omenti

finding a voice

On those clear and moonless nights stars would suddenly rise from the edge of the butte marking its shape and size.  Besides the stars the only other lights were a distant aircraft beacon and a flashlight modified to give off a faint red light to protect your night vision and to look around for sleeping cows.   Montana is this magical place.

 

There were three places Brian and I would haul our little telescopes. North of town near Benton Lake on the Bootlegger Trail.  East of town there was a  turnoff near the O'Day farm on the way to the Highwoods,.  And to the West was a little farm near the butte just South of Fort Shaw.  Mary was the owner of the last place and a family friend.  She had two conditions.  First you had  to be careful at the gate to make sure her cows didn't get out and second was was letting her look through the telescopes and sharing stories about the stars. 

 

Her stories were more interesting. They came some an elderly Assiniboine man she knew when she worked as a public health nurse at the Fort Belknap Reservation. It seems wrong I can't remember his name.    His people had named constellations to orient themselves at night, but they weren't those I knew.  The idea that someone could look at Orion or the Big Dipper and not see those shapes was delicious.  One night she casually mentioned there were "medicine wheels"  - astronomical calculators of sorts to track cosmic cycles - equinoxes, solstices, planetary motions and sacred days.  North American Stonehenges.  It shouldn't have surprised me. There is order and regularity in the sky.  There are people who observe and try to make order. It is only natural to make clocks and calendars.

 

We're funny about time.  We build instruments to measure it, but our senses can't dealt with very short or long periods.   It flies when we're having fun and drags when we're not.  A bit over a hundred years ago we learned that it doesn't exist by itself, but it is part of something deeper called space-time. At the deepest level it's still a mystery  What we do know is Universe is always changing.  As people we look backwards and forwards. We wonder what will happen - where we've been and where we might be going.  

 

Science is a tool for sorting out things that happen in Nature - and this is one of my frustrations. For two decades we've known that human activity is responsible for the increase in global temperature and increasing accurate forecasts have been made since.  We even know steps we can take to reduce the impact of the problem.  This is settled science with better confidence levels than almost anything in - say - medicine. But there's this problem. How do you get people to take action?

 

Scientists are generally poor public communicators and the basic story of global warming isn't exactly a riveting story with a feel good ending.  There's guilt with blame to go around and the problems are mostly cast as something future generations will bear.  Furthermore people in wealthy countries will be able to afford to minimize the problems it causes locally.  It's easy to forget, Even if it wasn't politically contested, it's not on the top ten list of many who want to take action.  

 

I've been thinking a lot about the role of the scientist as a communicator.  There's a tendency to feel like you need to provide a full story even though the subject is complex and no single person is up to the task.  It's different when you go to the doctor.  Your primary care physician lacks specific knowledge but that isn't seen as a problem.  She can refer you to a specialist.  A generalist's high level knowledge and connections to more complex understandings happen to be one of her specialities.  There are questions that you can ask both a medical doctor and a scientist and learn something deep.  A few years ago I was on the train with a heart surgeon.  I asked him what he thought about mortality - his own as well as his patients.  It sparked a conversation that was fascinating for both of us.  The train stopped at Penn Station and we spent the next hour at a coffee shop talking. His answers were undoubtely unique to him. They were his stories that motivated him and his telling made an impact on me. 

 

People seem to be wired for story telling. They sometimes go deep - even to our identity.

 

Maybe this is a way forward.  Michelle Alexander offered an interesting thought experiment - what if reincarnation existed and we came back to live in a world we helped make?  If it was random chances are we'd be poor living somewhere that wouldn't be able to respond to the problems like a wealthy nation.  Thinking along these lines may be an exercise in empathy.  You could ask questions about other religious traditions - say those that ask people to be stewards of the Earth.  There may be conversations lurking that could help people find common ground.

 

Conventional storytelling doesn't have  many storylines.  Think of the Lord of the Rings - a heroic effort to save the Earth against seemingly impossible odds.  Are there ways to create stories that might lead to deeper thought?  These are much more natural channels to a person's heart than a PowerPoint presentation.  I've made a few attempts, but I'm not a good at this sort of thing.  I'm open to ideas and some of you might be brilliant.  

 

A really neat idea is the global warming fairy tale. Fairy tales can be short, but powerful approximations for larger ideas. Kate Marvel is a climate scientist who has taken that path.  Give her  Slaying the Climate Dragon fairy tale a spin - it fits on a single page and touches many ideas.

_______

 

The call came about fifteen years ago.  It was Mary's family.  She had left a note asking for a favor.  She wondered if monuments could be placed on their property to mark the dates she came to the world and left it as well as noting the rise of Sirius and the Peliedes .. two of her favorite objects...  as well as the seasons.  She also wanted to know where North would be at one of periods H.G. Wells described in The Time Machine.

 

Designing a medicine wheel is a learning experience.  How accurate should it be?  How long should it be valid?  The Earth's axis wobbles and precesses.  Our orbit varies a bit year to year.  The ground moves.  There is constant change .. often too slow for us to notice, but the Earth - Nature - is always moving on.  It filled me with optimism thinking about those that will follow.

 

smoke rings, sports and beyond

Canals saw explosive growth in England during the first few decades of the Industrial Revolution allowing raw materials like iron and coal to fall in price by as much as eighty percent.   Improving canals became a major industry - they became straighter with locks and aqueducts coming into wide-spread use to deal with changes in elevation.  Then, around 1840, railroads became the thing and many of the canals were purchased for their right of way.  The expansion of railways led to two of the more dramatic financial bubbles in history, but that's another story.  The story here is about something really interesting that happened just before the railroads started taking over.

 

James Scott Russell found himself working on a large canal near Edinburgh, Scotland.  A newly minted engineer, he had been hired to investigate the movement of barges in the hope of making them more efficient.  Russell spent a lot of time observing and making measurements.  One day the tow rope between the mules and the barge snapped and the barge came to a sudden stop.  He watched in amazement watching mass of water in front of the barge's front bow 

“I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat sud- denly stoppednot so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course ong the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beau- tiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.”

Afterwards he built a tank in a laboratory to conduct controlled experiments. In 1844 he published his results noting four things about these solitons.

° The waves are stable, and can travel over very large distances (normal waves tend to either flatten or steepen and topple.

° The speed depends on the size of the wave, and its width on the depth of water.

° The waves do not merge, larger waves overtake smaller ones rather than combining.

° If a wave is too big for the depth of water, it splits into two waves, one big and one small.

A few decades later  physicists began to work out the physics leading off in unimaginable directions.  But back to that wave moving down the canal.  If it was large enough you could surf on it.  And, with enough study and money you could build very repeatable waves to your liking.  It turns out a surfer named Kelly Slater did just that.  The December 17^th, 2018 issue of The New Yorker has a great article. 

 

It turns out solitons exist throughout the physical world - smoke rings, packets of light in fiber optic strands and much more.  On light packets - high speed data communication using optical fibers simply wouldn't work without solitons - the bits of information would blur into a muddle at high data rates. The math is a tad beyond the level of this blog - you'd see it in a second year undergrad physics class.  As people continued to work out why it is stable some insight came from that radical moment in 1953 when the computer went beyond a bicycle for the mind to becoming both a telescope and microscope.

 

Physics 101 classes usually have a vortex ring demonstration to illustrate some of the properties of vortex ring solitons.  Smoke ring guns are a lot of fun and fairly easy to build.  Turning them into a really great demonstration takes some effort. Dianna Cowern recently posted her version.  Her enthusiasm is pure wonderfulness.

Recipe Corner

 

The return of recipe corner - at least for today.  This was great last night

 Roasted Brussels Sprouts

 

Ingredients

° 1 pound Brussels sprouts - remove the outer leaves

° 1 medium sized onion - I had a sweet onion (Vidalia)

° 1 largish baking apple (Granny Smith) cut into half inch chunks 

° 1 tbl olive oil (doesn't have to be a great EVOO)

° 1/2 tsp grated nutmeg

° salt

° ground black pepper

° 1 cup apple cider

° 2 tsp butter

° 1 tsp brown sugar

Technique

° preheat oven to 350°F

° everything through the olive oil into a large baking pan.  salt and pepper to taste and toss to coat.  Cover with aluminum foil. 

° roast for about 25 minutes, uncover and stir

° temp up to 375°F and roast with no foil 'til the sprouts brown a bit - 10 minutes for me

° when the roasting begins bring the cider to a boil in a sauce pan over medium-high heat.  Add butter and brown sugar and stir 'til dissolved. Cook at a boil until it is reduced to the consistency of a syrup .. about 15 minutes for me.  I had about 4 tbl remaining. 

° Put the Brussels sprouts into a serving bowl, add the syrup and toss.. you probably need to adjust salt and pepper a bit before serving.

 

technology risks

Fast moving technology can create risks as well as opportunities.  Recently we saw the shutdown of London's Gatwick airport by illegal drone activity.  It almost surprises me this drone delivered service disruption has taken this long to happen, although it is a surprise it went on for so long. It’s a classic example of asymmetric economics - drones are cheap and expendable but the impact of their misuse is large and very expensive.  Completely  defenses are impossible and what can be mounted is usually expensive. 

 

Drone attacks been suggested and defenses from drones with geofencing, flying nets, to jamming guns to trained eagles have been tried with varying degrees of success.  Several were tried at Gatwick but all failed.  All of these can be effective against subsists of attacks, but it is easy to design around them.  Having a variety of good enough measures will be expensive and one suspects cottage industries supplying all of this like we saw in the wake of 9-11.    I don’t know if penalties are enough to keep some types away, but it may be the most effective tool. In any event drone regulation is going to see a big re-visit approximately everywhere now.

 

This is a dramatic and very specific example, but there are so many others where the cost of attack is many orders of magnitude lower than the costs of damage and/or defense.  Russian interference in the 2016 American election may be the most dramatic example to date.   Coming down the road the Internet of Things opens up a serious Pandora’s box of opportunities for the bad guys.  Many, perhaps most, of these will be cheap with poorly written software and no mechanism for patching against attacks.  You really don't want these in your home where they can impact your life.  Add to this devices that spy on you..  Google, Amazon and Facebook offer hardware that takes information from your home and makes it the property of the company offering the services.  Thinking twice about these devices is prudent. 

 

It has been said that technology is neutral - it's all the application.  I don't buy that.  Some technologies are bad by design.  We need to be considering that much earlier on than we've been doing. The problems can't be eliminated, but perhaps they can be contained. Measures that can be taken with legislation and education.   A good example of education is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Gift Guide .. it's a good starting point and may make you think twice.

 

 

design as a bridge

We should not expect more precision than a topic naturally affords.

 

Mr. Wolff, a favorite high school teacher of mine, used the quote to talk about how art is created and enjoyed.  It is usually ascribed to Aristotle and I'll admit it flew over my head at the time. Now, walking with a friend in Manhattan, it came back as we talked about design.

 

He's an engineer - quite a wonderful one as it happens. His contribution to the world has been one of the more important computer languages.  He has to work within certain constraints and make something that gives programmers something to create bits and pieces of the digital world with.  As with all engineering it's an exercise in compromise and optimization.  As a creator he has to constantly deal with the politics of the user communities and help evolve the language to keep it useful.  

 

Both of us are reasonably adroit talking about technology, but as we walked we started talking about things that shouldn't be automated.  Games for example.  While a computer can be central to many aspects of a game and can play some of them, the point of a game is not how well it can be played by something, but rather is much more human - perhaps it shouldn't be called a goal.  Walking or cycling through a city designed for interaction is much more fun for some of us than being moved from place to place by something that isolates us.  There's the discovery road trips produce. The list goes on and on..  We need to make decisions about what and how we automate. 

 

My friend is an engineer, but he loves history and art.  I'm not an engineer - my background is a liberal arts education (some are surprised, but physics and math are both liberal arts).  I've done design without thinking about it - some of it very bad and some of it almost useable.   At times I'm involved in systems design.  This can be simple engineering at times, but is usually much richer and more interesting when those difficult to quantify human desires and needs enter.   I tend to think visually and like to sketch to clear my mind.  In a way it's a form of design.  There isn't a clear target or rightness or wrongness to it.  It can't be measured directly.  We don't expect precision from it just as we don't expect precision from a city that is wonderfully architected for the flâneur. 

 

Design can be a bridge between something we create and our humanity.  I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but it seems to exists at many levels each with their own precision requirement.  So much of the delight of being a person comes from the non-precise delights - things like play and discovery.  These are thing things  that are the focus of many of the liberal arts.  You don't do physics or math to improve technology or the world. You may get paid for it, but if it's a passion that's not why you do it.

 

Years ago I was talking with a cellist about the Bach D Major Cello Suite. When preformed well it is considered one of Bach's masterpieces as well as of the musician.   He stressed how difficult it is to make it accessible and beautiful and you don't hear masterful performances by young prodigies. Just the physical playing could be considered mechanical.  But the mental process, the emotional process, the psychic investment the musician brings to make it seem easy — that part is enormously deep and difficult and the musician is sharing something very personal.  The non-precise serendipity of a lifetime.

 

Most of us aren't very good at a sport, but just playing around is - well - play.  As a species it's remarkable what people have done just moving balls around with a bit of design going into the rules.  Pointless at some level, but for many it is the stuff of passion.  Every now and again you see something so far out of the ordinary that for a second or two it borders on magic.  I've seen it at the net from one of the readers.  People just can't do that. 

 

Designing for serendipity is certainly possible.  At a personal level it isn't terribly efficient, but there's a richness to the path and anyone can do it. I few companies do it by making good use of an intellectually diverse workforce and sometimes talking with people outside their wheelhouse.  An animation company tells me they enjoy my visits as it helps them think a bit differently.  Sometimes I wonder if my presence was useful as I feel like I'm the one who has learned.  Of course learning isn't a zero sum game.    

 

Currently I'm trying to establish a relationship between two schools - one is known for art and the other for science.  So far there's a pilot program for the science students teaching them basic sketching skills.  The other direction has been a more difficult, but shouldn't be. What Feynman said about appreciating the Natural world when you understand a few of the nuts and bolts and have more questions rings true to me.  So far the natural language between the two appears to be play, which tells me something is working as play is a natural language for thinking. 

 

Out of time, but this is an area that fascinates me.  I worry that much of the corporate world is going in a different direction.

 

 

red-edging life

Challenger, go at throttle up.

Roger, go at throttle up.

 

The disaster extended well beyond the manned space program.  The Galileo mission to Jupiter was going to take Galileo into orbit where powerful rocket known as the Centaur-G would set it on a direct trajectory to Jupiter.   New post-Challenger safety protocols and large schedule delays forced the Jupiter mission to use a less powerful booster.  Getting to Jupiter now required an indirect path using gravity-assist flybys.  First it aimed towards Venus and then made two close flybys of Earth gaining speed on each pass.

 

The delay and slower route frustrated many, but a bit of serendipity appeared.  The idea came from Carl Sagan.  As Galileo approached Earth its instruments were aimed Earthwards recording light reflected by the Sun.  Would there be indications that life existed on Earth?  Maybe it would be a clue to how we should be looking.  

 

 

In fact four signals indicated there was life on Earth.   The strongest indicator came as something of a surprise  - a dramatic change in the reflectance of near infrared light.  It turns out plants strongly absorb light in the visible part of the spectrum.  We see a lot of green because photosynthesis doesn't use it so plants reflect some, but for the most part plants are roach moteles for visible light.  At slightly longer wavelengths -  moving from visible red to the near infrared - plants become more fussy.  Having no use for these longer wavelength photons, they bounce them back.  The result is a huge increase in reflectance at around 750nm (visible red light's wavelength is around 650 nanometers).  Our planet has so much vegetation that the signal was easily spotted by Galileo as it sped by.    Note that many photos taken in the infrared often color code near infrared as red - the "red" in this false color photo by Trev Lea is the type of near infrared light Galileo would have recorded.

 

The spectral feature became known as the red edge and sparked a lot of thinking about astrobiology.  If a planet had life with an Earth-like photosynthesis, you could scan for a red edge as it turns out to be unlikely that other sources could generate such a feature.  Of course extraterrestrial  light harvesting life doesn't need to use light to make carbohydrates, but one can image photosynthetic processes with their own "red edges" at different wavelengths.  It is possible that some of this life may not get energy from light and that creates other challenges. Astrobiology became a serious discipline.

 

If  extraterrestrial life exists, it seems likely "dumb" lower life forms will be much more common that intelligent life trying to signal or visit us.  Other than waiting for radio or physical contact,  signatures in planetary atmospheres is one of the main tools we have until we develop interstellar travel.  But you have to start somewhere ... like finding planets in other solar systems.  But even the closest stars are a long way away and are much brighter than any orbiting planets.  Fortunately people are clever and a few methods have been developed.  

 

The first method is to recognize planets don't orbit stars. Rather stars and planets both orbit the barycenter - the center of mass - of their solar system.  The Sun has a bit less than 99.9% of our solar system's mass, so the barycenter is close to it.  Jupiter's mass is about one thousandth that of the Sun everything else is about a third of a Jupiter.    Our solar system's barycenter wanders around a bit and is usually inside the Sun.   If you were to look at the Sun from a distance over time you'd notice it wobbles a bit.  You can detect the wobble using  the doppler effect.   When the wobble - the technical term is radial velocity - is towards you, its light is shifted a bit towards the blue end of the spectrum.  Moving away it the light becomes a bit redder.  You have to get lucky and stumble onto stars with wobbles along the direction between you and the star, but it doesn't need to be exactly lined up.  The technique works best with huge planets in close orbits around small stars.  Think of a Jupiter sized planet inside the orbit of Mercury.  Usually they're really hot .. like thousands of degrees and are often called hot Jupiters.

 

Another technique is to watch a planet transit a star.    Watching from Earth, some exoplanets will appear to pass in front of a star as they orbit.  The star is so bright it washes out the planet completely, but it's apparent brightness dims a bit during the transit  An alien observing the Sun from a great distance would see the Sun dim by about one part in a million the Earth transited the solar disk.   Jupiter is so much larger that it would drop the Sun's apparent brightness by nearly one percent - an easy measurement for an alien with 1990 Earth technology.    The real ticket is to observe from space.  The Kepler Space Telescope bagged a few thousand exoplanets by staring at a small patch of sky for a few years watching for these minute dips in brightness.

 

While Kepler was great at finding new solar systems, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope would take a more detailed look at some of these candidates and wait for a transit to occur (many of these have planets that orbit their star quickly with years measured in days or a few weeks)  During the transit some of the star's light goes through the atmosphere of the planet.  It's a very delicate measurement, but it is possible to look at the chemical composition of some of these exoplanet atmospheres.  Then, perhaps, you could look for signs of life.    But the sensitivity isn't quite high enough to get too excited - yet.

 

Before talking about the signs of life that might be picked up and what might make a planet habitable, a bit on where we're headed.  The James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope will extend sensitivity far beyond what we have now with Hubble and Spitzer.  WFIST has a coronagraph - essentially it sticks its thumb in front of the star to create an artificial eclipse making it much easier to detect light from an exoplanet when it isn't in transit.    Further down the road the ideas is to make a better coronagraph.   The starshade is an umbrella-like objects tens of meters in diameter positioned about 50,000 kilometers  in front of the telescope precisely blocking out light from the distant star cutting down even more on the glare from the star.   Curiously the design is strongly influenced by the art of oragami..  a natural way to construct such an object.

 

 

A few other techniques to find exoplanets exit, but this should be enough for now.  Now  the task is to ask what do you look for and what are some of the characteristics life might require...    

Out of time, so perhaps the next post.