omenti

staying warm and celebration a common tradition

It is really chilly for about the first time this Winter and I found myself out in the cold without gloves and a cap for a bit too long.  In theory I shouldn't mind much - after all, I did grow up in Montana and remember taking walks in -40° weather and fierce blizzards. 

 

About a year ago I was fortunate enough to have made contact again with Jeri - a fellow classmate from Great Falls High.   In an email exchange a poem came up.  It turned out both of us had memorized it in different junior high schools and both of us have taken delight in reciting it over the years.  The poet was a Scottsman who spent most of his life in Canada, becoming famous for poems associated with the Yukon and the gold rush. 

 

A bit earlier I met Reggie Watts at a TEDx talk.  Both of us had "performed" and somehow found ourselves chatting afterwards.¹  In my talk I mentioned that I was from Montana and he told me he grew up there too.  Another minute of talking revealed we had lived within 500 feet of each other and went to the same high school albeit separated by a couple of decades.

 
It turned out Reggie knew the same poem and it was the introduction to the word moil for both of us.  

 

The world seemed very small as we talked that night.

 

 

By now you're probably curious ...  I'm afraid I couldn't get all of it from memory and had to cheat a bit.  I guess I'm out of practice.  My guess is Reggie and Jeri wouldn't have any difficulty.

 

Turn the lights down, light some candles and crack a window to the cold.Read it outloud armed with a cup of peppermint hot chocolate (recipe follows).

 

The Cremation of Sam McGee

by Robert W. Service

 

 

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

 

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."

 

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.

Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.

If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;

It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

 

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,

And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,

He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;

And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

 

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:

"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.

Yet 'tain't being dead—it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;

So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

 

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;

And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.

He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;

And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

 

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,

With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;

It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,

But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

 

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.

In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,

Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing.

 

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;

And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;

The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;

And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

 

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;

It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."

And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;

Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

 

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;

Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;

The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see;

And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

 

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;

And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.

It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;

And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

 

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;

But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;

I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.

I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide.

 

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;

And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.

It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm—

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

 

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

      By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

      That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

      But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

      I cremated Sam McGee.

 

__________

¹ TEDx Gotham.  I'm afraid my talk wasn't great and was very much in the shadow of Regge's amazing performance.  Mine was followed by a wonderful talk architect Craig Dykers and then the electric Juliette Powell.  As a speaker it probably makes sense to stay away from events with such serious talent.

__________

Recipe Corner 

 

Somehow a nice warm soup seems appropriate.  This one makes good use of carrots - use a rich vegetable broth, water just won't work.  As always all amounts are approximate

 

Carrot Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 tablespoons butter

° 1 large yellow onion chopped

° 450 g carrots, peeled and diced to about 1/2 inch

° 600g  vegetable stock stock

° 1-1/2 tsp cumin seeds

° 1 tbl honey

° 1 tbl lemon juice

° 1/8 tsp allspice

° Salt and pepper

° sour cream or plain yogurt for garnish

 

Technique

 

° Melt butter in a large sauce pan over medium-high heat. Add onion and saute for 2 minutes.

° Stir in carrots and broth and bring to boil. Now cover and cut the heat to a simmer until carrots are tender.  (20 - 25 minutes)

° In a small skillet stir and toast the cumin seeds over medium-high heat until you can smell them (about 5 minutes?) Now grind them in a spice mill.

°  Puree the soup with a stick blender until smooth.  

° Whisk in the honey, lemon juice and allspice and season with salt and pepper.

° Pour the  soup into bowls and sprinkle with toasted cumin.  Add a bit of sour cream or yogurt and serve.

_____

Peppermint Hot Chocolate

Ingredients

° one cup heavy cream chilled in the 'fridge (half is for topping and is optional)

° 2 tbl + 1 tsp white cane sugar

° 2 cups whole milk 

° 120g 60% chocolate chopped into chunks

° a small pinch of salt

° 1/4 tsp peppermint extract

° chocolate (85% is good) for shaving to use as garnish if you like

Technique

° Whip half of the cream and the tsp of sugar into whipped cream and put back in the 'fridge

° Whisk the other half cup of cream, the sugar and milk in a pan over medium high heat and bring to nearly a boil

° Remove from heat, whisk in the chocolate, salt and peppermint until it is smooth

° Pour into mugs, add a dollop of whipped cream and shave some chocolate onto the cream

 

why do some models endure even though they're wrong?

π = 3.14

room temperature = 72° F

an adult male needs 2,500 calories a day

an adult weighs 70 kilograms 

...

We live with approximations, but all to often we don't worry about when we require better precision.  3.14 for π works for simple tasks around the home - after all - it offers better than one percent accuracy, but 2,500 calories for an adult male is very crude and can cause havoc with dieting. The 70 kilogram rule of thumb for adult weight is equally crude, but many medications are dosed based on that approximation.  

 

Some nutrition experts argue that a calorie isn't a calorie confusing many who listen and often themselves.  Strictly defined a calorie is a calorie.  Physics works and energy is conserved any time it converts from one form to another, but you have to pay careful attention to the accounting.  More than a century ago it was recognized our bodies weren't completely efficient metabolizing food and careful measurement, by the standards of the day, were made.  It turned out that metabolism could liberate about four nutritional calories of energy from a gram of a carbohydrate or protein and about nine calories from a gram of fat.  This roughly accounted for the energy that was lost to us in the process, but roughly held across food types and people.  The problem of knowing how much usable energy was in a slice of bread or a bowl of ice cream was reduced to tallying up how many grams of carbohydrates, fats and proteins were present .¹

 

piece of cake...

 

It turns out there are several serious problems with this model.  The energy assignments for each main component are crude averages.  Additionally individual people absorb and metabolize food with different efficiencies and metabolic efficiency changes for a single person occur throughout life.²  When you look into the model a bit, you begin to wonder if it has any utility.

 

The trigger for this post was an article a reader sent.  From the Times of London:

 

Being short has always had its drawbacks. There’s the problem of the top shelf in the supermarket, the unflattering “short man” stereotype and the perils of running for the bus in heels. But things just got worse for Lilliputians — more precisely, they just got fatter.

According to a professor of numerical analysis at the University of Oxford, the formula used to calculate body mass index, is flawed in such a way that it makes tall people too fat and small people too thin.

...

 

Body Mass Index again... 

 

Like the assignment of caloric values to food types it has been around for more than a century and is know to be problematic.  Usually you see caveats like "athletes tend to have artificially high BMIs", but you rarely see a discussion of what went into the model.  That turns out to be interesting.

 

If you were to make a simple model that would address how people deviate from what might be an average weight you might start by noticing that people come in different heights, body shapes and weights.  For adults height doesn't change very much, but body shape and weight does.  A good place to start might be to notice that if you just scale up an object, its volume increases by the cube of any length you might measure on the original object.  If you have a cube that is a foot on each side and scale it up by a factor of two, you now have a larger cube that is two feet on a side.  The new cube can contain eight of the originals so its volume has increased from one to eight cubic feet.

 

Now assume you have a tall cylinder.  The same rule holds.  Scale it up by a factor of two and its height doubles as does its diameter.  Its new volume is eight times that of the original. You can pick any measure of length to compare scaled objects so long as their basic shape doesn't change.

 

People have very complicated shapes, but for an individual their height doesn't change so it makes sense to use it as the measurement that is cubed to calculate changes in volume.  

 

Given her height, Colleen is a good example.  She's about 23% taller than the average American woman.  If her shape was the same as someone who was of average height you might expect her to weight about 86% more. She doesn't and the fly in the ointment is her body shape is different.  This isn't terribly unexpected, but how do you account for different body shapes?

 

A quick and very simple approximation is to remember a person's height is fixed, but the shape can change.  If you divide their weight by the cube of their height the number will be larger if they are heavier and smaller if they are lighter.  It is a nice trick to quantify something about your change in shape without going and carefully measuring the volume.  

 

This is the rough idea behind BMI (also called the Quetelet Index) ...  divide a person's weight by a proxy for their volume.  The formula is 

BMI = mass/height²

where mass is measured in kilograms and height in meters.  Converting to English units the relation is 

BMI = 703 * weight/height²

with weight measured in pounds and height in inches...

 

But wait!  Didn't I just say you need to cube the length to get volume?

 

I visited the professor's site and noted his new BMI formula assumed the height was not squared or cubed, but raised to the 2.5 power and adjusted the final result by multiplying by a constant to make the new and old BMIs match for an adult of average height.     for mass in kilograms and height in meters....

new BMI = 1.3 * mass/height^2.5

He didn't have any measurements to go from and noted, while he was far from an expert, he felt this was a better estimate. It was not published as a formal result and he didn't claim it was a piece of serious analysis.

 

Plotting the new and old BMIs over a range of heights for a weight of 175 pounds you notice that the new BMI is lower than the old one for tall adults and higher for short adults.  I picked the weight because if I weighed that I would be average under the new model and overweight with the old one - the difference is nearly a one point change.  

 

The professor did note new BMIs would change for short and tall people.   Somehow a reporter saw the piece and believed it was a serious replacement for BMI.   There must have been no little or no fact checking as it led to the dramatic headline and a bad model became widely reported.  Too many people in the chain had no idea what BMI was...

 

It turns out analyses based on real data from large distributions of people suggest a good approximation to use in the model for adults is the square of the height.  For young children the exponent is between 2.5 and 2.8.  

 

The BMI model is ugly - a person with a technical background looks at it, sees the square, and thinks "area" until they look a bit more deeply and understand what the model really is.³  

 

It almost seems too messy to use, but if you are comparing one population to a similar population it can be a useful tool.  More accurate tools exist, but they are expensive and time consuming.  It would be too impractical to use the better estimates, but gathering BMIs is trivial- just weigh and measure people.  Armed with those numbers you can look at serious health issues like changes in obesity levels in a country. 

 

The connection with BMI and health problems is well established at very high BMIs, but less so in the overweight range and that presents a major problem for specialists and family physicians.  While the measurement has considerable utility, rigid predictions may not apply in your case.  A clear case where understanding what the measurement is and the domain where it is useful.

 

The same is true with nutritional calories (or ANUs).  Going by the textbook may result in dietary guidance that doesn't work for you, but if you establish a baseline and recognizing the thing you might call a calorie really isn't a proper unit of energy, you can create guidance for yourself that can be very robust.

 

There are two messages.  

 

° Models and approximations have their limits!  It is best to understand them in detail before using them for anything important.  In both of these cases the models and approximations are too simplistic and are very domain dependent.  

It is very easy to get cut by Occam's razor:-)

 

° Be very skeptical of science reporting in the popular press.  From climate change to BMI it is best to look at what the experts say.  

__________

¹ This is a simplification of the approximation.  Alcohols and a few other components appear in the model.  Here is an earlier post on the subject.

² When Colleen and I were sorting out how to communicate with this our working term was to reliable the nutritional calorie as an approximate nutritional unit or ANU. We never came up with a clever name, so if there are any suggestions.

If you have been heavy and lose weight, your metabolism compensates by becoming more efficient.  It doesn't seem fair, but it is common that someone who was one heavy must eat less food than if they had never been overweight if they want to avoid weight gain.  This feature of humans prevents keeps many dieters from long term success and help to fuel the diet industry.

³ The model is far from perfect and your composition also changes as you gain or lose weight.  Athletes have a much higher percentage of muscle, which tends to be dense.  Different ethnic groups have different exponents.  The exponent changes a bit with height, and so on... 

⁴ Other methods of measuring things like body fat percentages are expensive and time consuming at the required levels of accuracy

__________

Recipe corner

 

It is Winter in the Northern Hemisphere and many of us have had, or will soon get snow.  Assuming it is under 20° F and your snow is new-fallen and very clean, why not snow ice cream?   I've made this several times - you have to adjust the recipe to the temperature and moisture in the snow, but kids can have fun with it.  It is usually a bit slushy, but fun to make.    I offer two recipes - both depend on the type of snow you're having so you may want to try half batches until you get the hang of it.

 

Fresh Snow Ice Cream

Ingredients

 

° 6 to 10 cups of new fallen snow (depending on moisture content)

° 1 can (14 oz) of sweetened condensed milk chilled to near freezing

° 1 - 2 tbl maple syrup and/or 1 tsp vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° Put the snow in a large bowl that has been left outside to chill below freezing

° and the condensed milk and flavorings, mix with a big spoon

° serve in chilled bowls and eat immediately!

 

 

Rich Snow Ice Cream

Ingredients

 

° new fallen snow (depending on moisture content)

° 2 pasteurized eggs

° 2 cups of heavy cream or a half and half mixture of cream and whole milk or just whole milk - I've done all three, so it is between you and your cardiologist.

° 1-1/2 cups white sugar

° 3 tbl vanilla extract

 

Technique

 

° Beat the eggs in a large bowl, mix in cream, sugar and vanilla  (it helps of the milk and sugar are pre-chilled to nearly freezing)

° add enough fresh snow for a good consistency and mix with a really big spoon

° serve in chilled bowls and eat immediately!

 

 

from lance to chimps via godzilla...

As I was taking a walk a peloton of perhaps 30 bikes whizzed by in relative silence.  Everyone was dressed in the lycra uniforms that cyclists seem to prefer and each bike probably cost well north of $5,000.  There are several groups of serious amateur cyclists around here.  You rarely see people commute on bikes, but there is a small racing culture.

 

The train wreak that is Lance Armstrong made me think of how cycling has changed over the years.  When I was young that's how kids got around - cheap transportation that offered freedom.  In college I took up riding to unwind on weekends along with commuting as I didn't have a car.  I joined a club that regularly took 100 mile rides - centuries - and found them to be an ideal way to unwind from the pressures of school.

 

There wasn't any lycra, helmets were rare and most of the bikes were inexpensive Schwinns.  The lack of proper kit didn't make any difference.  None of us followed racing.  Bicycles were simple transportation.

 

Somehow biking faded.  There was a resurgence for awhile as "mountain" bikes appeared, but it was a fad for most people.  But then this guy named Greg LeMond won the Tour de France.  Greg was an American - an American who managed to break down a barrier by winning a quintessentially European race.  People took notice and amateur athletes took up cycling.  Then a more remarkable series of events - Lance Armstrong came along winning several consecutive Tours.  His performance was nearly super-human with a power output in the mountain stages that was freakish - fewer than one in a billion people would have that sort of capability.  Not to mention he was a cancer surviver.

 

Amateur cycling in the US became a big thing.   Cycling for commuting and for the fun of it was still fading, but a visit to a bicycle store revealed serious exotica.

 

My cycling club in college had an interesting connection.  Paul MacCready had developed an interest.  Not in cycling, but in cyclists.  He was mounting a challenge to the Kremer Prize - £50,000 to the first person who could take off, stay at least ten feet above the ground and complete a figure eight around two pylons separated by a mile and a half.  Many had tried, but materials had changed and Paul happened to be a serious boffin when it came to aerodynamics and aircraft design.

 

Finding the right engine was important.  I can't quote the exact numbers, but something around 400 watts were needed for takeoff and perhaps 250 watts for cruising - assuming the pilot was *very* light.  Bryan Allen was an amateur cyclist who could develop enough power while not weighing much - probably under 130 pounds.  To cut a long story short they not only won the prize in August of 1977, but went on to cross the English Channel with an improved airplane.

 

If you've ever been around a group of world class cyclists you are struck by their size.  They are rarely over 5' 9 and tend to have amazing leg development while having very little muscle in their arms - not terribly surprising.  The rules of many sports conspire with physics and physiology to give world class athletes in a given event very similar body types and sizes.  A great luxury of just doing a sport for fun is hard work and passion can produce results that are good enough to keep you going, but as the level of competition increases there is a selection driven by genetics - you won't see 6' gymnasts or 5' 5 basketball players in Olympic competition.  Even with freakish athletic abilities physics gets in the way.

 

For some sports "bigger is better" doesn't hold.  Some sports favor the ability to change the direction your body - or part of it - is traveling.  Others require pure strength.  For those you either need the largest possible muscle or create special classes to allow athletes of a range of size to compete.

 

Here is where scaling comes in ..  if you scale up a body by some amount, how much does his or her strength change?

 

The strength of a muscle depends on how many muscle fibers are pulling together - strength increases as the cross sectional area of the muscle.  A person's cross sectional muscle area changes as the square of their height.  Their weight, on the other hand, increases as the cube of their height.¹  What is important to note is their strength to weight ratio changes as the square of their height divided by the cube of their height.  The chart shows a reasonably good correlation between the olympic records for the "clean and jerk" and the weight of the athlete to the two thirds power.   The smallest class of weight lifter can have lift three times his own weight while the largest class world record holder can only lift about 1.7 times his own weight.

 

There are some interesting consequences.  This limits the size of animals.  Scale up an animal and you reach a point where it is simply too heavy for its muscles to move around.  Scale down an animal and its strength to weight ratio increases dramatically. Godzilla wouldn't be able to move.²

 

Some sports like discus and hammer throwing don't have weight classes, so only pure strength is valued and the largest athletes have an enormous advantage.  Other sports, like cycling, have more complex interactions dictating ideal size and weight.³

 

This brings up back to the elite of the elites.  There are some sports where you need genetics that are one in a million or even one in ten million to compete at the highest level.  Someone like Lance Armstrong recorded such freakish performance racing in the mountains that it was more like one in a billion - or even rarer.  The problem with cycling is there are perhaps fifty cyclists at least one in hundreds of millions ... an indication of foul play.

 

Doping of one form or another exists in some sports.  Much of this is dangerous, but where do you draw the line?  Caffeine has been shown to enhance some types of performance as an example.  What is the acceptable normal for a human and what are we comfortable with kids emulating?⁴   Already we have seen debate over "handicapped" athletes like Oscar Pistorius in the London Olympics  We are nearing the point where an elite athlete might have an advantage by amputating limbs replacing them with artificial limbs that use exotic materials. There are advantages for runners as well as cyclists.  And we are on the verge of manipulating genes - some of the modifications may be unhealthy, others may prove to be neutral or even healthy.  It comes down to the fundamental question of what competition means and where we draw lines.  Many sports at the most elite levels have become entertainment with the potential for great financial reward.  We've seen many athletes trade the increased chance of a shortened life for short term rewards.  Watching the Lance train wreck play out and seeing if it changes cycling may be an indicator of what we tolerate - at least for the present.

 

The good news is most of those who play amateur and school sports are not playing at the elite level and don't need to be in order to be happy.  Doping and body modification, along with a need to be an Olympian, are just not important.  Short people can participate in sports that favor height and make up the difference with training and passion.  Tall or short people can cycle.... the list goes on and on.  

 

A few years ago I spoke with the athletic director of an academically elite school.  They require three semesters of physical education for all undergrads. They participate in N.C.A.A. Division III, and their record happens to be at the bottom of the barrel.  What impressed me was the school's attitude towards sport.  Their goal was to allow students to find physical activities that they liked well enough to continue on their own for life. The goal was to provide counterpoint to what was likely to be a sedentary work style and promote health over the long term.  They saw themselves as having a mission to act as a personal trainer.  Team sports and competition are a driver for some of their students, so they participate.⁵

 

And that leaves chimps.  An adult chimp is seriously stronger than any human - their strength to weight ratio is off-scale relative to ours.  This seems odd as they are close relatives sharing about 99% of their DNA with us.  The trick is they lack fine motor control - their muscle fibers are wired to contract in large groups where ours contract in much smaller groups and we can't contract the same percentage of muscle fibers as they can.   A chimp baseball player might have a wicked left hand, but their ball control would be seriously lacking and their handwriting would be awful.

__________

¹ Assuming their body shape and density remains the same.  A good first order assumption for very elite athletes in a given sport.  Area will increase as the square, volume as the cube.

Specifically if the length of an object with an area of a₁ changes from l₁ to l₂ the new area a₂ will be 

a₂ = a₁(l₂/l₁)²

double the length and the new area increases by a factor of four, triple it and it increases by a factor of nine. 

The volume will increase by the cube of the length.  

v₂ = v₁((l₂/l₁)³

Now doubling the length increases the volume by a factor of eight, tripling increases the volume by a factor of twenty seven. 

Since strength is proportional to the cross sectional area of a muscle and weight is proportional to their volume if everything is scaling uniformly, a person's strength to weight ratio changes as the square of their height divided by the cube of their height.  Or as their weight^2/3

It is important to stress that this ratio only holds if everything is scaled.  My friend Colleen, at 6'7, is about 23% taller than the average adult female.  Appling simple scaling, you would expect her to weight 86% more, but she is both thinner and more muscular and her ratio of leg length to height is much greater than the average female, so the rule doesn't hold.  Simple scaling breaks down when body proportions change and variation is common with extremely tall and short adults. What is true is she is quite a bit stronger and heavier and the length of her limbs means she can't accelerate them as quickly as a smaller person.  The rules of volleyball give her a great advantage in many positions, but less where quick movements are necessary.  This means she needs a teammate who is significantly smaller and capable of greater accelerations.  Woman's beach volleyball seems to favor those with a height of about 6'0 to 6'2 and a slim build.

² Not only would Godzilla not be able to move, but his bones wouldn't be able to support his weight.  Note that elephants have to have much thicker bones proportional to their size than smaller animals just to deal with the extra weight.  

³ It would be fascinating to make a composite representation of the measurements of the top ten athletes in every sport (accounting for specialists in team sports) and make a chart of the silhouettes ranging from the smallest gymnasts to basketball centers.  There is a lot of physics going on!  

⁴ I couldn't find the reference, but someone published the weights of line backers on top ranked high school football teams in Texas over the past fifty years.  The increase was greater than you might expect for recruiting very large boys and giving them enormous amounts of weight training.  There is a chance that doping is taking place.

⁵ The school is Caltech.  Oddly enough they managed to violate the N.C.A.A academic eligibility requirement. Very strange as Caltech may be the most selective school in the nation.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

I'm a big fan of garlic and of pressure cookers.  Why not use to pressure cooker to cook garlic?  You'll need a trivet for your pressure cooker and a small steamer basket.  Most pressure cookers come with trivets.

I'm still exploring my pressure cooker and am finding it extremely useful - you can save a lot of time and energy plus modern cookers are very safe.  I use a Kuhn Rikon - a bit spendy, but well-made and recommended by every experienced user I talked to.

 

Roasted Garlic

 

Ingredients

 

° 3 large garlic bulbs (see if that will fit in your steamer)

° a bit of high quality extra virgin olive oil

 

Technique

 

° chop the top quarter or so off the top of the garlic bulbs - keep the top section for your future garlic needs

° pour about a cup of water into your pressure cooker and place the bulbs cut side up in a steamer that sits on a trivet  

° cook for about 5 minutes on high pressure and then let the cooker come back to atmospheric pressure naturally - e.g. - just move it to a cold burner and let the pressure come down by itself

° remove the bulbs with tongs, place them in a heat-proof dish and drizzle the olive oil over them.  Broil on the top rack of your oven until they are nicely caramelized - about five minutes in my case.

° yum!

 

beyond 3d printing

4:37 AM - a minute past nautical dawn and a pleasant breeze of negative pions continues from the South Southwest at 17 GeV/c ...

 

We tried to make at least one log entry per shift entertaining for the next shift.

 

This was from a particle physics experiment.  We were colliding negative pions into a target that was mostly protons (liquid hydrogen).  There were millions of tiny collisions that had enough energy that allowed the creation of new particles.  I was specifically interested in finding a few that would say something about the fundamental nature of the charm quark.  The problem was such events were very rare - there was an enormous amount of uninteresting information to sort through.

 

You get rid of most of this - about 99.99%) very quickly by knowing something about what the physics of the interaction you were looking for predicted.  This had to be done quickly as information was constantly flooding in.   Back then we built event triggers out of fast logic elements - literally AND, NOT, OR, and NOR gates.  It looks like a rat's nest as all of this had to be precisely timed.  A one foot long wire provided about a billionth of a second of delay.¹  We also had a more complicated trigger...

 

At the heart of two of our charm triggers was a then huge two megabyte memory array that allowed us to store the geometry of likely charm events directly.  If an event fell within some predicted position and energy boundaries, it was saved to tape - if not we dropped it on the floor. This was a new revolution in physics at the time - programmable triggers.

 

What made it possible was the rapidly falling price of memory and the emergence of cheap microprocessors.  There was a revolution underway with hobbyist computers fueled by eight bit chips like the Intel 8080 and  Motorola 6800.  We took advantage of it and I programmed the 6800 in assembly language to make it run as fast as possible.  We were surfing the microcomputer tsunami.  

 

A few years later I found myself at Bell Labs doing physics and applied physics.  I found myself doing lithography - one of the fundamental technologies of the past few hundred years - how finely can you draw lines and something at the heart of making integrated circuits.  The process was automated with computer aided design tools and the bits became atoms in the photomask.  The process was a form of custom manufacturing.  There were a couple of chemical processes for positive and negative image masks, several sizes of quartz plates, design rules and so on - but it was rare for the writing tool to write the same design unless it was a replacement.²

 

Somewhere along the way I did some work with a computer vision group.  There was an interest in building a 3d copy machine.  What would it take to scan an 3d image and recreate it in atoms rather than bits?  A hot topic in the late 1980s and it continues to be interesting.  Somewhere about 1990 I printed a crude 3d part taken that replicated a scanned model of the Star Wars death star.

 

My little death star wasn't very impressive, but it was an exercise you learn from.  I went on to other things, but periodically tried state of the art printing just to see how it had evolved.  By 2000 it started to make a dent in the prototyping world and, maybe 5 years ago, the hobbyist market began to explode.

 

There have been many predictions on how 3d printing is the next PC revolution or, a bit more conservatively, the next printer revolution.  While it is fundamentally important to some types of design, I don't buy those predictions for a variety of reasons.  Materials, physical limitations of existing and laboratory tools,  and the difficulty of design drive my belief.  But it is a great hobby and it is making a big impact on industrial design.  And for a few like Iris Van Herpen,  those who understand design and art, it is given access to new materials and shapes that influence their creative process.  

 

There is a larger revolution underway that 3d printing is often connected with...

 

The revolution is inexpensive computer assisted manufacturing in low quantities.  Mass customization and even single unit manufacturing.  The barriers to manufacturing anything used to be enormous, but now hobbyists can find a niche. Perhaps a niche that would allow them to quit their day job.  The hard piece -- going from a few dozen examples to thousands is now relatively easy.³  

 

There are still many tools to build and write and people need to be trained in design (STEM k12 education is not sufficient - you need to add the arts - STEAM eduction!).  Good design is approximately hard - most of us have no idea how difficult it really is.  There is great design in physical objects and services, but the best way to appreciate it is simply to get your hands dirty - most of us are functionally illiterate when it comes to articulating design, let alone creating it.⁴  

 

One can go on and on, but a recent interview of Chris Anderson by Glenn Fleishman (52 minute mp3) on his The New Disruptors podcast is a great tour of the new bits to atoms world of mass customization and scaleable manufacture

 

Highly recommended!

 

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¹ Rear Admiral and computer pioneer Grace Hopper used to carry around foot long wires and handed them out as "nanoseconds"  In the old charm experiment all of the fast signals were timed to within about a half nanosecond.  Colleen, who is exactly two meters tall, sometimes tells people she's six and two thirds of a nanosecond tall when people ask...

² The lithography tools of choice were electron beam writing machines.  We had a homebrew system called EBES - the Electron Beam Exposure System.  It could write half micron features to about a twentieth of a micron accuracy.  There have been enormous improvements since then.

³ I still regularly build 3d objects.  They are still temperamental and very restricted to design and material.  My larger interest lies in other types of mass customization.  In particular clothing.

For those who are interested in this revolution - even those who just track the state of technology - I  strongly encourage you to get your hands dirty.  You can learn an enormous amount trying to design and 3d print something on your own for example.

⁴ This notion of the learning of design is something that has been fascinating Jheri and I for the past few months.  How is design learned and articulated in apparel and how is that impacted by different types of community? There is a good deal of change taking place.

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Recipe Corner

 

Two recipes this time.  The first is so quick, easy and good.  And many variations with topping them.

 

Roasted Brussels sprouts

 

Ingredients

 

° a kilo or so of brussels sprouts

° 3 to 4 tbl olive oil

° sea salt

° ground pepper

° maple syrup or honey

° white wine vinegar

 

Technique

 

° set oven to 450°F 

° cut the brussels sprouts in half, coat in oil salt and pepper 

° arrange face down on a tray and roast for 25 minutes or so until beginning to caramelize

° flip over with a spatula and continue roasting for about 10 minutes

° plate and drizzle a mixture of maple syrup or honey and white wine vinegar

 

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The second is hardly a recipe, but is way better than store bought peanut/cashew/almond butters.

 

Peanut/Cashew/Almond Butter

 

Find some honey-roasted cashews, almonds or peanuts and throw them in a blender for 5 to 6 minutes, scraping down the sides of the blender as necessary, until you have a peanut butter consistency.  

That's it!

If you like you can roast the raw nuts yourself (7 - 10 minutes in a 350°F oven), but the honey-roasted nuts (or legumes in the case of peanuts) have a little sugar and sweet and work out very well without all of the stabilizer nasties you get in most commercial spreads.  If you roast your own you probably want to add a bit of salt and possibly some honey or maple syrup.

 

 

on creativity

Over the years I've been lucky enough to have known and worked with several exceptionally creative people and a couple of creative organizations.   There seem to be a few components that enable it.  Perhaps the best news is it doesn't seem to be a talent someone is born with.  A few themes emerge:   play, being unafraid to fail (confidence and play perhaps), the opportunity and ability to focus on a single task without interruption, isolation at some times and the right forms of communications at others, and letting the problem become a background task at times seem to be centrally important. ¹

 

This morning I was going through email and an old client wanted a bit on the subject for his organization.²  As an introduction I sent him links to two excellent John Cleese videos.  It seems appropriate to share them, so rather than writing much in this post (no recipe corner today - I need to get to my mini-sabbatical - a critical piece of my own journey to being a bit more creative), here are the videos:

 

from 1991

 

 

 

and from a few years ago ...

 

 

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¹ Many of these are connected and simple to state, but many are very difficult to achieve in a conventional workplace and many of us find critical pieces difficult to implement.

² In the past decade I've been asked to help a few organizations enhance and grow the creativity of the organization as well as that of its members.  There have been some successes, but this can be a non-trivial task with many dependencies.  

 

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your own private air force and a bit on creativity

I'm in the middle of my annual mini-sabbatical, but I spend the evenings and part of the weekends letting my mind wander as well as keeping things running.  That seems to work better than total immersion. I was part of a discussion on great projects for a 10^th grader who wants to impress engineering schools.  UAVs strike me as something potentially fascinating and there are more than a few unexplored areas where a smart teen could do impressive work - the field is very open ended.  

 

Lightweight video cameras and small flying platforms - unmanned ariel vehicles - can be mixed in a variety of ways.  You can put a camera on a RC airplane, fly it around, and watch the video later.  A more advanced flavor is called first person video - you put a camera in the aircraft, stream the video back and use it to control the flight - often watching the view with video goggles.¹  And you can let the aircraft fly autonomously to a pre-planned flight path and either store or transmit the video.  

 

Lots of fun, but there are any number of social implications.  It is still very difficult to fly autonomously in the US and commercial use of these flying cameras is still largely barred by the FAA (although they are working towards allowing it).  There is an experimenter/hobbyist space with certain weight and distance limitations along with a rule that flying must be within line of sight. Thousands participate and a cottage industry has sprung up making the bits and pieces that make this work.  Much of the software comes from research projects at Universities and some of it is fairly sophisticated.

 

a few videos have become popular 

 

 

One has to wonder what was running through the moose's mind - perhaps some lines from the Bullwinkle show are appropriate.  

 

Eirik Solheim -the Norwegian guy who created the video - has a site that is rich in content for advanced hobbyists.²  While there are very small toy class platforms, most of the serious  experimenting is taking place using kits that require something in the neighborhood $500 to $1,000 to build and fly.  Stability and control can be very impressive and the police who were involved in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations became very nervous when one of these appeared.

 

A number of turn-key autonomous commercial class drones used for police, military, construction, scientific and other work ...  the people who make the toy class AR.Drones (still very impressive technology) are involved in an autonomous UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) product called the senseFly.  Starting at about $9,000, but currently illegal in the US, you get an autonomous mapper.³  These would have been very useful in the wake of the recent  Sandy superstorm.  There is a lot of competition in this area with large increases in capabilities and reductions in prices likely.

 

 UAVs bristle with society and technology issues, but can be a great platform for engineering students.  I suspect hundreds of organizations in the US probably have someone playing with them on salary or as a hobbyist and suspect a lot of activity if the FAA announces regulations with few restrictions (which is expected). Think about any task that uses a helicopter for observation and lower the operating cost by a factor of 100.  And that is just a starting point.

 

This is very much a technology that an amateur can sink his or her teeth into - we're at a period that is similar to PCs in the late 1970s as far as required sophistication goes. Many reasons to get involved and learn if you have the time and inclination and a great activity for kids who are interested in engineering.   I'm a big believer in getting your hands dirty if you intend to learn about anything in depth.

 

Clearly one of those technologies that, while neutral by itself, can easily be used for good or evil...  And all the better reason for learning about it.  Not to mention that immersing yourself in something like this can encourage creative thought - perhaps in areas you may not have expected.

 

 

 

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There is growing evidence that multitasking limits creative thinking.  There is an increasing amount of social research in the field - some of it strikes me as flawed and experimental design can be tricky ... even basic definitions are fluffy ..  but this paper in PLoS is interesting and worth reading.  It has some issues, but the notion of using nature to promote creative thought is an old one that works for many people.  Recommended reading and I'm sure it is far from the final word on the subject.

 

I've been lucky enough to have advised a couple of exceptionally creative companies on increasing their creative level.  There have been some experiments, some failure and a few major victories.  The common thread among the best strategies to date has been allowing people to have the freedom to single task and convincing them to try.  There are a lot of basic components necessary in the first place - great hiring, great problems, certain communication patterns (very open communication paths are not universally healthy!), and a half dozen other things.  But once you have most of these the trick is keeping the gears meshing and tuning the system.   Fascinating stuff - but that's all for the time being.

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¹ There is quite a bit of hobbyist FPV these days as evidenced by sites like this

² Notes on his moose video

³ This marketing video from senseFLY gives an idea of their capabilities

 

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Recipe Corner

 

This is really great - parsnips are still good and you can find Granny Smith and similar apples that are ok.  A homemade vegetable stock is, as always, a central component.  I've never come across a good ready-made stock.  You can make it a bit safer by using substituing skim milk and using olive oil rather than butter. It would still probably be excellent.

 

Parsnip and Apple Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 28g butter

° 1 tbl olive oil

° 2 medium yellow onions, peeled, chopped and diced

° 600g parsnips, cut into inchish pieces

° 2 garlic cloves, crushed

° 600g pie class apples peeledand cut into chunks

° 1/2 liter (500g) vegetable stock

° 150g whole  milk

° kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

 

Technique

 

° Melt the butter and oil in a large saucepan. Gently fry the onions and parsnips on a low heat for 15 minutes, until the onions are softened.

° Add garlic and apples and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring regularly.

° Add the stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook for about 20 minutes, until the parsnips are very soft.

° Remove from the heat and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

° Blend the mixture with a blender stick or use a blender.  Season to taste

° Cool and serve