omenti

the development of the concept of privacy

My sister uses old photographs as an ingredient in her art.  One archive is a collection of glass plate negatives, mostly posed studio portraits of Danes.  Danes in suits, Danes in dresses, Danish children in little Danish suits and dresses.  All of them with the same fixed dour countenance.

 

Their letters suggest a more positive outlook on life.  The problem, it seems, was a photograph required an exposure of about ten seconds. It was an expensive process that you only splurged for on big days - Easter, birthdays and weddings.  You have to get it right the first time. Few can maintain a smile that long, but dour is easy.   Try it.  

 

It was a huge improvement from the earlier daguerreotype.  There's a story that Samuel Morse of telegraph fame visited Louis Daguerre's studio in Paris.  Looking at examples of this wonderful new photography, Morse was struck that even the busiest sections of Paris showed no human activity.  Daguerre patiently explained twenty minute exposures were at fault.  The streaks of moving people, carriages and horses only offered a slight blur on the streets.

 

While the Danes were exposing plates my sister would ultimately use, George Eastman had been working on making photography practical.  Around 1885 he had a film fast enough that an average exposure outdoors took just a fraction of a second - a short enough time that a smile didn't change.  He kept working and developed a series of smaller and smaller cameras that were increasingly easy to use. In a few years he had a small camera that was so small and so fast that a subject might not realize their photograph was being taken.  And then came the Kodak Brownie..  a small, fast, very easy to use camera that anyone could use.  It cost one dollar - about $30 in today's money - and came with a roll of film. The camera shown is the Model 2 - an improved camera that was introduced in 1900 at a much higher price point - two dollars.   Snapshots became a national craze.   People were taking photos of others without permission.  One woman even found a sack of grain at a store bore her unauthorized image.  Kodak fiend and Kodaker became insults.  Tabloid newspapers made a good businesses publishing unauthorized society pictures along with those of women in compromising dress - bathing suits and worse. People were fascinated by widely available photography and were doing it on their own, but a boundary was emerging without a much guidance. 

 

The 1870s also saw the wide scale use of telegraphy.  Moving a message from point A to point B usually wasn't direct.  Instead a message from Boston to Minneapolis might first go to New York City where a telegrapher copied it by hand and gave a piece of paper to another telegrapher with a wire to Chicago.  A similar exchange would take place before a connection was made to Minneapolis.  Some of these messages had important business information and there was a good deal of leakage.  Some companies began to use ciphers as a result.  

 

The telephone began to spread beyond the boundaries of business after WWI.  Operators could and did listen.  Many local exchanges were party lines where anyone could listen to anything up to a dozen people might be saying.  The telephone also revolutionized dating.  Scheduled meetings in the parlor of the girl's family could now be arranged to be somewhere else.   The concept of the date as a destination came about in the twenties and the automobile only made it easier. 

 

Society was going through huge changes.  Much more information was available in a variety of forms. Sometimes we wanted it to be made available and sometimes we wanted to protect it.  In 1890 two Harvard Law student, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review.  It's an astonishing piece.  Clearly written and still regularly cited.   The concept of a right to privacy was beginning to emerge in America.

 

It's a delicate balance that is in many ways a way of looking at how society comes to grips with changing technologies.  The historians I've talked to suggest no one talked about a right to privacy before the Civil War. Rather there was a concept of the home being a castle that an owner had a right to protect.  Information and who has access changed that. 

 

It's a double edged sword.  We want .. we need .. some of our information to be known in order to function in society.  When Social Security numbers were first issued, marginalized segments of society - African Americans for example - proudly displayed their number for all to see as proof of their being part of American society.  On the other hand moral crusaders were invading (legally) US Mail and in the 1950s what happened in the bedroom became an issue for the Supreme Court in Griswold v Connecticut.   Some historians refer to that event as accidentally confirming the right to privacy in America. 

 

And now we have the Internet and an exchange of a number of services in return for information about us .. information that we often know little about.  The information may rightly or wrongly describe us and it is often used without the correct context.  It might have implicit or explicit bias.  It is then used with a sea of other information about us and others to create a set of digital judgements which can be used for targeted ads or for darker purposes.  This gets fascinating and deserves another post or three.  

 

Technology usually outstrips the development of a social norm which usually precedes law.   It's messy and companies are now betting their futures on it.  It's interesting that one of the largest companies in the world has decided a right to privacy by  the end user of their products is a core value.  Of course it isn't completely bulletproof, but it is diametrically opposed to many of the other players.  All of this while people generally unaware of the issues.   

hunting serendipity through waylosing

I've been lucky at the art of getting lost just enough.  If you've walked with me while I'm thinking you've probably noticed my sense of direction and local awareness can be low.  If I'm by myself awareness comes into focus, but getting lost - just enough - is something I enjoy and can be a source of serendipity.   I should probably explain.

 

Alarm was the order of the day when Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957.  A big military threat from the USSR , satellites needed to be tracked. Some folks at MIT put together do-it yourself plans to enlist amateur satellite trackers across America.   All you needed was a knowledge of your latitude, a simple sighting device, a pivot and a clock.  Thousands of homemade sighting scopes were made overnight in home shops and within a month a factory was mass producing a kit that was set out to high school science classes around the county.  

 

It turned out a good clock was centrally important.  Knowing the time of a position reading to a second or two was necessary.  Shortwave radios were common in the 50s and satellite trackers were asked to tune to WWV in Fort Collins, Colorado to listen to the reference time signal.

 

A couple of physicists considered about the inverse problem.  What if you had a lot of good clocks in well defined orbits and could read their times?  That's enough (well, sort of) to figure out your position on the globe.  You'd have a global positioning system.  

 

It seemed like an extremely hard problem at the time.  You'd need to orbit atomic clocks and there were any number of issues.  But navigation was a hard problem - a really hard problem.  DARPA eventually went to work on it and, armed with boatloads of money,  made it happen.   Mix in the revolution from Moore's Law, add a few dozen years and navigation had been democratized.

 

Many of us get around following instructions from our GPS systems not paying great attention to what's around us.   Kids in the backseat watch videos or play games.  While this may be ok for some types of travel I think a lot has been lost.

 

I like to pay attention to areas I visit regularly to see change that is otherwise invisible.  There's an undeveloped and heavily wooded swamp next to where I live and, assuming I'm home, I take spend an hour or so every day around noon.  Over the sixteen year I've been doing this a richness of change from year to year rather than season to season emerges.  You get to know about certain animals and plants.  Stop and listen. Let your mind take flight. Try it at night with the fireflies and crickets knowing a coywolf or two is watching.  It's here that a lot of ideas seem to present themselves.  

 

Cities are great too.  I live reasonably close to New York City. If I have the time I'll go somewhere very unfamiliar and learn something..  I'm not a terribly outgoing type unless I know someone, but curiosity can take the lead.  It's not so much being a flâneur as it is looking, listening and asking questions.  

 

The same for universities.  Some of the places I've gone to school and worked encouraged cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Sit in on a departmental lecture outside of your field, ask questions afterwards, walk into people's labs, ask them what excites them now.  And for sports - you can learn a lot about a sport if you spend a bit of time with a competitor.  

 

Waylosing (a wonderful term I heard a few year ago) is very efficient in its inefficiency if you're after more than getting from point A to B.  And normal travel is getting more and inefficiently efficient.    

 

As you get good at it you find yourself asking questions .. why are things the way they are.  Start out with simple things for practice. Why are stores arranged the way they are?   What about the open lots or failed businesses along a route you take?  How many types of ants can your find in Central Park?     How does someone react when you give them a harmonica or a balloon:-)  A lot of this is mental exercise that just comes in handy.  There's a certain pleasure to working out something yourself.  Of course you don't need to - and can't - do it all the time, but it's fun when you do.

 

I worry that the technologies that isolate us from our environment lead us to making poor use of our  travel time (and time in general).  They can be very useful, but use them appropriately.  Other technologies  like cameras, binoculars and microscopes can extend your question asking capabilities.  Choose appropriately.

 

The weather is good this time of year for most of the readers. If you're planning a trip try the classic road trip stopping randomly along the way - get lost, ask questions and look.  The journey can be where serendipity lurks.  

 

Many of you have developed deep waylosing skills.  I'm up for walks...

 

Finally it has been observed that very efficient operations tend to stifle creativity.  That doesn't mean that inefficiency guarantees creativity.. There are a lot of issues . clearly a lengthy subject for another time.

 

 

 

(almost) in the beginning

I love it when a scientist or science writer gives  jargon-free explanations.  Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall  and Neil deGrasse Tyson come over as superstars and  a handful of new stars have emerged on YouTube.  The work of these explainers is important to society going well beyond science education.  

 

 

A few days back I was given a new cosmology book aimed at a general audience.  The writing was almost jargon-free and respected the audience.  The artwork was outstanding as was the layout of the book.  But I had to give it up.   There were a couple of glaring errors so large to be a post-worthy.  I'll write about the one that bothers me most.

 

You probably learned the Universe began with an event called the Big Bang.  The evidence goes back a long way.   About 90 years ago it was discovered that most of the Universe was moving away from us and that the further away something was, the faster it was moving.  The idea of a static steady-state Universe was in serious trouble.   If everything was expanding it implied they were closer in the past..  much much closer in the very distant past.  It implied a beginning .. perhaps a beginning time.

 

As the Universe expands it stretches the wavelength of existing light.  Blue light becomes redder.  The energy of a photon - the particle of light - depends on it's wavelength.  The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy.  Going backwards in time photons of existing light were more energetic.  The Universe was hotter.  As you go back in time it gets so hot atoms can't form.  Keep going and you get to a singularity - a super dense and hot region at the beginning of time.   The Big Bang happens and a Universe is set in motion.  You should be able to look in the sky and see the remnants of this event.  By now the expansion had been so great all that was left over was a cool glow of microwave radiation a few degrees warmer than absolute zero^.1  Two Bell Labs astronomers detected it in 1964 and the Big Bang was accepted.  The steady state Universe was dead.

 

There were some curious technical problems left to describe.  In the late 70s the notion of inflation came about to explain them.  Explaining cosmic inflation is a big too much for now, but think of it was the Universe expanding from an tiny size at an unbelievably fast rate for a short amount of time. Much faster than the speed of light (which turns out not to be a problem as information isn't exchanged between parts of the inflating Universe).  

 

The explanation was satisfying and compelling.  Now the Big Bang was seen as a singularity.. essentially a mathematical point of infinite density.  It happened and then the Universe inflated followed by the comparatively gentle expansion we see today.  Nobel prize worthy observations shortly afterwards dispelled that notion.  Inflation had to come first.  The Universe didn't begin as a superhot, superdense point, but more likely began without matter or radiation.  All of the energy was in the fabric of space-time itself - what physicists call a vacuum energy.  After about about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second,  inflation came to an end with the energy converted to matter and radiation somewhere between the size of a grape and a volleyball.  That glob and the expansion that immediately followed was the Big Bang.    

 

You might ask what set off inflation at the beginning of time?  Or was there a beginning of time? Or is was there time?   There are conjectures, but they're just that - conjectures.  There's nothing that can be addressed by physics (yet).   More to learn.

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¹ This background radiation fills the Universe.  If you have an old non-digital TV and tune it to an unused UHF channel, about one percent of the snow on the screen is that leftover from the Big Bang.  It's not from the Big Bang directly, but rather from the time when the Universe cooled to a point where it first became transparent..  about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. 

 

 

machine learning without a net .. from sports to smart toasters

And I don't mean Cylons.

 

Every now and again you notice a few trends coming together even though they hardly seem related at first glance.  Someone asked a question today that turned out to be something I've thought a lot about over the years - a collision between tiny machine learning, privacy and an ocean of tappable ambient information.

 

Twenty years ago some of us were playing with sound. After spending a lot of time analyzing it we wondered what areas existed beyond voice recognition and music. There was a small "name that tune" excursion where we tried to match sung, hummed or whistled bars of music to - well - name the tune.  We were trying to turn the sound into note patterns.  It sort of worked, but the the problem of building a notation library was too difficult at the time.  The easy way out would be a hammer and tongs approach - namely matching played music with a library of played music.  We filed a patent on it, but never pushed hard as we didn't see the use case. Oh well...

 

Next I tried to recognize misbehaving car sounds..  Auto mechanics have great stories of people trying to make broken car sounds.  Unfortunately the problem was not small enough and I shifted gears when a ventilation fan in my office started squealing.  

 

Big heating, ventilation, and air conditions systems mostly run with boring industrial sounds, but a good HVAC mechanic can recognize when something's about to fail.   They also tune these systems for efficiency by ear - for some systems the sweet spot isn't far from the point where problems happen and every installation behaves differently.   With my trust Sony DAT recorder I made recordings of these systems in various stages of failure.  Then some fancy pants signal processing and, lo and beware, you can detect and analyze failure modes.   There was probably a lot of interesting work that could be done, but my organization evaporated around that time. 

 

I was fascinated with low power computing a bit earlier than the sound work.  How little energy does it take to do a computation?  (you can make some interesting entropy arguments and get down to basic physics.)  More practically what could be done with very low powered sensors that didn't need batteries or wires?   The interest took several directions - all good as you slowly begin to learn.

 

Then about five years ago it struck me that the HVAC problem could be done more easily with machine learning.  I've expressed reservations about the misuse of machine learning and regard some of it to be not very different from phrenology, but potentially very useful where you can understand it and its use.¹  I supervised a senior thesis project that attacked the HVAC project using machine learning and a microphone.  It showed some potential, but for me the learning was finally realizing how computationally cheap machine learning can be at the low end.  I also ended up learning a fair amount about machine learning as the best way to learn is to do it yourself and then teach.

 

Given Bitcoin mining efficiency and the massive machine requirements at FaceBook and Google it isn't all together clear, but think about unconnected machine learning on your iPhone and perhaps your Apple Watch.  In conventional computing the CPU deals with a large number of instructions compared to the type of processor used in machine learning.  ML processing chips have a large number of tiny processors that work in parallel. Most ML is just matrix multiplication.  While there can be a lot of steps, each is really simple .. generally just addition and multiplication.  A properly designed ML element holds the numbers in the matrices its working memory cache.  It's much more efficient in time and energy use to keep what you're computing nearby rather than having to constantly read and write it to memory.  You should be able to do a specialized bit of silicon with enough ML horsepower to do some rather surprising tasks while using very little power.  And you can do a lot on a smartphone if some of it's silicon was designed to support ML.

 

I think Apple understands this at a rather deep level.  They're very careful about how to efficiently deal with graphics processors which is shorthand for saying they have optimized how to do huge volumes of very very simple computations.  The chips in the current iPhones are optimized for the task.  They've build machine learning machines you can hold in your hand and, in theory, run ML applications that don't connect to the net and divulge information.  The new measuring app on iOS 12 is an excellent example of a local machine learning deployment. I don't know if it is being done on the watch, but there's no reason why they couldn't. Perhaps the biggest design advantage Apple has these days is silicon. 

 

machine learning in your hand rather than the cloud.

 

I can think of a number of applications that use the sensors on the phone or watch -- from health, to motion analysis (think sports).. why you could imagine wearing a watch and using a couple of iPhones on tripods or held by friends to analyze your volleyball, gymnastic, or whatever moves.  A personal coach or a serious tool is you already have a coach.

 

Exciting stuff, but I suspect it goes much deeper.

 

A back of the envelope calculation suggests you can do useful ML with micropower.  I'm sometimes asked to come up with senior projects in engineering classes (dangerous as I'm not an engineer).  I think you could do the HVAC work with an accelerometer or microphone and simulate the type of compute power that, if done in silicon, could run for months on a watch battery.  Maybe some very simple chemical analysis.   Or recognize a very small vocabulary -- perhaps five words - to control your toaster,  thermostat or anything else.  You could use a key word to make it listen or shine a laser pointer on it.  You could also build a very simple image recognizer that would detect someone's gaze.  Look at your toaster and say medium please.  

 

Way safer than saying medium please to a Cylon.

 

A need for privacy may drive this even deeper and away from the Net.  You can sit down and go through a few dozen applications in an afternoon.  It seems very rich and very latent.    Apple knows how to do silicon and low power.

 

So many possibilities.. perhaps even my dream "big data" project of listening to the woods. 

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¹ I've written and talked a fair amount on problems.  It can get technical and I won't spend more time on them here, but it's a serious problem as surveillance systems transition to judgement systems.

 

chopsticks, silver spoons and beyond.

Flavor is an extremely complex fusion of senses - taste, smell, touch (pressure and temperature), electrochemistry .. even sight and sound have been shown to be involved. A bit of academic and much more commercial work has been done indicating:

 

° heavier bowls and spoon make yogurt taste better

° rounded plates make rice pudding taste sweeter

° angular plates bring out bitterness and work well for chocolate and deserts with a lot of coffee

° cheeses are rated saltier when eaten from a knife rather than a fork or toothpick

° music and lighting can make a big difference in taste.  

° higher altitude reduces salty tastes (airline meals.. when you can get good ones these days, are exceptionally salty to balance)

° the type of music has a big impact on the taste of wine.

° and so on.. (and on and on)

 

It's really complicated.  

 

Some years ago I became fascinated by something I had thought mundane. A seriously good chef had prepared a feast.  Little had been spared by the hosts and all of us polished the silverware before we were served.  At desert what should have been an excellent Tahitian vanilla ice cream had a distinctively metallic taste.   Could it be the silver?  The lighting was low, so I did what I tend to do.  I took a drink of water, pulled out my pocket knife and had some of the ice cream from its stainless steel blade.  Excellent!  A bit more water and back to the spoon -- ugh, metallic!

 

Stainless steel makes a lot of sense.  Working on high strength steel alloys for guns just before WWI a Sheffield metallurgist noticed a shining sample in an otherwise rusting pile of older rejected experiments.  They kept careful notes and this one had some chromium.  Its hardness was nothing to write home about, but the chromium formed a chromium oxide layer a few atoms thick at the surface of the steel which prevented rusting.   Cut the steel and a new layer formed almost instantly.  He had discovered stainless steel.  The metallurgist, Harry Brearley, wondered how food would taste.  He tried it and pronounced the material unreactive with food.  Something better and less expensive than silver had been found.

 

I learned about some experiments at a materials lab in University College London and decided to experiment on my own.  Early on people probably had copper and then brass cutlery .. at least in the West.  Those materials, by their electrochemical potentials, react strongly with a lot of substances and would probably impart a horrible taste.  The Chinese figured out the right path with chopsticks,.  Single use/minimum contact or highly inert ceramics.  They were millennia ahead of the rest of the world.  

 

Iron struck me was a bad choice (oxidation) and I had read zinc, tin (certainly plated cans), chrome and - of course - gold had been used in cutlery.  I plated a set of identical small spoons with various materials.    Zinc was universally awful (note.. I'm a vegetarian so I didn't test with meat).  Copper reacted strongly with anything acidic.. grapefruit and oranges are spectacularly bad.  The silver spoon left a metallic taste with dairy and something I couldn't really identify compared to stainless.  Gold was about the same as stainless for anything other than dairy or sweet.  Sweet things tasted creamy and dairy tasted even creamier and richer.

 

Next I made a set of spoons forks and took them to a dinner with several people and a variety of foods.  In general stainless came in second to gold - everyone liked sweet and dairy with gold even though they work blindfolds. There was fish and some people preferred zinc.  They could certainly taste the zinc, but liked the combination.  Zinc, copper and tin were universally bad with the vegetables and legumes served,.

 

The folks in England found the same and more.  A few dinners were prepared to pair certain utensils with foods.  That's way above my range, but I understand the results were so-so other than gold rules and stainless is way better than silver.

 

While they aren't scientific, trials like these are easy to do and you may want to try some on your own.  The work out of London were a bit noisy other than the stainless and gold results.   My take is you should use the least reactive utensils that are practical and if some interesting combination (zine and fish) is desired, perhaps it is better approached by seasoning and cooking technique.   This does beg the larger question individual reactions and machine learning based flavors.  I have an opinion, but it is time to stop.

 

These days I eat ice cream and sweet deserts with gold plated utensils - everything else is standard stainless or chopsticks.

 

 

 

the best summer intern ever

Recently I was chatting with some people about energy options and brought up the nuclear waste storage problem.  Someone suggested sending it to the Sun .. "after all" he reasoned "the Sun's gravity will just pull it in.."  That's a bad idea for a couple of reasons.  First there's a lot of waste and rockets have an unfortunate failure rate that is high enough to guarantee disasters - think massive dirty bombs.  But even if you had reliable launch vehicles there's this other problem --  it's very difficult to get something to the Sun.

 

While it's true that gravity is pulling us towards the Sun (and the Sun towards us), we're also traveling fast enough horizontally in an orbital path to constantly be falling around it.  Looking down from above the North Pole, the Earth is moving counter-clockwise around the Sun at about 30 kilometers per second - about 67,000 mph or 108,000 km/h.¹  To fall into the Sun you need to slow your horizontal orbital speed to zero...  your rocket has to be launched in a clockwise path at 30 kilometers per second.  That's fast.

 

 Really fast.

 

To go into Earth orbit you need about 7.8 kilometers per second.  Escaping Earth's gravity entirely requires about 11.2 kilometers per second.    Even making escape velocity is a tall order.  

 

Curiously it takes much less energy to escape the Earth's gravity and head out to the stars than it is to travel to the Sun (although making it to the stars takes longer).  Just as strange is what happens closer to the Sun.  The closer you are to the Sun, the faster you move.  Mercury orbits at about 48 kilometers per second.  So to reach the Sun from Mercury you need to burn off 48 kilometers per second.

 

This was recognized in the 50s when people started thinking about missions inside of Earth's orbit.  Initially it was thought that going outwards .. say to around Jupiter's orbit and then slowing to fall would be much easier than slowing from Earth's orbit.  But in the early 60s a Summer intern changed everything.

 

Michale Minovitch, UCLA grad student, had a Summer job at JPL.  He was working on orbital trajectories when it struck him that a spacecraft could steal the momentum from a planet and dramatically change its speed. Up until then people had been thinking of the motion of a spacecraft relative to the planet.  He did what physicists do to make problems easier... he chose a different reference frame looking at the motion with respect to the Sun.. effectively the rest of the solar system.

 

It's a bit difficult to explain without a bit of physics, but consider this analogy.  You're standing on a train platform and the express is about to shoot by at 100 kilometers per hour.  You're somewhat of a prankster and are holding a special bouncy ball that bounces off solid surfaces (almost) as fast as it strikes it.  The train is closing in.  The urge strikes.  You throw it at about 50 km/h directly at the front of the train and score a perfect hit. 

 

The train's engineer watches as you throw the ball.  From the cab she sees it coming at the train at 150 km/h.  It's a wonderful bouncy ball and bounces nearly elastically from the train.  Let's say it's a perfect elastic collision.  She watches it move away at 150 km/h.

 

You're watching the same collision.  From your point of view the ball is moving at the speed it leaves the train plus the speed of the train ... 250km/h. A bit of the train's momentum has been transferred to the ball.  The train slows down a tiny amount, the ball speeds up a lot.  

 

It's a bit more complex doing the orbital dynamics., but basically you approach a planet from behind going in the same direction and use gravity to transfer some of it's momentum to your spacecraft.   This is how spacecraft reach the outer planets and how they move to the inner solar system.  Some of the missions have multiple passes as they build up speed for long journeys.

 

Another dramatic bit was realized in the 60s - namely a lineup of planets would exist in the mid 70s that permitted a gravity assist trip that would take a spacecraft by all of them with very little fuel.  The opportunity, called the Grand Tour,  would only come once every 175 years or so.  NASA and JPL jumped on it and Voyager 1 and 2 set sail for the planets and beyond. They're still taking data and one is the most distant human-made object.   Pluto would have been possible, but was left off -- and that's another amazing story. But time to quit.

 

 

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¹ "about" is the right word.  Our orbit is elliptical and the speed varies.  It's slowest in early July when we're at our farthest distance.  All of the numbers here are approximations.. good to a few percent, but no better.