omenti

like a standard candle in the darkness

Indulging in some fine ice cream I found myself thinking about my Grandpa Joe.  Good ice cream was an art-form to him and he exposed me to good homemade examples early on.  These days I rarely have it and usually make my own, but every now and again a very high quality ice cream is called for - in this case Jeni's Splendid Salty Caramel.  I only had a little as it is spendy and laced with saturated fat, but as I thought about him I looked at the nutrition label and did a quick mental comparison with something else I associate with him - dynamite.

 

It seems he was rather good at it.  Harsh economic times caused them to lose their property to the East of Park City, Utah and he was forced to work a variety of odd jobs to support the family.  Economies were observed and he decided a cheap and efficient way to provide protein was to fish with dynamite rather than a hook.  A stick or two could produce a few week's protein which could be traded with other families.

 

About a megajoule of energy is stored in a standard stick of dynamite.¹  I was having about four ounces of caramel ice cream - 260 nutritional calories by the label or just under 1.1 megajoules.  The different is power - the rate by which energy is released.  Energy from the Jeni's is released over a period of hours while the dynamites is released in about a thousandth of a second.  

 

He told me stories about some strange things that were liberated from the lake during his fishing trips.  It had a secondary use of probing lake and river beds.  Explosions have a nice way turning things inside out...

 

We're seeing some of that right now in the Northern sky.  One usually thinks of discovery in astronomy taking place on remote mountain tops or in space with enormous telescopes, but most professional telescopes have very narrow fields of view to study very faint objects.  This one involves a 14 inch teaching telescope at the University of London's Observatory - not exactly primo territory for a dark night sky.²  And the weather was closing in, but the telescope was pointed at a standard target well-known by all amateur astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere..  M82.

...

“The weather was closing in, with increasing cloud,” Fossey says, “so instead of the planned practical astronomy class, I gave the students an introductory demonstration of how to use the CCD camera on one of the observatory’s automated 0.35–meter telescopes.”

The students chose M 82, a bright and photogenic galaxy as their target, as it was in one of the shrinking patches of clear sky. While adjusting the telescope’s position, Fossey noticed a ‘star’ overlaid on the galaxy which he did not recognize from previous observations.

They inspected online archive images of the galaxy, and it became apparent that there was indeed a new star-like object in M 82. With clouds closing in, there was hardly time to check: so they switched to taking a rapid series of 1 and 2 minute exposures through different coloured filters to check that the object persisted, and to be able to measure its brightness and colour. 

Meanwhile, they started up a second telescope to obtain a second source of data, to ensure the object was not an instrumental artifact. By about 19:40 GMT, the cloud cover was almost complete, but it was just possible to make out the new object in the second data set: this was a real astronomical source.

...

Guy Pollack: “It was a surreal and exciting experience taking images of the unidentified object as Steve ran around the observatory verifying the result. I’m very chuffed to have helped in the discovery of the M 82 Supernova.“

Tom Wright: “One minute we’re eating pizza then five minutes later we’ve helped to discover a supernova. I couldn’t believe it. It reminds me why I got interested in astronomy in the first place.”

... 

 

Stars constantly change over their lifetimes with the beginnings and ends often packing some drama.  Our existence depends on various forms of this drama as most of the observable matter produced during the first three minutes after the Big Bang consists of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium.  The universe undergoing rapid expansion and the process of making new atomic nuclei from protons and neutrons stopped around twenty minutes out with tiny bits of beryllium being formed.  A nice start.  Enough to allow stars to form, but the building blocks for life weren't there.

 

Stars, of course, did form and as they aged new elements were formed.  As it happens their initial mass predicts much of their future.  Most stars, including the Sun, will end up as white dwarfs.  A variety of elements, all lighter than iron, can be formed but many necessary for life are skipped.  Many of these, including our Sun, will end up producing a lot of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.  There will be massive energy bursts that eject large amounts of mass into an expanding shell.  These shells are planetary nebulae and, illuminated by the now smaller remnant star.³ In end a good deal of the Sun and all of the planets surrounding it will form a very beautiful object.  The ejected shells keep expanding and are used to help create new stars and their solar systems - recycling at an enormous scale!

 

Fortunately for life there are other ways to create elements in a star and move them into space.  Supernovae are extremely violent stellar explosions.  There are several types but since the discovery in London was a Type 1A Supernova, we'll focus that kind.⁴

 

Stars often form in binary pairs - orbiting around a common center of mass.  Imagine a pair that are evolving at somewhat different rates where one has become a white dwarf.  The other can be one of a variety, but imagine it being like our Sun will be just before it collapses and forms a white dwarf - a red giant.⁵  Some of the atmosphere from the red giant is caught by the gravity of the white dwarf which gains mass by accretion.

 

The white dwarf slowly grows until it gets to about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun.  Then things get really interesting.⁶  The core temperature rises to a level where carbon fusion can take place, but the star is unable cool itself normally.  It simmers along for perhaps a thousand years and then a conflagration flame starts internally and quickly spreads through the star with the internal temperature rising to billions of degrees.  There is enough temperature and pressure for a lot of elements to form and a violent explosion occurs releasing about 1 to 2 *10⁴⁴ Joules of energy.  Big numbers are difficult to get a handle on, but think of the energy the Sun releases in its lifetime -- this is on that scale and it is released in seconds.  A bright flash is produced, often as bright as a galaxy and what was left of the star moves away at about five percent the speed of light.

 

The flash has some interesting characteristics.  One is its brightness - about five billion times as bright as the Sun.  The mechanism for producing it is the same in all Type 1A supernovae as the triggering mass is the same, so the brightness or luminosity is about the same.

 

Astronomers love these events.  If you have similar flashbulbs going off and you use the inverse square law and estimate their distance to reasonable accuracy.  They become standard candles that allow you to measure the distance to galaxies.

 

Here is a video of one set of calculations from a massive simulation of about the first second of one of these events.  It is sobering when you consider that one of these 25 light years from Earth would certainly wipe out all life here.

 

But they complete the set of all the building blocks we have and move them into position where new solar systems can form.  Much of the matter we are made of are the result of not one but several - perhaps a dozen or so - "nearby" supernovae billions of years ago.  We are literally stardust.

 

So go out and look up at the Big Dipper and think about this event that is laying the ground for the creation of new solar systems and perhaps new life.⁷

 

 __________

¹ One of those nice little factoids one tends to remember.  A standard stick in the US is 8 by 1.25 inches and weighs about 0.2 kg.  The energy density for standard dynamite is a disappointing 5 MJ/kg.  Two hundred and fifty nutritional calories is about a megajoule - so the average daily diet of 2,000 calories packs the energy equivalent of eight sticks of dynamite. 

² 14" is small for a professional telescope, but is a common size for advanced amateurs and for hands-on astronomy and astrophysics courses.  You can also do serious work with such instruments.  For scale one like this on a good mount is probably in the $25k range.  More sophisticated optics, electronics and automation can easily take you over $75k, but there are people who put far more than that into boats.

 M82 and telescope images courtesy University College London

³ The term planetary nebula is historic and the result of bad optics and an insufficient understanding of astronomy.  William Herschel thought they were newly forming planetary systems. Nebula is Latin for mist or cloud and these were blurry blobs in his telescope.  The name stuck, but doesn't make much sense.  Such is science.

⁴ This is really exciting stuff, but there is no room or time for a reasonable discussion.  Ping me if you want to go deeper and I can recommend books depending on your background.

⁵ At some point our Sun in about four billion years will have exhausted most of its hydrogen and the core will shrink and heat up. The part of the Sun outside the core will expand - probably past the Earth's orbit.  The surface temperature will be cooler causing it to appear red.  It will still have the same mass, but its volume will be about ten million times greater so the density will be very low by our standards.

⁶ 1.4 solar masses is a very interesting point in astrophysics.  It also is close to the Chandrasekhar Limit.  In his early 20s Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar worked out the relativistic quantum mechanics that said stars with greater masses would have enough internal gravity to crush protons and electrons into neutrons allowing the star to collapse into a tiny neutron star - a star with a diameter on the order of ten miles. 

⁷ look around for star maps to pinpoint M82

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Recipe Corner

 

A nice healthy soup for a cold day.  It was thrown together so these are guess measurements, but it should make a good start.  More water if you like thin soups, less if you like them thick.  It would be nice served with a good bread and perhaps some sour cream and thin slices of avocado as a garnish.  If it was the summer with great tomatoes (sigh) I would dice a couple and stir them in prior to serving.

 

Red and Green Pepper Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl olive oil

° 1 large red bell pepper

° 1 large green bell pepper

° 2 red onions

° 4 garlic cloves, diced

° 2 tsp cumin

° 1 tsp dry oregano

° 1 tsp cayenne

° 1 tsp coriander

° 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (more if you like it hot ..  I used about a full tsp)

° 1 tsp sea salt

° 1 28 oz can kidney beans, rinsed

° 3 cups water

 

Technique

 

° thinly slice the bell peppers and onions and start the oil warming in a large pan over medium high heat

° add the vegetables and cook until the pepper skin blistered and starts to caramelize - maybe five minutes.  About a minute before the next step ad the garlic.

° push the vegetables to one side of the pan and add the spices to the bare side.  Toast for about a half minute and then mix and coat the veggies.  Throw in some of the water to de-glaze the pan and scrape the yummy brown residue from the bottom and mix it in. 

° add the beans, salt and what's left of the water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 20 minutes.

a tale of two papers

Last night I read two papers that had been recommended earlier in the day.  They couldn't have been more different.  One was patently wrong and raised questions about reporting and the other left me with a variety of questions I hadn't considered keeping me up nearly 'til dawn playing.

 

First the one that bothers me:

 

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics 

John Cannarella¹, Joshua A. Spechler¹

¹ Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

 

Abstract

The last decade has seen the rise of immense online social networks (OSNs) such as MySpace and Facebook. In this paper we use epidemiological models to explain user adoption and abandonment of OSNs, where adoption is analogous to infection and abandonment is analogous to recovery. We modify the traditional SIR model of disease spread by incorporating infectious recovery dynamics such that contact between a recovered and infected member of the population is required for recovery. The proposed infectious recovery SIR model (irSIR model) is validated using publicly available Google search query data for “MySpace” as a case study of an OSN that has exhibited both adoption and abandonment phases. The irSIR model is then applied to search query data for “Facebook,” which is just beginning to show the onset of an abandonment phase. Extrapolating the best fit model into the future predicts a rapid decline in Facebook activity in the next few years. 

 

 

A non-peer reviewed paper that predicts Facebook will pretty much die by 2017 was apparently mentioned everywhere and given enough credibility that six people forwarded the link to me.  You can read it for yourself - it isn't very deep or technical.  Basically a couple of people from Princeton use a simple epidemiology model, adjust some parameters to fit Myspace's rise and fall,  scrape Google for some information on Facebook and make their prediction.

 

It is wrong in so many ways.¹  It is bad enough that I wonder if it was intended to be a bogus piece to test how good online media is at filtering "scientific" results.²  The last point troubles me more than the first as science utimately regulates itself.  A check of online sites showed many picked it up and reported it as if it was valid.  Many people saw it and probably believed it to be solid work based on their trust of whatever website they were reading and the paper's Princeton pedigree.

 

The second paper is more interesting and useful.  Non-scientists often think papers exist to report results.  In fact there are a number of reasons, but some are written to summarize thinking and stimulate others into thought.  These are common when in new fields as well as fields undergoing enormous change.  Workshops are full of talks and papers like this and tend to be exciting places as a result.

 

Exobiology - life elsewhere in the Universe - is currently red hot with the discovery and early analysis of exoplanets as well as some intriguing possibilities of life on places like some of Jupiter's moons.  Until very recently most work has been focused on looking for solar systems with planets in the so-called habitable zone.  Our conceptions of life tend to be biased by the sample we're familiar with, so we're looking for Earth-like planets or moons in regions where there would be liquid water - something everyone agrees upon.  

 

The Earth is clearly in a habitable zone, after all, we are an existence proof.  But what if we aren't in an optimal habitable zone?  What if there are places that are much better?  What might that mean for the search for extraterritorial life?

 

About a year ago a couple of papers suggested that we are at the edge of such a zone - that if the Sun was a bit brighter, or we were a bit closer, that life would be toast.  The paper I read expands on that idea and suggests some characteristics that might make a planet or moon superhabitable.

 

Superhabitable Worlds        Hypothesis Article 

 

René Heller¹ and John Armstrong²

¹Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

²Department of Physics, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, USA.

 

Abstract

 

To be habitable, a world (planet or moon) does not need to be located in the stellar habitable zone (HZ), and worlds in the HZ are not necessarily habitable. Here, we illustrate how tidal heating can render terrestrial or icy worlds habitable beyond the stellar HZ. Scientists have developed a language that neglects the possible existence of worlds that offer more benign environments to life than Earth does. We call these objects “superhabitable” and discuss in which contexts this term could be used, that is to say, which worlds tend to be more habitable than Earth. In an appendix, we show why the principle of mediocracy cannot be used to logically explain why Earth should be a particularly habitable planet or why other inhabited worlds should be Earth-like.

Superhabitable worlds must be considered for future follow-up observations of signs of extraterrestrial life. Considering a range of physical effects, we conclude that they will tend to be slightly older and more massive than Earth and that their host stars will likely be K dwarfs. This makes Alpha Centauri B, which is a member of the closest stellar system to the Sun and is supposed to host an Earth-mass planet, an ideal target for searches for a superhabitable world. Key Words: Extrasolar terrestrial planets—Extraterrestrial life—Habitability—Planetary environments—Tides. Astrobiology 14, 50–66.

 

I won't go into detail, but the authors begin by looking at tidal heating as a way to create enough energy to keep water liquid in cold regions.  Nothing novel about this, but they go on to talk about some system characteristics.  A few are:

 

° a larger world than Earth with more surface area for life.  But not too large. They argue a mass of two to three times that of Earth is optimal.

° lots of shallow water and long coastlines.  Single supercontinents and huge oceans are probably not a good thing.  (a more massive planet gravitationally favors shallower seas)

° oxygen should be greater than Earth's 21% as that places a limit on organism size, but less than 35% where runaway fires would be too much of a problem.

° a fairly strong magnetic field - better than Earth's would be good - to provide shielding from ionizing radiation

° a long lived stable star ..  smaller than our Sun is probably best

° limited plate activity to induce long time scale carbon-silicate cycles

 

Other ideas that are currently popular are questioned.  If you are into this sort of thing I recommend giving it a read.  

 

It is important is that the authors are not reporting a result, but rather is reporting a serious of questions they've been playing with.  It is an open invitation to others to join and to come to conclusions strong enough that eventually testable models can be made for the next generation of space-based telescopes or even probes (to Io for example).

 

These papers point out some paths and cautions for organizations using "big data." People doing the work need to be expert enough in the domain they're working in as well as having a solid tool competence.  They need to be skeptical and they need the time and resources to play with a number of hypothesis.  Too many times I've seen data massaged to fit a corporate direction.  Good analysis often leads to new questions - questions that can make a difference.   Management needs to be sufficiently versed  to appreciate and even question the results.  

 

The first paper shows a failure of questioning and logic as well as a failure of the tech press.  The second shows two researchers playing with ideas and encouraging others to join the fun.  Guess which one is ultimately more productive?

 

I'm both excited by and leery of large scale data analysis.  It is damned hard to get right and there are a lot of tools that bury the details of what's going on under the hood enough to lead to bad results.  People are neurally wired for apophenia and there there can be cultural pressures that force it.  A strong natural skepticism is essential.  An organization requires good people before snazzy tools.   Fortunately the bar is being lowered for getting into the tools.  R has been terrific and now advances in some extensions to Python are bringing basic tools to undergrads and there appears to be a good deal of enthusiasm.  The computational tools are nice (name your favorite ball using sport) balls - you still need a lot of experience before you can play well and many people will never hack it.    It probably makes sense to have at least a few people who think like this for fun - and people from very different fields.

 

I'll end with a very bad physics joke.

 

There is a psychology experiment where a person very attractive to the subject waits on a table.  The subject is told they will start out 20 feet apart, but five minutes later it will be moved to half the distance and every five minutes the distance will again be reduced by half the remaining distance.  

The first subject is a mathematician.  Upon hearing the plan he gets angry and walks off in disgust muttering "I can't wait forever!"

The next subject is a physicist.  She also hears the plan and excitedly agrees.  The experimenter says "don't you know you'll never get there?"  She replies - "sure, but I'll be close enough..."

 

Close enough is very important to physicists - especially when they play.  There are several tools - fermi calculations and dimensional analysis are two important examples - that allow you to rapidly sort out if something makes sense.³  If it makes sense, you can think about going in more deeply.  But if you are going through hundreds of ideas to get to one worth thinking about more deeply it is important to be parsimonious with your time.  This sort of approach can be extremely useful in making sense of large amounts of data and getting to the right questions.

___________

¹ It doesn't deserve a detailed takedown, but a few points.  The authors posit the decline of a social network is similar to the spread of an epidemic - eg.  that leaving is symmetric with joining.  They don't offer any proof (plus it isn't).  They manage to show it works if the parameters are fiddled for one specific case - namely Myspace and imply that is sufficient.  It isn't.  Then they claim FB is showing decline by pulling their data from a very noisy source - Google Trends.  They make some bad ad hoc arguments and produce a plot that shows FB has peaked when all other evidence is to the contrary.  Then they imply this model just works for social networks.  

Seriously.  I wouldn't give this a passing grade as an undergrad paper.

² The last sentence reads:  "In addition, the authors acknowledge Professor Craig B. Arnold for fruitful golf discussion."

³ It is curious.  I'm a physicist and am often asked to look at technologies or some sort of technique.  Much of the domain is practiced by engineers and often that may be the best approach. But the physics approach is often very different and sometimes offers valuable insight.  I'm struck by the difference in approach some times.  Physicists tend to do a lot of simple play early on.

winter dreams

About a month ago I found myself at an airport waiting for a flight to Phoenix.  My father died a few hours earlier and I was deep in thought.  He loved classical music - particularly the 19^th century Russians.  Numbly browsing the iTunes store I found the same recording I remembered him buying when the family stereo was delivered.

 

It was a solid state Magnavox and probably a huge splurge for our family.   Home entertainment systems of the day had fine cabinetry and this was no exception, but the guts of the unit interested me - after all, the family transistor count just took a huge jump.

 

Any major piece of electronics came with a set of schematics - a shorthand blueprint of what made it tick.  I was fascinated by radio and could decipher the symbols and their relationships with each other.  It had a total of 31 transistors - a huge improvement from the six that were in my transistor radio.  Nerdy kids from earlier eras could tell you the family tube count and in the teens and twenties how many electric motors were in the house.¹  

 

We had a fair number of tubes in other family electronics, but transistors promised trouble free operation.  Tubes had to warm up for about thirty seconds and gave off a warm orangish glow.  This heat lead to failure and many stores had a tube testing machine.  If your radio or television wasn't working you would pull off the cover and look for the dark tube.  More often than not swapping it for a new tube would fix the unit, but radio repair shops were good businesses.

 

Accurate transistor counts today are a futile exercise - even estimates are very hard requiring specialized knowledge.²  So what to count?  It might be possible to count microprocessors, but even that is becoming difficult.³  Perhaps we should count computers, but that brings up a thorny issue.  

 

What do you mean by computer - what does it do?

 

This class of question is a good starting point for considering the emerging class of connected devices that talk to other machines - the so called Internet of Things.  In the past few years we've seen a big change of the perception of what the Internet is.  For most people it meant the web and what they could access with a browser, but mobile devices brought change.  Smartphones and tablets still have browsers, but they are also festooned with sensors and applications with connections to points on the Internet.  This is opening some major opportunities and causing a fair amount of scrambling.

 

Internet of Things is an unfortunate label as it lumps too many categories.  Nest thermostats are considers prime examples.  That class of device - a network connected control unit with a user interface - is quite expensive and difficult to get "right".  They will be important and visible and may even grow into hubs that connect groups of sensors and other processing units, but they will not represent more than a small percentage of IoT devices.

 

About twenty years ago I was spending a good deal of my time working on what were then high bandwidth networks.   One frustrating day I found myself late for something and having to turn back home because I couldn't remember if I had locked the door.  I built a key that would light an LED for ten minutes after it had been inserted in the lock, but the experience got me thinking about very low bandwidth opportunistic communications.  Specifically what is the byte of information that is very valuable?  The state of your house doors, refrigerator door, range element and so on...   The networking piece was mostly as anything that existed was expensive overkill.   Ultimately I wanted this on the Internet and readable by a portable device, but getting the information to the Internet in the first place was non-trivial.

 

Now there are many candidate networks that let you forget wiring your sensors.  The Nest uses WiFi, but that is overkill and too expensive (mostly in terms of power) for most of the IoT devices that will spring up.  For many shorter ranges and very low power consumption make sense.  BlueTooth LE is one of many network types that are appropriate - it may win early on as Apple has it in all of the iPhones produced in the last few years.  BLE exists on over a quarter of a billion devices ... devices that can interact with other inexpensive BLE radios.

 

People tend not to buy gadgets until they make sense.  Not many other than geeks and well heeled replacement customers will buy Nest thermostats.  On the other hand there is a good market for networked door locks.  It is easy to explain the value of the lock - even I could see the need twenty years ago.  BLE is very cheap and will soon be well under a dollar in added cost.

 

Anything with a processor will have a connection to a network.  LED light bulbs will change color and brightness from an app on your phone or tablet.  Your rice maker will talk to your phone and other appliances.  Some information will go to the Internet, but some will have decisions made locally on smartphones, PCs or even other IoT devices.  This piece is interesting - Apple and Google represent very different approaches to where and how the information from these devices will be analyzed and other approaches will emerge.  Questions that beget questions.  A fascinating and deep area to ponder.

 

That brings us to how rapidly this will grow.  If you only think about UI class objects like Nest thermometers, Fitbits and the like,  the answer is not many for quite awhile.  These tend to be expensive and most people don't have an immediate need.  Very few of us are interested in the "quantified self" for example.⁴

 

But start controlling lights, knowing which pills your 90 year old mother on the other side of the country has taken so far today, learning if you left the tea pot on when you're ten minutes from home on your way to work,  and looking for those missing keys and you'll see a need.  In very little time none of this will cost perceptively more than the things we own that lack a network connection.  BLE can be made to run for years on a watch battery and the basic electrics will disappear onto the silicon with existing microprocessors or be available as a standalone chip for ten cents or so.

 

I was recently asked how big the IoT will be by 2025.  Most estimates are in the 30 to 50 billion unit range (currently there are about 10 billion devices connected to the Internet), but that is far too conservative.  My semi-educated guess is based on the notion that almost every gadget will be assumed to have a network connection.  Most of these will be to local intranets within the home (I like to call this ground fog based computing rather than cloud based computing) with a much smaller number being directly connected.  I think we'll see a half billion households with at least 100 IoT devices in each and perhaps a similar number in business and government - so I'll put my guess at a trillion devices.  So ubiquitous and so necessary that the terminology Internet of Things will have completely faded.

 

Will it make our lives better?  Well - if I don't have to hunt for the keys a ferret stole, I'm a happy camper.  If my shirt sends information on my health to my insurance company I may not be quite as happy.  Additionally security will be a huge issue -- there far too much to go into now except that is is largely ignored at this point.

 

At this stage the most important point is our perception of what the Internet is will continue to move away from the browser.  It is clear Google and others know something big is afoot.  Search is becoming much less important.

 

Tchaikovsky's 1^st Symphony is known as Winter Dreams - how fitting on this cold January day as one dreams of the direction of sensors and the Internet.   A lovely piece of music.

 

__________

¹ Prior to the 30s electric motors were expensive and it wasn't uncommon to use one for multiple tasks.  

² Most of your transistor count is likely to be in flash memory.  Depending on design flash chips can store one, two or three bits of information per transistor.  DRAM stores one bit per transistor and SRAM usually requires six transistors per bit.  My 16 GB iPod Nano uses MLC NAND memory - two bits per transistor, so it has about eight billion transistors.  Sukie's 256 GB MacPro has a MLC NAND, so it has about 128 billion transistors just in the memory.   SLC NAND is used in high performance flash memory and has just a single transistor per bit, but it is more expensive.  (SLC is single level cell - MLC is multilevel cell - refering to the density of information per cell.  Higher densities correspond to slower performance and shorter lifetimes.) In any event it won't be long before average households have close to a trillion transistors.

³ Some cars have over 100 microprocessors ranging from very simple four and eight bit chips to large 32 and 64 bit microprocessors.

⁴ In a few years the objects on us will be providing us with what amounts to a stream of biometric selfies.  There is evidence that there will be very small - the people who act on quantified health measurements seem to be those who act on suggestions by their doctors during physicals.

__________

Recipe Corner

 

A friend lives in Cameroon.  Here is a vegan adaptation I made of a peanut soup. An excellent Winter soup. 

 

Peanut Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° about 2 tbl of finely chopped fresh ginger 

° 3 cloves of garlic

° 2 cans of unsalted tomatoes (I had 28 ounce cans) diced and keep the liquid

° 1 cup smooth peanut butter

° 2 tsp paprika  (cayenne or a hot sauce if you like spicy soup)

° 1 15 oz can black eyed peas (2 cups final if you soak your beans)

° salt

 

Technique

 

° Mince the ginger and garlic in a food processor (I'm lazy)

° add the tomatoes and  juice, pb, and paprika and process 'til smooth

° poor soup in a pot and cook over a medium heat for about 15 minutes

° add the beans and cook for another 10 or 15 minutes - salt to taste

 

thoughts on the internet

The apartment rules clearly stated "No Cats, No Dogs!" Somehow this lead to our first ferret and they've been helping with the entropy of the house since.  At the time ferrets weren't common pets and veterinary experience was difficult to find.  We found ourselves spending time at the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan - not an easy trek - and Sukie threw herself into learning about what makes them tick.  

 

About the same time there was a netnews group devoted to ferrets - rec.pets.ferrets - and Sukie co-founded a mailing list that centered on health issues and is now known for being an information link between vets and medical researchers.

 

In the late 80s a frantic message arrived from Sweden.  A ferret was very ill and the local vet has determined a potential problem with  an x-ray, but didn't know how to interpret it.  Sukie knew there were a few possibilities each with differing outcomes and medical approaches.  The problem was the nearest vet who was knowledgeable on the subject was in New Jersey.  Unfortunately the clock was ticking and Federal Express was not going to cut it.

 

I had contact with a Swede who I thought might be in Stockholm.  Urban had a ferret and shared an interest in aircraft, so we knew of each other.  We chatted and, mirabile dictu,  he lived not far from the Swedish vet and had access to a digital scanner at his University.  He flew into action and scanned the x-ray while I tried to set up something to transfer the image.  It turned out to be a bit too large (well - way too large) for our first idea, but a quick hack to some client code took care of that.  Urban grabbed the changes and compiled the new client on his side. - we were in business and soon the file was making its way across the Atlantic.  

 

The expert vet on my end came over for a look.  All of the technology involved -  clients, computers, routers, and networks faded away and real medicine took center stage.  A phone call was placed to Sweden and a vet was guided through an operation.

 

the little ferret made it and returned to health

 

The pipe part of the Internet was improving rapidly at the time and people were recognizing once prohibitively large chunks of information could be economically moved.  Around '93 I was involved in what may have been the first high quality live multicast  concert on "the net"..  A few of us were testing what was possible with a variety of technologies, but the real reason was a fundraiser for Bruce "Utah" Phillips - a folk singer without the funds to have cardiac surgery.  There were hacks to be sure, but the effort was much lower than what conventional telephone networks required - and at a much lower cost.  It was also becoming clear that voice and video telephony over the Internet were going to be possible and that could sink the telcos unless they could evolve.

 

The world had changed.  A lone individual could create their own service without having to ask permission.  As long as your client spoke a common protocol and you had a large enough link it would just work.

 

With that I begin a rant - a reaction to the court ruling this week that attacks network neutrality in the US...

 

<rant>

 

It took me ten years - the point where a ferret was saved - to appreciate the Internet is much richer than a communication network.  It is made up of a variety of networks, a common protocol, peerage agreements and so on - but it is also a collection of cultures and people. 

 

You should be able to attach to a connection and exchange packets of information with others around the world.  Many people think so-called ISPs are selling Internet service, but the are just providing carriage between you and their connections to other networks. Services happen at the periphery.

 

I'm willing to pay my ISP for the carriage they provide for their portion of the physical Internet, but they shouldn't have any filtering capabilities.    The intelligence should be at the edge - in my smartphone, laptop and desktop.  I should be able to create a service on my own if I desire.

 

Of course this notion has been stated more eloquently by others.  My friend David Isenberg, the guy who popularized the idea of dumb networks in the 90s, notes:

 

the Internet is a communications network the way oil is a transportation system

 

There are many technical legal issues and I have refrained from mentioning network neutrality as it is usually poorly defined.  Getting into definitions and legalities clouds the basic issue and books have been written on the subject.  The core notion of the Internet vanishes in a puff of greed if those we call ISPs are allowed to become filtered gateways making money in the process.  These filters won't matter for major destinations like Google and Facebook, so don't expect them to fight -  but could have a chilling effect on small and medium sized companies.  And even worse can happen.  

 

I apologize for the rant as it is not my normal style, but it is important to recognize broadband isn't the Internet, mobile connections are part of it, no entity owns or manages it and there is much beyond the pipes and software.  The Internet - perhaps I should just call it the 'Net - is so much more than. It is a matrix that supports cultures.  We are fundamental contributors.

 

Over the years I've been witness to some remarkable things enabled by the 'Net... sure we have any number of whizzy services and performance has improved enormously, but it is the ability for it to morph so easily and the cultures it supports that continue to fascinates me.  

 

Culture is messy and it is easy to cherry pick examples where good comes from the ability to filter, but we don't live in a black and white world and I think a simple open 'Net is by far the better choice.   It seems much to important too leave to governments, a few companies and their lobbyists.

 

</rant>

 

A decade ago another friend - Steve Cisler, perhaps the first spiritual librarian of the 'Net, took a long road trip to understand what connection to the 'Net means by disconnecting himself and observing.  About once a week he would type up his notes and mail a memory card to me for posting.   His journey is fascinating and worth thinking about a decade later.¹

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¹ It is in blog format, the most recent post first, so go back in time if you read it.  

I didn't realize he had terminal cancer at the time and he departed not long afterward.  I wish he was with us to articulate his views on 'Net and culture.

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Recipe Corner

 

I found a nicely ripe avocado the other day and the sandwich I made was delicious.  Just a sketch recipe as you could go many ways.  This is enough for about four sandwiches.

 

Avocado Bean Salad Sandwich

 

Mash a ripe avocado with a can of chickpeas (about 14 ounces).  Mix in the juice of a half citrus (I used lime) , a few tablespoons of chopped coriander , a couple of finely chopped scallions, salt and freshly ground pepper.  Spread on sandwich bread or into pita bread. Tomatoes are awful this time of year, but a slice of tomato would make it even better.

 

 

are we near there yet?

Walt Disney Enterprises was the forerunner to Walt Disney Imagineering - Disney's R&D shop that produced major innovations in cinematography, animation and even robots. As researchers they had contact with Universities and their animatronic work became known to the military.

 

The 50s and 60s were a period when a lot of crazy engineering schemes were hatched. Schemes ranging from the truly crazy to those that merely weren't possible with current technology, to a few where the technologies were invented on the fly and enormous change came about.  Organizations like ARPA were charged not with incremental improvements, but with order of magnitude change.  Their batting average wasn't good, but they were swinging for the fence coming up with the the foundations for the Internet in ARPANET, many foundations of modern computing with Project MAC and GPS. 

 

One of the big problems the military faced was how lighten the load of a soldier.  There was an obsession with the idea of an exoskeleton - an Ironman-like suit that would give the wearer superhuman capabilities.  A Naval Research organization approached Walt Disney Enterprises for help.

 

The memo reached Walt's desk.  He simply scribbled NO on it and that was that.  It turns out he made the correct decision. The necessary technology was a long way off - too far off to invent on the fly.  General Electric and a few others tried and failed.  Only now are we seeing such dreams realized (and then some) by companies like Boston Dynamics er Google.¹

 

Much remains to be done, but at least the necessary technologies have advanced to the point where it is possible to see a few of the most likely directions and begin creating scenarios and timelines.

 

It is easy to dream up a future technological niche.  At the same time it is often impossible to predict the form it will take and on what time scale.  As telegraphy spread in the 19^th century the bandwidth of communications was exceeding the capacity of the telegraphs.  The trick was to multiplex the signals - run several frequencies over the lines.  Multiplexing quickly jumped from four to eight to twelve and more signals on a single line.  It was noticed sounds in rooms with several multiplexed sets were being reproduced in remote locations along with the morse code signals.  It became clear that audio telephony was possible and a race to the telephone began.

 

About the same time several schemes for sending images over the wire were invented - a precursor to fax.  It wasn't long until newspapers could exchange images to other newspapers in under and hour rather than waiting for the post.  Remote images, telephony and the movies gave people the idea that television and video telephony was possible.  Predictions of video telephones and television were common before the arrival of the 20^th century.

 

Getting to television was more difficult.  Numerous important technologies needed to be invented, but by the late 1920s there was a considerable amount of invention underway - most of it was impractical, but it even amateurs were building their own televisions.  More serious organizations like RCA had enormous efforts underway.²  Even Bell Labs was involved, but with something else in mind.

 

I was reminded of this last weekend as I chatted with Uche.  She was at home near London and I was in New Jersey.  We were using Skype, but could have used any of a number of video chat clients.  I don't know what her device was - I was using my iPad, but could have used my desktop, laptop or iPhone.  The key, and what AT&T lacked, was we were both connected to the Internet with enough bandwidth.

 

The early AT&T attempts at video telephony were enormous and only exploratory, but in the 50s the company took the idea seriously and started working towards a real service.   Expending an enormous amount of resources on everything from television cameras and receivers to network engineering to human factors work,  a design known as the Mod II became part of the service offering.  For only $169 a month, plus a per minute fee, you could have a video telephone in your house (note that we've seen five to six times inflation since that period).  

 

Reading the technical journals it becomes clear the most difficult part was making the service work over AT&T's circuit switched network.  Each device required a special six wire connection with line modifications required for the local loop as the one megahertz bandwidth pushed the capability pushed its capability.  Even hacking the lines a six mile connection was as far as a signal would travel.  To go further it was necessary to digitize the signal and put it on a special purpose T-2 digital line.

 

By 1973 AT&T finally reached one hundred subscribers in the US.³  By 1977 the number had dropped to nine.  The labs had an effort to understand how to make color videophones to make the images more acceptable and serious advances were made to color gamuts on CRTs.  A bit earlier the CCD array had been invented by Bell Labs and engineering work on it was partly supported by the lure of a small video camera.  Many important technologies came about - some useful for AT&T, many for the rest of the world.  

 

AT&T tried again in the late 80s with image compression that tried to push a signal through the regular telephone network.  They were sold in pairs and an effort was made to market them to grandparents through an AARP magazine among other efforts.  It failed and the extras were made available for little or nothing to AT&T employees.  I remember trying to use one and being appalled at how awful the image was.⁴ 

 

The major problem was the AT&T's legacy network which made it almost impossible to do real video telephony at a cost people were willing to accept.  The Internet changed all of that.  If you can attach whatever you want to a network you can pretty much do what you want within limits.  Dumb has its virtues.

 

Uche and I have corresponded over various matters for years, but we've never met.  The video chat was a good enough that I feel as though I have finally met here.

 

There were many interesting learnings from the Bell Labs research.  Here is a bit from a human factors summary paper that might be useful for your video chats

 

Beyond the quality of the picture itself, other factors played an important part in the design of the display unit. For example, the camera is placed above the picture tube to make the eye contact angle as small as possible. This is significant because, while the camera is looking at the subject, the subject is looking at the picture tube. The apparent "looking away" is annoying to the viewer unless the angle is small. The least annoyance occurs when the subject appears to be looking slightly down, which is frequently the case in normal conversation. Locating the camera just above the picture tube creates this effect.

The best position for the camera has proved to be about 12 inches above the desk top so that its field of view is essentially straight ahead. Here the camera gets the most natural-looking, least distorted view of the subject, keeping him on camera while allowing some movement, and (hopefully) not picking up too many ceiling lights.

 

Many technologies take decades to evolve to the point where they can leave the laboratory.  History tells us that the core inventors and developers of technologies are usually not those who reap the benefits.  That, along with the need to get an early return on investment is a serious problem.  In the old days of Bell Labs, IBM and a few other places serious industrial research with connections to universities flourished.  It still exists, but I have the sense it is not even close to being as dynamic.  Outside of universities few research places are doing real research and most that claim R&D and doing very low technical risk development.  Attempts are being made to change that and I hope they're successful.

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¹ Boston Dynamics is deeply in bed with the Department of Defense with the all terrain pack animal robot Big Dog, the running robot Wild Cat,  and the more human form Atlas. They were recently purchased by Google for whatever reason.  I have my suspicions, but they are only a gut feeling and not worth sharing at this point.

² The winning scheme by Philo Farnsworth was pretty much stolen by Sarnoff of RCA.

³ In my early years at Bell Labs, talking with some of the videophone pioneers I learned that Hugh Hefner was one of the subscribers.  It is also possible that the 100 subscriber number was inflated with units being given to prominent people who were then comped separately.

⁴ The pioneers would have been horrified by the early digital compression models.  A huge amount of work had established the minimum acceptable image level and they couldn't do it.  A smartphone, on the other hand, passes with flying colors.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Tiny Caramelized Potatoes

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 kg small and waxy fingerling potatoes

° 1/2 tbl sea salt

° 125g fine sugar - I use a very fine, but not quite powered, variety.

° 115g unsalted butter (a half stick) cut into four pieces at room temperature

 

Technique

 

° cover the potatoes with cold water and bring to a boil over a medium heat in a lidded saucepan.  Add the salt and continue to boil with the lid slightly off for another 10 minutes or so until they seem close to done.

° cut the heat and keep them in the water for 10 minutes to soften them.  Drain and cover to keep them warm.

° put the sugar in a heavy pan over a medium heat and cook stirring every now and again for until golden colored (about 12 minutes for me).  Add butter and stir until they are properly mixed - about three minutes.  Now you have your caramel.

° Cut the heat to a simmer and add the little potatoes carefully folding them in.  Continue to simmer stirring every now and agin until the potatoes look like they are caramel colored  About a half hour on my stove.

 

 

hot and cold

Gore Hill bounds Great Falls on the West and, with an elevation of about three hundred feet above the city, offers a fine view that extends to the Highwood range to the East.   In the Summer it was a fine place to put the family car in neutral and see how far you could coast and in the Winter there was some insane sledding and discing.  You could also watch a peculiar dance between the Missouri River and the town's commuters.

 

Reasoning with a car in the Montana Winter takes a bit of care.  You need to make sure the antifreeze is good to at least -40° and you need to heat the engine oil if you want any hope of turning the engine over on a cold day.  Most people have head-bolt heaters in their engines - a 1,500 watt heating element that you plug in about an hour before using the car if the engine is cold.  

 

On still cold days I would drive to an overlook on Gore Hill at about 6:30am and watch the show.  Every house and business was marked by little clouds streaming up from their chimneys.  Sometimes these would form a thin fog about twenty feet up and sometimes there were amazing optical effects from the street lights illuminating the ice crystals, but the real show started around seven when something like 20,000 head-bolt heaters were plugged in to the grid.  This was thirty megawatts that added to the draw of lights coming on and breakfasts being cooked.  A lot of water had to pass through the generators to deal with the load and the warm water turned into a dense fog as droplets were turned into tiny ice crystals.

 

The Missouri flowed through a gorge - a gorge that was filling with a dense fog.  The fog would spill over the city.   The fog would plate itself on bare metal and glass as frost.  Scraping it from a windshield was work that wouldn't quit until the glass was warm.  Sunrise came a bit after eight and people left for work driving in the fog with frost covered windshields.  At sunrise vision could be bad and wouldn't improve until the Sun burned off the fog - conveniently just after the rush hour.  Probably great for the local body shops.  While only happened in extreme weather,  it was an illustration of a human caused - an anthropomorphic - weather phenomena.  

 

Weather is something of a verb to Montanans.  There are several climate types each with their own signatures.  Great Falls was on the East Slope of the Rockies and could get impressively cold - the weather bureau on Gore Hill registered -51°F on year and Malmstrom Air Force Base on the other side of the city dropped to -58°.  The Summers were usually comfortable with readings rarely in the 90s, but occasionally there was hot weather and the official high was 107°.  During my high school years we regularly saw -30° and -40° was not unheard of.  One year had a three week period where the highs never rose above zero.  

 

We were unified in our survival of the season and learned to deal with and even enjoy it.  You quickly discovered the mountains were warmer when it was really cold.  But over the past few decades Winters have been getting warmer.  You still see some dramatically cold excursions, but not to record levels and not as frequently.  Now we are talking about climate rather than weather and it is changing.  It has changed enough that the Department of Agriculture's planting zone is on the verge of shifting.  It has changed enough to impact the onset of the first plants breaking ground in the Spring.  It is close enough that the average date that a junker car breaks through the ice on a small lake near town is shifting.

 

Similar shifts are taking place in many locations around the US - Climate Central has prepared a bit of information that may cover your location.

 

It is curious how so few of us think about climate, but we all talk about the weather...¹

 

In New Jersey we recently saw -10°F.  Almost warm by Montana standards, but most are not prepared to deal with such drops.  The temperature increased rapidly and a rain feel at about freezing giving a lovely coating of ice to everything.  Far too dangerous to drive or even walk without aid, ice storms are wonderful if you take the right precautions.  About ten years ago I bought a pair of studded strap-on rubber cleats for my boots.  They're something of a pain to put on, but they provide enough grip that you can run ice.  Highly recommended assuming you take precautions like avoiding trees, power lines and roadways.  I have a day-glow yellow waterproof hooded shell that goes over my coat and similar leggings.  Late ice storms in the Spring are particularly beautiful as are sunny periods immediately after a storm.

 

The other thing I noticed during the recent storm was the quality of the sound produced by walking on the snow.  It was a very dry powder with an air temperature much lower than normal New Jersey snows.   Snow is made of a range of ice crystals whose geometry depends on temperature and humidity.  I was walking in a classic Montana snow - the type that fell at ten below rather than some of the colder snows.  Ken Libbrecht is a physicist at Caltech with a snowflake hobby.  He travels, photographs, experiments with and thinks about snowflakes in his spare time.  His webpage has some excellent photography along with a lot of information from an expert.  And if you know a young reader with an interest in science his book The Secret Life of a Snowflake makes a great gift.

 

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¹ It is likely this is an artifact of our neural wiring and genetics.  Although that and how do deal with it are fantastic questions, it is the basis of the great frustration I've ever faced.

 

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Winter is a wonderful time for scones.  My grandmother was a remarkable baker, but her scones were awful.  It turns out they were Irish scones - totally inferior to their English cousins.  Not particularly heart healthy, but a great splurge in cold weather.  You can use anything you have on hand as a replacement for the blueberries - currants and cherries are particularly yummy.  I happen to love blueberries and hand 'em on hand.

 

Blueberry Scones

 

Ingredients

 

° 250g all purpose flour

° 1 tbl baking powder

° 1/2 tsp salt (uniodized)

° 70g white cane sugar plus some extra for sprinkling

° 150 - 200g dried blueberries (guessing ... something over a cup I think)

° 1 cup chilled heavy cream

° 3 tbl unsalted butter (high quality) melted

 

Technique

 

° oven to 375°F rack at middle level

° sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.  Stir in the blueberries and add the cream using a mixer (or a strong arm and large spoon) until the ingredients are just combined. Do not over mix!

° put the dough on a lightly floured surface and knead it a bit.  Roll out to an inch thick and cut into biscuits. (either square with a knife or get fancy with a cookie cutter)..  I keep them about an inch and a half on a side.

° use a pastry brush to paint the tops of the scones with the melted butter and sprinkle with sugar.  

° bake until golden - a bit under 15 minutes in my oven.

° cool on a baking rack