omenti

visual storytelling

At the 1986 SIGGRAPH conference a short computer animation from a small company called Pixar wowed the audience.  Technically it was a breakthrough, but more stunning was the audience's reaction.  The technical crowd was not asking questions about the new animation techniques it highlighted, but wanted to know if the larger lamp was Luxo Jr's mother or father.  They finally had a viable story telling technique.  John Lasseter and Ed Catmull were able to apply the animation principles developed by Disney's Nine Old Men decades earlier to create an emotional story.

 

Mention advances in computer animation and conversation often turns to the uncanny valley hypothesis.  While there is some evidence to support it,  more interesting is how we respond to the a variety of media types - the spoken word, literature, paintings, music, film and their variations emotionally.  

 

Think about it.  We look at a piece of paper with small regions of contrasting reflection that follow a simple pattern.  Our mind decodes these patterns and transforms them into an artificial world in our mind - a world that, when guided by a master, can have exquisite beauty and compelling power.  Power that goes well beyond entertainment plucking at our deepest emotions.  A plateau of emotional believability.

 

The same can be said for the other storytelling media.  A new media develops and it takes the storytellers a generation or two before it finds its voice and power.  Old media are rarely completely replaced.  Should she master it, the story teller has acquired a new arrow for her quiver.  

 

Technical papers are usually dry.  The audience is assumed to be expert and aware of the the work's contextual place.  This can be disorienting for nonspecialists presenting something of a barrier to cross-disciplinary work.  Some people make an effort to remedy the problem.  Good talks often have an introduction explaining why the work is relevant tailored to what may be a diverse audience.  Sometimes review articles offer the additional context and even popular press descriptions in Science, Nature and Scientific American and even podcasts are useful. 

 

Last weekend a friend pointed out a supergravity paper I normally would have skipped.¹  A graduate student co-author spent some time with iMovie and put together a trailer that gives a strong motivation for why you might want to read the paper.  It worked and I did:-)

 

Reacting to this another friend noted his company,  large investment bank that relies on some rather complex algorithmic processes, took on an intern from CalArts this Summer.  She is an animation student with the goal of working at a studio like Pixar, but they wanted to see if she could help with visual storytelling.  Specifically little videos to motivate complex documents for non-specialist clients.  The model they wanted to explore is the one pioneered by minutephysics:

He was very impressed by some of her work and said she has been offered work after her graduation, but that she was much more interested in a conventional animation studio.  He doubts that anyone in their organization is cross-disciplinary enough to do this sort of work.  I suspect if they looked at more recent hires they might find some video literacy.

 

Twelve years ago I began to devote a considerable amount of my time to issues associated with the acceleration of global warming. The fit seemed good at first - after all, it involves energy and I'm a card carrying physicist.  It turned out I didn't understand the problem. 

 

For years I thought education was the answer and, with the help of a friend who wasn't a scientist, tried to put together a book.  Despite her best efforts I'm not a good storyteller and I wasn't finding the right path we could use to connect.  She had some great ideas which have influenced my approach, but in the end we realized the education path didn't make sense and I began to explore other channels.  A dear friend (that would be you Juliette) suggested  I should be concentrating on video -  very foreign to me, but completely natural to her.  

 

I've been exploring storytelling with some experts in getting science across to the public - science communication and popularization.  I've learned a bit about making stories simpler - Colleen, my writing partner, told me I had a tendency to 'Matryoshka doll' everything going deeper and deeper into explanations trying to offer background along the way.²  I've made some progress breaking away from that tendency, but a using a less ancient media is central if there is to be any progress.

 

The language of video and cinema is becoming important in areas I hadn't imagined.  A few weeks ago, corresponding with a student planning on astronomy, I advised at least a few courses in film making and be very serious about them.  And I should be taking my own advice...  you are rarely too old and I know some experts.

 

Other forms of storytelling are emerging.  I was lucky enough to meet Horace Dediu last year.  We share a few fascinations including the basics of cinematic storytelling.  He has helped fashion a tool with Pixxa to support the technique combined with some ideas from Tufte - and gives beautiful presentations.  If you or someone in your organization gives quantitative storytelling presentations I strongly recommend attending one of his Airshow presentations.

 

Finally the written word is still very powerful.  It and music offer some of the deepest forms of communication.  It is not replaced by video and newer media and in many areas is the best channel.  But unless you are enormously gifted it is difficult to reach others outside of your normal area and investigating other communication channels makes a lot of sense.

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¹ Perhaps too much detail, but supergravity is a supersymmetric variation of General Relativity.  Supersymmetry places some very tight constraints on what can create gravity - it has to come from peculiar fields that are combinations of boson and fermion fields.  The problem with current physics is making this fit in with inflation requires some cobbling to get things to work.  This paper comes up with a simple way to do that - a single superfield.  

² This is a very common problem with scientists and I suspect those in many other fields that are a bit too removed from normal educations.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

First a kickstarter on an immersion circulator and then a recipe:

 

I made an immersion circulator about five years ago.  A heating element, a control element that could regulate the temperature to about 1 °F and an insulated water container.  It was difficult to use, noisy and - in a word - frustrating, but I learned about sous vide cooking.  Commercial units were a lure, but good ones cost nearly $1,000.

In the past year or two some less expensive commercial units appeared along with some Kickstarter projects of varying quality.  One of the Kickstarters was the Nomiku.  I've played with a friend's unit and like it a lot.  A few days ago the Nomiku folks announced a Kickstarter for a second generation unit.  I thought about it for about 15 seconds and bit.  If you want to push your culinary education this may be just the ticket.  It may be more appropriate for meat eaters, but even as a vegetarian I see great utility and grounds for experimentation.  

 

and on to the recipe..

 

I had some rhubarb, but being allergic to strawberries the old standard - strawberry rhubarb pie - was out of the question.  There were red plums, so why not..  Normally baking is the stuff a carefully followed recipes - after all - the chemistry has to come out just right.  Pies are different and closer to art.  There are tricks getting the crusts right, but you make that up on the fly.  The same for the fillings and you usually can't go wrong unless you burn it.  I wanted something tart so I went about 40% plum and 60% rhubarb - if you like sweet go the other direction rather than add sugar.  I won't go into religion as everyone has their own pie crust methods - pick your own method.

 

Plum and Rhubarb Pie

 

Ingredients 

 

° 2 pie crusts 

° 3 cups rhubarb sliced into chunks you'd like to see in a pie

° 2 cups red plumbs diced - don't use the very soft ones... a bit firm

° 1-1/4 cup white cane sugar

° 2 tbl tapioca 

° 1/4 cup corn starch 

° small bit (1/8 tsp) sea salt

° milk and sugar for the top of the pie

 

Technique - easy as pie

 

° preheat oven to 425°F

° put the rhubarb and plums in a mixing bowl and gently mix in everything else with a spatula 

° line a 9" glass pie plate with a crust and pour in the mixture

° add the second crust, perform whatever art you like crimping edges and cut some vent slots

° brush the top with some milk and sprinkle a goodly amount of sugar on the pie top

° bake for 20 minutes and then reduce to 350°F (don't open the oven or the temp will fall too quickly) and bake until beautifully golden brown - 45-55 minutes - look at the pie bottom through the glass plate for brownness.  

° place on a pie rack and let cool enough.  Great with vanilla ice cream.

 

from words to mastery

On Friday afternoons a few of us would meet mostly to talk about ideas.  A playground to frame and test ideas involving a small number of people who knew each other well.  At one point there was discussion on changes in the government's support of corn based ethanol production.  Sorting out the relative carbon footprint change turns out to be devilishly tricky and it was clear politics was a huge driver, but there is a more fundamental question:  how efficient is the process - can it scale?  

 

It turns out the deeper question is easy to answer.  I came up with a few ways to approach within a few minutes and another participant did the same with slightly different approaches.  These good enough back of the envelope calculations - known as Fermi calculations to physicists - were core to our playground.¹  Questions are much more important than answers in these playgrounds, but quick and dirty answers are also important providing a bit of testing and direction.  

 

In the past few years much has been made of the positive side of failure, but mostly by a few unusual organizations and in TED talks.  The word has a variety of meanings and some context needs to be set.  It is usually set against success, but then you need to worry about another loaded word.  The right approach is to begin with definitions that a community can accept - something Horace does well in his work at Asymco.  Regular readers probably notice that I try to establish definitions of terms like play, serendipity, creativity, ignorance and others.  These sometimes aren't the standard definitions, but a foundation is necessary.

 

Regular language does not have its roots in critical thinking, yet we use it as a powerful tool for very complex ideas.  In science, and probably many other disciplines, there are two glaring imperfections.  First is incompleteness.  Many concepts lack  simple words that paint an accurate picture for a  non-specialist.  Quantum mechanics is extremely difficult to describe outside of mathematical physics.  It is an excellent description of how Nature works at a tiny scale, but alien to most people.  We end up with jargon like entanglement, superposition, and wavefunction collapse.  Jaron that fuels the problem of communicating science to non-scientists.  The problem is sometimes attacked with the use of visual representations like videos, but the result is usually unsatisfying at the specialist level.

 

The second language problem is more fundamental and perhaps more insidious.  Rather than being incomplete, sometimes words are too complete.  When something has a name we associate it with a concept or object that is real.  But the naming may not be entirely accurate.  Now you are trapped in a framework that can make it difficult to 'think outside the box'.  As it happens Einstein confronted this trap.

 

As he worked out the special theory of relatively, Einstein ran into problems with the notion of a universal 'now'.  He wrote:

"All attempts to clarify this paradox satisfactorily were condemned to failure as long as the axiom of the absolute character of times, viz., of simultaneity, unrecognizably was anchored in the unconscious. Clearly to recognize this axiom and its arbitrary character really implies already the solution of the problem.”²

His wonderful 1905 paper that gave us special relativity illustrates the paradox with the solution that required abandoning the notion of a universal 'now'.  The result of breaking through created a revolution in physics.  But the familiar concept of 'now' was no longer useful or relevant in physics.  A similar case can be made for the concept of 'here' in quantum mechanics. 

 

Incompleteness and overcompleteness are tough problems.  When working at depth you need to be aware of them.  You need to be skeptical and ask a lot of questions - hopefully good questions when you are trying to probe deeply and particularly when starting a careful investigation.

 

This is some background for thinking about success and failure.  Success is one of those fluffy words that needs contextual definition.  Generally we think we know what it means, but I find that many of the ideas of what success is are the product of ideas that are not our own. It is often defined by other people, amplified by advertising, consumption, expectation and other social constructs.  It is necessary to have an idea of what it is, but it should be your own.

 

Success strikes me as a time based victory.  There are several components, but an element of chance is often involved.  Sports may be a good analogy.  You can have several terrific teams in a tournament, but frequently ultimate success does not come to the team with the most skill and effort.  I prefer the term mastery.

 

Mastery strikes me as a long journey to an unreachable goal.  It goes beyond the simple can define a life and sometimes an organization.  It requires discipline but isn't perfectionism as the journey is more important than the destination.  I'm greatly impressed by a few masters I've encountered, but none would consider themselves a master.

 

Play is essential to my work and composed of actions that involve little successes and failures that hopefully allow me to hone my questions.  In the end my goal is to ask more meaningful questions - the questions that lead to deeper questions.  It is a long and sometimes difficult path, but it has been rewarding over time.  It isn't deep enough to be a mastery, but a solid foundation is often required.

 

Speaking of sports, there are more than a few interesting parallels that illustrate mastery, but also ask some rather deep questions of our perception of reality, but that will have to wait for a future post.

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¹ Fermi calculations are in honor of Enrico Fermi who had a legendary knack for asking the centrally important questions to difficult problems.  The questions were often phrased in such a way that it was nearly trivial to come up with a numerical estimate.  

² Einstein “Autobiographical notes” in Albert Einstein, Philosopher-Scientist (ed. Schilpp, P.) 

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Homemade ice cream is one of the best ways to spend Summer evenings.  Sitting out on the lawn watching the fireflies with a bowl of frozen goodness.

 

Raspberry Ice Cream

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 pt fresh raspberries (or mostly thawed frozen if out of season)

° 2 large pasteurized eggs (this is a raw egg recipe, so only use pasteurized eggs!)

° 1-1/2 cup white cane sugar

° 1/2 lemon 

° 1 cup whole milk

 

Technique

 

° Toss the raspberries, half of the sugar with the juice of the lemon in a bowl.  Cover and refrigerate at least two hours (the goal is to get it as chilled as possible without freezing.  Getting down to below 38°F is ok if you have a refrigerator thermometer)

° Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, slowly whisk in the remaining sugar and continue whisking for another minute or so until completely blended. 

° Add the cream and milk and whisk to blend.

° Puree the raspberries and stir into the cream mixture.

° Churn freeze as per your ice cream freezer's instructions.

 

(photo of a friend helping out with a similar batch a few years ago)

 

 

elements of style

Thomas Jefferson had the reputation of an extreme bibliophile, but was forced to make choices 'only' reading about 7,000 books.    Ben Franklin had a similar information challenge and both men were unable to fully respond to their mail.  They lived at a time when it seemed like a powerful and well connected mind could have a deep understanding of general knowledge, but that was an illusion.  Information growth had become too great for single humans to manage and it had become necessary  to construct filters and trust the filters of others.

 

Today we have something of an information explosion.  Physics occupies a tiny percentage of humanity, but is sometimes citied as an extreme example of information processing.  Single particle physics experiments generate information at over 100,000 times the rate it can be stored.  A carefully designed hierarchy of filters known as triggers identify relevant information and throw away the rest.  

 

Although not as dramatic as a particle physics trigger, most organizations have developed a series of filters - some are carefully considered while others are poorly understood.  We might think of our social and work interactions to be well understood, but in reality they are poorly understood making it difficult to model.¹

 

Our senses are even more overloaded - we live at the bottom of an information well that our brain partially samples and heavily filters to create an illusion, albeit a rich one, of reality.  We tend to trust these personal filters, but careful science shows we are easily deluded and caution is necessary.

 

Filters are central to our relationship with the natural, cultural and machine worlds.  Companies like Google, FaceBook, and many others build filters that may not be aligned with the user interests and it is usually impossible to understand what these filters are.  Some focus on adding value to advertising and attempt to drive consumption and perceptions about our place in culture.  The difference between fashion and style presents an interesting example.  

 

Fashion is the relationship to the external.  It is how you mix and match predefined pieces to show you are part of a larger tribe that is constantly in motion.  It can be expensive or cheap, but is ephemeral.  It allows you to distance yourself from yourself and blend into a cultural tribe.  It is 100,000 people wearing the same jeans, shoes and a tshirt that proclaims 'I am an individual'.  

Style is the relationship to the internal. It is about your sense of self, your identity, your perception of who you are. It is a process of introspection where you ask what is in here and reflect that in what you wear.  The emphasis is on the person rathe rather than popular culture and social norms.  It requires a good sense of self.

 

Jheri and I have an ongoing conversation on the difference between style and fashion.²  With her permission I quoted her definitions from a very long letter describing her continuing journey finding her personal style.  Her body type is unusual enough that nothing fits off the rack.  She described her experimentation with fashion during her teenage years as learning about 'hats, scarves and cheap costume jewelry' as well as what looked good on her friend.  By the time I met her she was having clothing modified, but she was also searching out pieces that expressed her in one way or another.  Pieces that would last a long time.  Her closet is not deep, but her look can be striking and reflects her personality and image of herself.  The image is some out of season boots that were slightly damaged.  The calf width was too large, but she saw something and figured out an usual way to wear them.  She also made a great coat from an old horse blanket that gets  compliments in Paris and Milan.

 

Her definitions refer to clothing, but  could describe anything that becomes part of how we see ourselves culturally.  Recently some of us been talking about distinctions between fashion and style in mobile and wearable electronics down to their user experiences.  The social image you present using a mobile phone in public to the 'naturalness' of the user interface of a device.  There are interesting links to the increasingly divergent paths Google and Apple are taking.

 

Both companies have hired people associated with the fashion industry - Google for the Glass and Apple for a variety of positions.  Jheri works in the industry and is familiar with a few of the Apple hires by reputation.  She notes they deeply understand the difference between style and fashion.  A nimble company can add a fashion layer if they have a good control of design, but going deeper and focusing on style is more difficult.

 

An interesting emerging between the two companies is user privacy (not security, although that is related).³  Neither model is universally aligned with the needs of all users.  People say privacy is important, but most people don't place a high value on it and few understand its implications.⁴   The service they receive is sufficient compensation.  Apple is moving to a higher privacy model taking advantage of a natural alignment as their users are their customers.  The Apple ecosystem requires tight hardware and software integration and is perceived as valuable to many Apple customers - enough that they are willing to allow Apple to have high profit margins.  This division will become even more important as we connect to the things around us - it is just beginning to get interesting. 

 

Filters are a huge issue and are at the heart of our developing computer mediated interactions with each other, machines and information.  We are not having a robust public discussion on the filters stand between us and information and who controls them.  It isn't clear if we will have a discussion and if transparency and control will exist - even in small corners of our world.   This is a big thing - I don't know if it is the next big thing, but it has major implications.

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¹ Trying to understand social filters and develop new filters and even relevant replacement filters is the job Google, FaceBook, OKCupid and other social platforms attempt.

² Style and fashion are often assumed to be the same.  Jheri and others in the industry make the distinction that appears in her definitions.  It would be too diverting to launch into a deeper discussion than the sketch applied here, but the sociology and implications for consumption are fascinating.  

³ A long discussion that would be diverting.  It is important to understand the distinction between security and privacy and  social, hardware and software architectures associated with privacy.

 ⁴ It's Complicated by danah boyd is an excellent introduction to teenage privacy constructs.

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recipe corner

 

Bagel Topology

 

Topology is the study of shapes.  If you have a rubbery coffee mug, you can reform it into a doughnut.  A flexible sheet can't be made into a sphere...  lots of fun things.  

 

It turns out you can cut a bagel and make linked halves.  

 

I learned about this in grad school and have made more than a few over the years.  The trick is to find a very solid bagel and use a good knife.  Make sure you don't stab yourself! - A friend was going to have her cello master's recital, but managed to stab herself cutting bagels during the reception before the concert.  She couldn't play for over a month.

 

This video is much better than any drawings I could make.