omenti

freedom and trust plus the skepticism and curiosity

There was to be no mouse hat for me...

 

I later learned he was disappointed, but he didn't show it at the time.  When I was about 12 my father took me to Los Angeles.  He was getting two weeks of training and I was tagging along.  Friends and relatives were excited that I would see Hollywood, the beaches and - most important of all - Disneyland.  As it happened he went along with my agenda:  the Griffith Park Planetarium, JPL, Caltech, and Rocketdyne.

 

There seems to be a period - somewhere around the third to sixth grade - where a lot of kids seem to lose their natural interest in science, but a few manage to get hooked. Almost every scientist I know can trace their first real spark to this period.  A flame was ignited and somehow didn't manage to get blown out...  The same is probably true of other fields.  My sister is a successful artist and her passion in art began around this period too ...  But I will focus on what I know.

 

We're talking finding a passion and you have to wonder why and how those of us who are lucky manage given home life and many school systems.

 

Earlier today I was asked to write a paragraph or two about what got me interested in the first place as part of a survey for a magazine article on science education.  It struck me that a more interesting question might be "why did I not deviate once the interest started?"  I'll take a crack at that one here.

 

First a caveat.  I am not a good role model.  My education background is extremely narrow - a math and physics double major while managing to avoid much general education followed by a rather serious specialization in graduate school.¹  Only as an adult did I become multi-disciplinary.  That should happen much earlier, but we all make mistakes as we find our own paths.

 

My parents were the opposite of helicopter parents.  They were both struggling to bring in enough to support the four of us and there weren't many resources for lessons in this or that, let along supervised time slots that seem common today.  I was pretty free-range, but in a special way.  Let me explain...

 

I had sought out two mentors to help me learn things that weren't available in school.  I can't say I was a particularly exceptional student in grade school or junior high, but I was spending a lot of time observing the natural world and learning a bit of math, general science and physics from my mentors.  I knew some other geekish kids and we would conduct our own investigations. For what it is worth rocket motors were very interesting at the time.  There were some books that the library lady loaded onto the bookmobile  that provided enough information to get into trouble as well as more than a bit of challenge.  We made things from small transmitters and sensors for payloads to a little wind tunnel to test shapes with to real rocket motors.  I wanted to build a liquid fueled rocket, but that was way beyond my skill level, so I settled for a ZnS fueled motor.²  

 

The results were not pretty, but I learned a lot in the process and the house survived mostly intact.

 

My parents must have known that things were going on in my room and the basement.  Bad smells, potential explosions, real explosions, minor electrocutions, a lot of rf noise that often made radio and tv reception impossible and power overloads as I would be drawing more power than the circuit breaker could handle at times.  And then there was the rocket motor on the bicycle ...

 

I was allowed to be curious and skeptical at the same time. A strong religous tradition existed in the family, but it was not pushed on me - what I believed was my decision and I ignored the formal early morning religous instruction classes.  With my clumsy attempts at learning science I could experiment and learn on my own.  I needed to learn how to learn - most importantly how to ask questions.  I slowly began to realize that science had nothing to do with memorization of "facts" or even their discovery.  In addition to the time lost on a "normal" childhood there was a bit of danger associated with this and I'm sure they realized it - after all - there were a few little fires and I managed some nasty electrical burns.³

 

They never told me "no"....

 

I didn't have much money, but jobs always seemed to materialize when I was deeply into a project. Christmas and birthday requests must have seemed perplexing.  Some of the materials I needed weren't available to minors, but dad would always sign for them as the responsible adult.  After the 7^th grade I was allowed to manage my own time.  In theory there was a formal bedtime, but the night sky managed to seize my imagination.  They looked the other way when I'd show up at breakfast after having been up for much of the night with my little telescope or binoculars - or just wandering around in the dark playing with my night vision or night walking - and on school days.

 

Such an incredible gift from them - I was free and, even more important, I was trusted ...  perhaps against their better judgement.

 

Without this leap of faith in me on their part I probably would have not been able to sustain my interest.  Through my own play I was developing a passion.  I was learning how to cultivate my own ignorance, which is the most wonderful and powerful toolkit I have at my disposal.  It is still intact and I can happily report the expansion of my ignornace is still occurring at a fierce rate.  I even have ten functioning fingers and the burns and scars do fade after a few decades.

So thank you Mom and Dad!!

 

such an amazing gift 

 

I eventually did go to Disneyland and Disneyworld as an adult and in a professional role working with their social scientists, Imagineers and a few others who are adroit dot-connectors - including this most amazing engineer from CMU.⁴  There is some interesting depth, but it was beyond my imagination at the time.  I do have my mouse ears now - dad would be proud. 

 

Again I'm a really bad example, but I think there is a powerful message deep in here.  Giving kids some degree of freedom and trusting them is an incredibly powerful gift.  You may have no idea where it may lead, but that's exactly the point.

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¹ When I finally retire, I want to be around a really good liberal arts school where perhaps I can learn a bit and become a more rounded person.

² The beginning of the space race saw quite a bit of activity in this area among teenagers and the Army even had an office charged with education outreach.  Captain Bertrand Brinley wrote Rocket Manuel for Amateurs - I remember it well.  Several designs had been created by the Army specifically for teenagers at Fort Sill.  

I tried hunting for it and found a pdf version.  It is interesting looking at the fabrication skills assumed in teens - of course many kids built stuff back then.

There were more serious books that the military had placed in high school and public libraries around the country free of charge.  I remember that was one of the places I first encountered calculus and differential equations.  

This was very sexy stuff for a geekish kid. But a word of warning - don't do this at home!  You can burn down a house or worse.

³ I can tell the different between 120 and 240 VAC by touch  Not recommended, but if it happens enough, you manage to learn.

⁴ If you have never watched Randy's "Last Lecture", find an hour and a comfortable spot and just watch.  It is amazing and perhaps it will inspire you.

 

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I was going to get back into healthy recipes, but someone asked if I had a great pound cake recipe as they have a need this weekend.  Poundcakes are really simple with only a few ingredients, but there is some technique if you want a really good one.  The ingredients need to be *very* fresh.  Safe food next time, but for now ...

General Directions

° The ingredients need to be at room temperature as cold ingredients do not blend evenly.

° Butter is one of the primary flavors in the cake, so use good sweet butter with high butterfat content. I prefer cultured butter for an even better flavor, but you may have to do some hunting.  I can find it at Whole Foods, but warn it is spendy.

° Beat the butter well in a mixer- at least five minutes - and add the sugar slowly. Then beat some more. Constantly scrape the bowl so everything is consistant.

° Add the eggs one at a time. These are your major leavening agent, so you want to incorporate as much air as possible. I like to beat each egg for a full two minutes before adding the next one.

° Use cake flour - this isn't the place for mere AP.  Only use a fresh bag.

° When adding the flour, remove the bowl from the mixer and do it by hand.  Gently folding in the flour. Stop as soon as the flour is incorporated into the butter and egg mixture!

Ingredients

° 225g very fresh sweet butter or, better yet, cultured butter

° 225g white sugar

° 4 large eggs

° 250g cake flour (King Arthur is good) 

° 1 tsp high quality vanilla extract

° 1 tsp baking powder

° a pinch of salt

 

Technique

° Preheat oven to 350° with a rack roughly in the middle of the oven.  Butter a 9" x 5" pan.  

° Beat the butter at high speed as per instructions above until it is fluffy - about five minutes.  Slowly add sugar a bit at a time.  Add the first egg and beat 2 minutes, then repeat until all are incorporated scraping the bowl down along the way.  Add the vanilla.

° In a separate bowl whisk the dry ingredients.

° Remove the bowl from the mixer and gentle fold in the dry ingredients.

° Pour the mixture into the buttered pan and smooth the top.  Pop into the oven and take about 10 minutes until a crust just starts.  Now for an artistic touch remove the cake from the oven and use a buttered knife to draw a line down the middle of the top of the cake.

° Return the cake to the oven and bake until a toothpick comes clean - about 60 or 70 minutes for me.

° Cool the cake on a rack for about 10 minutes and then separate it allowing it to cool completely - or until you can't take it anymore.

 

 

 

colors of light

Today was one of those Spring days had managed to wander in from the Summer and I found myself a bit bored as I sat near a busy swimming pool in the heat, humidity and noise.  My mind wandered as I considered the wild motions of waves as they spread around the pool.  The surface of the water was an amazing complex surface - a basically two dimensional membrane moving up and down all over its surface as it occupied a bit of a third dimension in space and a forth if you count time.

 

I wondered what it would be like for an insect to be on that surface of the water - perhaps near the edge of the pool holding onto the side somehow.  Perhaps it would have a couple of feelers probing the water surface.  Now imagine what was making the surface of the pool jiggle so much.  Sally dog paddling in the deep end, the twins happily splashing each other with their hands,  George in a determined crawl as he did laps, and Kevin's rather nasty belly flop a second ago.  What would it take for our insect to visualize what was going on?  Could it reconstruct the locations of the events and a bit about them in real time as it felt the surface of the water jiggle back and forth with that terribly complex interaction?  What would its sensors have to do and what kind of computation would be required?  

 

As I considered this I was watching these events transpire with my own two small arrays of receptors - nerves that are sensitive to a different sort of wave.  These arrays - my retinas - are about 3 centimeters in diameter and are located on the backs of my eyes.  The light they detect is really a just electromagnetic radiation.  The space around me is filled with an incredibly complex jiggling field of electromagnetic waves.  Some pass through these two little black holes on the front of my eyes.  These pupils are probably only about two or three millimeters (maybe a tenth of an inch)  in diameter on this bright day as they allow bits of this mass of complex vibration to makes its way back to my retinas where they are converted into electrical signals that send information to my brain where an image representing the scene is formed in three dimensions and color.

 

This three dimensional space that we sit in is filled with electromagnetic waves that come in a wide range of sizes.  The AM radio wave that corresponds to a frequency of 650 kHz has a wavelength nearly half a kilometer long while some of the ultraviolet light that is threatening to penetrate my melting sunscreen has a wavelength of about three tenths of a micron.  These differ by more than a billion in wavelength and don't begin to describe the range of wavelengths found in this complex jiggling mess.  

 

Some of this electromagnetic field is absorbed as it strikes an object, some reflected, some is absorbed and then retransmitted.  I can see the scene from my vantage point and Sukie who is sitting about 90° to my right can see her own version with the waves that end up impacting my eyes passing cleanly through those that impact hers.  And without thinking we manage to assemble an image of what is taking place with only a short delay.  

 

the mind wobbles

 

It turns out our eyes are sensitive to only a tiny portion of what is really around us.  Our vision is extremely limited in its scope, but is still wonderful.¹  

 

We tend to label the different wavelengths with colors that correspond to them.  So 0.45 micron light might be called blue, 0.63 red .. When we break up sunlight with a prism we see a spectrum in seven bands of color - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet ...  

 

But it turns out color is really something done in our head that we assign. 

 

Take a red light and shine it onto a white piece of paper.  You see a red splotch.  Now shine a green light onto the paper so the two splotches partially overlap.  What your eye is picking up is electromagnetic radiation corresponding to two distinct wavelengths, yet where they overlap we see yellow even though there is no radiation with the wavelength of yellow.  

 

It turns out we have three types of color receptors in our retinas - the cones.  They come in three varieties each with its own response and cleverly labeled as s (short), m (medium) and l (long) cones.  They are not sensitive to narrow ranges of wavelength, but rather have sort of gaussian shaped response curves that overlap a bit.  Electric signals are produced by the cones and the rods (which are sensitive to non color specific brightness across the visible light range) that travel to the brain.  There colors are assembled. 

 

A color TV generally has three colors of pixels that produce a subset of the color range our eyes can perceive.  Some new TVs have a forth color - yellow - to produce a more accurate color range.  But to date all attempts have been approximations as some tough engineering compromises are made.  Some research indicates that five color tvs would be remarkably close to our color vision.  

 

We can rapidly get off into perception, what other animals can see (your dog sees a rather limited piece of a rainbow and other animals, even butterflies, leave us with what would seem like very poor color discrimination.

 

A recent Radiolab has an excellent feature exploring color.  I struggle with explaining it in an interesting and even exciting voice.  Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich do a masterful job connecting the dots - and finding an exciting story telling voice.  Robert, by the way, did one of the best commencement addresses I've ever heard and the best for science majors at Caltech in 2008.  (note: both of these Radiolab segments will fail on iOS devices - the Radiolab player is antiquated and requires Flash)

All of this has been a lead-up to something quite remarkable from Jad and Robert - a recent show on color that touches history, science, poetry and beyond. This is required listening. find something delicious to snack on and perhaps someone you love and listen - and I will listen again in the next few days.



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¹ Red light has a wavelength on the order of seven tenths of a micron and blue light, about four tenths. Radio waves tend to be fractions of a kilometer for AM broadcast radio, to about the width of your palm for the waves in your microwave oven.  Many of us have a bias to refer to visible electromagnetic radiation and perhaps bits that are close to it in size - infrared and near ultraviolet - as "light" ... when we really mean visible light.  

Also note there is a wave-particle duality for light that we're not mentioning in order to keep things simple.  Talking in terms of photons makes more sense for other aspects - but they are just two different views of the same thing.

Our understanding of nature has been dramatically altered as we learned how to probe it at wavelengths shorter and longer than those available to just our eyes.  The same is true to signals weaker than we can detect.  And in a way that went far beyond our imaginations.  Building new instruments to extend our vision has been a fundamentally important piece of science.

important point!

There is a subtle, but critically important point to make.  Receiver sophistication is extremely important when it comes to how much of the signal can be pulled out of this jiggling mess of waves.  When radio was first developed we had very primative receivers that weren't very sensitive (they required strong signals) or selective (signals close in frequency could confuse the receiver). Technologies rapidly improved through the 1920s, but then the concept of receiver design became somewhat fixed - at least in policy.

Since the late 20s receiver technology has greatly improved and slight modifications to policy have been made, but mostly receivers are considered to be primitive.  Now computers make so-called agile radios and some other exotic techniques possible that hugely expand the amount information density we can transmit into a volume and decode in a receiver.  The so-called spectrum shortage is not a physical limit, but rather only a policy limit!  It is very possible that your mobile device bill could be dramatically lower if we moved to some of these newer technologies and the concept of data caps would be just silly.

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And now the recipe for the day - very easy to make.  It is very important to use very fresh ingredients, but this is terrific on a hot Summer day.  Note that the eggs are not cooked - it just tastes much better than way.  You need to use pasteurized eggs for safety!!

Chocolate Chip Ice Cream  and just six ingredients!

Ingredients

° 2 large pasteurized eggs

° 3/4 cup white sugar

° 2 cups whipping cream

° 1 cup whole milk

° 2 tsp of a high quality vanilla extract (I make my own from vanilla beans and rum)

° 2 bars (100g each) of a good chocolate chopped into chunks.  I like a mixture of a roughly 60%  and a 80 or even 85% chocolate.  Some people like some or all milk chocolate.  I usually use Lindt or Scharffenberger.

 

Technique

° Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy - about 1 or 2 minutes depending on your style.  Then mix in the sugar a bit at a time and completely blend - another minute or so.

° Add the cream, milk and vanilla and continue to whisk until blended.

° Transfer to an ice cream maker and churn freeze to the manufacturer's instructions. Just before the ice cream sets (when the motor or your arm begin to labor depending on your ice cream maker), add the chopped chocolate and let it distribute.

° You can put it in a freezer to allow it to ripen - or, if you are like me, just be a barbarian and eat it directly.

 

 

 

connecting the dots with curiously ripe technologies

This will be a very short, but hopefully fascinating, post.  

 

People ask me about some of the more interesting projects I've worked on in the past ten years.  Some of them involve clever hacks and some of the more interesting involve position information - feel free to ask for details.  I've mentioned some like Air Graffiti and there are several others that I can talk about and some I can't.

 

What strikes me as interesting is there are types of practical questions that can be answered with brute force and cubic money and, at the same time, have very clever solutions that depend on a wee bit of coupled orthogonal thinking.  The later approach often depends on foundational technologies and science in which there are few short cuts, but benefits extend beyond the wildest dreams of the original implementors. Exactly where connecting-the-dots and having a lot of interests and the ability to dance with others who are very different from you come in handy.  I should add that it is really important to have a rich problem space and can also help a lot to be resource poor (money and people), but connection rich (several people with very different backgrounds and someone who can tie everything together).  Large well-funded projects with massive teams are rarely clever - large organizations that field cleverness tend to use very small working groups.

 

Rather than my rambling on,  take a look at this talk by Googler Michael Jones at the US Naval Institute and see if it doesn't leave you with some interesting questions and ideas   -  its popcorn time!

 

mean free paths - from pinafore to removing risk to custom design

It was a beautiful late Spring day and I found myself of singing a song from The Mikado as I strolled down West College past the Conservatory.  I'm not a good performer, but my rendition must have been recognizable as a chap walking next to me took the one of the other parts and we were doing a bit of harmony as our paths became a formation.  We stopped for the light, stopped and continued until we had finished.  I smiled and nodded.  He reciprocated, but then he started into the first song from  Pirates - We sail the ocean blue.  He had a strong voice and I followed him in whatever harmony I could muster.

 

We crossed the street and continued a block to the intersection next to the conservatory and more magic - two others joined and we continued walking until the song was over smiling broadly and nodding before we parted.

 

Oberlin, Ohio is a tiny town and we had all probably overshot our destinations as we sang together that day late in April 12 years ago.   It was a powerful manifestation of how serendipity - at least a certain type of serendipity - is possible when the mean free path between people with similar interests is small.

 

In physics mean free path roughly means the mean distance between objects that may collide - the mean free path between molecules in a very high pressure gas is less than that of one at a low pressure.  There is also a social mean free path and it is one of the reasons why cities, Silicon Valley, the restrooms and central atrium of Pixar, the old Bell Labs, and any number of other concentrations of talent are important.  Bring people within a few meters of each other and they interact.  Bring passionate and talented people within a few meters of each other and you may just get the unexpected.

 

These clusters may not be stable over time as people migrated - Brooklyn has become one of the East Coast regions that shrinks the mean free path between creative residents. Take a look at the Outlier video Om has featured for an excellent example of what a low mean free path can mean for someone interested in something novel in dungarees.  

 

Brooklyn has become so important for a certain type of young creative that the new Pixar building in California is known in some quarters as "Brooklyn"...  

 

Now back to Oberlin ..  There is enough talent in the Music Conservatory that it is possible for someone without great means (me) to have a piece of music composed.  You need to be tapped into the roots of the beast - I was an adjunct professor there for several years as part of a joint AT&T Research/Oberlin College Music Conservatory project.¹  This position gave me a rich interaction with students and faculty often into the wee hours of the morning with drink and good food.  Ideas would bounce around and people began to sense a few new possibilities that would normally remain hidden.  These things can and do happen over the Internet, but their cross section - the probability of them happened and being recognized as interesting - is much lower.  Our online environment, rich as it is,  is much less sophisticated and rich than the real world

 

Under the right conditions the Internet can decrease the mean free path between parties. Long distance mentor relations and even a few projects.  The problem is finding people well matched for serendipity and creativity.  A large amount of research has gone into creativity in individuals and groups.  To date online creativity - the connecting the dots/serendipity kind - is still a loooooooong way from face to face human interaction.  

 

But the Net can help creative enterprises - often at crucial movements.  Om has recently talked about Kickstarter.  Now most projects proposed on Kickstarter fail, but well thought out and articulated projects do succeed providing enough money to get them over a critical initial hump.  

 

Perhaps just as important is a funded project also gives insight into potential market size. Horace Dediu has an extremely insightful blog and a fairly well known podcast.  Some people had encouraged him to make a transcript of all of the shows aired to date available for sale.  Unfortunately the problem with this is he had about sixty hours of material and even the cheapest transcription services would introduce a risk of several thousand dollars if people didn't purchase the final product.  There was also an issue of understanding how to price it and if a print or ebook version should be made.  

 

He decided to turn it into a Kickstarter project and learned (a) there was a market large enough to support the transcription and editing effort, and (b) the price he picked was considered reasonable by those who bit - two absolutely vital pieces of information acquired with almost no risk.  His success gave me paused and made me think of a few small projects I've seen fail due to incorrect estimates of these questions.  

 

The Kickstarter approach may be superior to funding it yourself even if you have the money as it provides a sandbox to answer potential market size and price questions

 

One of you (the Jheri of the Jeri/Jerry/Jheris I know) happens to be very tall and hard to fit - not only clothing, but also airline seats, countertops, chairs and so on.  She introduced me to her taller friend Colleen.  Both of them don't think about their poor fit that often as you get used to your environment and learn to compromise, but being different can take a physical toll with bad backs being far too common in that crowd.  It is good to have friends like this as they provide a rich problem space you may not have considered.

 

I decided to work on a simple cutting board for Colleen who happens to love to cook.  It turns out there have been numerous studies on work surface positioning for almost every body type and physical condition.  It became clear a raised wooden board would be the best bet and I had one made for her as the cost of hardwood is so high that a woodworking shop could do it at a lower cost than I could and they would probably do a better job.   The owner of the shop became interested in the idea of making this a product and Colleen put together a page promoting it as she loved hers.²  A bit of asking around got the attention of a well-known women's tv show and they wanted to feature it.  The problem was they also demanded a copy be given to everyone in the audience in a special "tall" show.  In the end the cost of doing that was greater than the profit made selling these online.  The product remains as it is custom made for the user, but I don't think they have made  profit on it.  

 

In retrospect this may have been a great Kickstarter project.  Although it is custom made by a small shop the more important function of Kickstarter would have been gauging the size of the market before any major effort was undertaken.  It may also have allowed a volume purchase of hard maple as well as specialized shipping materials.

 

The other project that should have been done on Kickstarter was an attempt to make very long inseam jeans for tall women.  The designer spent about a year online lining up customers, finding a boutique manufacturer and so on.  He rounded up about 2,000 firm commitments that they would buy - enough to allow an initial low volume production run and sell them at a reasonable price.  Based on these commitments he went ahead with a somewhat smaller run to err on the side of caution thinking 500 or so would bring him close enough to break even that he could proceed.  Unfortunately only about 25 orders materialized and he lost a large amount of money.³  The beauty of Kickstarter is that not only must a threshold be reached to start a project, but the money will be there once the threshold is signup period has successfully concluded. 

 

We are moving to a world where individualization and shared design and intellectual property will become much more common.  The Maker movement provides some fuel for this and grassroot interaction street fashion is likely to become important. Sites like Etsy as outposts for the tiny manufacturers and spaces like Pinterest for matching interests with the makers.  There will probably be a lot of evolution and new thinking in this area - current sites and tools aren't up to the task.  We may be at a diamonds on the beach period.

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¹ At once the least musical and most mathematical faculty ever associated with the place

² It turns out the standard countertop height in the US is 36" and was determined in an ad hoc fashion when cabinets began to be mass produced for the great suburban expansion after WWII.  This turns out to be optimal for a 5'4 to 5'5" cook.  Significantly shorter or taller cooks will have ergonomic issues and those who are seriously away from average can experience pain bending or an inability to comfortably reach the surface.  On the tall side the threshold is around 5'10 - certainly cooks 6' or taller should use a higher surface.  The shop own and I both thought this meant a market might exist. If you think you might use one I can give a strong recommendation to AWP.

Before settling on a simple raised table I was interested in an adjustable board.  It presented a challange so I attempted to crowd source some solutions from readers of another blog of mine  here and here adding some notes on design. Some ideas were submitted, but nothing earth-shattering, so I went with a simple table.  There are times when brute force is appropriate.

³ It turns out 20:1, 50:1 or even 100:1 ratio between people who say they will order a product and those who follow through is common in apparel

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And a recipe.  I needed chocolate and pistachios recently.  In order to manage my weight and deal with Sukie's chocolate allergy a few neighbors had a happy evening.

 

Chocolate Pistachio Cookies
 

Ingredients

° 185 g  (6.5 oz) shelled pistachios

° 28 g (2 tbl) unsalted butter

° 115 g (4 oz) unsalted butter, sliced into tablespoons

° 115 g (4 oz) bittersweet chocolate, chopped - I used Lindt

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract

° 60 g (1/2 cup) AP flour

° 35 g natural cocoa powder

° 1/2 tsp baking powder

° 1/2 tsp fine grained sea salt

° 100 g (1/2 cup) white sugar

° 2 large eggs 

° 1.5 tsp vanilla extract - you need the real stuff - mine is rum based

° 120 g chopped milk chocolate - again I used Lindt ..  reliable for baking

Technique

* Place one oven rack at the center of the oven and preheat to 350°F

° Line two cookie sheetswith a silicone mat or parchment paper.

° Spread the pistachios on an unlined baking sheet and bake for ten minutes until golden brown, Remove from oven and immediately add the 28g butter and stir well. Set aside to cool.

* Melt chocolate and remaining butter together in a microwave oven. Stir together until smooth and set aside to cool slightly as you beat the eggs. While the chocolate is melting combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a food processor and pulse to blend completely. 

* Combine the eggs and sugar and beat until they become pale yellow and light in texture. Stir in the chocolate. When it is mostly incorporated, add the vanilla. When the vanilla has been incorporated, add the flour mixture and stir gently to blend. When the flour is almost completely absorbed, add the pistachios and milk chocolate folding into the batter. It will be dark and shiny with a texture similar to marshmallow Fluff.

° Spoon about a heaping tablespoon (or 1.5 inch ice cream scoop) of dough onto the sheet tray for each cookie, arranging them in a 3X4 pattern on the tray. Bake the trays one at a time on the center rack in the oven for 10-12 minutes. The cookies will rise slightly, develop a shiny crust and appear to be just set. Let them cool for two minutes and then loosen the bottoms from the lined tray. Let them finish cooling on the sheet trays or move them to racks depending on the final texture you want - experiment the first time.

 

 

 

from communication modalities to the higgs boson

About a year ago I was walking with with a dear friend in Manhattan completely engaged in idea building together.  Fore me intensely delightful activities like this make the leap to Csikszentmihályian flow and I tend not to notice the time and space I'm embedded in as carefully as I should...  Fortunately she is far more perceptive of these things and carefully guided me through the human and vehicular traffic without indicent.   I've been told I can be engaging and perhaps even interesting during times like this if the subject is something we both love.  But there is this problem - I'm not very good in other communication modalities.

 

Recently I've been asked to give several talks to general audiences.  I don't mind public speaking, but I also tend not be be very good at it (my TED^x talk is a bit painful to watch - fortunately food was not allowed in the auditorium).  I'm ok if there is a subject of mutual interest and have an idea of the appropriate level.  And feedback from the audience is extremely important - especially visual feedback.  But if the feedback goes away I'm toast and the performance - and value of the communication - leaves something to be desired.  

 

Writing has similar issues.  One of the reasons why these posts and my personal emails are full of typos and spelling errors is in an attempt to keep a conversational flavor I don't go back and edit.  The temptation to wordsmith and tighten up on precision is too strong and the note begin to take on the smell of a textbook.  A few years ago I rediscovered this tendency as I was toying with writing a different sort of energy book.¹  I found myself tripping badly in my attempts to describ the underlying concepts. I couldn't get a handle on who would understand this without explanation and who would need four other concepts under their belt before the concept could be explained clearly. Who would want explanations and who would find them boring.  None of the compromises seemed to work well as story telling.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - finding the right level and words for this sort of thing is not easy work.

 

The strange thing is I can usually explain this type of physics to most sharp people even if they have very non-technical backgrounds, but often only if we are talking to each other face to face.   The telephone removes too much of the presence required for the explanations to work well and face to face is better than a video link.   Many people are much better than me.  Feynman was an expert explainer, but most of his filmed pieces were responses to questions posed by an interviewer - one on one was his natural high information bandwidth channel. He was also a brilliant lecturer, but the nature of his communications changed to something a bit different and focused on a less general audience.  Carl Sagan was and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and E.O. Wilson are fantastic public communicators - a very rare quality among scientists.  These skills require real work to perfect.  Neil told me he will spend dozens of hours preparing for a five or seven minute interview on the Colbert Report.  It is not natural or easy, but he is so good it looks that way.  

 

The issues I have with different communication modalities and the need for direct feedback from what are sometimes called "out of band" channels² and undoubtedly exist in people from many other fields, but I think they are especially important for science as only a small portion of the public have a notion about how science works and what reported results mean.  At the same time science policy is of enormous importance - witness issues like global warming, nuclear proliferation, healthcare, nutrition, and a thousand other things.  The tobacco industry and a few others on the political left and right discovered that the nature of scientific communication makes it possible to easily manipulate public opinion and leave most scientists almost without defense.³  My book project was a reaction to this.  I naïvely thought that better education would make a big difference, but now I'm not certain this is the best way to spend my time.

 

None of this will settle itself soon. I've been having some second thoughts on the book and alternate ways to get some of the more important bits across.  If I think it could make a modest different I will go ahead and find the time somewhere.  

 

In the meantime I look forward to those wonderful times when I can engage with some of you one on one in playful ideas - but, and this is an important safety tip,  be warned if we are walking that you shouldn't take traffic safety cues from me:-)

 

I leave you with a delightful layman's discussion of the Higgs boson that nicely skates through the jargon.  When I'm one on one with a smart non-physicist this is pretty much how I would approach it, but everything tends to fall apart when I shift communication modalities and lose my way.⁴ Synchronous out-of-band communication channels are the headlights that cut through the darkness for me.

 

____

¹ In talking to industry groups about energy and global warming I found most people lacked a basic understanding of the physics to make informed decisions.  The notion of the book was to concentrate on removing much of the jargon and getting the physics of energy and power on the human scale.  The goal was not to have the reader understand the basic physics or how to solve equations, but rather a good qualitative sense of what is going on.  How do you ask questions like a physicist before moving to the calculations?...

² An enormous amount of information is subtly communicated through prosody, gestures, facial expressions, body positioning and more.  Voice channels can pick up some of this, video a bit more - but face to face is almost always best.  Asynchronous and one-way discussions can miss a lot and a good deal of confusion is possible with neither party recognizing that at the time.

³ A few great reference books:

Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson ...  I don't agree with everything he says, but his book pointed out major problems I was unaware of and has allowed me to repair a few (unfortunately not all) of them.

Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway  A well researched and incredibly important book to anyone who worries about science policy and the issues of science and the public.

⁴ When I try to explain the Higgs field I use an analogy of a "fame" field and actors walking through a room of people vs the rest of us to explain the concept of a coupling constant.

digital something or others

I tend to worry about labels and definitions as it is extremely difficult to achieve depth in anything where you aren't clear on the basics.  A term that has bothered me for some time is digital native.

 

It is generally invoked to imply the generation that grew up with an Internet connection is somehow fluent in everything about the Internet is some deep and special way that those who came earlier aren't.  I get the point, but it is terribly inaccurate and the academic world quickly abandoned it for its inaccuracy.

 

Rather it is one of those flashy terms that became overused by techno-utopcans  - the people who believe the Internet will radically change society and for the good.¹  Years ago I started using an illustration in talks.

 

° Creating a new business that may be the seed of something dramatic takes a few years

° Discovery and invention that leads to new businesses usually takes at least a few decades

° Changing something fundamental in us with evolution generally takes thousands of years - often tens of thousands.

° social is very old, very important and a good deal of it may be in our genes

 

People react to new technologies in interesting ways not seen by those who built the technologies.  Dime novels, movies, radio, television, the telephone were all fashioned onto our social selves. The  Internet is no different although the scale of it is enormous - just as the scale of some of the other technologies I mention was enormous.

 

Teens are a special problem.  My take is that the label digital native is not only inaccurate, but counterproductive and can have negative consequences.  Over a decade ago my human computer interface department at AT&T Research studied teens and folks in their twenties.  One of us called them technological idiot savants - they may know how to use a technology and service on the surface and even find a few novel uses, but mostly they are incapable of mastering it and inventing on their own.  No surprise as most of us are idiot savants when it comes to technology.  How many of us could reinvent bits of our world on a desert island?  I wonder how many appreciate the implications of the heavy filtering of information aimed at them? I suspect, like their parents, very few.

 

I claim the term has negative consequences.  My worry is that it creates a level of expectation that many can't fulfill.  Many kids are poor and lack access - by calling them natives we fail to note they can't even get to the point of being an idiot savant.  

 

It also ignores that teens are teens.  Teens and adults are social creatures.  Teens don't know the ropes of social interaction yet (arguably many adults never learn) and are actively experimenting.  Our wetware hasn't changed - that will take thousands of years. What has changed is freedom of place and association.  When I was a teen I had a lot of unsupervised time and could pretty much go anywhere my feet or bike would take me.  Teens now are often micromanaged by parents worried about what college they'll get into, the evils they'll find if they have free time and perverts hanging out in the parks and malls.  

 

When watch and talk to kids they always seem to prefer the company of others to being online.  They don't use the phone very much, but have moved to a variety of Internet services and are attempting to make a crude approximation of what the real world offered.  Navigating this is often opaque to adults which only complicates the problem adding the wrong sort of feedback to the system.

 

If we are focused on teens I like the term flâneur - a French word that suggests someone is exposed in a public place as a combination of an exhibitionist and a voyeur.²  It strikes me as a nice summary of an experimenting teen ..

 

a digital flâneur.

 

 This is a very rich subject.  I suspect more than a few Internet services will be sideswiped by not understanding teens?

 

__________

¹ There are also techno-dystopians who believe the opposite.  I'm neither.  I prefer to observe and measure.

² So I'm told .. I don't speak French. Sadly there is no English equivalent.

sharpen your dot connection skills...

Scientists are skilled dot connecters as that is one of the more powerful tools of the trade.  Years ago Greg, another physicist, recommended visiting "companies that make stuff"and see if they'll give you a tour of their process.  Making physical things presents multiple challenges including human factors and social challenges and, if you get someone who is proud of what they're doing, you can dive in and ask a lot of questions getting some real depth in the process.  

 

Over the years I've visited companies that brew beer, cartoon, make rocket engines, fabricate ICs, build large gas turbines, do precision wood work, build submarines, bake cakes, make ultrasound machines, pull wire, smelt copper, make exotic steels, make potato chips, make electric motors, make dresses (many companies here - it is a rich area), craft bespoke shoes for athletes, build exotic batteries, make LED lamps, and build bikes (that is a small list - it has been going on for years).  

 

All of these tours have been worthwhile and some of the visits have given serious insight for problems I have worked on years later - the potato chip factory visit provided just the right clue in thinking about mesh networking. Although the reasoning is a bit difficult to explain, all of a sudden the network problem became obvious in light of the clues I had learned watching a quality control step at the Utz factory in Pennsylvania.  

 

Post 9/11 it has been more difficult to get tours (I tired for a few years to get a tour of the place that makes water tanks for buildings in Manhattan before having success) and many companies are giving up the fabrication phase at this point.  But don't let that stop you - there are a lot of places that are thrilled to have someone take an interest.  Except for the Mars company (M&Ms) - one I will probably never crack...

 

I've learned a lot from bicycles including their design and fabrication.  Simple machines  hold a special interest as you can easily wrap your head around the integrated design.  So this 1945 film on the fabrication of Raleigh bikes is particularly good.  I'm keeping this short today as I spent the 17 or so minutes watching.  Comments from the company:

Our resident historian (HR Manager Frank Ellis) tells us that the bike was a “Low Gravity Carrier” (a Butcher’s Bike to you and I) and “The guy putting ball bearings in the bottom bracket took me back….he had that authentic piecework dance…people used to say that if you worked at Raleigh long enough you started doing the dance in your sleep!” 

Frank, who carried out time and motion studies when he joined Raleigh as an apprentice in the 70s, said: “The hub lacing shot towards the end was great to see. It used to be done by hand by women and the first frames capture the classic fanned spokes that the women achieved with a simple flick of the wrist…try that one and see if you can get them anywhere near as evenly spaced! I’m always telling people the top women pieceworkers were faster than the automatic hub lacer, but I might be exaggerating just a little.”

Give it a view - great stuff!

 

 

Bike manufacture has changed considerably in the 65+ years since then and that is another story...  I've been involved in it a bit myself and for someone without a mechanical engineering background it has been a terrific education and has expanded the pool of dots in my quiver.

 

Nothing like ending on a mixed metaphor...

 

 

leading horses as well as choosing them

Earlier today I received a note from Jheri about her grades for thetwo remote courses she recently finished.  I had offered to help her with differential equations if she had any problems with the course, but other than suggest and grade some interesting practice problems I didn't do anything.  She is exceptionally motivated and breezed through this and a biology course. It must have been challenging as she has a career that involves a boatload (well - planeload) of international travel.  

 

So three cheers for Jheri!  I am toasting her with some proper homemade ice cream tonight.

 

Jheri is now in her mid 20s and was a poor student in high school.  There were some reasons for this, but the bottom line is that she wasn't ready to learn.  We have an education system that assumes a readiness on the part of the student across many subjects that is probably optimal for a small minority.  But now she wants it and is focused on learning biology and has been finding math and science come easil to her.  I'm not surprised - she has a sparkling curious mind and has discovered the wonderful ignorance that science provides..  She has a career, but is getting a bit of schooling in her spare time and will soon quit and go full time.  I wouldn't be surprised to see her go on for an advanced degree.

 

I'm finding something similar about myself.  I was extremely interested in math and science as a kid and far to focused. (another Jeri knew me a bit then and will probably vouch for that)  Then I found myself as an undergrad in a school that was really a glorified trade school.  I tested out of many of the "non important" subjects and continued my singular focus.  Grad school was a mentor relation that focused almost entirely on physics.  As a result I'm extremely narrow - something that has been bothering me a lot. I have been developing interests in history, art and music playing with these a bit as a curious amateur. Perhaps one day I'll go to a real university and learn how to ask a few questions in these areas in much greater detail.  At least I am identifying my ignorance and am curious enough to learn.  It doesn't matter that I don't know much - at least not to me.  

 

Being ready to learn happens in areas you may not immediately suspect.  The men's volleyball team at UC Irvine took the NCAA Division 1 championship this past weekend.  Except for volleyball they have an unremarkable athletic department, but head coach John Speraw is one of those remarkable characters who is both cerebral and humble.  He knows that he doesn't know and seems to delight in learning.

 

Speraw hasn't been with Irvine that long, but has managed to put together three national championships.  During the last season he raised eyebrows when he hired a female psychologist with no volleyball experience as one of his assistant coaches - even though the program is too small to support full time assistant coaches.  This weekend he praised her noting she gave him and the team the right tools to do the remarkable.  Of course they, as an organization, had to be radically different from the standard men's volleyball team in order to understand, modify and implement what she was telling them.  Speraw observes, experiments and learns from his successes and failures.  He has turned his staff onto his techniques and the players are doing the same.  UC Irvine now has a learning organization that is crushing organizations with rich histories and much larger financial resources.  My guess is more than a few men's programs will hire psychologists and most (all?) of them will be too inflexible to learn and adapt.  In the meantime John will find other tools.

 

One wonders about the parallels with other organizations - corporations for example.  

 

When are companies ready to learn and can you identify them by the questions they are asking?  Does their thinking become calcified over time and do they see a need to learn and adapt?  Where do they find the questions to learn from and what are their mechanisms for dealing with the questions? Do they have an institutional learning process and an institutional memory to take advantage of their learnings?  Do they recognize the value of failure?  Do they recognize the value of play?  Are those charged with running the company curious enough to ask questions or have they followed a path that has given them success to date giving them an artificial sense of confidence?   How do they select and promote employees at all levels and is the ability and readiness to learn part of the process?

 

My guess is learning organizations are probably rare.  I'm reasonably familiar with Apple and Pixar and both are great examples where learning is central. I'm also familiar with many others that are mostly unable - or at least unready - to learn. 

 

Is your organization curious enough?  Does it actively identify, cultivate and celebrate its ignorance?  Is it diverse enough to connect dots and identify potentially new areas of ignorance  - areas that, when explored by the right people will illuminate opportunity that others hadn't considered.

 

Think about the last paragraph and imagine Apple and Pixar. Try it again with average organizations you know.

 

 It makes me think of how new ideas and techniques are identified and, if useful, implemented.   Many companies follow bandwagons - some companies sort out the world by asking the right questions and blaze their own paths, but many become little more than buzzword compliant with a considerable amount of time, talent and money in the process.

 

I think data mining and "big data" (I dislike both terms for a variety of reasons - sit me down with some cold milk and fresh cookies and I'll go into detail) are a great example of the potential success and failure of institutional learning.  A few organizations will understand what they are doing deeply enough to be able to play in this area effectively, but many are probably going to fail as has been true with many "next big things" over time.

 

You really need to understand something deeply enough to know if there is a there there.  I was drawn to physics as, in principal, it is so simple.  Simple enough that you have some hope of asking fundamental questions in a productive fashion.  But add a bit of complexity and the world rapidly becomes far too complex to understand at a fundamental level.  There may be levels of possible understanding that describe it that, if you are sufficiently clever, allow you identify those techniques that will work for your organization.

 

The term "data" is highly contextual - so much that I try not to use it.  It isn't a fundamental piece of information, but rather is a cloud of information surrounding the core of what you think it is.  Some of this cloud may be obvious and some may be hidden.  As an example consider this well-known description of an email problem.  The system is relatively simple (I've written successful email gateways so they must be simple), but the description assumes you have a bit of familiarity with the subject.  Feel free to skip over it if your eyes glaze over - the point is there was an obscure condition that eluded detection resulting in some puzzling behavior.

 

The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:

From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org>
To: sage-members@sage.org
Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible
    task?)

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when
I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated.  "A
little bit more, actually.  Call it 520 miles.  But no farther."

"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to
keep panic out of my voice.  One doesn't display panic when speaking to a
department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like
statistics.  "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500
miles?"

"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily.  "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice.  "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"

"We could send email.  Just not more than--"

"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that.  But why didn't you
call earlier?"

"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now."  Right.  This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I
asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

"Geostatisticians..."

"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles.  There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands.  "When did this start?  A
few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that
time?"

"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."

"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along.  It wasn't April Fool's Day.  I tried
to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.  This
was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own
account was delivered without a hitch.  Ditto for one sent to Richmond,
and Atlanta, and Washington.  Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles).  It failed.
Boston, failed.  Detroit, failed.  I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down.  New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity.  I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed.  If the problem had had to do with the geography of
the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken
down in tears.

Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true,
and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file.  It looked fairly
normal.  In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory.  It hadn't been
altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written.  And I was fairly certain I
hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option.  At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port.  The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.

Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner?  At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature.  Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8.  And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte.  When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail.  The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most
of the rules had at that point remained unaltered.  But the new long
configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped.  And the
sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding
no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the
remote SMTP server.  Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched.  An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side.  So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:

$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
        * 558.84719
        / 0.0017893979

"500 miles, or a little bit more."

 

 

This example is really easy - it involved a well-defined system built around logical constructs.¹  Understanding humans and human behavior is much more difficult and anyone who says they can is naïve and/or lying.  Data mining may give candidate shards of information, but they are highly contextual and you must know the steps used to gather, filter and process the information and how reliable they are.  You had damn well know the errors and error propagation.  And even then the resulting information may not be terribly useful as human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system.

 

It is more important to develop a deep understanding of what you need to know.  You must learn what it is you need to know and how to get a "good enough" approximation.  For companies like Apple, Pixar, Trader Joe's, and Lululemon success doesn't rest on data mining, but on other techniques.  It is likely data mining techniques wouldn't be terrible useful to these companies for their current products.  It may be that Apple finds some great uses as Siri builds out, but for now great design doesn't rest on it.

 

I suspect the companies successful with data mining will be vendors who sell to the masses and don't really care about the results as long as the money keeps coming in along with a few companies who have learned there is a solid niche for them and can ask the right questions to know the information produced is robust enough to make a material difference in their bottom line.  I suspect the later group will be made up with companies who are indeed ready to learn.

_________

I'm very proud of Jheri!  Here is the ice cream I'll make in her honor defrosting some wild blueberries that were picked last Summer at peak season.  I'll follow it with a quick recipe for something really simple.

The photo is of Colleen enjoying the same recipe on one of her visits.  You always give the dasher to the honored guest.

There are many ways to make ice cream - I use a simple refrigerated freezer that gets reasonably cold.  Liquid nitrogren techniques are even better if you have access.  Drop me a note if you are interested.  Also I have more than a few great ice cream recipes from years of experimentation starting with Steve in the dorm basement at Stony Brook.  We literally wore out three freezers during our experiments.

 

Blueberry Ice Cream

       Ingredients

           

        (all ingredients should be very fresh)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs 

° 1.25 c white sugar (if the berries are extra sweet, cut the sugar a bit)

° 2 c blueberries - or flash frozen from last season

° juice of 1/2 lemon

° 2 c heavy cream

° 1 c whole milk

Technique

• toss blueberries, lemon juice, 1/2 c sugar in a small bowl, cover and refrigerate for a few hours tossing every half hour or so

• wisk eggs until fluffy, wisk in the sugar a bit at a time and then blend in the cream and milk

• mash the berry mix by hand and mix with dairy mixture

• churn freeze and season if you can stand the wait - I usually just eat it immediately!

 

^{OK now the simple recipe.}

The Un-Egg Cream

Too simple to talk about ingredients or technique.  I like the idea of an egg cream and this is a simple variation.  Get some seltzer or, better yet, Cherry 7-Up chilled to near freezing.  Pour some milk based drink, properly chilled into the glass - perhaps 50 grams or so (about two ounces).  Pour about five or six times as much of the bubbly fluid on top and rapidly stir with a long thin spoon.  

Very refreshing.  My favorite combination is Sunkist Naturals Pina Colada Protein Smoothie and Cherry 7-Up (diet or regular ... diet is probably somewhat healthier)

^_______

¹ There is a class of computer "failures" that are, at their hearts, insufficiently understood systems.  Often "data" is the issue

solving problems

When I was a junior undergrad - sometime in the late Pleistocene -  I decided to write down what I had learned about problem solving. It has a bit of a Polya-ish flavor, but it reflected the bits and pieces of what I had learned.  I still keep a copy over my desk.  Some of the pieces, particularly those on creativity, mean much more to me now and I would go on for pages, but just seeing them calls all of that up. 

 

Problem selection is more of an art and I have never written much about it as new problem spaces tend to only present themselves when you are hard at work on something else that is at last partly related.  I have never had a problem with finding a list of great problems to work on …  a larger issue is which ones should I be working on.  That can have different answers depending on what the goal is (who or what I'm working for)

 

I was a physics and math double major, but I've found it useful in many other areas.  I should probably write a bit about problem selection other than picking something that you might have a bit of hope on gaining a bit of understanding.

Of course there are many other approaches - this is just mine. Not every problem would have all of these steps.  

 

So here goes: 

1. Understand the problem

 

- do you understand all of the words and equations in the problem?

- can you restate the problem in your own words?

- can you think of a picture or diagram to help understand the problem?

- what do you want to find or show?

- what level of accuracy do you need?

- is there enough information to find a solution?

- is the problem a relevant problem or is it gibberish?

- what is the scale of the problem?  can you do it in an hour or will it require unobtainium?

2. Devise a plan

 

- guess and check

- consider special cases.  what are the boundary conditions?

- select your tools

- do you fully understand your tools?

- draw a picture

- solve a simpler version first

- create a model

- use approximations - but understand their impact

- work backwards

- be ingenious …  this comes with experience and often with re-thinking the problem in a different context.  

This and the next step - connecting the dots are the non-trivial piece!!  Remember:

play and your ability to fail with grace are essential

curiosity is your driver - remember informed ignorance rules in science and math! never lose fact that your final job is to expand your ignorance - results are a by-product!!

- connect the dots - this is a subset of being ingenious

serendipity is another driver.  remember that serendipity is making discoveries by accident, but you must have enough sagacity to note what holds potential.  

dot connecting is best done using averted attention.  Don't tool constantly on your problem.  Focus hard, but pivot off to equally long period of something completely different. This may even fool others into thinking you have a life. 

3. Carry out your plan

 

- find a quiet place with no interruptions.  nature is your friend

- use some care and be a craftsman

- if you get stuck, take some time off and try to forget about what you are doing

- if you fail, use another approach

- know when you have failed

- if you are working with others know where the strengths are and divide appropriately

4. Check with reality

 

- does your answer make sense?

- can your solution make testable predications?

- ask an expert in your field to examine your work for flaws

- reflect on what you have done and examine was worked and what didn't

 

5. Next steps

- what are the new areas that expose new and even beautiful ignorance on your part?  These may be diamonds on the beach to explore.  Perhaps even a new beach and that is your reward.

 

_____________

A Recipe

Cherry and Chocolate Scones

Ingredients

For the scones:

 
° 500 g  all-purpose flour (4 c)

° 55 g white sugar (1/4 c)

° 8 g baking powder(1-3/4 tsp)

° 5 g baking soda (1 tsp)

° 4 g kosher salt (1-1/2 tsp)

° 250 g unsalted butter, cut into half inch pieces (2¼ sticks)

° 300 g cups heavy cream (1-1/4c)

° 125 g dried cherries (1-1/2c)

° 150 g chocolate chips (1 c)  depending on your taste regular Hershey's or the good stuff.  I use a mixture of chocolate chip sized quality milk chocolate and half 60% chocolate

 

For the glaze

 
° 85 g confectioners’ sugar (2/3 c)

° 2 tbl skim milk

° 1 tbl cherry puree

 

Technique

 

° Preheat oven to 350°F with racks in upper and lower thirds.

° Whisk flour, sugar, powder, soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl. Using a pastry cutter, cut in butter until combined with some pea-sized lumps. Stir in cream, cherries, and chocolate chips until combined.

° Put quarter cup sized scoops of dough on 2 buttered baking sheets and bake, switching sheets half way through (and you were worried about the rack arrangement:-), until golden and cooked through, something like 15 to 20 minutes.

° With the scones baking, make the glaze by whisking together sugar, milk, and cherry puree in a small bowl.

° Once scones are cooled, spoon over glaze, set and cool to about room temperature if you can stand the anticipation, and then scarf down.