omenti

pretty swift

 

 I've never taken a programming class, but have done a fair amount over the years in a variety of languages.  I'm not fond of it myself - at least not something I'd like to do for a living.  You get spoiled being around the likes of Brian, Ken, Bjarne and Dennis -- particularly Dennis.¹  I don't code seriously for the same reason I don't do serious art -  I know what good is.   That said knowing how to code and, just as important, how computers work, has been incredibly valuable and necessary to me over the years.  Not only can I hack together what I need for physics and other purposes, but you get insight into how more complex systems behave -- sort of important these days.  My belief is coding is something that young people need to be exposed to - even if they never write anything for your job.  Because of this I've followed and even participated in a variety of teach-kids-to-code efforts over the years.  

 

Most of them were awful.  They tend to be implicitly and sometimes explicitly sexist.  They're usually boring.  Most of them don't teach you technique and many, combined with incompetent instruction, teach bad habits.   CS 101 classes often have to focus on unlearning bad habits.

 

So why am I writing this?  

 

Earlier today a good friend was looking for long-form reading suggestions for the weekend. Normally I have a dozen or so books that I try and push on others, but about a month ago I had a special experience. I watched a twelve year old code for the first time in her life.  We, I should say she, used Swift Playgrounds - Apple's new teaching environment based on the Swift programming language.   I won't get into language wars (heaven know I used to work out ideas in Common Lisp), but Swift is a very good modern programming language.  Learn one well and you should be able to pick up others.  What is special about Playgrounds is its playful nature.  Some really serious folks who think deeply about teaching coding skills including girl gamers were involved and it shows.  You start out solving a simple puzzle as it introduces concepts and you write real code.  It encourages experimenting and learning from failure.  It doesn't push cookie cutter solutions - you can solve an example in any number of ways, but it encourages efficient code.

 

She was thrilled and upset we ran out of time.  I was there to help and offer suggestions, but she was off on her own. I mostly watched her excitement and thought about the enormous effort getting this as good as it is.  

 

The full language is there and you can move your code over to Xcode and create iOS (or even OS X) apps.  Educators are being encouraged to create their own games and modules with tools Apple has provided and free teacher instruction manuals are online.

 

Highly recommended.  I can't think of a better introduction to coding.  So if you know of a kid with an iPad - or if you want to learn about programming on your own - this is the real deal.  All free except for the iPad ... if you don't have one, this may be is worth the price.

 

I'd love to try this with some senior citizens...

 

Here's Apple's glossy introduction with download links.

 

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¹ My word all of these are masters... The Picassos and Bachs of computing ...   the 1 in 10,000  or 100,000 who see things so much more deeply than others.  Dennis was a different sort all together - perhaps a one out of all of the programmers in the world...  unique..  computing's Shakespeare.

 

144.17

On September 17^th Canadian engineer Todd Reichert squeezed into the cockpit while his crew installed the aerodynamic shell around him.  A rather tight fit, it does allow for the centimeter or two height variation a human body can experience during the day.  He switched on the GPS, pedal ergs and other instrumentation,  twin video screens and the radio.  A crewman gave a push to get Eta rolling... 

 

Engineering - the best engineering - is an elegant set of compromises to accomplish some task as best you can manage.  There is a certain beauty when the task is aimed at a limit.   Human powered vehicles offer delicious challenges.  I was fortunate enough to have had a modest involvement in early human powered flight, but the land speed record is special as bicycles are the most efficient means to move a human on a hard, mostly smooth surface.  

 

An adult in good physical shape can easily ride a bike at twenty kilometers per hour at an equivalent fuel economy of about a thousand miles per gallon.¹ A Tour de France class bicycle can level speed of about 60 km/h with the strongest riders.  At such speeds an athlete, and an elite bicycle rider has the highest power to weight ratio of any athlete for periods over a few minutes, is delivering about six hundred watts to the pedals.  The problem is wind resistance - about ninety percent of his effort goes into moving and swirling air.  To go faster you need to attack air resistance.  The same for moving an average person on a bike faster for the same amount of power.  Aerodynamics dominate.

 

If you look at the kinetic energy involved in moving air a simple model  shows power required is linear with the frontal area of the vehicle and air density, but increases as the cube of velocity.   If you want use as little power as possible, speed is your enemy, but if you want to go fast or be efficient at speed, beating air resistance is where you focus.  Going a bit more deeply the area confronting the air flow is an effective area... namely the area you physically measure times the coefficient of drag or C_d for the vehicle.  You can think of the C_d as a number that describes the aerodynamic slipperiness of the vehicle.  A falling piano or brick has a large C_d while a car typically has one that is much lower.  A falling human before opening her parachute has a C_d of about 0.8 to 1.2 depending on how she holds her body.  A person sitting upright on a bike is about 1.0, a TdF racer in full crouch about 0.7.  A Ford Model T is about 0.95 while many of the best cars are about 0.24 to 0.26.²  The VW One Liter was about 0.18 .. probably close to the limit for a street legal multi-passenger four wheeled automobile.   

 

Todd's Eta has a C_d of about 0.03. 

 

Todd is an outstanding, but not,  elite athlete.  The Eta needs about 265 watts to go 100 km/h on level ground.  Your car's air conditioner needs about 2,000 to 4,000 watts on a warm humid day.  The numbers quoted for the Eta vary a bit depending on the development of the product, but figure over 9,000 mpg equivalent at a legal highway speed in the US.³

 

So a few weeks ago he opened it up and went an honest 144.17 km/h ... just under 90 mph.  Just his muscles using the just plain food for fuel.  

 

Take a look at their video from a year ago:

 

I suspect they can push further even without going to an elite athlete.  I wouldn't be surprised to see 100 mph some day - that would be like breaking the two hour marathon .. everything has to come together, but it is theoretically possible.

 

This has implications for velomobiles - the rare streamlined bikes you see mostly in Holland and Germany.  It would be easy to install a three hundred watt electric motor with a very small battery - one or two kilowatt-hours would give great range and cost almost nothing - and have a vehicle capable of highway speeds. Of course you'd need safer highways..  On the other hand thirty or forty km/h speed limits with streamlined human-electric hybrids may be practical in some areas.  

 

You probably don't want to get me started on the merits of active transportation though...  The transportation we have is based on legacy standards that go back over two hundred years.  We're left with cars of a certain width, footprint and now even speed.  There has been a large improvement in nearly everything about the car, but I wonder what it would be like if we had standardized on 500 or 1,000 kg vehicles and 50 km/h rather than 110 - 130?  On the other hand we could have standardized on 4,000 kg tanks - the shape of cites and suburbs would be a different animal indeed.

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¹ This is the food energy burned and makes the assumption that a gallon of gas has about 36.6 kWh of energy.  Since the human body is only 20 to 25 percent efficient riding a bike, the power delivered to the pedals is much less and replacing the person's legs with an electric motor would improve the equivalent fuel economy by a factor of three or four.

² The reason why oil changes aren't easy is cars now have aerodynamic pans and farings under their body to clean up the airflow.

³ This is power delivered to the crank.  Factoring in human efficiency reduces this to somewhat under 3,000 mpg - how sad.  Of course you get get exercise riding any bike, so it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

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Recipe Corner

Nothing for now..  I'm playing with my new immersion cooker (improperly called sous vide cooking).  I had a homemade unit a few years ago, but it was too frustrating to use.  It interests me as 99% of the cooking done in them centers around meat - cooking produce is a poorly explored area, so I'm playing and making mistakes.  

Something real next time

 

 

 

making sparks

 Tell me a bit about your favorite trips?

 

Forty minutes into the interview and Bill hadn't asked anything about my specific work.  We touched  tracker action pipe organs, color vision, and several topics I can't remember.  Here was a famous Bell Labs director asking about trips.  

 

Road trips..  I like road trips without a destination.  I like taking the backroads, learning from breakdowns and generally getting lost.  I love doing it slowly on a bike.  Arriving is usually less interesting.

 

I had no idea what he'd think, but it was honest.  He told me he only interviewed candidates who were considered capable of the work.  His task was more difficult - building and encouraging an origination that could function creatively in the research environment.  How do you find a group that sparks off each other and improve the chances of serendipity of the entire organization.

 

A madman can spew a random stream of novel words and phrases and most of the useful things and ideas in our lives are far from novel.  Creativity is the combination - something novel and useful.  It also has to be useful to society at the time - at least to be recognized as creative. 

 

It is often assumed that creativity is part of intelligence or that the two are somehow part of something larger, but that doesn't hold up.  Creative networks in the brain turn out to be different from those linked with intelligence.  With intelligence is is all about more neurons and connectivity between them.  Strong paths between regions of the brain.  It is as if there is a network of superhighways that allow you to get from one part of the brain to another.   

 

Creative networks are a different beast.  They're backroads that wander all over sometimes taking seemingly random paths, stopping and starting.  It is like going from the Autobahn to village pathways in pre-industrial times.  These are very high friction paths and rapid information processing just doesn't happen.  But something remarkable does.  Ideas are linked together.  It's as if less is better - in particular activity in the frontal lobes drops dramatically.   Very creative people regular enter a state where activity in the frontal lobes drops for awhile - a self-induced transient hypofrontality.

 

I'm struck by the importance of random influences ... that's probably why Bill was probing for interests outside of math and physics.  He had a reputation for putting together groups of people each with a diverse set of interests to increase the probability of chance interaction.  Architecture plays an important role - the rabbit warren layout of Bell Labs at Murray Hill came close to that of MIT's legendary Building 20.  Physicists would run into mechanical engineers, social scientists into mathematicians, computer scientists into artists and partnerships no one would have predicted emerged.  Occasionally people would have difficulty describing what they were doing as they were in the process of doing something outside the regular boundaries of existing fields. Figuring out the social chemistry to make this happen is - well - non-trivial.¹  Being part of a regulated monopoly is part of it success, but Bell Labs pulled off the creative part for about seven decades.

 

Some organizations, mine was one, wanted members to spend part of their time working in an entirely different discipline. Others were more focused.  This extended to the cafeteria..  tables were somewhat fixed, but some people would float around connecting ideas.  Of course much of it wasn't useful, but the practice and the careful bit of HR at hiring,  led to a creative organization with about seven decades of greatness.

 

 

I'm struck by how new ideas seem to occur during down time after a period of very hard work.  For me it can be during a walk, while sketching or in an exercise session - all times when my mind is completely unfocused.  They seem to appear out of nowhere and seem completely obvious and trivial at the time.  A fair number - certainly well over half - are complete garbage when you look deeper, but there have been a few real gems that I can't imagine where the link came from.  The transient hypofrontality hypothesis seems correct.²

 

Creativity takes many forms across many fields, but being able to find downtime and play with ideas appears to be common.   Boredom is emerging as  important - particularly as a training ground for kids who develop the capacity for creative thinking.  It's not that they're smart and things are easy, but rather that the conditions conditions creative processes to wander, link and leap through the brain.  There is evidence developing tricks to deal with the boredom leads to techniques to trigger transient hypofrontal periods.  Knowledge acquisition by itself by itself fails..  teaching kids to efficiently fill in the correct ovals with number two pencils may lead to great crank turning, but is counterproductive if creativity is a goal.

 

We're all getting older and around the age of forty demyelination takes place - the wiring in our brain slowly gets a bit frayed and leaky.  The smooth superhighway structures no longer support fast and efficient movement.  We still think, but calling up information or normal fast judgements require more time.  But there may be a positive side if we take advantage of it.  It appears our capacity for creating rich transient hypofrontality events increases.  Combine this with the increasing evidence for neuroplasticity and perhaps we can make our older brains more powerful, more creative, with age.

 

I'm just skimming but again this is an area that one can talk about for days.  I've spent more than a little time learning from neurologists and have been thinking more and more about the stability of creative organizations.  But there appear to be some rules that are well grounded in science as well as some widely practiced folklore that is counterproductive (brainstorms sessions for example).  Here are some well-known approaches (you need all of them)

 

° Work intensely and practice, practice, practice in the  field(s) you're interested in.  You're building neural connections that make thinking easier courtesy of neural plasticity.  You're also given your mind difficult problems that it can't solve using the superhighway approach.

° playfulness with downtime to provide opportunities for hypofrontal events.  Learn what works for you.  Yoga, long showers, long walks looking at nature (a favorite of Beethoven), playing a musical instrument (Einstein's path), whatever works..  The point is your mind can't be occupied with what you've been working on.

° have lots of random interactions with people and ideas...  

° keep at it.  creative people put out a huge number of ideas.  many are stinkers, but that doesn't matter.  

 

Again this is just a very high level introduction - I know some of you have been doing this for decades.  I've seen it in so many areas  - recently I had a great discussion with some athletic coaches about it in sport. It can and does appear in the most unexpected places.   It certainly isn't necessary for a good and happy life, but it can be learned and encouraged.  

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¹ I strongly recommend Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace describing the process of building and encouraging a creative organization at Pixar.  It's style isn't standard, but I don't know of a better description of the process.

² It is still a research hypothesis, but it is holding up well so far as the science progresses and some of the competing explanations have fallen to the wayside.

 

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Recipe corner

I'm a huge fan of okra ..  roasted or fried mostly..

 

Okra Stir Fry

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 tbl vegetable oil

° 2 cups chopped okra

° 1 medium onion finely sliced

° 1/2 tsp turmeric

° 1 green chili finely chopped

°  sea salt  to taste

° red chili powder (if you like)

 

Technique

 

° take the oil to medium heat in a pan

° cook the green chili for a couple of minutes

° add the onion, cut the heat a bit and cook until transparent 

° add the okra and turmeric - cook over medium low uncovered for about a half hour stirring a couple of times

° salt to taste and pull from the heat

° add chili powder if you like (I do) .. I also added a bit of garam masala last time which was great

 

getting over wack-a-mole

This past Monday Randall Munroe posted a beautifully done timeline of the Earth's average temperature since the last glaciation on xkcd.   It's beautifully crafted, but...  

scroll down and enjoy and I'll pick up on the other side..

 

 

I first became aware of global warming in the mid 80s.  Back then I was interested in the climatic impact of limited to mid-sized nuclear exchanges.  Many physicists were pushing for large stockpile reductions when Star Wars was taken up by Ronald Reagan.  Computation had advanced to the point where non-trivial climate models were possible.  Some folks at NASA and elsewhere started using them to study human caused - anthropomorphic - global warming with James Hansen testifying before Congress in 1987.  I started following it, but the science wasn't well settled in my mind for another decade.  By 2000 it was becoming very clear the effect was real and more alarming than Hansen had predicted.   For me it had become one of two preventable existential level threats.  I had to do something.  

 

Talking to people and looking at television, newspapers and magazines I saw the subject was very muddled with some organizations pumping out misinformation.  Most of the energy we command comes from fossil fuels and their combustion was the major source of the greenhouse gases that were tipping the scale.  Physicists are heavily focused on energy so I thought a clear soup to nuts discussion of energy on a non-technical level would be valuable.  I had a chance to give a serious of talks to some non-technical audiences and found a good deal of interest...  the talks would run an hour, but the Q&A sessions were longer.  I looked around for good books and found anything useful to be too technical for most readers.  That started me on a book project in my spare time.

 

There were problems I didn't recognize at the time.  I like to think that I can drill deeply into a problem and understand it deeply enough to gain a bit of insight.  Of course that isn't always true.  I had assumed that education was a useful path and that the focus should be on energy.  Both were mistakes caused by a poor understanding of the problem.  And so my education began...

 

I wasted a lot of time and that of a friend who was helping as the concerned non-technical person.  Writing to the right level and covering the right ground wasn't working with painful rewrites combined a sense of failure  At the same time the talks were well received and the Q&As were becoming learning experiences for me.  I was building toward an epiphany.  

 

During the session following a talk before a few hundred animators in Burbank someone identified himself as Blackfoot .. a fellow Montanan.  I had been talking about climate cycles with very long periods ..  explanations for ice ages and the like.  a medicine wheel ...  he went on to explain that the tradition he was from believed in cycles of many things dictated by the turning of medicine wheels and how he was struck by the similarity of what I was saying.  We had very different explanations for something in Nature.  Mine was empirical - his not, but the impact through our eyes was similar.  We were talking about something that might be a source of friction if approached as I would be tempted... but this was a breakthrough for me - a reason for conversation.

 

I watched as he talked...  several hundred people - people who tell stories - giving him full attention for ten minutes.  We are indeed narravores.  He finished and I decided to kill the rest of my talk...  They were the story tellers and should have been teaching me.  I told them I probably couldn't make a difference, but maybe they could.  They were the reason why I was a vegetarian.. not a bad trick considering where I was from.   They made Bambi and that raised some questions that changed my worldview.  

 

What followed was a real education into the social problem of global warming.   I still have a deep interest in the science and technology component but I'm not a technosolutionist.  I could talk for days on the subject now, but just a few points.  

 

Shortly after this I came across an interesting piece of work out of Yale - the Six Americas Project.¹ The population is segmented into six groups based on their level of global warming concern:  the alarmed, the concerned, the cautious, the unconcerned, the doubtful and the dismissive.  The alarmed believe this is of fundamental importance, but none of the other groups would raise it to a level demanding immediate attention.  Furthermore the doubtful and dismissive are so fixated in disbelief that the presentation of fact only hardens their view.  The hardening is largely independent of their education level.  Similar work has been done for many other areas.  It is not a liberal vs conservative thing, although conservatives tend to be doubters and dismissive as their party has hitched its fortune to burning fossil fuels.  Some liberals  take evidence conflicting positions in areas like vaccinations and GMO safety..  Of course these unscientific positions are distributions.

 

I'm naturally disturbed by the amount of global warming disinformation and it is in my nature to debunk it.  Unfortunately this turns into a game of whack-a-mole.  You can spend a lot of time debunking, but the doubtfuls and dismissives don't buy what you've said and through up several new bits of pseudo-science.  It is a losing game I've wasted too much time on.  It turns out the concerned group is the largest single segment of the population.  Combined with the alarmed it is now a slight majority.  A better use of time is to ignore the doubters and focus on the concerned.  

 

Another epiphany came from a conversation with a businessman from Texas.  Early on I could tell I had to hold my cards closely - he was ranting on the nanny state and know-nothing scientists and their atheist ways continuing on to racist comments about our President.  But he was focused on wind energy and power transmission.  He had been in the business of connecting bits of the electric grid to bring the economy of scale to parts of Texas and Oklahoma .. at first with coal fired plants.  Now he was into wind turbines and was ecstatic about the potential money to be had in transmission and interconnection.  He told me he was doing eight figure a year business with a staff of ten.  Both of us want to see more efficient power transmission and the connection of alternate energy sources like wind and solar.  Our positions on global warming are diametrically opposed, but both approaches lower carbon emissions.  I could only wish him great success.

 

Finally one needs hope.  A good deal of warming is baked into the next several decades and that is and will be a disaster. It would have been nice if we had taken serious steps twenty years ago.  Mitigation is much less expensive than adaptation.  While it is still important to  make dramatic carbon emission cuts rather than just throwing in the towel, some brilliant approaches to adaptation are emerging.  I'm running out of time, but carefully controlled underbrush and new growth burns can lead to greater carbon sequestration and much better water control.  This is beginning to work in parts of the West.

 

So much more around storytelling and empathy ..  Alan Alda's empathy approach using tools of story telling and the theater vs the NSF's sound-biteable news releases ...  guess which one I like?

 

I'm beginning so see more of the problem now. Several new questions have emerged and dealing with them brings great intellectual satisfaction.  Hopefully there will be a modest contribution to a solution, but the experience reminds me of the importance of deeply understanding a problem.  Sometimes the only way to see a larger picture is to make a serious of mistakes as you forge ahead with your early ideas even though they're wrong.

 

And Randall's beautiful graphic?  It is just a sermon, a rather lovely sermon, to the converted...  And for those who can trust the nearly universal consensus result of researchers this graphic put together by NASA is good.

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¹ A good deal of research has been published by the Yale group as well as a few other organizations.  A nice high level overview is Global Warmings 'Six Americas' (pdf)