinker Toys. 

 

But Minsky's point is valid even if he said it in jest.  Some models provide a richer insight into how the world works than others.  Playing with a diverse set of models can be enormously important.

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¹ Biases are very common.  Recently there was a lot of speculation on the cause for a decrease in miles driven in the US.  Many suggested it was caused by a change in how people between the ages of 18 and 30 relate to cars.  It turns out a more careful analysis shows this is only a small component, but so many people wanted to believe that youth are falling out of love with the automobile that they seized upon it.  In science there have been dramatic examples like the cold fusion debacle.  People wanted to believe it - so they did for awhile.  Some still cling to the belief more than twenty years later.

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The photo is an Instagram photo by silverstar22b

ignorance and thrivable science

OK - Jean is sitting up now...

 

A few people have asked questions and commented about the notion of ignorance so I'll continue to explain ignorance as cultivated by scientists.

 

The popular form of ignorance suggests a state of being uninformed.  But I'm talking about something that is deeply honest.  A recognition that you really don't know something.  If it is an area you are curious about you can begin to explore.  Is it worthwhile? Do you have a sense it is something that can be explored, how connected is it to other lines of exploration?

 

The process of learning more and exploring is a sharpening of the ignorance. The process of this curiosity driven ignorance is very dynamic whereas the standard form of ignorance tends to be static and dogmatic.   Using the old black cat in a pitch block room that scientists like to use, there are a lot of these rooms - some are empty, some have black cats and some have black non-cats that we might imagine as well as those we may not.   There are some ideas that seem great, but after years of pursuing them carefully you may not find anything, but you have learned something and perhaps can find some other entrances to ponder.

 

This is very different from the public perception of science which favors the great discoveries.  This makes science seem to be a deliberate and reliable method for learning new facts and even getting things done -  Just to this research and you will get a new battery for an electric car.  All you need is a pile of money and a group of scientists.

 

That can work for developing existing ideas.  Frequently the problems are so constrained that you can be fairly certain solutions exist and a scientific approach just works.  This is more of an applied science or perhaps engineering research.  It is the sort of thing that allows people who know the field well to predict slices of the future.  Most industrial labs live in this space. A few, like the old Bell Telephone Laboratories and parts of IBM's Watson Labs, actually did real science.  They, at least pieces of them, focused on what wasn't known.  They relied on the cultivated ignorance of some very talented people and changed the world.

 

As an example I was part of an applied group that had a very good idea of where digital music might be going.  We weren't in a position to predict winners and losers, but it was easy to project that five years out X would be possible and 10 years out Y would.  And we did something very similar for location based services.  Not that any of this was useful to our employer.  It also wasn't science. (scientists can be very good at engineering research)

 

Prediction can be an excellent mechanism for cataloging ignorance.  If you sit a scientist down and ask them to predict what might be in their field ten or fifteen years out, you will get some educated conjectures.  It is really a list of ignorance she has identified as ripe for cultivation and perhaps she is even beginning to sharpen it.  Really good scientific projections are very rare and probably no more than statistic flukes.  But cataloging ignorance is useful as it can illuminate potential pathways and asking your scientist friend what may happen is a good way to engage them in what is, for them, a very exciting process.

 

Cultivated ignorance is terribly exciting. Science is not a terribly easy sport, but this drives scientists to do it.   Admitting ignorance and moving on it is the point at which the questions sharpen and become more real.  It is the start of the journey and the end of the journey, like a great road trip, is not the point.  At some point there may be a discovery, measurement or non-discovery (which, as we mentioned, can be extremely important!), but that is not the goal of science.  What happens along the path is the creation of new questions.  Questions that weren't accessible and perhaps not even possible to express before and you realize the game is still afoot.

 

All of this is self-sustaining and quite thrilling.

 

 It is, I think, a manifestation of what my buddy Jean Russell would call thrivable. 

 

Along the way you've probably wondered why I haven't mentioned hypotheses - after all, don't scientists observe or theorize, make a clever hypothesis and then test it?  

 

I'm not terribly fond of that model. For one thing the real process is much more messy than that simple model.  Another is a hypothesis can be far too limiting.  People tend to come to believe them and not be as skeptical and curious as they should be - at least when you are working in new areas. Too much belief in a potential outcome can often lead you astray or not be sufficiently careful with your experimental procedure.  But there is a place where hypotheses develop more formally and you have to deal with them.

 

Scientists rate the quality of their ignorance as well as their findings.  You measure and report a statistically sound confidence level (scientists tend to understand statistics deeply).  This can get in the way of conveying science to the public as nothing is really black and white - finding can be proven wrong by experiment if that is the way Nature really works.  There is always a chance you haven't measured carefully enough - that something is wrong with your technique or that some other signal is present.  

 

 It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. - Richard Feynman

 

The public expects black and white pronouncements and this breakdown was exploited by the tobacco industry in the 80s and 90s and have been exploited by the fossil fuel industry for more than a decade.  A few weeks ago someone asked me about the consequences of a scientifically literate vs illiterate public and these are beautiful manifestations of some of the issues.¹

 

If you know a scientist and want to really learn more about what they might be doing, the wrong question to ask is "what do you do?"  Some friends have asked me this and I'm sure most come up with the conclusion that I have no discipline and can't describe something that simple.  The right question is "what are you trying to find out?", "what would you really like to know?", "where are you stuck?", "what is unknowable these days?", "is there any progress in how well you can measure something?", "what would be really exciting to work on, but the technology isn't quite there yet?", "tell me about some new questions you would like to ask of Nature that have come to you in the last six months..."  

 

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to explain energy and power at a layman's level and haven't been terribly successful. On the other hand, when confronted with questions - the sort of questions I can't answer, people around me tell me I can be animated and perhaps even a bit interesting.  The level of the material changes from Russian doll science 101 explanations where you keep having to define and explain one set of things to cleanly explain another, to something crisper and much more respectful of your attention and mind.  I'm still hunting for some clear ways to do this and think they are out there, but I need to be more clever.

 

And that is an interesting point - information is being generated at a fantastic rate.  There is no way to keep up with it and that makes any field you aren't a specialist in seem inaccessible.  It reduces experts to high priests in lab coats who speak in a confusing tongue.  It renders science intimidating.

 

Scientists don't really worry about the information explosion at a core level of their curiosity.  Sure they may as necessary part of something they are working on - just ask an experimental particle physicist about his trigger logic or someone sequencing DNA about their data handling issues.  The important task is not information driven, although that is part of the process at some level.  What is important is being curious and able to recognize and cultivate your honest ignorance.  

 

The scientist deals with the explosion of information by realizing ignorance is growing at a much greater rate and this is a good thing.  You can pick a bite-sized piece off and jump in!

 

Dealing with ignorance is something scientists are great at.  Science can thrive - the information explosion is something of a red herring here. Science makes the Universe more accessible and, hopefully, science itself can be more accessible to the public.

 

The black cat and pitch black room metaphor may not be the best.  A great professor of mine explained cultivated ignorance in terms of surfing (this was in Southern California, so do as the natives).  First click here to set the mood with a bit of background music - I loved these guys when I lived there and recommend the electronic version of Pipeline

 

Imagine surfing this big frothy wave.  As you act on your cultivated ignorance (he used the phrase targeted ignorance) you keep moving along and you begin to realize there are other waves that you never noticed before that you can move along to that will take you even farther.  Making it to the beach becomes just silly as you realize you can go forever.

 

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¹ As something is verified and re-verified with increasingly accuratue experiments its  confidence level increases it takes on a more solid nature - perhaps this is moving towards an honest and generally accepted hypothesis. Proving it wrong means you have to be increasingly careful when you do your experiment.  The speed of light, the core notion of evolution, and basic quantum mechanics have very high levels of confidence attached to them.  It makes sense to keep testing them as techniques improve, but it is unlikely that you'll prove them wrong (still it would be thrilling!)  

It is usually the case that science usually builds on itself rather than going through true revolutions.  Newtonian physics breaks down in certain areas - the very small and the very fast for example.  In these regimes quantum mechanics and special relativity are better descriptions of Nature, but they are no better than Newtonian physics at describing much of the world we live in.  We can say with some confidence that the simple Newtonian physics that describes the mechanics of a car will not change.  Relativity and Quantum Mechanics both reduce to Newtonian physics as speeds and sizes become closer to the physical world we feel and observe with our naked senses.

 

from watches to red:white muscle ratios - and a rapidly evolving technology

While reading a recent issue of Science I came across a short article on the metabolic mechanisms invoked during judo.  Now I know nothing about judo, but a fair about about metabolism and that sparked a need to for a short post.  Not one centered on sport or metabolism, but rather it makes sense to move back to my human-computer interface department at AT&T Research in the mid 90s and something completely different...

 

Among other things we were charged with looking at user behavior and began to notice that as people became more comfortable with mobile phones they were beginning to use the watch that came on some of them in place of a watch.  The trend seemed to be larger among groups of young users, but nothing for Swatch to worry about at the time.  

 

We did a bit of work with Swatch - they were convinced the technology trend was more towards a focus on the watch and were busy trying to concoct ways to move some of your personal information to your wrist.  The concept that the phone was the important target was lost on them and those of us who were working along the phone line did not - or at least I did not - have an extremely strong conviction one way or the other.

 

About the same time some of the folks in the lab started working on combining digital cameras and mobile phones. The early attempts were incredibly crude to the point of being unusable and the dog and pony shows would produce a lot of abrasive comments.  But there was a certain amount of magic in it.  

 

A few of us had become fascinated by digital music devices and serious work informed us that quality - at least as measured by the standard measurements found in audio magazines - didn't matter very much.  People were more interested in convenience.  Terrible quality was shunned, but as it increased there was a point ..  around 96 kbps mp3 - where the objections went away.  People might be able to tell, but they didn't care.  Furthermore, when they were isolated from comparisons to a reference, they could put up with cheap reproduction hardware including very cheap headphones.  It was something of an epiphany to me.

 

At the same time we were seeing the same thing with video and video conferencing.  Just make it work and get it to a minimum acceptable level and the vast majority of people don't really care about quality.  This gives you a very different way to think about cameras - use Moore's law and a bit of optics from physics and you could convince yourself that cameras on cellphones would begin to make real sense around 2004 give or take a year or so.  

 

I was thinking a lot about photography at the time as two of us were deep in thought about how people interact with music and were inspired by Susan Sontag's essays in On Photography as a framework.  The real question for digital photography was convenience and cost was a major part of convenience followed by size.  The notion of taking an instant image at no cost and of being able to have a camera with you always was compelling.  It was easy to predict film was going to die and we did.  We also suggested the camera would become part of the phone as an always present ability to capture images was highly desirable.  It was then that I started to see the mobile phone as a small box that could be filled with sensors and that these sensors had a connection, albeit an imperfect one, with the external world.  We got excited about what it meant to attach a real computer and have it disappear into that box.  It all seemed so obvious (Steve, Nancy, and Wayzen are all nodding now).  We did something called Air Graffiti around 1999 to 2001 with bits that would still seem interesting today.  All you needed was something like an iPhone to make it work.

 

I've been thinking about other sensors recently - the urge comes every few years.  The most recent thinking came with noticing the new third generation iPad has BlueTooth 4.  BlueTooth is pretty ugly as a protocol (or pile of protocols), but it works and volumes are high enough to render it approximately free and ubiquitous.  BT4 has some lightweight features that seem tailor-made for talking to external devices that may have a sensor or two, but have very tight power requirements.  You look at the world and begin to imagine what a home with a few hundred - or thousand -  sensors might look like.

 

An obvious use is making measurements of what your body is doing.  Smart shirts and so on start to become very inexpensive.  Up to now a considerable engineering design effort was required to make a system work - you had to source and program a very small computer, worry about communications and do a hundred other tasks that drive the costs high enough to prevent enough volume for them to be affordable.  A lightweight radio link and remote processing and display would vastly decrease costs.  That would only decrease the costs of the tiny computers and radios used by the sensors. They would probably all be integrated into a single chip that could be produced for pennies - plug in an antenna, battery and a sensor or two and you're all ready to go.

 

This, and a few other things, has me thinking more about the science of sport as that is a leading edge for this sort of device (arguably so is the medical world, but that has some strong legal restrictions and I don't know that many medical researchers.

 

Anyway the trigger for writing this was a fascinating paper on metabolism in Judo.  The muscles turn energy into motion using two (three depending on how you count) basic mechanisms - anaerobic and aerobic metabolism.

 

We use two basic forms of anaerobic (without oxygen) metabolic systems - alactic and latic.²   The first is for short intense bursts of exertion using energy stored energy compounds known as phophagens that are present inside the muscle.  Terrific amounts of power can be generated.  World class sprinters like Usain Bolt develop power in the vicinity of 2.5 to 3 kilowatts for about ten seconds - impressive when you consider the electric burner on an electric range uses about 1.5 kilowatts.  For the runners about 80% of that energy is turned into waste heat, which causes their internal body temperatures to soar.  Anything much over fifteen seconds at that level can be fatal, but they have exhausted their store in that period. The second allows muscles to break down sugars anaerobically and is good for a few minutes, but at power levels well under those unleashed by alactic metabolism.

 

Longer term muscle use requires externally supplied oxygen - aerobic metabolism - which basically works as long as there is oxygenated flowing blood and  energy being converted by breaking down food or stored fat.  A world class runner or bike racer can probably manage 350 watts of output indefinitely.   Think of invoking them as shifting gears.  You can get a sense of the power available in this post.

 

There are several muscle types, but they are often categorized at a high level as white and red muscle.¹  Red muscle is optimized towards aerobic metabolism and is best for long duration use.  White muscle excels at getting its power from anaerobic metabolism and is useful when bursts of power are required. People have different muscle compositions based on their genetics.  Sprinters tend to have large percentages of white muscle - up to 70% -allowing them to convert a lot of energy into motion for a short period.  Endurance runners and cyclists can convert a more modest amount of energy over extended periods and have as much of 80% red muscle.  Most of us have about half and half, but most marathon runners are usually at least 60% red muscle.  Even very athletic average people can have serous problems with endurance work and marathoners are notoriously bad at jumping. 

 

Judo is interesting as it is an unpredictable sport with differing output demands. 

 

The judo work informed us that all three metabolism types are important.  Phosphagen metabolism was critical in throwing people and the other class of anaerobic metabolism came into play, but aerobic metabolism was much more important than suspected. Probably enough that conditioning for the sport probably deserves a more critical look.

 

This caught my eye as I've been worried about the energetics of volleyball; another unpredictable sport which is a combination of moving around the court in longish bursts with brief moments of extreme output.  Indoor volleyball, the the elite level, tends to specialize and some extremely good jumpers emerge, but the beach game is too much of a generalists game.  Height is important in both, but tall extremely good jumpers are rare as most people - including tall people - tend to have a 50-50 red:white muscle ratio.  It is spectacular when it occurs, but they tend not to have a lot of endurance.

 

Learning about how the body works in sport means asking questions demands measurement and that may provide novel techniques that are useful in many other areas - perhaps sorting out interesting sensors that naturally pair with smartphones and may be useful far outside of sport.  Spinoff happens all the time - just another form of connecting the dots.

 

Predicting many of the big trends in technology a decade out is certainly possible and it is much more likely among those who are engaged in serious play and connecting with areas beyond technology.  Smartphones were very obvious 10 years out when you started to think more about how people relate to music and photography.   Getting the specifics is probably impossible.  At the same time it is possible to rule out many other technologies.  You need multidisciplinary teams with multidisciplinary - and really curious - people.

 

Oh - and on watches - in 1997 we wrote a paper that the watch industry would have serious problems, but the high end would probably do well as watches are also a form of jewelry and that serves an important function for many people.³  We suggested watches could also house sensors that would talk to small computers housed elsewhere - like in a mobile phone - using very short range radio links.  One of us even developed an unusual pointing device that listened for the acoustic signals caused by rubbing fingers together.  The convenient place to locate it was in a ring.  While it was impractical at the time it was formed the seed of a line of extremely rich inquiry.

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¹ Also fast and slow twitch muscle.  A general comment.  At elite levels genetics and body type are important components of winning, but at lower levels it makes sense to go with your passion.  I see parents moving kids into sports that may be optimal for their genetics when they are nine or ten years old ..  completely silly.  For most of us sport should be recreation and a pathway to lifelong fitness.

² Alactic metabolism is also known as the ATP-PC phosphagen system - a very beautiful piece of biochemistry that is well beyond the time I have to write.  If you haven't been exposed to it I encourage you to read about it.  The other lactic metabolism is as known as anaerobic glycoloysis.  Glucose and glycogen are used anaerobically and one of the by-products is lactic acid, hence the name.  Duration is in the 200 second range at power levels significantly below phosphagen metabolism.  This mechanism is very important in 400 meter to mile long foot races.  

Here is a nice little video from the School of Physical Education and Sport University of Sao Paulo showing how some of these things are measured in sport.

³ Pocket watches are now being embraced by leading edge 20 somethings, although it is too early to identify a real trend.

 

probing ignorance a bit more deeply...

I'm not happy with the way science is usually taught in secondary school.  It is rendered boring - memorize a number of "facts" and either replay them on a test or use some recalled formulae to plug in a few numbers to find an answer.  It completely misses the fun of science and also something rather fundamental about how new knowledge is found and why, at least to a scientist, answers and fact aren't the real product - even though they may be useful and advance knowledge.  It also creates a view of science that has opened a divide between scientists and non-scientists - something that in a society that depends so much on science and technology is a serious disconnect and perhaps a danger.

 

As it happens a beautifully cultivated ignorance and questions is more fundamental to the forward motion of science. I suspect applying some of the techniques may be very important to other fields where "out of the box" creative thinking is required and I sometimes rely on it in my consulting practice. The recent post on ignorance brought some email reaction, so it makes sense to wade in a bit deeper..

 

The general notion of what a scientist does is to collect data (information is a better term) by observing and manipulating bits of the natural world by doing something called experiment.  There is a methodology - the scientific method - which is based on observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation , a new hypothesis and so on...  There is a sense of order, but that turns out to be far from the truth.  You experiment to learn something - ideally to discover something.

 

Discover, dis - cover, is the act of revealing.  What is revealed can be very beautiful and it often becomes a "fact" in text books and teaching, but what many consider the end product of science are known to be unreliable to the scientist.  Nothing is safe - nothing is above question.  Not even something like the absolute speed limit of the speed of light.¹  Scientists don't know things absolutely, but rather report how well it is known.  Newtonian mechanics turn out to be incorrect - but at the scale where humans live and observe everyday things it is more than accurate enough that we still routinely use it as a "good enough" descriptive model.  We know where it begins to fall apart and have made other discoveries to more accurately describe those areas - special and general relativity for example.  

 

In the 19th century it was believed the universe was permeated with with a luminiferous ether to allow a substance through which light could propagate.  It was the wrong path and, in 1907, Albert Michelson became the first American physicist to be splashed with the Swedish holy water for failing to observe the ether in his extremely clever measurements of the speed of light. 

 

Think about it for awhile - Michelson got the Nobel Prize for an experiment that didn't work.

 

Some would later describe the ether as the black cat physicists had been theorizing about, experimenting and trying to measure in a pitch black room for decade.  Literally hundreds of approaches and many many scientist years of effort.  Michelson somehow found the light switch and it became clear the ether didn't exist to a rather high degree of accuracy.  The confusion that resulted led to an entirely new line of questioning - several doors to new rooms, all pitch black with their own black cats, appeared with the light provided by Michelson.  A patent clerk who went by the name of Albert was pushed to a line of novel questions that gave us a fundamentally new understanding of the universe.  And even better he opened the way for many rich new questions - questions that were beyond our imagination until we saw a bit of the nature of his black cat.  

 

Sure we had learned something, but  it gave us a new appreciation for how much more ignorant of the universe we really were.  

 

We keep discovering and adding to this area we call knowledge and people often make practical use of these discoveries, but the meaningful product of science is not facts or knowledge, but rather the expansion of an informed and cultivated ignorance.²  

 

One of my mathematical heroes is Kurt Gödel.  Mathematicians had a sense that everything - at least everything in mathematics - was comprehensible and could be explained with math itself.  Gottfried Leibniz, one of the inventors of the calculus, tried to construct an alphabet of human thoughts that would allow you to take combinations of thoughts and form any idea just as letters can make words and words can make sentences.  A few hundred years later David Hilbert made an attempt to similarly code knowledge. 

 

The impressive achievement of Gödel was to show that all of this was impossible.  Gödel was a shy and quirky person - hardly anyone's candidate for a revolutionary - but he is incompleteness theorems rocked mathematics and physics.  I can't give a rich general level discussion of what he did, but at its core he showed an consistent system in math (like the whole numbers and the operations - like addition, multiplication and so on) can't be complete and consistent.³ This may seem to be a depressing notion - finding a fundamental limit in mathematics, but rather it opened an incredibly rich source of new questions to Gödel and others.  It is fair to say that unknowability and incompleteness led to questions, reasoning and discoveries that have impressively benefited computer science - and to think that computer science is fundamentally based on absolute and complete logic:-)

 

This ignorance - the recognition that we really don't know something as deeply as we thought we did - is a fundamental driver of science.    The problem of the unknoweable isn't a real obstacle, but is really just a serious of paths to deeper understanding.  Also, to a scientist, the explosion of information isn't terribly important either - at least not at a fundamental level.  The rich sources of discovery are more dependent on new questions that arise from cultivated ignorance.  Questions are the goal of science - it just happens to generate results (with attached confidence levels!) that have historically advanced civilization and cultivated ignorance is a necessary component of making the process move.  

 

It is ignorance rather than data that moves science along.

 

A very import and somewhat subtle point of doing science is that scientists use ignorance to work and the management of this ignorance is incredibly important.  Sometimes it is called the taste in picking and progressing with problems.  It is often chaotic with communication and collaboration often being extremely important.  At the leading edge it is often cross disciplinary.  I have a tendency to not be able to describe exactly what I do.  This is really common among scientists and the area they are currently working in is often shifting dynamically.  It is messy and may even seem inefficient, but it is a proven path to real discovery.

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¹ Which is why the recent neutrino experiment got so much attention.  People have been testing the limit for over a century and so far all of the results that suggest it can be violated, including the most recent, have turned out to be so flawed as to be invalid.  A good deal of pseudo-science is based on experimental "results" that are incorrect - they are often trivial, but sold to non-scientists as something absolute.

² The time gap between discovery and practical use can be very long.  Faraday thought his early work with electricity and magnetism would have no practical use. A practical use for general relativity seemed a crazy notion for fifty years, but it turns out to be a critical component of making the global positioning system work as accurately as it does.

³ Consistency is the characteristic that a system's rules will not  result in self contradictory statements.  Think of science fiction as a rich source of counter examples - when Captain Kirk defeats machine logic with simple logic puzzles.  Take a card and write "the other side of this card is true" on one side and "the statement on the other side of this card is false" and think about it for awhile:-)

At least two readers of this blog are mathematicians and my appologizes for the very rough high-level treatment of something that is very rich and deep.  If you are a student just study the work!  If you aren't technical I strongly recommend Rebecca Goldstein's book on the subject.

 

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Maple pecan pie - really good with vanilla ice cream or gelato!

 

Ingredients

° 1 unbaked pie shell

° 215 grams/2 cups pecans (coarsely chopped)

° 55 grams/¼ cup dark brown sugar

° 25 grams/¼ cup tapioca starch

° 4.5 grams/ ¾ teaspoon kosher salt

° 240 grams/1 cup grade B maple syrup. Grade A or "fancy" may not be strong enough

° 60 grams/¼ cup heavy cream

° 4 grams/1 teaspoon vanilla

° 2 large eggs

 

Technique

° Preheat the oven to 425°F

° Place the chopped pecans in the unbaked pie shell. Whisk together the sugar, tapioca starch and salt in a medium sized bowl. Whisk in the maple syrup, cream and vanilla. Whisk in the eggs. Pour over the pecans.

°  Bake for 20 minutes and then turn the heat down to 350°F without opening the oven. Bake for an additional 30 minutes. Let pie cool at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving.

 

 

homeward bound

 

Homeward bound 
I wish I was 
Homeward bound 
Home, where my thought's escaping 
Home, where my music's playing 
Home, where my love lies waiting 
Silently for me 

....

 

Home is one of those loaded words that brings to mind a certain image for many even though it has a much broader meaning.¹

 

Pip, Dave and others in that team have been using it to talk about an important aspect of how companies can deal with customers ...  sort of a peace of mind that is quite different from low prices, product selection and so on.    I'm probably not using the concept in exactly the same way, but hearing about it from them recently caused me to reflect on some organizations that are good at it.  I suspect it is something best accomplished face to face and may be a powerful tool for brick and mortar stores as online ordering becomes more prevalent.  There may be some interesting ways of addressing it online too.

 

There are a lot of examples where it breaks too...  shopping suggestions based on prior searches and visits annoy me to no end.  It reminds me of Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" - a hypothesis that as robots begin to look and act like humans there is a point where we sense they are imperfect copies and that grates on us.  Inferior models are preferable.  Pixar is very aware of this effect and are careful to stray into the region as they found rather dramatically in the animation Tin Toy about twenty years ago and other works have been burned - famously Polar Express.  I suspect a huge amount of social understanding and much more sophisticated techniques will be required to make interacting with these online ads less negative to many of us.  

 

Many of you think about this more deeply than I do and I'd love to hear your experiences and insight.  To start things off I put together a short list of a few recent experiences in brick and mortar stores and something a bit more personal to illustrate a positive sense of being understood and cared for even though the interactions were with strangers for very short amounts of time.  In all three cases there is a very careful selection of staff along with a considerable amount of training.  The experiences were all powerful and left with with a strong images of a company that is doing something right.

 

Lululemon

About a month ago and friend and I were in Manhattan trying to understand a bit more about street fashion and its possible future directions given new technologies and rich online social networking.  Our base camp was the Lincoln Center area as Fashion Week was underway and the street fashionistras were curious about the shows as well as showing off what they had done and watching others - it was something of a sartorial scene.  Out of curiosity we found ourselves in a Lululemon across the street.  

 

Last week I was taking a gelato gelato break from some street fashion interviews with J across from Lincoln Center.  On the way back we walked by a Lululemon Athletica store.  She made the comment that she hadn't been in one, but some of the women she knew in the US who did yoga were passionate about the place and were regularly dressed in their togs.  So we went in… as two tourists…

J happens to look like a model, and also happens to be in great physical shape (she runs an hour a day and bicycles everywhere).  She tried yoga, but finds it frustrating and gave it up.  I happen to not look like a model.  I tried yoga a decade ago and quickly gave it up as I just couldn't get my mind and body to couple with the experience.  Both of us recognize it has a passionate fandom, but we're not part of it so we were visitors from a foreign land.

As she looked through the clothing a salesperson approached and asked if she was here for fashion week, where she was from etc.  Then came a few yoga questions with J noting that she didn't have much luck with it and considered herself a more kinetic personality.  The salesperson (very personable) noted a lot of people have issues like that and finding the right trainer can be a deal breaker - she said she could recommend several who specialized in working with people who were left with a distaste.

J then introduced me noting she rarely visits the city, but that I have similar issues. The salesperson asked a few questions and said she could link me with trainers who specialize in working with men and there were a few in my area of New Jersey.  Up to this point there was no sales pitch to J.  She consulted a sheet and wrote down some phone numbers for me.  

In the meantime J was looking at clothes and was told she would probably be too difficult to fit as she is very tall and thin.  She asked another woman who came over and said J could try on a top, but it probably wouldn't fit.  She knew of someone in the city who had a specialized business making custom athletic clothing for women.  She Googled on her iPhone and sent J the contact information.  

Our ten minute visit left us with a warm feeling that an effort had been made for both of us when a sale was impossible.  The feeling was a yoga lifestyle was being sold - the clothing was incidental.  J liked the styling and quality of the clothing, but felt it was overpriced - but she added:  "this isn't really a clothing store, is it?"  

They clearly wanted to make sure we both had had a proper trainer before abandoning us to a yoga-free life.  The fact that I was male and would never use their products didn't seem to make much of a difference.  I've seen similar behavior at Apple Stores.  A key point is these people really aren't salespeople (I shouldn't have used that term), but provide service instead and have a high degree of integrity.  I've seen that time and time again at Apple Stores, Trader Joe's and suspect it is true here.  

As we walked out we went past the Manhattan Mormon Temple …  an interesting juxtaposition …

 

Apple

 Apple Stores are almost always too busy, but somehow the sales guys manage to find you without being too intrusive.  You are encouraged to play with the products and the atmosphere is such that other customers often offer their own comments and suggestions.  The only pressure I've ever felt wasn't that great - mainly being encouraged to purchase AppleCare when I buy a computer.

 

The sales people do not work on commission and can route you to others if you have very specific questions.  Trouble shooting of existing product is done at the "genius bar" and the stores offer one-on-one training.  I've been visiting the stores since the first opened in New Jersey and note how much they've changed as the company learns more about retail and its customer mix changes.  There is a nearly constant experimentation and the overall quality of experience is kept high throughout.

 

The ability to help people with various skill levels use their computers is remarkable.  They have a few classes, but increasingly they offer one on one training using a full or part time employee who is expert at teaching and a few applications.  A friend spent $99 for this service and spent about 20 hours learning fine points of a serious video editing program taking him much futher along than he was able to get using books on the subject.  A user group meeting even meets in this Apple Store (in Manhattan on West 14^th St - sort of ground zero for that sort of thing)

 

I was interested in how a new AirPlay enabled amplified speaker might be sold.²  The speaker is the product of a medium to high end European audio company and it is one of their first excursions into the larger consumer market.  I approached clerks at several Apple Stores and was routed to their audio expert.  All of them gave the right advice for me - that this amplified speaker wasn't going to make me happy and I could put something together on my own for much less and almost no effort.  Three of them made lists of what to buy elsewhere.  How novel - get the maximum value out of what you own rather than buy something expensive - even though the item I originallly asked about is sold by the Apple Store.

 

Trader Joe's

I suspect many of you have shopped at Trader Joe's.  It may or may not be to your taste, but it caters to people who like a curated selection of a certain class of food.  We're often struck how much we identify with other customers as well as the clerks.

 

Channeling Barry Schwartz and Steve Jobs, they limit product selection to make the experience easier.  They cheerfully refund the inevitable disaster purchase, allow you to taste products in the store, offer advice and, most important - they watch and listen.

 

Information is gathered from employees and customers and is frequently acted on.  A friend worked in one for a few years and noted several customers wanted their particular store to open an hour earlier.  The store put it to a customer vote, found there was general support and that particular store now opens at 6am.  I suspect their information gathering system is much more powerful than massive data mining attempts by others...  Knowing your business and customers well enough to listen makes a huge difference.

 

personal chef

I've had a personal chef cook for me a few times as a present.  G. is the brother of a close friend and is amazingly talented.  More important is the fact that he listens and tries to come up with an experience involving fresh food, your own tastes, and his experience and inventiveness.  He loves to give surprises and walk you in directions you have never been.

 

I can only decribe him as passionate.  The experience starts with a trip to a farmer's market earlier in the day with you picking up things you like and letting you sample other items that might work out well.  There is a conversation about food and he's building models of what might work in his mind as the trip progresses - it is clear he never uses recipes.

 

The cooking experience, at least for me, involves me helping out as I want to learn technique and he's a great teacher.  To this day we still have email conversations about interesting things to do about food and he almost makes me feel welcome even though many of my ideas are probably naïve.  

 

His goal is not to cook a spectacular meal, but rather to spark a passion for food and cooking in me.  To this end he's also interested in learning what I can offer - sort of the physics of cooking and some of the chemistry involved.  This is so much better than a restaurant experience - so much deeper and more personalized and it inspires me to cook for quite some time afterwards.

____

 

None of this  is rocket science, but rather the hiring of passionate workers along with clear policies of doing right by the customer.  In most cases the product being sold only enhances what the customer is really after and it is up to the organization to make that desired experience central rather than the product itself.  Only a few organizations manage to pull that off.  

 

It may be helpful to have additional information available, but only if it enhances the ultimate goal.  And most remarkably it makes a lot of sense to recommend services and products that the company does not offer if it makes the most sense.  

 

One can imagine that happen as a community based experience online as well as in hybrid online/brick and mortar mixed model. Some - like street fashion - are probably best done by the mixture.  

 

I suspect getting this right takes a lot of common sense as well as the experimentation and honing that Apple and Trader Joe's are constantly performing.  You need passionate employees and a structure that gives them a bit of freedom and treat them fairly.  Your best employees may come from the pool of your most enthusiastic customers.  Commissioned sales probably poison the process as the optimization shifts from the customer to the employee.

 

Most of all drawing up this list makes me reflect on my own practice.  Am I bringing the appropriate passion to what I do and am I finding what my client is really after rather than what I - or they - may think on the surface?  My greatest value is probably helping people connect the dots where they didn't see connections before ...  other things may not matter as much to either of us.

 

So what are your favorite companies and what makes them special?  What about your passions - are they well supported?  Feel free to add your comments!

_________

ok - I mentioned cooking, so it is time for another recipe. This is my chocolate chip cookie recipe.  It is decidedly not healthy, so don't make it all the time.  It is simple, but a bit strange and has a long resting time in the refrigerator before baking.  Not exactly the Toll House recipe.  Although I don't really measure in cooking, I use a scale for everything in baking.  If you bake a lot you need to get a good scale accurate to the gram!

This one came out of the realization that all purpose flour is a compromise, so I use a mixture of bread and cake flour.  The cookies need to be large to take advantage of this mixture and it produces a soft and moist interior with an exterior with a nice crunch.  Make sure your ingredients are fresh!  I am a big fan of King Arthur flours.  Also - I am addicted to eating a bit of the raw cookie dough.  This isn't safe unless you use pasteurized eggs.

 

Monster Chocolate Chip Cookies 

ingredients

240g cake flour

240g bread flour

1.25 tsp baking powder 

1.25 tsp baking soda

1.5 tsp kosher salt

2.5 sticks butter (fresh and high quality!)

225g white sugar

285g light brown sugar

2 large eggs (pasteurized if you sample raw cookie dough like me)

2 tsp vanilla extract (I make my own with vanilla beans and rum and time for aging)

550g 60% to 70% bittersweet chocolate.  I like Lindt in the thin sheets and break them into bits about the size of a nickel

150g chopped pecans or walnuts 

small amount of large crystal sea salt (Maldon)

method

° sift dry ingredients into a bowl

° cream the butter and sugars in another mixing bowl until light and smooth - about 3 or 4 minutes on a medium speed with an electric mixer for me.  Add the eggs one at a time mixing well after each.  Add the vanilla.  Now add the dry ingredients and mix at low speed until just combined.  Don't overmix!!  About 10 seconds for me.  By hand carefully mix in the nuts and chocolate pieces.

° press the dough into a plastic wrap and tightly wrap into an airtight package.  Refrigerate for a day or so.  I usually go for a day to 36 hours.  There is a very slow chemical reaction going on and baking sooner won't produce the same result.

° preheat oven to 350°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper

° scoop some large mounds of the dough into golf ball sized globs (I have a four ounce round scoop).  Some of the chocolate chunks will stick up - push them flush.  I go for about six cookies for my sheet to give them room to expand - these are BIG DANGEROUS COOKIES.

° sprinkle each with a bit of Maldon salt and bake until golden brown.  About 20 minutes in my oven (which runs just a bit cool).

° the leftover dough will keep a few days if you want several days of warm monster cookies that are fresh.

Also - Sukie is allergic to chocolate and I make a version with dried fried and more nuts that is pretty good.  If you aren't using chocolate, skip the Maldon salt finishing step - salt pairs well with chocolate, but not dried sweet fruit.

 

 

 

___________

¹ In my Human Computer Interaction department we kept track of some of these and tried to avoid them when there could be a misunderstanding.  Community is another example.

The lyric sniplet is from Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound.  If you don't have a copy, you need one.

² Airplay allows to to wirelessly stream content from Macintoshes, iPads, iPhones and so on to any stereo system or TV in your house.  Content can be on any of the devices or from iCloud.  Properly executed it can add a good deal of flexibility to a home system.