omenti

questions inadequately probed

Kip sent this lovely piece 

 

 

It's pretty funny, but then you remember some misconceptions you had became you didn't ask the right questions.   When I was a kid we had to sing the Christmas carol Angels We Have heard on High.   Apart from the line  Gloria in excelsis Deo,  it made sense.  Our teacher didn't explain it was Latin, so my mind patched together a meaningless phrase that I could sing out out - something like in eggshells sustain -e-oh.   A few years later we had to sing it in a choir -  this time with a score.  I didn't know Latin, but at least there was enough information to track it down. 

 

Keeping with the family tradition one of my nieces proudly sang the line:  The ants are my friends, they’re blowing in the wind. The ants they’re a blowing in the wind.  (I wish I could remember her full take on the song - she was about four)

 

The mind is awfully good at coming up with an explanation when you don't have enough information, I've had several other dramatic misunderstandings - often much more serious than the lyrics in a song.  Over the years you learn you need to ask questions when there's cognitive dissonance.  Not that this works for all misinterpretations and misinformation, but it helps for some.  

 

Feel free to add some of yours in the comments.

 

 

a thread of music

Today is Beethoven's 250^th birthday.  

 

When I was fifteen my big Christmas present was a Norelco cassette tape player.  Pre-recorded tapes were too expensive for me back then so I used its not so great microphone to record music from the family record player.   My Dad had developed a taste for Italian opera along with Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and a few other late 19^th century composers.  He wasn't  a fan of the classical or earlier periods, but his collection had a smattering from those periods too.  I placed an LP of Beethoven's 6^th Symphony and started recording.  

 

The tape that came with the recorder could record thirty minutes and had to be turned over halfway through, but that didn't matter.  I found myself listening carefully ... much more carefully than usual.  The recorder didn't do a good job on music, so I went back to the LP and listened again.  And again.  Aside from eating M&Ms that's probably all I did that afternoon. 

 

I'm not very good at playing musical instruments but have a history of concert-going.  My first year of college was in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah.   The Utah Symphony had a special offer for college students - the full concert season for fourteen dollars.  The performances were in the Mormon Tabernacle - an acoustically "bright" ellipsoid and perhaps the worst acoustics of any major concert hall.  My regular seat was a focal point for one of the bassoons.  Around the same time I managed to invite myself to a professor friend's Friday evening chamber music evenings.  The hook was set. 

 

The next school was in Pasadena.  Southern California had a lot of great music, but it was impossible without a car and money.  My lifeline was an FM radio.  Grad school turned out to be more interesting.   Stony Brook's  music department was home to The Beaux Arts Trio - one of the world's great piano trios.   Somehow I managed to find my way to more than a few master classes of a good friend who was a cello major.  In my third year things got a bit out of hand. Another grad student and I decided to start a concert series.   In retrospect being naive was a feature.  Somehow we found half of what we needed from the President's office.  It occurred to us the Graduate Student Association could help out, but they had other ideas.  We took matters into our own hands by running for the student senate.  As senators we  pushed for funding again and to our delight managed to get it on a narrow vote.  These things only happen to beginners and fools.    The auditorium we had for the first concert was directly over a bowling alley.   The second concert went more smoothly and by the third it was almost easy.  We even managed to turn a small profit selling out our last eight concerts. Others took over when we left and, excluding this year, the series is still going strong.

 

I need to listen to music carefully and find background music distracting.   The presence of live music is important and, although I'm missing physical presence, live performances during the pandemic manage to give some of it.  My home audio equipment isn't very good, but I've learned performances are deeper than their reproduction.  Books with stained pages are often just fine.

 

In the eight grade we had to take an occupational aptitude test.  My results predicted a poor match for any of the areas, so they had me take it over again.  The results were the same.  Next we had to write an "occupational monograph" on two types of work we were interested in.  The ones I picked weren't on the list, but turned out to predict what I eventually went into.

 

Several of the long journeys I've been on began in my teens. . That tape recorder on a Christmas day set me on one of those journeys What's fascinating is they've turned out to develop in way I couldn't have imagined.   Other threads developed later, but I wonder how many major ones develop then.

 

Today I'll pull out Dad's old LP with  Beethoven 6^th Symphony encoded in its spiral grove.  An RCA Red Seal re-issue of Toscanni and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it takes me back to that first listen, to it's performance years before and even to Beethoven's writings.    It's amazing how you seem to always find something new every time when you really listen.   Celebrate the day by picking one of your older paths and doing it deeply - Beethoven won't mind if it isn't music. 

 

guides to help you make your way through dense forests

By the end of the sixties mainframe computers were churning out reams of printout, film and television made reference to them complete with blinking lights, and a combination of great social and political upheaval and technological advancement gave a sense that no one could keep up.  The time was right and  Toffler's Future Shock came along and popularized the notion of information overload.  

 

The truth was no one could keep up for centuries.  My friend Andrew has a hobby of studying financial bubbles.  He began with the twin 19^th century railroad bubbles in England and has extended his work backwards in time to Tulip Mania and beyond.  To do this meant spending large amounts of time in serious libraries - first in New York City and then London and beyond.  His pieces are wonderful, but there's so much information for him to comb through. Even with the help of others it's taken over a decade.  There's simply too much information available.  The relevant information to avoid financial ruin was sometimes available at the time, but knowing which information sources were correct meant success and failure often involved chance.  Reading Andrew now still makes me wonder how these events can be avoided given the complexity of human psychology. 

 

The history of its information handling in my area is fascinating.  England was something of a hotbed as science developed in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.   The Lunar Society of Birmingham ( I've written about them here ) became a centrally important group.  For about fifty years people like Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestly, James Kier and Erasmus Darwin met under the light of a full moon and exchanged ideas.  New ideas were hatched, partnerships formed and they ended up making a considerable dent in the Universe before the the Royal Society in London became the center of scientific thought.  Here formal papers were presented along with public showings of new discoveries.   It became a repository for the advances in a number of fields.  The deluge of information for any dozen people to absorb, so proceedings were published along with condensations  to help local and remote members better navigate the constantly expanding change.  

 

Other societies formed in England and around Europe, but commercial advances in chemistry and engineering brought attracted money and colleges and universities started to become deeply involved.   Some information was being shared, but the flow even within institutions was a daunting problem.  Finally one of the most remarkable inventions of the 19^th century arrived: the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge - a future machine.  Without repeating myself too much it created concentrations of written and institutional information along with a culture which continues to grow and expand even today.

 

The process of science is very messy and bears little resemblance to the scientific method you learned about in school. There is  enormous amount of careful work to separate signal from noise and to constantly question yourself. It's been estimated that over 70% of time spent by physicists goes into looking for holes in their work. I've had three eureka moments in my life and all turned out to be wrong.  Discovery usually begins by noticing something isn't working right.   It's rarely perfect, but progress is made.  There are a number of information flows involved, but I'll skip them for now and focus on what it isn't.

 

A  model that came out of system analysis in the 1930s and was popularized in the 1980s says data → information → knowledge → wisdom.  Data is processed or filtered to give information which can further be processed to result in knowledge and so on..  Each step is more valuable - some use the terminology more actionable.   I've heard computer programs described as as algorithmic processes that turn data into information. Information is somehow processed to create knowledge which is even valuable and actionable.  As I read it the implication is knowledge results from a successive filtering of data and then information. That everything else is some kind of noise. Perhaps this is a useful model for some fields, but not in science.  

 

The concept of knowledge differs from the DIKW construction.  Roughly speaking science considers  knowledge as a growing collection of beliefs that can be empirically justified by experiment and observation using Nature as a reference standard. The pieces that form the collection can be challenged and improved or overturned as our understanding of Nature grows.  Together the pieces form a beautiful collage representing work that spans centuries. The concept of knowledge coming directly from the data→information stream is foreign.  Our reality is much messier with discovery, serendipity, curiosity, play, failure, learning from failure, culture, the passage of time and so on being important components.   Some pieces are replaced over time, others - like when to use Quantum Mechanics, Relativity or Newtonian Mechanics - are more nuanced.  Knowledge becomes an important reference that lets you understand how to use information.

 

With that detour, how does science - in my case physics and astrophysics - deal with information?  The invention of the modern laboratory at Cambridge is a big part of it.  Groups of people working along similar paths with access to shared resources - lab equipment, technicians, mathematical tools, a shared culture and  knowledge base.   Labs across the world interconnect with a rich rapid communication framework quickly raising issues worthy of confirmation or shredding.  They provide a sense of direction and make problem spaces and information loads manageable. Local and extended groups are a rich source of new ideas and questions - ultimately new questions are the gold.

 

Experiments and observations have become more complex and data filtering is common.  As an example it's common for a detector at CERN to recognize less than one in hundreds of thousands of collisions is important and pass that on for more detailed analysis.   The filters - called triggers - are built on a knowledge base decades deep and are constantly checked.  Conceptually they're simple.  Two particles collide at extremely high speed and the collision produces a a number of rapidly moving particles. The signature they make as they pass through a series of detectors gives a clue about what they are and what the collision was. Most of the collisions are uninteresting so you need to discard them quickly as you can't store all of them.  Much of this is done as the reports from the detectors are progressing so keep/ignore decisions have to be very fast - billionths of a second. The image is from one of my first particle physics experiments.  The rats nest of wiring was my work and is part of the logic looking for two types of particle interactions.  The messiness results from the need to have signals arrive at exactly the right time - so the length of each cable is a reflection of the speed of light - some signals need to be delayed more than others.  There is a constant check on this logic and you're alerted when something was out of wack - a piece of electronics failing, an intermittent cable connection and the like. It was something that had to be attended to daily for over a year. These days triggers are much more complex requiring teams of people using a much deeper knowledge base.  Such is progress.  

 

There are problems with this focused approach.  Natural boundaries form with specialization and understanding what's going on in other fields is a casualty.  There are efforts to increase cross-discipline work, but the culture that produced specialization makes it difficult.   Every now and again those barriers fall.  That seems to happen more in applied than fundamental research, but when it does major leaps tend to happen. 

 

I've recently become interested in information flow in sports.  There are some similarities to what I'm used to but often it seems more complex and my conversations with an articulate athlete have been illuminating.   I'm guessing there are nearly as many information flows as there are fields.   I'm stuck with my own biases, but suspect using knowledge as a way to use information may be important to many.  

 

aerosol transmission

minipost

 

The American Physical Society had a webinar on aerosol covid transmission.   Jose Jimenez of the University of Colorado at Boulder is an aerosol physics expert.    It’s not terribly technical, but the first 45 minutes is probably mostly for public health and medical types. Much  is making the case for about 80% of covid transmission being aerosol rather than droplet.  This was an issue until a few months ago as the WHO and CDC believed it was mostly droplet.  It turns out that was based on a flawed study that is almost 50 years old!  They’ve since recanted.

 

 

Starting around 45m he goes into recommendations.   As always the best bet is to avoid them if people you don’t live with are present or have recently been inside.  With aerosols stagnant air is a problem so you want good ventilation if others are involved.  It turns out CO₂ level in a room is a good enough proxy for aerosol concentration.  Sit in a car with three other people, windows up, and after a short amount of time you’re breathing each other’s air and the CO₂ levels are sky high. Open a window and turn on the ventilation and the levels come down.  He wants to see CO₂ meters in all enclosed public spaces so you can decide what might be safe or not or how long you can be inside.  He’s not a virologist, but some are recommending 700 ppm as a guideline (I've seen 600 mentioned).

 

 

Good enough detectors based on NDIR are in the $100 to $200 range.  It's a very simple technology that uses the fact that carbon dioxide strongly absorbs a specific frequency of  infrared light.  They’re only good +/-50 ppm, but that’s good enough.   Of course all of this has to be balanced with the infection levels in your community.  

 

postscript

 

Several readers asked for CO₂ meter recommendations. I can make a few recommendations, but have only used a few.  Stay away from sub $100 units is the only rule of thumb I can offer.  Schools should have them in each room as well as stores, offices and so on.   You probably don't need one in your home unless you’re curious or want to see how well your windows and HVAC system are working (that can be a big issue).

 

The seminar talks about airplanes. Air exchanges per hour are very high when the ventilation system is on so airborne infection risk is low inside the cabin.  The rest of the trip is questionable - very high levels were found in jetways for example. New York subway trains have good air exchange rates, but I haven’t seen any work on the platforms. Buses vary and I’d be suspicious when the heaters are on in the Winter. I’ve measured a variety of cars. With windows up and two occupants CO₂ levels were over 3500 ppm in twenty minutes. That’s extremely dangerous if one of the occupants is contagious. Opening windows helps, but cars vary. The effect isn’t big on very streamlined cars like Teslas. On aerodynamically dirtier cars opening rear windows canincrease air exchange more than front windows as the outside air pressure on a moving car increases towards the rear of the vehicle. You should also turn on air circulation. With just circulation I got readings around 900 ppm and the best readings with windows were in the 700s.  I’d stay away from any car if someone outside of your bubble is in it.

 

An interesting note is some measurements have been done on cognitive ability and alertness. Over 1500 ppm and people become less alert.  That can have an impact on the quality of work as well as high attention activities like driving. The few studies that have looked at cognitive ability show declines with increasing CO₂ levels.  One study saw the decline start around 800 ppm and another around 1500 ppm.  Neither study was gold standard robust, but I suspect the effect is real - certainly alertness is real.  Many school rooms, offices and homes are normally over those levels so your may want to make changes even after the pandemic.

 

 

frogs, pots of water and the slow application of heat

A few weeks ago Om posted a piece on Apple's new laptop based on their M1 chip.  It's one of those huge transitions that gives Apple a much higher starting point  for desktop and laptop machines - machines that are still very important to many of us. They've been working on this for at least ten years as part of their smartphone silicon effort. People like Horace Dediu and Om (and even a non-technologist like me) have noted the progression of Apple silicon and wondered if it would be deadly to Intel.  For me the biggest surprise has been the software effort - writing was all over the place for on the silicon side. 

 

Zoom's emergence represents a pot that had been slowly warming for decades coming to a sudden boil with pandemic-fueled heat.  It's frustrating with a terrible UX and UI, can be iffy on highly asymmetrical Internet connections that are slow upstream (cable modems for example), causes enormous frustration for many, but it's better than other tools and works well enough.  Last week I described it as the modern equivalent of the <blink> markup in html during the early days of web browsers like Mosaic.  People think it's cool at the time, but it will be laughably primitive down the road.   

 

Remote video tools will get better and may change some habits. At the same time others are recognizing the importance of face to face. One university I work with just completed a survey that found 0% of 1600 students said they'd prefer in-class instruction to remote leaning when the pandemic quiets down.  Already there's a lot of experimentation on campuses and in some businesses.  An animation company saw productivity crater and is working on a better than Zoom suite of tools for internal use. The university I mentioned has found messaging apps like Discord excel in spaces that Zoom handles poorly.  And perhaps we'll get better Internet connectivity.  Price to performance in the US is abysmal, 5G is a largely marketing joke, cable modems are too asymmetrical (upstream is slow) to support serious video conferencing, and the digital divide has widened the already huge education gap.  There's a lot to fix.  It's like cycling - you need to sort out infrastructure and culture along with adding bikes.  

 

I'm confident tool improvements will come but serious leaps need to be taken and I don't have great confidence in the major players.  What I'm more worried about, at least in the US and Canada, is infrastructure. A friend is moving from Colorado to North Carolina and needs a very solid Internet connection.  The only advice I could give was to find cities that offered good fiber connections that we're from telcos.  That mostly narrowed it down to Ting, which left only a few cities. The movement of people from cities to rural and suburban areas is constrained by many forces - this is one. 

 

On to something else..

 

I've argued that virtual reality wasn't very important and augmented reality meant much more than projecting information in your field of view - and that Apple had just introduced their first AR product. 

 

In a way glasses are AR devices - they help you see more than you normally would. The same for microscopes, telescopes, stethoscopes, I have built bat detectors that let me augment my world by adding a bit of theirs, ... the list is long.  But back to my comment about Apple.   I have to admit I was wrong.  Apple's first AR product was the Apple watch, although they didn't know it at the time.  At first it was more of a fashion statement with a weird assortment of apps.  After a few years they learned what it was for.  People saw it as something for improving their health and fitness. Exercise, heart monitoring, and even the state of your body. Jutta has an app that interfaces with other hardware for diabetes management.  We're talking about life altering AR.   The area is growing rapidly and we won't even think of it as AR because we're used to its Hollywood manifestation.  Of course Alexa, Siri and other voice driven interfaces are AR.  They augment our local information space.  Apple's EarPods are just a portal you wear.  There's still a place to visual AR, but the pot's already boiling.  AR is here now.

 

Of course we should think about how these things fit into our lives. That's a serious area I'm not terribly confident about - at least if tech is making the design choices.