omenti

normal?

About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal.  That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them,  who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that.  Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.

 

Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy.   We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve -  "normal" distributions.  Height is the usual example.   A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall.  This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails.   Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short.  A few readers happen to be very tall.   Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary.  It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.

 

In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly.  The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit.  Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified.  Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster.  Skilled pilots were making lethal errors.    A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist.  Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation.  Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements.  Not a single real pilot was average.   The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.  

 

Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies.  All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies.  Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats -  I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools"  We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success. 

 

Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or  running shoes?  Why are some people excluded from the made world?   Who makes the designs?  What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough?   Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?

 

"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve.  The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is. 

 

What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others.  Some are forgotten and even warehoused.  How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues.  I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience.   Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct?  With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid.  Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction.   Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many.  How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity? 

 

 

how big is switzerland?

Rey-k-javík

The big test was would come at the end of May.  Sixth grade and we had to identify countries and their capitals on a world map.  That meant spelling everything correctly and adding some countries not on the list for extra credit.   I wasn't good at spelling then and it seems to have gone downhill since, but the unit was fun as our teacher had been around Europe and was a good story teller.  She also wanted to make the point that maps lie - that various projections color our impressions and even doing something simple like measuring an area on a Mercator projection was difficult.  A few weeks later the question came that I kept visiting for a few decades. 

 

How is the area of a country measured?  Is it considered a flat surface, or do you measure it on a sphere (I didn't know about the shape of the Earth then), or what about uneven ground?  What do you do about tides?  Shared lakes (like some of the Great Lakes)?  How do you measure a coastline? 

 

My parents tolerated this for awhile and then it was off to the library.  There wasn't much on this, but visits to libraries are never wasted. 

 

Over the years bits and pieces came when I wasn't looking. I first encountered fractals in Scientific American and followed up with Mandelbrot's paper . The measure of a coastline became finally became clear. There was an inherent fuzziness and you had to choose a scale.  And he had developed some beautiful mathematics that got at the heart of the matter - what is a fractional dimension?

 

A countries area is usually defined as the outline of the country projected onto the Earth's geoid or ellipsoid (there isn't standardization, but using the ellipsoid is probably good enough). In other words the so-of spherical nature of the Earth is used.  High tide marks boundaries, interior bodies of water are included in the area, but uneven terrain isn't accounted for.  The terrain bit made me want to see what the impact would be.   About ten years ago I found a dataset of terrain altitudes for the planet on a 100 meter grid. I used these with some detailed country outline data and looked at a few countries.  The Netherlands only gains a tiny bit of area.  The US grows by almost two percent, but Switzerland was slightly more than seven percent larger.  That's big enough to make Switzerland larger than Denmark and the Netherlands.   I didn't have good data for places like Nepal and Bhutan - they'd be spectacular.  And imagine looking at Manhattan with a one meter grid...  Its area would grow enormously.  

 

One of those questions a kid can wonder about that gets quite involved and requires standards be set. 

 

_________

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

For many of us this is peak tomato season.  In late August years ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish. The tomatoes were in chucks and not really cooked. It would only work if they were perfect so I gave it a try. Here is about what I did. This would be enough for two hungry people or four people if served as a side course.  It's more of a narration than a conventional recipe. 

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great flavor. If you can, go with heirloom tomatoes as the new ones have so much goodness bred out of them. My guess is I had maybe about one and a half pounds of tomato. Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a bowl making sure to recover some of the juice left on the cutting board.

Pour to glugs of a good extra virgin olive oil over the tomatoes.  Sprinkle on a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper before gently stirring to mix.  Set the bowl aside. 

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in. Cheap salt of course

Now chop a strong red onion into slivers. Maybe about a quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula

Cook about a half pound of pasta (I like a quality thick spaghetti for this, but pick your favorite) and try to stay away from the marinating tomatoes

Layer the onions on top of the tomatoes and then make a layer of arugula choppings

Dump the cooked pasta onto the layered mixture in the bowl and give it two or three minutes to heat up a bit. To deal with the frustration grate some parmesan for a topping. (I prefer it cheeseless, but most people probably want it). The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath, just barely, but perfectly enough.

Gently mix and serve.

 

how to speak

minipost

Some of you are amazing speakers.  I'm not.  Thankfully I'm not teaching anything this year - Zoom lecturing was a disaster for me for a number of reasons.  Rather than a post mortem, here's something useful.

 

This is from the 'how to speak' course that Patrick Winston gave for years at MIT. Not all of it will be applicable, but you may find a few bits of useful information. 

companies that care

Recently a heard a podcast on what it means for a company, or employee, to be a steward.  It could be any number of things - relationships, society, the environment. All good, but not many large companies seem to exemplify this beyond PR efforts.  But some smaller organizations are good at this.  I'll mention one - you can probably think of a few on your own. 

 

I'm not athletic but enjoy rowing as an exercise.  In the early 90s I found myself with a used Concept 2 model B rowing ergometer. It had been abused and needed a serious clearing and a few replacement parts.  Calling the company I found myself talking to the product engineer responsible for its design.  He asked some questions and said he'd send a parts list.  A few days later a box arrived with very clear repair sheets and the parts.  The bill of sale said $0.00.  I started the repair, but one of the old parts was bent and I was afraid of damaging the unit.  Another call and he talked me through the repair.  I asked what the parts cost and was told that wasn't a big deal, he was just happy to see one of his old machines being used. 

 

The old model B still works well.  It was made in 1986 and has seen more or less daily use since the repair in  1995.  I've had to buy some parts for standard wear and tear over the years.  They aren't expensive and the company stocks parts for every machine they've made.  The phone support is always friendly and free. 

 

Their ergs work well and I've probably generated a half dozen sales - word of mouth and gym experience are their big referrals. They're the standard erg in college rowing programs and the sport of competitive erg rowing has grown organically within the user base.  They also make most of the oars used in Olympic class competitions.  A combination of design, execution, support and general friendliness makes them one of my favorite companies.   Here's a piece about them from twenty years ago.

 

(the image is of an ancient model B like mine - newer ones look different, but are functionally about the same)

 

Feel free to write about your favorite in the comments section.  Are there any that will be making people happy and the world a better place fifty years down the road?  How about any that are publicly traded?  Is there a size ceiling? 

 

 

 

the small things that make you happy

Pip Coburn and his circle have a practice of sharing "anti pet peeves" - those little things that bring a smile and a bit of happiness. It's a good practice these days.  I had one today and sent it to him and Om Malik.  Om suggested I post it.   Feel free to add your own reason to smile in the comment section.

 

We live next to a large piece of undeveloped swampland. It’s full of deer paths and a mixture of heavily wooded and open areas. For about seventeen years I’ve taken a ninety minute walk around noon when I’m working from home. Today is worth writing about - my vulture returned!

About six years ago a female turkey vulture began to accompany me. She’d wait on a telephone pole where the woods cleared or sometimes she’d spiral down from the sky. For nearly a kilometer I’d walk through a large open area and she’d follow along, making short flights from telephone pole to telephone pole. . Then I’d disappear into a heavily wooded around for about thirty minutes before coming back to the clearing. She’d be waiting and together we’d make our way through the open space - regular partners for nearly four seasons.

Then nothing…

I kept looking and even got in touch with the Raptor Trust in case they had taken in an injured vulture, but after a month assumed she had left the area. Hopefully by her own choice.

Today - mirabile dictu - she reappeared. She only followed me one way, but it was so nice to see an old friend.

 

 

why are plants green rather than black?

minipost

 

It turns out they use red and blue light for photosynthesis and reflect green light. But why? That wastes an enormous amount of energy - why didn’t plants evolve to look black?

 

There have been any number of conjectures and they tend to be unsatisfying. Here’s something central to life on Earth and we can’t answer a simple question of efficiency. And recently Astrobiologists worry about such things as they like about lyfe (a more general form of life that has the life we know as a subset)

 

Recently a paper appear in Science that offers a neat hypothesis (hypotheses are much more important in science than conjectures) .. that the collectors on plants have very erratic power outputs locally .. wind blows a leaf partly away from the sun, etc. .. and the downstream biochemical processes from the initial photon conversion have serious problems with too much fluctuating energy. The investigators turned the problem into a network problem and asked the question what colors of the spectrum would be best for these noisy inputs. The answer is red and blue.

 

I’ve been meaning to write about it, but yesterday Pip mentioned efficiency and resiliency in a news letter. Nature is full of resilient systems that are so because, among other things, they don’t try to optimize efficiency. In biology you might not judge something resilient unless it can go thousands of life cycles. There aren’t many man made systems that can say the same. Today, going through Quanta, I found a piece on the green plant work that is much better written than anything I’d do, so enjoy!

 

Oh.. and the sky isn’t blue either. it’s just a mostly transparent stage upon which all the colors dance. It just turns out blue is a bit of a ham.

there is a season

The wheels appear to be coming off the Major League Baseball season.  The NBA basketball may have built a tight enough bubble, but at great cost. And I'll bet a fair amount that NFL and college football will be disasters if they take place.  Some sports and associated logistics may too difficult to handle given the poorly controlled pandemic situation in the US.  There is some truth in what Sean Doolittle said:  "Sports are like the reward of a functioning society."

 

There are examples of carefully executed seasons even in the US. Before getting an example there's a more interesting question:  Why do people care about sports?  I'm not terribly coordinated but am a fan of and advisor to one of the Olympic sports.  The science of sport is deep and fascinating.  I've dabbled a little and have found it's a way to connect dots and gain insight in areas I hadn't considered.  Unexpectedly it became a gateway to learning about neurology and metabolism and a good way to teach introductory physics.  And that's just the beginning.  Sport is one of those interesting lenses for looking at the world. Not to mention sports are a form of rich story-telling that take can even create a community identity.

 

BBC's The Why Factor had an episode asking "why people care about games". (23 minutes audio) It touches on some psychology and cognitive neurology among other things. 

 

As I write the last day of the AVP beach volleyball season is about to begin in Long Beach, California.  The athletes saw the international and American schedules evaporate along with the Olympics. The center of gravity for North Americans is Southern California - specially the South Bay region of Los Angeles. The AVP decided they could pull together a three tournament schedule spread over three weeks and finally managed to find a venue - the parking lot of the Long Beach Convention Center - and a few sponsors.   Amazon PrimeVideo handles the video.  It was an intense effort - a bit of the story appeared here before the tournaments began. 

 

Some of the teams are a bit rusty, but the intensity of play is very high.  Beach volleyball is not a wealthy sport - only a handful make enough to do as their only job and this was the only money available.  More importantly this is the only serious competition available.  There is a lot of covid testing with one and two day turn-around times.  A positive and you and your partner are out for the season.  The players were told to not use indoor gyms for training.  The players quarantined before hand and only a limited number of media, officials and players are allowed on site. They're keeping things clean, but they recognize airborne transmission is probably more important so everyone but the players is masked and isolated.   Of course no spectators are allowed.

 

The game play has been excellent.  Rather than fake crowd noise the AVP and Amazon decided enhance the fan's experience with the court's sound field.  Twenty microphones are scattered around the main court and more installed in the player's time-out corners.   It worked brilliantly but after the first tournament PrimeVideo had to run a content warning click-through to the tournaments.  It seems some of the players have foul mouths when they're excited. 

 

The AVP consulted with a infectious disease experts from local universities. The plans for what to do if something goes wrong are much more detailed than the already complex operational plans.  It make me wonder what kinds of plans schools and universities have for when something goes wrong.

 

PrimeVideo streams and archives the tournaments here if you're interested.