omenti

making things and change

Twenty years ago an anthropologist in my department was studying the relationship between teenagers and technologies - specifically how they adapted to new technologies quickly sometimes developing novel uses not seen by the inventors.  She observed that although adults assumed the kids had some natural deep knowledge, in fact the teen models of how the technologies worked was paper thin and often wrong.   The skill was a facility to use the technology.  They were effectively technology idiot savants.  

 

In a way we are all idiot savants with technology.  On the desert island none of us could build even the simplest integrated circuit from sand, let alone something as simple as a steel knife.  Civilization is built on accumulated knowledge with deep knowledge necessary for making being mostly narrow and isolated.  Understanding how and where production methods can be used is essential in any kind of manufacturing. How would you go about making Saran Warp?  How about a glass bottle? Where would hydrodynamic machining be useful?  What are the variations of forming sheet metal?  How do production techniques scale? When do you invest in an entirely new technique?   Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design by Chris Lefteri is a terrific book.  It isn't very deep - a page or two for a few hundred techniques, but Lefteri's explanations and illustrations are very clear and give a sense of what might be appropriate for a wide variety of products and scales.  As a bonus you'll probably be the only person in your circle who knows about jiggering and jollying.  Go for the 2^nd edition physical book.  The ebook is a disappointment.

 

Which brings us to Tesla.  It was suggested I say something about the 'revolutionary' Model 3 given the fact that about 350 thousand people gave Tesla a thousand dollar interest free loan in exchange for a place in line for a car that hasn't been publicly tested and probably won't be produced in any volume until well into 2018.

 

I don't consider any of the Teslas to be revolutionary.  I don't mean to take anything away from them - their cars are among the best in the world and they've managed to built an incredibly strong aspirational brand.  If you want to make a car in low volume and don't worry too much about cost or making a profit, you can take a route similar to that of the Roadster ..  buy a roller from an established company (Lotus), bolt on an electric power train assembled from off-the-shelf components, bolt on a body and focus the engineering on something that would surprise people.  None of this is easy, but it can be done a few dozen engineers, a few years of hard work, good timing and the right financial backers.  In fact a similar approach is used by many of the few dozen boutique supercar and hypercar makes.  

 

The Model S was an exercise in understanding limited conventional production.  Again there is no innovation (other than perhaps the sales model, but that exists outside of the US).  There were teething problems, but they managed to keep their well-healed customers delighted and focused on performance that is desirable to that nice.  It gives you the ability to build a nearly five thousand pound car that can accelerate nearly any Ferrari or Porsche - although it can only keep up this power level for a very short time before blowing through the battery's charge.  The choice to follow a conservative path was prudent - mixing in innovation would probably have killed the company.

 

Musk has stated his goal is to get other car makers to go electric for the environment.  A noble goal and the other makers will go electric by themselves, but I doubt many people buy Teslas for being green.¹  They're buying the brand.  With the Model 3 the company has to figure out volume production and profitability.  Somehow the plant tour managed to impress the reporters, but it appears to be a rather conventional, albeit new, metal stamping facility.  It can be done - there are several existence proofs, but there are also more than a few failures.  

 

Transportation is enormously complex and has defined the layout and nature of our cities and suburbs.  Commuting takes an average of about an hour out of our day.  Some people are excited by the changes coming with self-driving cars, but general use is quite a way down the road.²  The size and energy use of a car is current fairly rigid and inefficient.  To innovate transportation you need to do something besides the powertrain as that just leaves you with a functionally equivalent vehicle.  Real change is most likely to take place in how cars are made.  After all, the last major innovation in the US came from Toyota in the 70s with high quality vehicles made using just-in-time production and enabled and educated production workers. 

 

Most cars are built using unit-body (monocoque) construction.  Metal is bent and welded together to form a structure that replaces the older technique of bolting a body to a rigid frame.  With proper design both techniques can produce safe vehicles, but unit-body is cost effective only with very large production runs.  A set of dies to make a model goes for about $450 million and has a lead time of over two years.  A maker tries to stretch out a design's life to recover the initial die cost. And this is just for one type of metal. Ford spent something north of two billion on their aluminum F-150.  They'll probably be under a half billion on the next design change, but the material change was a big one.

 

Small production runs still use welded steel frames and increasingly some form of composite construction like carbon fiber.³  There are many ways to do this, but they've been slow and expensive.  The best car production lines have a dwell time of about a minute - no production step can take longer. Carbon fiber has one step that, cure time, that is often measured in days.  Until now that is.  BMW has it down to about five minutes with the i3.  Five minutes corresponds to about 250 cars per day or something around 80,000 per year.  I'd wager five minutes will drop over the next decade.

 

The video (a tip of the hat to Horace Dediu for pointing it out) interviews Sandy Munro, principal at the legendary automobile fabrication cost analysis firm of Munro & Associates on their tear-down of the BMW i3.   They're famous for aircraft and automobile costing analysis - completely tearing down something not only to understand what went into it, but how it was made.  Sandy calls the i3 the today's Model T.  They've torn apart several hundred vehicles and this is the one that blew their minds.

 

BMW's composite tooling for the i3 is costs a third to a quarter as much as conventional unit-body tooling.  It should be quicker to bring a new model on line and you don't need to build a million units to recover your cost.  On the other hand it doesn't scale past 80,000 units per year, but perhaps the design flexibility offered by an electric vehicle offers to make a much wider range of vehicles better targeted to user needs and regions.   BMW mentioned that Apple visited for talks.  It isn't clear where the discussions went, but almost certainly i3 production technique was the central topic.

 

In a decade imagine a smaller electric car (the i1?) that has a top speed of under 35 mph and is only used in an urban environment as part of their transportation infrastructure.  Some European cities are talking about excluding gasoline cars from downtown regions.  Paris' Sunday without cars was wildly popular.   Highly constrained driverless cars will be possible in five to ten years depending on city and how strong new traffic flows can be enforced (think China and a few European cities).  They'd use much less energy to get around and pollution released in the city is little or nothing.  A city like Paris might buy a large number as an extension of their transit system - or perhaps companies would compete.    With maintenance and a modular electronic and battery design they might have a service life exceeding 30 years.  Something like this might be a plausible early major step towards autonomous vehicles. 

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¹ An electric car is a rather poor use of resources if your goal is reducing carbon emissions in the short term.  Given the current mix of electric power generation and localized distribution some parts of the county an electric vehicle is currently counterproductive.  But the advantages, other than limited range, are huge and it makes sense to support early production as the generation mix will hopefully become cleaner with time.  It will take awhile as fewer than ten percent of the fleet is replaced every year.  When unsubsidized prices cars with a 200 mile rang appear there will be an issue with battery production and charging facilities.  All of that will sort out, but production ramps rarely align in complex technologies.

Would I buy a Model 3 or a GM Bolt?  Perhaps.  I've driven several electrics and although I'm impressed none of them currently meet my needs and budget.  We tend to buy cars thinking about the three standard deviation uses.  The sort of thing that makes people who rarely haul things buy a large pickup.  We only have one car, but a 200 mile range certainly covers 99% of our driving.  We could rent for the outliers.  But we'll see...  

If you really want to be green that is a different conversation...  Some of the most cost effective strategies aren't obvious.  

² There will be limited use on clear and low density freeways fairly soon which will probably be followed by restricted very low speed urban use - probably beginning in China in five to ten years. What most of us will see is an increasingly smart car that helps us with the task of driving.

³ Composite covers an enormous range.  As a teenager I made composite model airplane wings with styrofoam/balsa structures.  Carbon fiber usually refers to a carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Lots of flavors, but CFRP - carbon fiber reinforced plastic - is a common variation.

Bicycles point to some of the most interesting CF construction techniques and CF bikes are now the norm in the over $2k class of road bike.   I don't like the ride quality compared with some of the more exotic steel and titanium frames, but that's just personal taste.  There is no arguing with the fact that carbon frames are lighter weight.

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no recipe today, but a comment on energy

 

If you divide the energy used by the country by population you find that the average American uses about 14,000 watts of power around the clock.  An electric range element on high takes about 1,500 watts - so think about almost 10 of them running constantly - that's what the average American uses.   Multiply that by the hours in a day, week or year and you get the energy used for the period.  I've attempted the calculation from the bottom up.  It turns out to be impossible to do accurately - you have to account for the embedded energy in stuff you buy the food you eat and even that used by government - but  with a few assumptions you get in the ball park.  I can account for a rough average of 14 kilowatts and Sukie and I have reduced our individual consumption to about 6,500 watts each.  Europeans tend to be in the 5 to 7 kilowatt range, so our household is sort of European.  It hasn't been easy and it would be very difficult to go lower.

 

Going vegan saves about 500 watts.  Adding 10,000 air miles adds about 1,000 watts.  (think of 15,000 miles of flying as turning on an extra electric element on a range and leaving it on constantly). Using Uber adds as the average Uber car only has a passenger for a bit more than half of the miles driven, plus urban Uber users are statistically shifting from more efficient mass transit.   Upper middle class people tend to go well over 14kW each.  Note I've avoiding talking about how that energy is produced.

 

Now think about the 14 kilowatt level. The back of the envelope way of looking at it is ~ 125,000 kWh of energy a year (a year is a bit under 9,000 hours).  If your electricity is 10 cents a kWh that's $12,500 a year.  Of course electricity is more expensive at the residential level and a bit cheaper at the industrial level.  Plus much of the energy is in the form of hydrocarbons which are less expensive (coal is a couple of cents per kWh).  In any case energy costs are often hidden, but are non-trivial.

  

finding an intersection of clarity and accuracy

Canada is undergoing a fantastic profound change.  For more than a decade the government has chosen to underfund science, undermine Universities and science education and focus on a path of applied paths that are somehow guaranteed payoff.  This changed with the last election.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shows a genuine interest in science and technology and the support is beginning to be felt in the trenches.  This seems to have captured everyone's attention.

 

Reflecting on it left me a bit depressed.  A government official, asked about a major bit of spending, is expected to provide answers to a press that knows what questions to ask -- except, in the US at least, in science and math.  Somehow it is ok to be ignorant.  For people in power there is an army of people ready to provide a mini education on the main points. I doubt Trudeau knows anything about Shor's algorithm, but he probably has the time to learn about the science and technology, where things might go and where it makes sense to provide some help.  

 

In the US we have a press and political class that often focuses on pseudoscience as much as it does science.  Part of the blame is education.  There are a few champions who have been trying to change that.   Carl Sagan was undoubtedly one of the most important popularizers.  He wrote extensively on the value of science and the harm of pseudoscience - perhaps best in The Demon Haunted World.  A few bits (my copy is very dog-eared and marked up)

 

Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting [believers in pseudoscience], providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and writers messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, actually foretell the future. These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature-often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. 

....

Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality–where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison–are more readily avoided. The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed. In part for the same reasons, it is much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science.

At the heart of some pseudoscience is the idea that wishing makes it so. How satisfying it would be, as in folklore and children’s stories, to fulfill our hearts desire just by wishing. How seductive this notion is, especially when compared with the hard work and good luck usually required to achieve our hopes.

...

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting them away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise. Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced. 

....

It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course. Many, perhaps most, science textbooks for budding scientists tread lightly here. It is enormously easier to present in an appealing way the wisdom distilled from centuries of patient and collective interrogation of nature than to detail the messy distillation apparatus. The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. 

 

That leaves the task of communicating science.  Something I have struggled with for a long time.  Einstein often said that the mark of knowing your stuff is being able to communicate it to an interested person who doesn't have your background.¹ Defending my Ph.D. thesis was, as it is for most people, straightforward and without surprises.  The surprise was a requirement to communicate what I did to a high school physics class.  I still have nightmares.  What a disaster.  My advisor stepped in and saved the day getting to the core without jargon.  He took a few liberties with physics getting there, but the core idea came through and stood alone.  

 

I still try.  Sometimes with this blog and sometimes just walking with someone.  Walking is much easier (assuming someone can save you from the traffic - eh Juliette?) as it is a give an take.  Trying to communicate an idea with someone where you have feedback can be an exhilarating experience and often you learn something.  If you're really lucky you can learn from them about their area of expertise.  

 

Part of the trick is avoiding jargon and finding an accurate nugget.  Extra points if it is visual or poetic (Sagan was very poetic).  When I get in the muck trying to work out a path I remember a story by Richard Feynman:²

 

We used to go up to the Catskill Mountains for vacations. In New York, you go the Catskill Mountains for vacations. The poor husbands had to go to work during the week, but they would come rushing out for weekends and stay with their families. On the weekends, my father would take me for walks in the woods. He often took me for walks, and we learned all about nature, and so an, in the process. But the other children, friends of mine also wanted to go, and tried to get my father to take them. He didn't want to, because he said I was more advanced. I'm not trying to tell you how to teach, because what my father was doing was with a class of just one student; if he had a class of more than one, he was incapable of doing it.

So we went alone for our walk in the woods. But mothers were very powerful in those day's as they are now, and they convinced the other fathers that they had to take their own sons out for walks in the woods. So all fathers took all sons out for walks in the woods one Sunday afternoon. The next day, Monday, we were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."
He said, 'It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

The result of this is that I cannot remember anybody's name, and when people discuss physics with me they often are exasperated when they say "the Fitz-Cronin effect," and I ask "What is the effect?" and I can't remember the name.

I would like to say a word or two--may I interrupt my little tale--about words and definitions, because it is necessary to learn the words.

It is not science. That doesn't mean, just because it is not science, that we don't have to teach the words. We are not talking about what to teach; we are talking about what science is. It is not science to know how to change Centigrade to Fahrenheit. It's necessary, but it is not exactly science. In the same sense, if you were discussing what art is, you wouldn't say art is the knowledge of the fact that a 3-B pencil is softer than a 2-H pencil. It's a distinct difference. That doesn't mean an art teacher shouldn't teach that, or that an artist gets along very well if he doesn't know that. 

In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, and that's all right. It's a good idea to try to see the difference, and it's a good idea to know when we are teaching the tools of science, such as words, and when we are teaching science itself.

 

It takes me back to my high school biology class.Mostly rote memorization and very little science.  Looking back there were many fascinating concepts, but I had no clue they might be interesting as I slogged through mnemonic memory tricks the teacher provided so we could make it through the multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank tests.  Other than the thrill of some semi-dangerous experiments, chemistry class wasn't much better.  In the end you could sound like you knew something, but it was just a veneer.  It would be much better to teach real concepts and forget about the terminology. Fortunately some classes have moved in that direction. 

 

You also need to be able to build a pseudoscience detector.  Science is great at bull-sh*t detection, but it can take time and is often not presented well.  But here's a nice trick that trips up many of the pseudo-science crowd - the people who try to sound smart but don't really say anything (Deepak Chopra comes to mind).  Again from Feynman:

 

I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language. Without using the word 'energy', tell me what you know now about the dog's motion.' You cannot. So you learned nothing about science.

 

If a specialist can't express something in clear language to a non-specialist they have no business explaining it in the first place.  If you hear someone rambling on, stop them and ask them to express it non-technically without the jargon.  If you ask them about something they can't find language for, and there are some ideas that fit that category, they should tell you they can't explain it clearly.  Feynman was very frank upfront.

 

I struggle along and beg your patience.  Fortunately there are people who are very skilled at the sport often using visual tools and other approaches that are much more effective than my rambling.  But I'll try and sometimes I'm not bad in small groups or one on one.  It is a most worthy challenge.  After all, there are many intersections of clarity and accuracy.  Being clever enough to create and present the right one for an audience is the trick.

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¹ While he did write a clear book on relatively aimed at high school students, it is not terribly accessible unless you have a firm understanding of high school math .. If you are motivated to learn and remember high school trig by all means go for it, but thee are some excellent texts that have appeared over the years that do at better job at high school and college levels.  For brief overviews others have provided clearer explanations that aren't rigorous .. you won't understand special relativity reading or watching them, but you'll have a pretty good idea of what it is and why it was revolutionary.

² From the talk What is Science from the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association in 1966.  It was reprinted in  The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1968

 

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Recipe Corner..

Just a quick trick.  I have a good friend with West African heritage and tried to make a few dishes of the area.  Completely non-authentic, but many of the soups and stews have peanuts.  That turns out to be brilliant.  If you're making a vegetable soup with the standards - onions, carrots, celery and tomatoes - try throwing it a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter for each serving and a handful of chopped peanuts.  The resulting soup is very rich and has much more protein than the vegetable base.  

 

vr

We experience the world as a smooth and constant stream of perception.  At least that is how we interpret it.  Reality is wildly different.  We only are able to perceive heavily filtered bits of the world around us through, depending how you count, about a dozen senses.  The resulting signals travel to the brain where they are woven into a reality even though they don't arrive at the moment we perceive them and they don't arrive at once.  Our present is a window about a second and a half wide that scrolls along seeming like an instant with some older bits of sensory information as old as fifteen seconds thrown in for good measure.  Our now is a fairly long now.  Interacting in real time, say catching a falling object, is limited by the faster perception components and give us our reaction time.  At the moment our muscles are commanded to act we don't have a complete picture of the moment as it is still under construction, but we don't realize it until later.  This can be troubling to some as it has implications about free will, but how the brain paints our version of reality - our personal virtual reality - is beautiful.

 

This ability to weave a reality in our mind makes reading a great author a powerful experience.  The vision from the pages can be incredibly rich - sometimes richer than the immediate reality we experience.  The same is true for music, but the images are more abstract. It is the enabling foundation of our love of storytelling.

 

Several types of systems referred to as virtual reality that have been in the news these days.  Most display computer generated stereo images to give the illusion of three dimensions along with some form of  located sound.  The user can move around and interact in these environments, although that tends to be restricted.  They're a far cry from how we sense where we are in space and how we perceive and move around in a real 3d space.  Stereo vision is only a component and there can be disturbing cross-talk from your other senses (like your inner ear) that can make the experience confusing and even nauseating.  A good deal of clever hackery has been done to minimize the bad effects, but we're a long way off from simulating location and movement - let alone sound and interaction.  What exists now is may be very good for certain classes of games and perhaps some forms of mostly passive storytelling where you do little more than look around.  Understanding how we use a new media has historically required a generation or two of artists to get to the point where good storytelling happens.

 

There are many other types of systems that use the sometimes use the label - augmented reality (Google Glass) where information is overlaid on a sense (typically vision) , enhanced reality - where senses are extended beyond what we normally can sense (extend your vision into the infrared or ultraviolet .. or add a magnetic field sense), simple multi-camera recording systems that capture 360° video and allow you to choose your view naturally by simply looking around, and so on.  I would argue that books should be on the list as an example of old technology and along with lucid storytelling.

 

How this develops and how it is used is up in the air.  Augmented reality has been used for years in industry and computer generated virtual reality dates back to the late 1960s at Evans & Sutherland.¹  Simple 3d stitchings like QTVR have been called VR when viewed through stereo displays.  There are some really interesting social science questions that have been difficult to tease out that are now doable as it is possible to put someone in another person's shoes for things like height and physical challenges.   

Everyone jumps to the remote workplace and conferencing, but I suspect we'll see a succession of niches.  Right now remotely piloted drones are used halfway around the world, robots that give presence in failed Japanese reactor buildings and Mars rovers, so we have a few good use examples.  It isn't clear how important the technology will be for conferencing and calling as people are highly adaptable to limits.  I was startled to learn that although people can detect the difference between 20 kHz stereo audio and 7 kHz mono, they often prefer the later and low fidelity, but intelligible audio on mobile phones is preferred to high quality audio by people under 25.  People also seem to be happy with low quality web images with poor and uncalibrated color fidelity.  A huge learning to me over the years is for many applications quality measured by engineering metrics doesn't matter much in the real world.

 

Another set of questions is who makes and who finds the standard uses of the developing technologies (these are often different groups).  The people who create the foundational technologies have historically been fairly clueless about projecting final use cases.  A few years ago I was compelled to write a post as a reaction to a danah boyd piece on sexism and VR. (the second half of the piece - I start out with Cosmos 2.0 and wander into sexual dimorphism).

And which senses are important for which applications?  How will we communicate forces -- touch, g forces.  How good does sound have to be? We're often more sensitive to that than to images and general sound field reconstruction is a hard problem. What about the gyro and accelerometer of the inner ear?  The list goes on and on.  Since the late 80s (a 25 pound helmet display, pulleys and a counterweight tethered to a half million dollars of computer) I've tried a dozen or so approaches to 3d vision VR and am always left feeling disoriented and nauseous.  This is true even with the latest Oculus kit paired with a $6k fairly exotic PC (that kept crashing) and content authored for the device.  I'm fairly convinced the approach doesn't play well with the neural wiring of my synesthesia.

 

But with all of the challenges at this point it is easy to identify a few bits of low hanging fruit as well as major obstacles.  We'll probably see a continuation of the gradual rollout of the technology that has been taking place for nearly fifty years.  I'd give it some time before it becomes a general displacing technology.  An observation is we place great value in 'being there' - a business meeting, conference, sporting event or vacation location may cost thousands of dollars to attend in person plus a good deal of time and inconvenience when a video and audio link of the same event is free.  Of course we know why now .. but what does it take to close the gap?

 

In the meantime there are some simple steps you can take to make video conferencing much better as well as a few that, while more difficult, would vastly improve the experience and even remove some embedded sexism.  And be sure and enjoy your own personal virtual reality.  It is far better than anything you're likely to experience in your lifetime and comes as a free feature of being a human.

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¹ Evans & Sutherland was something of an offshoot of the University of Utah.  It is interesting to look at schools that were visionary in hindsight.  The U of U had an outsized importance.  Pixar and Adobe have their roots there, computer generated art became real at the place - some people jokingly call the Utah teapot the sixth Platonic solid - the Teapotahedron:-)  The U of U was also one of the four original ARPANET nodes at the birth of what later became known as the Internet. And of course there was the dynabook - which has now been realized with the iPad.

 

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I played with an oil based garlic bread. Use one of those long crunchy rustic loaves .. like what garlic bread is made with.  I used a garlic infused oil as it was sitting around.  You could smash a few cloves and let them soak in oil for a few hours and brush the oil and what is left of the cloves onto the bread directly.

 

'Healthy' Garlic Bread

 

Ingredients 

 

° about 3 tbl of a garlic infused olive oil

° 1 tbl honey

° the of a half lemon

° some sea salt (about a tsp)

° a loaf of your favorite rustic bread

 

Technique

 

° put the olive oil, honey, lemon juice and salt in a small bowl and wisk

° slice the bread into good sized (3/4" for me) slices

° brush the liquid onto the bread and let it sit for a few minutes

° broil the bread until it browns and the edges get crispy

° let it cool a bit before service. 

 

like buying a parachute from a bird

About twenty years ago Mattel rolled out Teen Talk Barbie - a talking Barbie that had 270 phrases.  One of them turned out to be controversial and the doll disappeared from the shelves to be replaced by one with 269:

The remake was warranted, but sadly many Americans agreed with what she was saying and helped instill the sentiment in their children.  Americans tend to believe math is hard and that you need special gifts to do it well.  They also see it as little more than a tool.  An exceedingly unfriendly tool.  

 

A few friends mentioned Andrew Hacker's book on math education was wrong to the point of being clueless.  I had come across a few of his newspaper op-eds that were enough to keep me away, but last week Evelyn Lamb, a math postdoc at the U of Utah, published a great commentary in Slate.  

 

I've only taught in universities and can't claim to be a professional teacher.  Some of you are and have a much better sense of challenges and direction, so consider what I say nothing more than opinion from someone who went deep on the science and math track years ago.  It may seen odd, but I worry that STEM education is gets too much attention and, in its current form, is poorly tuned to the needs of most students and society.  I've commented on my belief that those who will go on into technical areas are already well served.¹   Science  and math courses need to be taught so as to engage and even inspire more of the students.  We need to move from the pre-professional track that excludes most students to something that engages most students.  We can't have people nodding their heads thinking Barbie was onto something.

 

Math is in particular need of re-work.   There is too much repetition, memorization and mechanical effort.  Math has a beauty of its own - a beauty that can be taught at many levels.  Kids can worry about puzzles, knots, various types of infinity, probability, risk analysis, and dozens of other areas without touching on trains traveling from Cleveland at 47mph.  Interdisciplinary work is obvious - probability fits in with sports, biology, history, science and many other subjects.  Here's an example that might appeal to young bike riders - the math could easily be worked out by high school students.  The fact it took a real mathematician to work on it is commentary on how many interesting questions there are rather than the problem being difficult.

 

Beyond the useful there is the beauty of the subject.  It really needs to be considered on a level with art and music and not just a tool.  There are simple ways that can bring flashes of insight ..  You may have seen the construction attributed to Archimedes that seems to indicate the circumference of a circle is 4 rather than π.  Of course this is wrong, but understanding why and gets you into a class of beautiful objects.  I remember being enthralled with them when I discovered them in an article by Martin Gardner in Scientific American.  Here Vi Hart encourages students to dip their toes in the subject:

 

 

Unfortunately a good deal of the STEM curriculum was written by technical types who work towards the preprofessional pipelines.  One is reminded of buying parachutes designed by birds - maybe for those who will grind it through to become experts, but everyone else gets killed along the way.   We've seen this type of panic over job relevant skills before.²  The notion of relevant STEM is fine, but it needs to engage and inspire most students on one hand and isn't watered down like Hacker suggests on the other.   Students need to realize there are many dots to connect and having played with dot connection a bit first seems right and math is a big fundamental dot that has connections, both obvious and subtle, nearly everywhere.

 

Evelyn, the young mathematician who took on Andrew Hacker, came to her passion as an undergraduate and is fascinated by the mathematics of sewing (among other things).  It turns out to be deep .. she notes:

When you get down to it, sewing is applied geometry. You are using flat pieces of fabric to approximate the curvature of a complicated surface. Seamstresses and other sewists don’t get much credit for their research in applied geometry, perhaps because traditionally "feminine” activities are not assumed to be very mathematical. Of course, those of us who sew or make crocheted hyperbolic planes or Klein quartic curves know better!

Barbie indeed

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¹ There is a good deal of underemployment in many of the sciences - far too many Ph.D.s, often brilliant, for each position.  

² So many stories here.  One of the funniest was a group of universities trying to mandate computer literacy by mandating APL classes for the entire freshman class.  This was in the mid 70s and fortunately crashed and burned before the end of the first semester.  A friend who happens to be one of the great computer scientists of the world has taught introductory CS courses and notes kids who had a high school background often come with bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.  The kids who do best are those who had a bit of logic and probability in high school. Also music students did very well.

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Recipe corner

 

Spring has finally arrived!  Here's a quick linquine

 

Spring Asparagus Linguine

 

Ingredients

 

° 12 oz linguine 

° 1/3 c olive oil

° 1/4 cup of nuts - pine nuts are traditional, I used pecan bits

° 4 garlic cloves sliced

° 2 pounds of asparagus, trimmed and cut into inchish pieces

° salt and pepper

° 2-3 oz shaved parmesan (omit if vegan)

 

Technique

 

° cook the pasta according to directions on the box, drain and return to pot

° heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the nuts and garlic and cook for a minute or two - don't overcook.  Add the asparagus and cook 'til tender .. 2 or 3 minutes. 

° add the asparagus+nuts to the linguine with some salt and pepper and toss.  Sprinkle with the cheese if you like and serve

 

 

Technique