omenti

cloud illusions

They appear as electric blue wisps well after sunset - far too long to be normal clouds, but there they are reflecting sunlight from about fifty miles above the Earth.  I've only been lucky enough to see two noctilucent clouds in my life so far and I've been hunting since I was a teenager.  

 

Fifty miles up the atmosphere is nearly a vacuum - a very dry vacuum.  Ice crystals can form if it is cold enough.  During the Summer the region chills to about -120°C.  A bit of dust - most of it is thought to be fine particles - a smoke -  from micrometeorites act as nucleation seeds to start the formation of ice crystals.  When the Sun is low enough to catch them leaving normally brighter clouds and the sky glow dark they can pop into view.

 

They've only been noticed since 1885 - a few years after the eruption of Krakatoa.  People were in the habit of watching the beautiful sunsets produced by volcanic dust and reports of these odd wispy clouds that were too high up to be clouds started to appear.  Since then sighting have become more common and their frequency seems to be increasing.   A few years ago some were spotted as far South as 35°.  I've seen them at 40° and 53°.

 

There are still a large number of questions and they may be gauges of other activities.  One hypothesis that is gaining strength is their strength is related to the amount of methane in the upper atmosphere.  Their frequency and strength may be an indicator of natural gas that has escaped from wells and leaking pipelines. 

 

If you're in Canada, most of Europe -  even the Northern US  - go out and look at the sky around an hour after sunset on clear nights. Seeing them once is worth looking hundreds of times - they're very special.  If you're good with a camera and low light situations these are beautiful subjects.

 

maybe, just maybe ...

 

the beautiful photo was taken in Stockholm by  Kevin Cho last year

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 Recipe Corner

 

Every once and awhile it is good to list something to avoid.  I grew up in a region where the dessert salad ruled.  They seem to be associated with the upper midwest and Scandinavian populations, but their ease of preparation and women's magazines probably caused them to spread in the 50s and 60s.  Concoctions like glorified rice, ambrosia, seafoam salad...   I was thinking about listing Ambrosia, but  my mother liked Snickers Salad - just the thing to inflict on a church social when you aren't doing the hot dish.  

 

Snickers Salad

 

Ingredients/technique

 

° chop an apple (something like a Granny Smith), a Snickers bar into a bowl of Cool Whip (or some other whipped cream substitute)

° mix in some sliced banana and chopped walnuts or pecans to customize

 

what should a watch watch?

A few days ago someone flashed his Apple WATCH announceing he might periodically take standing breaks at the watches' promptings.  Apart from being a bit socially odd at this point  the idea seems like it may be good. There is a a body of research showing that extended sedentary periods are unhealthy - even for those who are otherwise physically active.  Standing and even walking desks with treadmills have become more common, but in the past few years it has been suggested that periodic standing was good.  If true it would be wonderful - powerful benefits with little effort are rare.  You could set an alert on on your computer or, better yet, have your watch remind you. Apple has seized the idea and implemented a reminder in their watch.  Unfortunately it may not be ponies and rainbows...

 

Sedentary research turns out to be difficult and there aren't many solid studies on periodic standing.  It appears there is some benefit but it now appears that a bit more exercise is needed.  More work still needs to be done, but it appears you should get up and walk around for a couple of minutes.  That might be problematic in meetings, but should be easy in the office or the home.  You can still use your watch or a timer on your computer, but move around a bit.  It may even make for some interesting meetings:-) 

 

Smartwatches (or just watches when they're popular enough in a few years) can be very good at alerting, prompting behavior.  Making measurements is another thing - you have to understand what is being measured how it is properly used.  Take calories burned while running as an example ...

 

full stop - calories burned in exercise is a red herring

 

It is possible to measure human output with a  calibrated ergometer.  Such beasts exist on some  professional exercise kit.  Bicycle power meters are perhaps the most common example.¹  They are accurate, but useless if you want to figure out food you've burned as involves knowing the efficiency of your metabolism and muscles.  There are ballpark figures of 20 to 25% average efficiency for many activities.  That doesn't matter to the athlete who only wants to know how much useful work her muscles are delivering as a gauge of training technique and performance.  Most exercise equipment in homes and commercial gyms makes a mostly uncalibrated power measurement and displays calories burned by adjusting with an assumed efficiency.  There is a tendency to report an optimistic figure - sort of like sizing on some clothing clothing.

 

It would be nice if we could calculate how much nutritional energy we consumed and how much we burned.  It would then be an easy matter to populate a spreadsheet and do the accounting to see if we're gaining or losing weight.  Unfortuantely there is a bad data problem at nearly every step of the process:

 

° We don't know how much energy is in the food we eat.  Even if we have a good idea of the accurate caloric density of a dish (and that is rare), few of us weigh our food.  Almost all experiments that carefully look at what we've eaten and compare it with self reported estimates show errors on the order of 25 to 35%.

° Few of us know our resting metabolic rate.  

° Almost none of us know the efficiency of our digestion and metabolism.  This is an area of active research and non-trivial to measure.  The flora in your gut appears to have a major impact.  

° Likewise almost none of us have any sense of how many calories we burn a day from normal activity.  It is much more complex than counting steps and other forms of exercise.

 

The good news is most of us were born with a fantastic feedback mechanism to adjust our eating and match it to our activity.   The body knows when to shift burning food to storing it in the form of fat, but normally sends a message in the form of satiation during a meal.  Unfortunately with calorically dense and readily available food it is easy to ignore internal feedback signals.  

 

Humans have far and away the most body fat of any of the primates - a marathon runner is fat compared with a chimpanzee.  In times of abundance we deposit fat.  If we've put on too much weight in theory we can just eat less, but this is where evolution has been cruel.  If you've been overweight for an extended period your metabolism becomes more efficient.²  Say your normal weight should be 150 pounds and you didn't gain weight on about 2,000 calories a day.  If you go up to 180 and finally manage to get down to 150 again you'll dramatically gain weight on 2,000 calories a day - your needs have dropped by a few hundred per day - perhaps to around 1,700.  Your internal feedback for satiation doesn't adjust to the new number.

 

While a normal person who hasn't been overweight can listen to his body someone who has a damaged feedback mechanism can't.  For these people the external measure of counting calories is be important if they want to maintain the lower number.  Since exact calorie counting isn't possible they have to use relative amounts and use a scale for feedback.  This is too difficult for most of us.   We rarely loose weight and maintain the target number for more than a year or two. The upshot of this is the diet industry doesn't work for most people. It is relatively easy to lose weight but most will gain it (and more) back.  The average Weight Watchers client has been with them for about a decade and has been through somewhat more than four cycles.  

 

About 80% of the energy an average body uses just goes into keeping you alive and warm.  Physical activity adds very little and you have to do a large amount to lose weight - basically you probably can't outrun your fork.³ 

 

Exercise for health.  Eat for health and manage how you eat to regulate your weight.

 

You don't need a smartwatch to be healthy. If it encourages you to exercise and walk around a bit during sedentary activity it may be worth the price of admission, but you can get there via other methods.  The functionality is part of the watch so having it isn't a loss - just remember where it is and isn't useful.

 

What excites me is its potential as an always-worn data collection device.  The Apple WATCH has a good accelerometer and heart rate meter - as good as or better than any of the fitness bands and it will probably get better given its computational power.  It can network with other measurement devices you wear or interact with and create a rich profile.  Very little or any of this will link first to the cloud.  It will be stored on the watch and processed on your phone.⁴  At that point you may share it with a doctor or medical researcher.  I know of several interesting devices under development and I'm not privy to much.

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¹ Power meters measure the power you are delivering to the machine in watts in real time.  Output measurements are extremely useful for training and in competition - a good bicycle power meter costs about $2,000 and is a requirement for cycling competition these days.

Some pro grade exercise equipment have ergometers and it is possible to build and calibrate one - I've done that with my rowing machine.  It is great for feedback on how I'm doing physically - and essentially useless for how much food I'm burning.

² Researchers are still working this out.  It appears being 10 to 15% overweight for several months - perhaps a half year - is sufficient to break do this.

³ Serious athletes can, but this is extremely unusual - we're talking 6 or more hours a day of very heavy physical activity.  

⁴ It is far too expensive in terms of energy to keep an array of sensors directly connected to the cloud.  Preprocessing the data locally is much more efficient.

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Recipe corner

 

We're not quite into fresh Spring peas.  If you can't get same day peas go for high quality flash frozen peas.  Peas loose their flavor very quickly - good flash frozen are usually better than day old fresh picked.  I made this with frozen peas in preparation for the real thing.  It was awfully good and worth repeating.

 

Pea Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° 6 cups vegetable stock

° 3 cups fresh peas (shelled)

° 1-1/2 cloves of garlic thinly sliced

° 3 tbl olive oil and more for garnish

° sea salt and ground black pepper

° 1/4 cup of mint roughly chopped and stems removed

° juice of a 1/2 lemon (I had a very small lemon)

° 1/4 cup crème fraîche

 

Technique

 

° Bring stock to a simmer over medium heat

° Combine the peas, garlic, olive oil and a pinch of salt in a sauté pan over medium heat and cover the peas with a bit of stock 

° Braise the peas at a simmer until nearly tender.  Add most of the mint to the peans and simmer another minute 'till the peas are just tender.  Season with salt and pepper

° Transfer pea mixture to a food processor and purée.  Add stock and thin to desired level blending as you go.  Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice as needed.

° Divide into bowls and garnish with remain mint leaves, a good drizzle of olive oil and a tbl or so of cremé fraîche.

 

tíma

 

What do you think of the new iPhone?

 

A reasonable question, but I couldn't say much as I didn't have one yet.  I was with a very eclectic group of people that got together a few times a year for conversation and a month had passed since the iPhone went on sale.  About a third of the people in the room were wearing one... the early tech adopter.  Somehow the Icelandic musician who asked the question thought I was one of them.   

 

I told her I was waiting.   Buying one now would be be a waste of opportunity.  There are times you can afford something, but it isn't worth the cost of what you have to give up to get it.  That is usually time or money, but in this case it was insight.  I was more interested in learning how people used a smartphone rather than playing with one myself.  Using one too early might color my perception.  

 

A big smile broke out on her face -  tíma!  You understand tíma! 

 

Tīma is an Icelandic verb that means you don't buy something - not because you can't afford it, but rather what you give up in time or money is greater than it's value.  

 

In the last half of the 90s I was interested in portable and ubiquitous computing.  Moore's Law was still very much in evidence and by the mid 90s we were seeing consumer level digital replacements for analog devices.  Digital cameras, handheld GPS receivers, mp3 players ...   It made sense to combine functionality where possible.

 

We mashed a handheld Linux box with a small hard disk and a WiFi radio.  It was piano wire and chewing gum hackery, but I've rarely worked with a better palantir into the future.  A few similar devices came together - a GPS was linked to the Linux box.  A cameraphone that could send and receive photos over the cellular network. All were ugly and designed to play with interfaces, but it had become clear multiple functions would merge into one device. 

 

We had a vague idea of what the future would be - one paper from 1996 suggested a handheld computer with  power of a workstation  was possible and that any number of sensors would be attached.  We didn't know if everything would go into one box or if you would have a local area network on and near your body.  What was likely and what could we invent.  There were several drivers in our scenarios - the evolution of batteries, Moore's Law, low power computing, and the evolution of radio.  In retrospect we slightly overestimated Moore's Law (as did most people), got batteries and power management about right, and were in the ballpark on radio even though we wildly missed the path it would take.  We based much of what we were doing on an iPhone-like device (down to the touch screen and GPS) that we predicted would enter around 2005.  We knew we weren't smart enough to predict the specifics, so we never published them.  To give a sense of our misdirection, we thought Nokia and Microsoft would be the major players.  

 

We knew this would be an interesting device, but completely missed the importance of apps.  We saw it as a computer you would wear most of the time - a computer with sensors and a connection to the Internet.  The problem was it wasn't quite close enough to you.  That's where we became interested in ubiquitous computation.  Watches, belts, shoes and canes were all considered.  Interfaces were all over the place including a ring that listened to h ow you rubbed your fingers, but that's a different story.  Our gut feeling told us the watch was perhaps the most important real estate on your body if you could convince someone to wear one.  It was clear that a watch ultimately would do quite a bit more than just telling time.  

 

There are technologies that greatly enable other parts of the economy.  Electric power did much more than illuminate lights and run electric motors.  Railroads did more than move people and things around.  PCs did much more than standard computing. There was a great inflation of what was possible.  Another great inflation with the Internet and web had an enormous impact.  But it didn't end there.  The smartphone has created yet another wave that is large enough to be considered on its own.

 

Tíma indeed.  I can't afford the risk of coloring my perception of the Apple WATCH by focusing on my specific use case.  By waiting a year or so I have the advantage of avoiding first generation hardware.

 

I knew the iPhone was going to be important.  I didn't know if it would be successful for Apple or if someone else would made something better in the category, but it was clear it was worthy of study.  

 

An anthropologist friend told me when you study the use of a new technology it is important to remain a bit aloof initially.  Carefully observe how other people use it.  What new use cases develop?  Did its designers intuit how people might use it?  Where are their problems, where are the success and where is the serendipity.  Only after you have a rough view of the land do you jump in and examine your own use case.

 

I'm reasonably convinced a wrist computer is extremely important and we're finally at the level where a viable first generation is possible.  Batteries and power management remain issues and the state of radio plus the potential importance of privacy are dictating Apple's approach.  It is a real computer, but it is a networked extension to the iPhone and a few other devices and services that are beginning to emerge.  What it does may represent a distillation of computation that is centrally important and perhaps unique to its user.  

 

Apps were a startling surprise for the iPhone - last year Apple's app market was larger than Hollywood and it is growing at a much greater rate.  I suspect the watch will provide a visit to the land of Serendip.  I don't know if Apple will make the first viable example, but suspect they stand a good chance as they get other dimensions of value that are opaque to much of the tech world.  I also suspect there will be a good period of a year or more marked by confusion about what the watch does and what it is useful for.  It is also clear there is an enormous amount of technological and social headroom in this class of computing.

 

Given a few years many will exclaim how obvious it was...  I agree with Horace when he says this is more of a real estate play than a watch and bare wrists are more interesting than those that currently host watches.

 

I tíma my purchase of an Apple WATCH.

 

oh yeah -- it is roughly pronounced  tee-ma

 

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Recipe corner

 

I love to roast produce.  Here's a vinaigrette that worked well on a few roasted carrots.  There are a number of ways to roast carrots.  I cut them into sticks about 3 inches long by 3/8 of an inch on the sides.  Equal size isn't important or good as some variation during roasting is interesting.  Once chopped spread them out on a pan (rimmed is better), drizzle with olive oil (a few tablespoons) and roast at 475° for about 15 minutes if you watch them like a hawk.  450° is better if you want a bit of latitude before they burn - but the taste at the higher temperature is better.  This is enough for a lot of carrots - I probably did 4 pounds.  

 

Vinaigrette for Roasted Veggies

 

Ingredients

 

° 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

° 2 tbl white wine vinegar

° 1 tbl minced garlic

° 1 tbl Dijon mustard

° 3 sprigs fresh thyme leaves finely minced

° 1 spring fresh rosemary leaves finely minced

 

Technique

 

° put it in a jar and shake 'til it emulsifies

° pour it over your roasted veggies ('told you it was simple:-)  It will keep about a day in the fridge