omenti

wellness

After all these years my mother still holds the record for the most tragically wrong holiday gift.  The sad thing is most of it was thought-out and given in the spirit of goodwill and love.  Unfortunately a misunderstanding of psychology set the stage for some holiday bad cheer.

 

The year before my father's father was taken by a heart attack in his early 70s. Dad was something of a workaholic with a fondness for ice cream and all things fried.  Since he wasn't exactly following his doctor's advice, Mom reasoned monitoring was the answer.   On the recommendation of the family doctor she bought a beautiful sphygmomanometer - exactly the same device found in his office.  

 

I knew about it and had a look before it was wrapped.  Fine instruments are beautiful and she got the top of the line model.  Using an old stop watch we tried it out on each other.  Sweet.  It even seemed fun.  I thought about finding a nice logbook for a gift, but fortunately was derailed.  Christmas would be her's to lose.

 

For  years there wasn't much money, but this had been a good year and my sister and I had great expectations.  He probably had great expectations... expectations that continued until the moment he unwarped his own precision medicial instrument.

 

It is difficult to mask disappointment. Expectations were shattered by reality.  He got up without saying much and walked out.  Mom passed a bowl of M&Ms around.

 

___

 

Sensors are cheap.  Soon the devices we carry will be passively monitoring some of our vital signs creating biometric selfies in the process.  How much of a difference this will make and to what segments of the population?  Will the information be accurate enough to act on, will we know how to use it, will we act on it, and who else will be party to it?

 

____

The notion of wellness goes back to  mid 1840s London and the founding of the YMCA by George Williams.  It was a reaction to the physical and social displacements visited upon England by the Industrial Revolution.  The idea was to give young men (and later young women) a safe haven where they could improve their health through competition in sport and become better Christians as part of the bargain.  

 

The movement grew rapidly and with it amateur and professional sport. Later in the century the American branch of the Y creating the 'safe' sports of volleyball and basketball.  As part of the Muscular Christianity movement churches sponsored youth sports as safe haven from the dangers of urban life.  Calisthenics became popular and part of primary education the US and many European countries.  An Olympic movement emerged for the upper class.

 

About the same time great advances were being made in sanitation and a few people, nominally the wealthy, began to worry about what they ate.  Towards the end of the century we have the curious story of the Kellogg brothers...

 

Perhaps you've seen The Road to Wellville - the film adaptation of a novel by T.C. Boyle. Funny and recommended, but I didn't realize until today that much of it is accurate.  During this morning's rowing session I caught a bit on the Kellogg brothers on the Science Friday podcast. (audio, about 21 minutes) I won't spoil it as it is very entertaining involving gorillas, a wolf, a sanitarium, the first exercise recordings, brass bands, corn flakes and an obsession with constipation. 

 

There have been ups and downs in active wellness over the years.  Current trends are not terribly encouraging with fewer than 20% of adults meeting minimal recommended levels of exercise and about 5% getting the recommended 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day.¹

 

My physician has pointed to work that suggests if Americans met minimum recommended fitness and nutrition levels that the savings in healthcare costs would be greater than the massive amount of waste and inefficiency that currently plagues the system.  Denmark and the Netherlands recognize this with pedestrian and cycling infrastructure costs partly being paid for by healthcare savings.  Most of us have problems following advice.  Perhaps we'll exercise for a few weeks after some bad news from a physical exam.  Perhaps we'll spend a half year on a diet to lose twenty pounds.  Unfortunately most of us have problems maintaining these levels.

 

We already have ubiquitous measurement tools - scales and the fit of our clothing is ubiquitous as is our level of exhaustion as part of normal life.  We can get fitbits and other monitors, but sales tend to saturate.  It has been shown that people who use them for more than a few months are the people who are in the fit 20% - the people who meet the recommended minimum fitness levels.  

 

I suspect the same will be true with biometric selfies and 'videos'.  Most of us will just ignore the information.  For those who use it clear actions need to be suggested.  Particularly with diet and nutrition that turns out to be difficult as the underlying science is not well understood and anything deeper than the general recommendations of today is unlikely for some time. 

 

What might happen is insurance plans might require the data as part of their risk management.  We're already seeing this with companies offering incentives for employees who wear fitbits and report the results.  Perhaps we'll see individualized risk management on the part of insurers before individualized wellness.

 

The motivation problem needs to be cracked.²  B.J. Fogg and others have taken some steps, but the field is waiting for real innovation.  At the same time solid wellness information needs to be clear.  It exists, but there is an enormous amount of wrong information and many people can't separate good advice from snake oil.  Huge social problems.  I wouldn't expect miracles any time soon.

 

__________

¹ It is difficult getting historical statistics, but fitness levels tend to be low along with decreasing nutrition levels.  One high level source is from the federal fitness site.

² There are promising paths.  My undergrad school required physical education, but the focus was on matching students with activities they enjoy and might continue with after graduation.  It was like having your own personal trainer who is looking at the next thirty years or more of your life.  I have poor eye-hand coordination and am a terrible jumper and sprinter, but I have reasonable endurance.  Cycling and rowing were recommended.  Like many others who exercise regularly, I have put together a small social web that offers support.  In particularly I owe a lot to a one time professional athlete who is good at offering encouragement when it is needed and figuring out the right mix of exercises and challenges.

 

__________

Recipe corner

 

This time a guest recipe from Sandra.  Really fine chai!  I've made two batches.  One used tumeric and almond coconut milk and the other used nutmeg and orange peel and straight up almond milk.  You *really* should give this one a try!

 

Sandra's Chai Tea

 

° Whole Cloves (8-10)

° Cinnamon stick (1)

° Cardamom pods or the ground spice (1/8-1/4 )tsp

° Fresh ginger (½-1) tsp

Optional:

° fresh turmeric (1/2 tsp)

° grated fresh nutmeg 1/8 tsp)

· orange peel

° star anis

° black tea

° Milk (regular, skim, Soy Almond, etc)

Put all ingredients onto a tea strainer. Pour hot water over all ingredients. Add milk and allow to steep until water cools enough to drink. OMG!!!

the golden haired girl with the gold spoon

I was at my favorite Gelateria and asked one of the owners if she remembered someone.  She looked at the photo on my phone and a big smile came to her face.  

 

Oh! The thin one with the golden hair and the gold spoon.  She always orders a pint and has all of it in shop with her gold spoon.  You can tell the serious ones.  They always bring their own gold spoons...

 

Jheri was partly to blame for my New York gelato quest.  She loves the great gelateria of Italy and had made the comment that, except for a few shops in the city, American gelato was very good.  That was excuse enough.  I made a list of candidate shops from reviews and personal recommendations and had a nice excuse for a treat on most trips to the city.  It started in May and by October a clear winner emerged.  

 

Up until then I had not asked for Jheri's recommendation.  Flavor is a complex synthesis of several senses making it even more interesting that both of us were in agreement.  I was took back my phone and took a seat with my two flavors and thought about gold spoons.

 

Shops usually provide tiny plastic gelato spoons, but plastic colors the flavor a bit.  Gelato purists bring their own spoons.  Gold seems to be favored and that raises a few questions.

 

I had a taste of the questions as a kid.  For whatever reason I licked the terminals of a nine volt battery. There is a mild electrical sensation along with a bitter taste.  A wiser person would stay away from battery licking, but a twelve year old kid isn't exactly wise.  I had to try it at different voltages and different parts of my tongue.  Then I tried it along with apple slices to see if it modified the flavor.¹  That led me to try tasting metals directly - copper, zinc, tin, steel, stainless steel and my mother's silver. Some of them had strong and disagreeable tastes.  It was enough fun for a day - back then my attention wasn't different from Dug's in the movie Up! ...  

 

Iron and steel corrodes in the presence of acid and would be a bad choice for anything acidic - tomato sauce or anything with citrus for example.  Copper is used in in some pots and pans.  It has a bitter taste, but copper pots and pans usually don't touch your tongue.

 

The battery gives hints of paths to explore.  Metals like copper and zinc are reactive.  They react with your saliva and electrons flow.  You have made an inefficient battery and the current may be triggering the bitter taste.  Stainless steel is very neutral but regular steel leaves a metallic taste. 

 

Metals are so important that ages of civilization take their names - copper, bronze, and iron.  They have a variety of useful properties that come from their internal structure.  Metallurgy deserves its own post, but you have to go to the microscopic level to sort out what makes them special and see how they differ from each other.  It seems odd, but their atoms form a crystalline lattice structure.  These crystals are small and broken by dislocations which make metals malleable.  It is possible to insert other atoms in the crystal lattices to form alloys which can have very different properties from pure metals.  Metallurgy has produced an enormous variety of alloys making our much of our physical world possible.  

 

Steels are iron based alloys.  Until the last century creating good steels was something of a black art.  The secrets of the fine steels used in swords - Damascus steel and Japanese samurai sword steel - were carefully guarded secrets and, in the case of Damascus, lost until recently. About a century ago metallurgists laboriously searched for better steels.  Steels that would be better than the Titanic's that became brittle in icy water, better steels for gun barrels, and specialized steels for the emerging aircraft and automobile industries.

 

Just before WWI Harry Brearley was conducting such a search at a lab in Sheffield, England.   He would make small batches changing the amounts of carbon, nickel, aluminum, chromium and other materials - a very slow and laborious process and not terribly different from what is done today.  Quite by accident he found a piece from an old experiment that had been sitting around for some time.  It was still shiny when any other steel alloy had started to rust.  That shouldn't be.  He checked his lab book and found this one had chromium and carbon added to the iron.

 

Initially the chromium seemed to be a mistake - the steel wasn't harder than good carbon steels so he had initially rejected it.  But not rusting was special - even revolutionary.   If you expose steel to air and water iron oxide - rust - forms.  The trick is chromium reacts with oxygen before the iron gets a chance.  It forms a tightly bound transparent layer of chromium oxide on the surface of the material.  If you cut or break the material a new layer forms almost instantly - it is self-healing.  He called the new steel stainless steel.  

 

When you put a stainless steel spoon in your mouth you are tasting the chromium oxide layer which,  compared to normal steel is, tasteless.  Assuming you can form it into the appropriate shapes it is an excellent material for cutlery.

 

Gold is a nobel metal - supremely non-reactive.  Some people say it makes some foods taste a bit sweeter, but that may be speculation.  At the very least it is probably more neutral than other more reactive materials.

 

Only a few metals are found in their pure forms - copper, gold and iron.  Early on pure iron came from meteorites and was the rarest of the three.  Gold is common enough that it is found in many early civilizations, but rare enough to be used for objects of value (if evenly distributed each person currently alive would get a bit less than an ounce).  It is soft and melts at comparatively low temperatures making it easy to work with.  It alloys with silver.  An 18 carat alloy is three quarters gold and is rugged enough for use in watches and jewelry.

 

Gold is easy to spot.  Metals tend to reflect most of the visible light that strikes them.  Aluminum, silver, platinum and many other metals absorb very little visible light giving them a silvery appearance.  Gold preferentially absorbs light from the blue end of the spectrum making while leaving in the reds, oranges and yellows.²  Our brain processes this as a gold color.  

 

Gold spoons aren't as difficult to own as you might think.  While the real thing is far too expensive for most of us, gold plating only uses a few cents of the material and can be durable enough for light use.  It would be fun to plate spoons with various metals and have a tasting party with various foods.  You might end up abandoning silver as it tarnishes too easily giving it an unpleasant taste.  Stainless steel would probably do quite well, but perhaps gold would dethrone it.

 

I'm nearing my time limit and it is clear something should be said about metals - their strength, malleability, ductility and electrical properties.  The alloys, special metals like the supersteels in Colleen's bicycle frame and the transition of metallurgy from an art to a science.  Even its sensual qualities.  But for now I'll end noting a recent conversation about gold.

 

There was some speculation on how much gold will be used in the  watch.  A horologist said gold watches have between a tenth and three troy ounces of gold.  The case rarely has over an ounce and is usually closer to a half ounce in fine watches.  The alloy is usually 18 carat for durability.  If the watch has a half ounce, you aren't going to see it for $1,000 and probably not even $2,000.  Horace Dediu speculated the profit margin for the watches could easily be over 50% and I'd agree .. and at the high end it could be much more if conventional high quality watches are a guide.  

 

What if the Apple's gold watch is successful?  What if they sell several million in the Chinese market?  How much would that impact the gold market?  A million watches at fifteen grams each is fifteen metric tonnes.  Demand is something like 2,000 tonnes for jewelry and 4,500 tonnes overall.  It would take a lot of watches to make a serious dent.

 

Oh - and I now have a small gold plated spoon for gelato and other deserts.

__________

¹ My notebooks would have frightened my mother.  I was the sort of kid who fooled around with electricity and can tell the difference between 110 and 220 VAC by touch. It got worse around the age of 14 or 15 with tesla coils and linear amplifiers for the radio transmitter.

² Metals reflect equally across visible light because quantum mechanics doesn't allow photons to change an allowable energy level in the atom.  Gold is special - the nucleus is so dense that relativistic effects come into play and the absorption of short wavelengths is allowed.  

Copper also allows transitions, but for a different reason.

__________

Recipe corner

I've been away and haven't cooked anything notable since the last post.  I did run across a fascinating piece by Hillary Rosner on the modern domestication of wild plants.  It turns out we rely on fewer than 150 plants for food while about 50,000 are edible.  The last major domestication of a plant took place about 3,000 years ago.  There is great room for experimentation and some of this could turn out to be extremely important given the rapid climate change we are currently witness to.  

I asked René Redzepi what culinary areas seemed ripe for exploration.  Without a pause he said exploring the flavors of wild plants.  He's doing some of that at NOMA, but he said the flavor palate was unimaginably large with the potential for fantastic discovery.  In his mind we're too dependent on limited cuisines.  

 

 

 

it's personal

The other day I was using one of my slide rules while waiting for a train.  I was absorbed in calculations until someone interrupted me wanting to know what I was doing.  People tend to be mystified when they see an unfamiliar technology.

 

Slide rules are simple in concept. When you were a kid you may have learned to add by physically laying sticks of different lengths together.  A slide rule also adds lengths, but now they are in a logarithmic scale.  Now you can make use of the fact that log(xy) = log(x) + log(y) so adding these lengths multiplies and subtracting divides.  You end up with sliding rules that allow you to multiply and divide to a couple of digits accuracy - often much faster than keying them in on a laptop or calculator.¹ 

 

I bought my first rule in the eighth grade.  It wasn't of much use in school, but it was perfect for the types of calculations I needed in amateur radio and astronomy.  Not only did I learn blow through numbers quickly to get good enough answers, I developed a natural sense of what logarithms 'felt' like along with a good sense of playing with orders of magnitude in my head and mentally approximating ball park answers.  In short it was a tool for given a physical sense of approximate calculations - something of enormous value to anyone who goes into the physical sciences.

 

My best rule was a Pickett N4-ES.  I bought in the tenth grade for about $200 in today's money.  It went far beyond multiplication and division with special scales for better accuracy, trig functions and so on.  It was what real rocket scientists were using up until the point where Hewlett Packard killed the business with the HP-35 calculator.  Jet fighters, atomic weapons and moon rockets were designed with the help of slide rules.

 

I gave my Pickett to a young friend who has a love for calculation.  She would have it down the road, but I have a few other rules and this one is a special heirloom - the sort of thing you pass on to someone.  It was much more fun for me to tell her the stories and watch her delight as she mastered it to the point where she regularly puzzles coworkers.  There are movies with its fingerprints.

 

It is said that we are experiential beings - that we prefer experiences to stuff.  I'd agree to a point.  There are some things that are so important that they take on stories of their own. There is a slate blackboard, my father's dress watch, my grandfather's pocket-watch, and a few things I've built over the years. Not a lot, but more important than anything else I own.

 

Some people collect - my sister is into fountain pens.  She's an artist, but does writing and some ink sketches with them.  Both of us sketch and both of us give homemade as as important presents.  They may not be as nicely executed as commercial art, but they are very personal and carry a story.

 

Story or a potential story.  Personal items become even more personal as we use them and some become part of our style. My grandfather's pocket watch drifts more than a minute a day and is cumbersome.  But it feels good in the hand and reminds me of old family stories.  I didn't have enough time to know him while he was alive, but I'm getting to know him now - his punctuality and love of machines and precision.  It is a container for stories and, like the slide rule, has become part of my style.

 

Watches are personal items.  Consulting them is a movement of the wrist - a natural gesture.  They may be beautiful to look at, feel, and can signal others if we choose.  They represent a progression of technology as time keeping moved from experts to shared town clocks, to home clocks, and finally to a wearable.  

 

I've been thinking about the Apple Watch and what wearable means for a few weeks and am finding my views shifting.  I don't know if Apple's watch will be the first successful wearable, but I think it stands a good chance.

 

About twenty years ago we started to think about what would happen as Moore's Law progressed and computation moved into the fabric of our lives.  It raised a lot of interesting questions and generated a few interesting new questions and answers (a lot of bad answers - a few good ones).  The watch form factor seemed ideal for a computer if you could solve interface, communication and power problems.  Our belief was that successful watches would concentrate on bits of information and control that didn't require much of an interface, but were things you wanted to do all of the time.  A watch gives you the time, but not your full calendar - it is still a very useful tool even though the scope of its temporal information is limited.

 

I have not touched an Apple Watch and can't be a judge of its style or its price points.² It is striking that it is not a peripheral, but rather a full fledged computer.  Apple is good at design that integrates physical design and software, but they are also very good at chip design that optimizes physical space, task specific computations and power consumption.³   The core of the watch is computer called the S1 that is embedded in resin for durability.  Android smart-watches probably have higher power consumption and so far are used as peripherals.  This difference is fundamental and needs to be thought through carefully.  Apple has created a new platform that will take a few years to perfect, but it may become more important, more personal, to you than the smartphone in your pocket or purse or the laptop on your desk - even though you still have all of them.  Many other questions are raised that will be answered with time, but networking is very interesting and a key difference between Google and Apple.  It may be extremely important if privacy becomes a major issue.

 

What the watch will become is the stuff of story and heirloom, at least for some makes.⁴  I've been excited by a few technical revelations over the years - about five when I think about it.  I'm adding this as the sixth.

__________

 ¹ You can still buy used slide rules on eBay.  Here's an old manual from Pickett on the use of one. One of the readers of the blog caught the bug and is a collector. (I don't know if I was partly responsible for the affliction - if so, sorry Dave)

² I've had conversations with people in design and fashion who range from very impressed to 'a computer maker is incapable of understanding fashion'  The most enthusiastic were those who design rather than market fashion and two who were briefed by Apple.  There are biases that I can't sort out at this point.

³ The A8 system on a chip (SoC) is uses a bit more than half the power than similar silicon in ARM based Android smartphones.  A remarkable achievement that is at least as important as physical design.

⁴ Some guesses.  Watches have to last through the generations and that imposes constraints beyond style.

I'm guessing the price points of the three watches will be widely separated.  That 16 hours between charging for normal use is close to a target and that the battery is about a half watt-hour at best and capacity will improve slowly over the next ten years.  (Predication - watches are probably the first place rechargable metal-air batteries appear). The battery will have to be replaced every two years and some models may also get a S2, S3 or S* as part of normal maintenance - just like a mechanical watch has to have maintenance every few years.  If I had to guess I would say the low end aluminum watch only gets battery upgrades and the stainless steel and gold models get battery and module upgrades to make them 'timeless' as capabilities grow. If this is true it would be a fundamental shift in modularity in a tiny high volume device.  With careful design this could be done with a small robot - perhaps even in the back of an Apple Store.

Networking is fascinating - the intranet ground fogs I've described and asynchronous communication begin to make a lot of sense - particularly if battery life and privacy are important. Lots of ideas if you're interested ..  they were leaving many signals.

 

__________

Recipe Corner

 

There are a lot of fresh vegetables available at the moment.  Rather than let them go to waste it makes sense to make vegetable stock.  This is usually a long term event - restaurants frequently start the stock pot first thing in the morning and keep it going all day.  I'm a big fan of quick stocks when I run low.  Pressure cookers are great for this, but you can also through together something much better than any pre-made stock from a store in less than a half hour.  The recipe is only a guide - try it with almost anything!

 

Simple Twenty MinuteVeggie Stock

 

Ingredients (for about 8 cups of target stock)

 

° water for the amount of stock you want plus about a cup

° 1 tbl of peppercorns

° a quartered yellow onion 

° a few (say three) cloves of garlic, peal and smashed 

° 2 sprigs of thyme

 

Technique

 

° Add the above to the water and let it come to a boil. Reduce to a simmer

° as you prep your soup thrown in left over trimmings from carrots, tomatoes, onions, greens, mushroom bits etc.  Don't be too afraid of strong flavors as you won't boil for a long time.  This is all about flavor reinforcement.

° Let it simmer away about 10 or 15 minutes, strain and use.