omenti

one of the four great chinese innovations

As I paged through the old book, a paper slid out and fell to the floor...

 

The book was a bound collection of magazine articles on the development of television and may have been from a personal library as there were several volumes from the late 1920s to the beginning of WWII.  The text was underlined and the margins were full of notes, drawings, schematics, simple equations, and a few ripped pieces of paper as page markers.  Hardly pristine, but much more interesting.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any indication of who the author was.

 

The piece of paper was more interesting.  A  folded letter without envelope, it was in a different hand from the book's annotations and was signed V. Zworykin. The salutation didn't ring a bell, but maybe it was the book's owner.   It was dated 1931 and mostly devoted to a hand-drawn schematic  of what appeared to be the electronics to drive the coils of a cathode ray tube for a television camera.  There was also an artifact that appeared to be a coffee stain.

 

So much and so little.  

 

About that time Vladimir Zworykin, one of the two principal inventors of a practical television system, was doing fundamental work for David Sarnoff at RCA.  There was a good deal of industrial intrigue as the other inventor - Philo Farnsworth - was on a better track, but ultimately was ripped off by Sarnoff - the techno robber baron of the day.  It was a tiny window into a period of white hot technology development and competition from a period where standards and a winner had not yet emerged.  

 

The book struck me as too expensive so I tucked the paper back into the book and returned it to its shelf.  A month later I changed my mind and drove back to Princeton.  The book was still there, but the paper was missing.

 

Paper is a remarkable technology.  Writing on high quality low acid paper stored in a low humidity environment should last for thousands of years.  There are thousands of varieties ranging from extremely inexpensive disposable paper to the finest stationery and photographic stock.  When used with a pen or pencil the user experience can be a delight for both writer and reader.  There is a certain magic in the lost note from the hand and age of someone who is no longer around and a handwritten letter from a friend can amplify its written message.

 

My sister is an artist with a taste for fine inks and fountain pens.  I like pen and ink but she has been trying to get me to come over to a proper writing instrument. I'd do it but I have a poor hand posture that causes problems with the nib.  I do appreciate good paper for letters, back of the envelop calculations and sketching.  Nothing in the digital world comes close.

 

We tend to think of plants as machines for converting light from the Sun into energy locked in the chemical bonds of a sugar.  In fact they go way beyond that making very specialized materials like the cellulose that are important structural elements that give them shape  Cellulose is a polysaccharide - a long chain of linked sugars.¹   Molecular chains attach to form thin microfibrils which, in turn, bundle to form thicker microfibrils that are a few microns long - end to end a few dozen would be about as long as the diameter of an average human hair.  These, glued together with other engineered materials, are stitched together to give the plant its strength and shape. Fantastic self assembling nano-engineering.

 

The trick to making paper is to form a wet mass of cellulose and dry it to form a fiber mat.  This isn't terribly difficult if you extract the cellulose from cotton, but wood is much less expensive so most of our paper starts out as a tree.

 

Wood is another remarkable substance - a composite material composed of cellulose fibers bound together by a glue called lignin.  It can be rigid and stable for centuries.  All we have to do to go from wood to paper is somehow disentangle the cellulose from the lignin - a process sometimes described as similar to getting chewing gum out of your hair.

 

There are variations but general recipe is to grind the wood into small bits and boil them with some chemicals to break the lignin bonds to free the cellulose fibers.  Separate the cellulose and you get a pulp that can be poured onto a flat surface and allowed to dry.  The result is paper and a few millennia of effort have given a large variety with very different characteristics.  You can feel a bit of texture, but at human scale it seems very flat.  Zoom in with a microscope and even at 100 times magnification its microstructure is apparent.  

 

Much can be done engineering the tangled mess to create specific papers.  Bleach it and add from chalk dust and you  get a white paper.  Coatings and process can control how deeply ink soaking into the paper - if at all.  A good stationery paper allows the ink to soak in just enough to become part of the paper forming a bit of a composite material that is very robust over time.  If the paper is too glossy the ink pools on the surface and smears, and if it is too absorbent the ink smears in the paper.  The surface roughness is engineered to give a nice interface to a pen's nib or the tip of a pencil.  People develop preferences that depend on the task.

 

Many papers have the ability to hold a crease - something lacking in most other materials.  Cellulose fibers partly break at the crease - the fibers to either side are unaffected and the amount of breakage is determined by the paper type.  Kids use of this without realizing the nanoscale realignments that are taking place under their finger tips.  Most of us are happy idiot savants when paper airplanes are being made.

 

There is far too much detail to talk about - after all, this is the result of some very clever invention and craftsmanship over a few thousand years - but I'll end with two things.

 

The 'weight' of a paper bothered me for a long time.  I usually buy a 20 pound weight, but a ream of 500 sheets weighs about five pounds on my scale.  It turns out the 8.5 x 11 inch sheets are cut from a larger sheet and 500 sheets of that weighs 20 pounds.  The ISO standard used in the rest of the world is more sensible - the weight of the paper in grams per square meter.

 

A friend realized his thesis - the work about about four years -  was going to be uninteresting to almost everyone.  He put a five dollar bill halfway through it and checked a year later to see if anyone had taken the bait.  Nothing.  After ten years he thought it would be right to sweeten the pot. For over a decade a crisp Ben Franklin has been waiting for someone along with a stamped addressed envelop and a request asking why the finder bothered to look...   Write only memory...

 

Perhaps some day I'll end up with a fountain pen. For now the act of creating personal letters is important to me and lesser tools are just fine.  I'm not terribly good at expressing myself in words, but personal letters are rare these days and the act of writing is special.

 

“GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.” - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

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¹ (C₆H₁₀O₅)_n, where n can ranges from a few hundred to several thousand. It stores energy - it burns well, but our bodies can't metabolize it.

 

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Recipe corner

 

I was in Mesa recently and visited the Cornish Pasty Company with my niece.  They had several vegetarian and a few vegan pasties on the menu and my vegan 'southwestern' was delicious.  I've never made them before, but a reasonable way to start experimenting is to use puff pastries and fill them with savory fillings.  Traditionally these are meat and potatoes fare, but I'm having luck with mixtures of carrots, broccoli, corn, sweet potato some coconut milk and spices.  Lots of ways to go. and the pre-made wrappers make them look professional.  Sort of 400°F to get the Maillard reaction going and 20 to 30 minutes depending on how thick they are.  

Experiment away!

what is deep enough m and s and what about steam?

The American public is remarkably out of step with the findings of the science of global warming.  Generally less than half of the public agrees with the statement there is solid evidence for global warming caused by human activity in contrast with the very strong consensus among scientists.¹  Curiously  public opinion has been fairly static for the since 2000 while citizens in the much of the industrialized world show opinions that trend towards those of science.  Huge discrepancies raise interesting questions.

 

Dan Kahan of Yale notes most current measures of the dynamics that create conflict over risk are invalid.  He studies beliefs and clustered inferences and notes that it is possible to have people with some proficiency in a subject area reject predictions that conflict with a larger world view.  This illogical rejection appears across the political spectrum and can be stronger as education levels increase.   His paper is fascinating, but I think his analysis misses a few points.  Perhaps most important is what is scientific proficiency?

 

Many of the standard measures are little more than the ability to perform rote memorization.  Unfortunately this is how a lot of science is presented and tested.  There is a belief among many that science creates facts, but nothing is farther from the truth.  What is the core of an adequate education in science for non-scientists and how much does that differ with what is being taught in school?

 

I had a reasonably intense undergrad education in science and math.  Moving through grad school it became clear that the physics I had learned was not much deeper than becoming familiar with a few very important basic concepts and learning how to manipulate them mathematically.  There was a thread of the art of asking questions, but it was largely academic and  was often eclipsed by the need to gain a bit of literacy in the background.  In fairness an increasing amount of the real core of the game came through, but it would be a mistake to say most undergraduates were doing science.

 

I don't see any reason why questions can't be asked earlier.  The mentors I had as a teen often posed interesting questions - they weren't trying to teach me from a book, but wanted me to discover a few things for myself with a bit of guidance.  This was the intoxicating stuff.  I began to wonder if the scientific method that was taught in high school made sense.  What I was doing was much more disordered.  It wasn't real science, but it was closer to the real thing than some of my physics classes.²  I grad school I found myself wondering what science was and found myself coming down on the side of the English rather than the Germans.³

 

One of the regular readers of this blog is currently in a boreal forest learning some skills she'll need when she does serious research on her own.  She's learning how to live in the wild and not injure or kill herself and the others around her, but more importantly she's learning some observation techniques.  What does it mean to measure and what are your errors.  She'll make a lot of mistakes and learn that perfection never happens.  The statistics courses she's had will become more relevant.  She's getting a taste of science.  

 

There is no reason why this can't be done earlier. It is commonly said kids are born scientists.  It isn't true.  While they show the curiosity and ask questions there is little rigor and they form interesting models of the world.  They're guided and learn to trust other information sources.  The lucky ones retain their curiosity and are skeptical.  The rest can be great students by the metrics used by much of education, but sometime is broken.  I'm very interested in learning how to fix that.

 

When I taught undergrad physics many of the students would spend a few pages of blue book space doing step by step calculations.  The meat of the problem was stating the question clearly in physics and building something you could solve.  That was 90% of the grade, yet most people would get mired in the calculation - often using an inappropriate formula - and get the wrong answer to 10 significant digits. 

 

Math is a good example of where some refocus is appropriate.  Much of the teaching focuses on calculation - a narrow slice of the subject that is becoming increasingly less important.  The field is much richer and allows the development of skill sets relevant to many fields outside of  standard STEM world.  I see an applied math problem as having four components:

 

° posing the right question

° real world → math formulation

° computation

° math formulation → real world and verification 

 

A bit of effort required to understand how to formulate a question, move to an answer and see if it makes sense.  Once you've done it enough you have respect for the technique.  I may not know much chemistry or geology, but I know the people who are doing it are driven by the same process and, assuming their work passes peer review, I trust them.  There are exceptions, but this trust is almost always well-placed.  I have to wonder if otherwise educated people would trust results they currently dispute if they had a somewhat deeper understanding?    I suspect this may be true of many fields.

 

I've had some amazing experiences working with people with deep expertise far from science.  Musicians, artists, designers, film makers, athletes ...  I can only hope I could give them a fraction of what they gave me.  This is fundamental to my support of STEAM education (STEM + the arts).  Much needs to be done and it needs to be done with both sides contributing.  We have physics for poets and even poetry for physicists classes (I took one of the later), but they are often watered down versions of the core subjects and useless for cross field collaborations.  

 

This project impressed me .. 

 

How can we teach at a deeper level without getting lost in the weeds?  Unlike some of you I'm not at the coal face, but bit of experience and my gut tells me there is great promise in STEAM.  The approach, done right, can be seriously fun and that is enough to motive me.  It is not the silver bullet - working silver bullets don't exist outside of werewolf movies - but perhaps it can be a bit of silver buckshot.

 

This shouldn't stop at graduation.  Education needs to be life long experience.  I've been involved with a few organizations that use something of a STEAM approach as part of their business and they use it to great advantage.  We can do much better as a society.  

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¹ The Pew Center does good work - this is representative.  The figure for scientists is old and is higher now.  Over 99% among citied researchers last year.

² You all know the statement of the scientific method.  For me the question never comes at the beginning - it is much messier than that.  Science is much more adaptive.  There are procedures that everyone uses because they tend to be efficient at quickly getting to the bottom of the matter.  Mathematical rigor, peer review, criteria for statistical significance, double-blind studies and so on.  These can be field dependent and vary in significance.  There is even some non-empirical hypothesis assessment at some point - particularly in theoretical physics - but in the end Nature and solid measurements are trump.

³ Science is from the Latin scientia which is close to what we would call knowledge.  The German word for science is Wissenschaft, which is very close to the Latin.  In the day the Germans would include the social sciences, math, computer science and even the arts and humanities - the science of art is Kunstwissenschaft.  The Germans basically say that almost anything that can be studied at a university is science.  I can't buy that (and German scientists haven't bought it for some time).  The English established the domain of science as the natural sciences.  The description of Nature.  That works for me, so when you hear me say the social or computer sciences aren't, that's where I'm coming from.  

The growth of university science at a few English universities - particularly Cambridge, as the Industrial Revolution progressed created the distinction.  Science was the description what was underneath all of the marvelous engineering that was underway.

 

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Recipe corner

 

Really simple this time - I wanted an appropriate butter for some corn bread.  I've adjusted honey butter over the years and find this ratio works very well.  

 

Honey butter

 

Ingredients

 

° 450 g (2 cups) unsalted high quality butter - softened

° 175 g (1/2 cup) honey

° 4 g (3/4 tsp) fine kosher salt 

 

 

Technique

 

° for a fluffy consistency throw everything in a mixer or food processor. for coarser just mix by hand..

 

why are we in a hand basket and where are we going?

... and does it seem like it is getting hotter to you?

 

While doing a bit of cleaning in the kitchen I found a surprise a friend had hidden nearly in plain sight.  I was on the step stool storing some things that are rarely used high in the cabinets that are rarely reached.  Looking around I saw the top of the refrigerator was very dusty.  I pushed the stool over and found a smiley face that had been drawn with a finger looking back at me.  A time capsule from the past.

 

This past week a kerfuffle erupted over a published Facebook experiment and I found myself thinking about social computing and the importance of filtering.  I tend to think of  three issues central to  social computing - security, privacy and filtering. The first two are often confused and all three can be related. Issues of trust are tied to all of them.   I'll approach it using filtering.

 

I didn't see the smiley face because my vantage point for seeing the world wasn't high enough.  The person who drew it a few years ago is about a half foot taller than me and seeing the top of refrigerators must be a common experience for her.  Making use of this she left a little time capsule in her plain sight using my comparative lack of height as a filter.  Perfectly played:-)

 

Our senses only give a rough approximation of the world around us. We live slightly in the past due to neural signaling and synchronization speeds and some aspects of vision now appear to be averaged over very long periods (10 to 15 seconds) to beat down noise in the environment and our nervous system and to allow us to synthesize a stable image. Our vision is sensitive to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum selected by evolution to correspond to the majority of sunlight that makes it through the atmosphere and that is energetic enough to cause chemical reactions without destroying chemical bonds. The signals from retina to to visual cortex undergo a good deal of processing and the effective data rate isn’t impressive — about the same as a twenty year old ethernet cable. We don't respond to fast or slow events, our sense of smell isn't up to that of our dog, and the list goes on and on.  But from this highly filtered information we construct our own reality of sorts and we, at least I, find the result rich and compelling. We can and have managed through our wits to augment our senses and to quantify the result allowing for an empirical study of nature.   And we have a brain that is powerful enough that we often can make empirical measurements and extend the range and variety of our senses. 

 

One type of reality we construct is in the form of story. We experience the stories of others, construct our own and sometimes mix them. We are wired for patterns which can inspire them in our minds and fix some degree of trust to stories from others. Story telling is important to sociology, anthropology and the like is extremely complex and difficult to study.  Complexity is tough.

 

An impressive amount of  work goes can go into the storytelling in a movie. The music is carefully selected to enrich your experience — a filter.  Consider this analysis of the main theme for ‘Frozen'

 

Facebook trades in stories. It wants to be the medium that people can share their own stories with friends and perhaps act on the stories advertisers are paying them to find an audience for. In my mind Facebook has two goals: first to keep its audience engaged in their conversations and second to serve their customers - the advertisers. Without the first the second is impossible. They need to understand how to keep and grow their audience and a firehose of data - very rich data.

 

Facebook needs people who can understand it and how it fits with their business. They employ a lot of data scientists, but data science is far from being a science. It is just a tool for addressing questions. It is important to ask questions that can be meaningfully answered.

 

The best people for understanding social systems are seasoned social science types. The good ones are driven more by research and the thrill of the hunt than by money. They often see the business world as limiting, but places like Google and Facebook offer treasure troves of rich data to play with.¹

 

There was a failure in Facebook’s PR and legal departments. This type of internal research is very common and important for Google, Facebook and others. We did it in the data with call detail records at AT&T, dating sites and others do it all the time. Controlled A/B tests (and many other techniques) are how you figure out how to turn the knobs on your filters. 

 

My hope is that there might be a conversation on filters. What they are, how they work, who controls them and so on. We’ve been dealing with filters for centuries.  They impact politics, consumerism and even belief. … print, electronic and face to face: newspapers, radio, tv, used car salesmen, religion.   Now they can be personalized (face to face has been able to do that for a long time, but it doesn’t scale well). A problems is filters can create signals that seem wrong or may have an unintended consequence. If FB tries to make people slightly happier in order to keep them it may be a mistake. For example some recent work shows that some people, when they see everyone else is happy, tend to get more depressed. The whole notion of what an emotion is turns out to be very fluffy.

 

I think the firestorm may be partly driven by an unease with 'big data' — few know what it is, how it is used and how it impacts them. They see ties into security and privacy - and now this may be illuminating filter manipulation for many.

 

Deeper issues why people are upset are largely overlooked.  We have any number of signaling and out of band communication that are missed by the measurements of social media.  They would completely miss the time capsule joke Colleen drew on the top of my refrigerator and millions of other subtle and not so subtle interactions.  

 

We rely on computer aided networked communications to send fragments of larger stories, communication exchanges and other forms of signaling to others.  It is a mistake to think this is sufficient and a greater mistake to attempt to curate it.

 

That may be a central point.  In the past we have relied on media companies to give us books, movies, television and other types of media to consume.  It is filtered culture, but we are mostly aware of that.  We also rely on others to carry our remote communications - the post office and telcos.  We have trusted them not to filter meaning.  The phone company doesn't decide what is the the conversation we're having with our sister. 

 

Media companies regularly do A/B testing to see what we will buy.  Communication companies do testing of the quality of signal to optimize their networks.  What interests me about Facebook is not that they have done A/B testing as organizations that have filtered information often do such things, but rather that they are filtering our personal culture - they have put themselves in the position of making some rather delicate choices that impact personal signaling and communication.  We only have sketchy ideas of how they are doing this.  I'm guessing their attempt to curate our personal culture may be at the heart of what is bothering so many.

 

I sent this image to a few of you the other day. A version of the famous duck/rabbit illusion, it shows how our brain can be on the fence making an image conclusion. Some practics data science poorly -  a lot of not understanding the data, its errors or the questions. Pretty patterns are found - sometimes great effort goes into sorting out is it a duck or a rabbit, when in reality is is neither and had nothing to do with animals in the first place.  It happens all to easily when there isn't enough information about the situation in the first place (it can also happen when there is too much information or a lot of noise).  Social signaling and communication is much richer than what social media can deal with.  Perhaps we have found a valley of social uncanniness with Facebook.²

 

We have a long way to go in our understanding of human interactions - I suspect current social media will be footnotes in the history of the subject a few decades from now.  Hopefully we will begin to ask questions about filters and what they mean.³  

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¹  It is very difficult to find this in the academic world and people will go into these companies with the intention of staying a few years and learning and then moving on. To keep them you can allow them to publish. Google mostly doesn’t and it shows. Facebook has tried a few times. My guess is this was part of a recruiting effort. The paper is ok - not brilliant or very descriptive. The problem it is addressing can’t easily be answered with the technique they used. They can get a sense of the windage and make adjustments. The nature of how the review board acted is under question, but that points to issues with academic review boards. I can’t see anything really wrong with this. The tech press went crazy, but it seems they weren’t parsing the meaning of some words that have very different definitions when used in academic research (a problem all researchers have when trying to communicate with the general public - I have failed terribly at times). It also strikes me that many people writing about this didn’t read the paper and certainly didn’t understand the context.

² For the record I have a Facebook account, but only use it around my birthday and Christmas as something of an updated holiday card.  I try to have deeper connections with those who are close to me.  I also gave up on Google except for YouTube.

³ This will probably blow over like so many other issues do.  It is important for us to have discussions and hold filtering companies accountable - or at least realize what is going on and make intelligent choices as users.  Sadly the track record for society is not very good.  Failure could be  dangerous - we need to be asking ethical questions of filtering in everything from MOOCs to democracy.  What is the public square anyway?  What is the peronal discussion?

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Recipe corner

 

Grilling time!

 

BBQed Sweet Potato Fries

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 large sweet potatoes, cut in french fry like  strips 

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 2 tsp sea salt

° 1 tsp ground cumin

° 1 tsp chile powder

° 1 tsp paprika

° 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

° 1/2 tsp cayenne - more if you like hotter, less if milder

 

 Technique

 

° toss sweet potatoes and oil in a large bowl 

° combine spices a small bowl and mix

° add the spice mixture to the sweet potatoes and toss

° cook in a vegetable holder on a grill until the sweet potatoes brown nicely - alternatively cook them in a fairly hot (425°F or so) oven for about 25 minutes turning them halfway through.

° these can be very good with a yogurt or sour cream sauce. I made a yogurt sauce with plain yogurt, chili sauce, chopped cilantro, garlic, lime, pepper and salt .. what was around.

system, intersystem, intrasystem and metasystem dynamics

The transportation system is enormously fascinating and complex.  There were a few decades of radical developments in the automobile about a century ago coupled with the growth of energy, roadway, legal, safety and other systems.  The growth in the adoption of the car caused an enormous expansion of a sprawl to the suburbs that had been foreshadowed by commuter trains and new modes of shopping.  

 

If you get behind the driver's seat of a 60 year old car you'll find yourself in a familiar place (try that with the console of a 60 year old computer).  There have been a large number of refinements, but the "car-ness" hasn't changed much.  Now we're at a point where the car-ness of an automobile may begin to change.

 

Most people tend to think about a change in drivetrain - an electric car for example.  That is part of it, but only a small part.  We'll see a move towards the electrocution of the automobile - probably the vast majority, but the degree will cover a wide range and seeing the majority of cars being electric is some time in the future - perhaps three decades or more.  (note - the Chrysler turbine car was certainly not an electric vehicle, but underscores the focus on powerplants even though the overall system is more complex.  It is also beautiful..)

 

But the real change is much richer than power plant.  How are cars made?  Where are they made? How are they used?  What is the nature and rate of adoption for self driving cars?  What do people expect from a car and is it changing across generations?  Is the notion of range and refueling anxiety changing across generations?  Amazon?  Value of time? Do vehicles become more specific to the task?  When and how are carbon strategies implemented?  What is the path of applied research, research engineering, invention, and new technology?  Grid directions?  Vehicle to house, vehicle to grid? What synchronizes?  Financing of all of this? What about the developing world? etc. etc.  What about urban and suburban design?

 

So many questions and this just touches the surface.  There are emerging signals and one can construct a few interesting models to gain some depth.  Reality will not strictly follow them (that's why they're called models), but it may rhyme enough that they are interesting.  It is great sport.

 

Horace Dediu and Jim Zellmer conduct fascinating discussions that speak to these issues at Asymcar  - a podcast, but you can find individual programs and show notes on the site.¹  They were kind enough to invite me to the discussion on Asymcar 16, so I'll take the easy way out and count that as my blogging hour this time around.   We only scratched the surface, but this was an interesting discussion with two very sharp people. 

 

For fun you might be interested in a short Ars piece on the evolution of automotive controls and interiors - something deep that we tend not to think about.  One of the sharpest engineers I've met works on this problem - to say she is multidisciplinary is  understatement.

 

There are several earlier posts that are relevant - you can also poke around in the energy category

 

change will be electrified

car power - where does it go?

moving beyond cup holders

fc-evs

 

If there is interest I'll write a post with some of the numbers and back of the envelope calculations you can use to compare apples and oranges in a meaningful way.

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¹ Horace also has Asymco and his Airshow presentations which combine the language of cinema with presentation.   I strongly recommend both.

 

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I've been playing around with banh mi variations - here is a simple pickled vegetable that works.  Amounts are guesses - they won't be very critical

 

Pickled Vegetables 

 

Ingredents

 

° 1/4 cup rice vinegar

° 1/4 cup water

° 2 tsp sugar

° 1/4 tsp salt

° 1 cup carrots cut into matchsticks

° 1 cup peeled daikon radish cut into matchsticks

 

Technique

 

° combine vinegar, water, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl, stirring until sugar and salt dissolve.

° add carrot, radish, and red onion and toss. Let stand for at least a half hour stirring occasionally.  drain the excess liquid..