omenti

breadth and depth

His parents were Danish, hers Swedish.  By some measures it was a mixed marriage with any number of small cultural differences. He noted and took delight in these small differences and ambiguities.  Rather than hunting, fishing or bowling he'd hike in the Summer and take long walks the rest of the year.   He liked to walk by himself and I suspect thinking about the stories he'd tell to friends and family about once a week.  He said storytelling was in his family and he had a great voice for it.      We'd sit in his yard and listen.   Some were short, some took a half hour.  They were imaginative with emotional moments coming in unsuspecting places.  They weren't the polished work of a writer, but left you wondering how he made those connections.  Only years later did I learn what an amazingly varied background he had and continually sought out.

 

My sister is a visual storyteller.  It took her half a lifetime to come to a place where she realized a single frame made of many images could be a short story that left you with questions and an open invitation to wonder.  She's extremely creative. The stories come to her quickly, but require a week or two to realize.  I suspect my Dad was a big influence.  He believed the best answers were incomplete and led to deeper questions.  He believed breadth was required to see simple answers weren't simple.  Corinne went for breadth, unfortunately I started down a path that was deeper than broad. 

 

A trigger for this post was a recent newsletter from David Epstein (The Sports Gene, Range).  He begins by talking about Emma Raducanu at the US Open:

Earlier this month, 18-year-old British tennis player Emma Raducanu won her first Grand Slam title. It was a shock; she entered the tournament with 400-to-1 odds. One of my favorite sportswriters, the Guardian’s Sean Ingle, asked Raducanu’s former coach about the factors that helped her talent blossom. Here’s what the coach said:

“From my perspective one of the best things with Emma is that she was exposed to a lot of sports from a young age, and didn’t go too specific into tennis straight away. I see that on court. When she’s learning a new skill, or trying something a little bit different, she has the ability and coordination to pick things up very quickly, even if it’s quite a big technical change.”

Raducanu added this:

“I was initially in ballet, then my dad hijacked me from ballet and threw me into every sport you could imagine. I was doing horse riding, swimming, tap dancing, basketball, skiing, golf and, from the age of five to eight, I was go-karting…From the age of nine I started motocross in a forest somewhere for a year. This was all alongside tennis.”

 

Although there are a few athletic geniuses like Tiger Woods who focus early, most elite athletes follow a very different path building a broad set of varied skills before specializing.   Epstein goes into depth in both of his books.  Outside of athletics, the generalists he focuses on in Range have richly diverse backgrounds. Something very different that the experience many have in trade school and college programs.  These people have built the tools they need to think creatively.  They're often better than narrow experts when confronted with a novel challenge.

 

 I'm sometimes asked to speak on the importance of STEM education at a local school and am doing it again.  I tell them STEM ok, but overemphasized in K12.  I think a broader liberal arts education leads to flexibility and creativity later on in life.  Unfortunately that isn't reflected in many (most?) hiring practices.  The lack of intellectual flexibility and diversity has lead to serous problems in some companies (tech in particular).   One can always add breadth later, but that can be inefficient once you're out of school.

 

I don't mean to disrespect STEM subjects.  Assuming the curriculum allows, they can be made relevant and exciting to those who won't use them in their work.   They add to breadth and can be a starting point for depth.   There are wonderful math and science books and teaching approaches that unlock wonder without getting bogged down in minutia.  Enough information and wonder that perhaps students will become citizens who can make informed choices.

 

Over the decades I've slowly broadened muself by talking to people and getting involved with their ideas and projects.  Many of you have your own diverse lists.  My short and incomplete list includes human powered airplanes, done strange things with sound, learned a little about animated film making, been around story tellers, learned a bit of anthropology and sociology, done art history research, learned about fashion and how clothes are made, learned a bit about diabetes, been involved in sandbending, the mental side of elite sport, and even know a bit about the fluid dynamics of balls used in sports.  Many of my guides and friends see this blog and I need to say thank you!   It amazes me how some of this triggers a thought in something I'm working on later.  You find yourself becoming more creative with age.  Who would have thought that the math for thinking about boundary layer separation on an almost non-spinning beach volleyball would help thinking about neutron star atmospheres.  Or the linkage between animation and fabric design, or...  the list goes on and on...   

 

Depth is great, but you need breadth to be creative.

 

 

mother's day

She enjoyed having to wait.  People around her would become characters in stories she'd make up.  Story making was a hobby of hers.  Often she'd invite you to join in.  As you gained experience, she'd take greater leaps.  Simple things on the street would develop complex plot twists and even find themselves in other eras or places.  

 

She was a bit on the quirky creative side and some of that may have rubbed off on me and my sister.  Here are a few lessons I learned:

° It's good to have some boredom in your life. It encourages you to try something new.

° It's fine to not be great at something if you enjoy it.

° You need several very different interests because they'll have conversations with each other if you just listen.

° Don't worry about names and dates in school. "How" and "why" are better.

° chocolate is good, pie is good, ice cream is good.

° Your friends may turn out to be at least as important as your family.  Find the good ones.

 

We were never pushed to do homework school. My parents were busy enough that our upbringing was more semi-supervised free range.  There were a lot of books and trips to the library.  The reward for a good report card we'd get an ice cream cone from Dairy Queen.  Perfect marks scored a banana split or milk shake.  And even if she didn't understand our interests, she'd support us how best she could. 

 

When I was about fifteen I read Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland - probably the book that had the biggest impact on me until I went to college.  As I  described the world Abbott created, Mom ran with it and developed a richer story and asked some "how" questions.  Those questions started me down a path  that taught me a little engineering - subjects she was unfamiliar with.  I began to see the value of story telling - particularly those visual stories.

 

Besides stories she enjoyed drawing and painting.  She wasn't very artistic, but spent a lot of her free time playing with projects.  I wondered why as my sister's art was much better.   Then I went off to college and found myself drawn to sketching.   I was and still am terrible, but it's a form of play that can take me to a state of flow.  I realized she was probably doing the same thing.  My sister became an accomplished artist - some her pieces have been described as snapshots of quirky short stories.   She picked up a lot from Mom too.

 

We celebrate those important ones through memories and  recognition of how they helped us become who we are.  Even now I find myself watching people and imaging stories when I'm waiting and everyone else is studying their phone.  She would have laughed at how unimaginative smartphones are.

 

Happy Mother's Day Mom.

 

the power of the liberal arts

a minipost

Tomer Hanuka of the School of Visual Arts in New York asked his third year illustration students to create a post-pandemic New Yorker cover.   Some of the pieces were so moving that he posted them on Twitter where they quickly went viral.   So viral that an article appeared in The Washington Post.

 

The power of art never ceases to amaze me.  I'm clearly not an artist, but think visually.  The few beginner art classes I had in school as a teenage played a big role in how I think abstractly.   I don't understand why art, and for that matter liberal arts in general, are on the cutting block these days.  Somehow they're not seen as relevant for the job market.  I think they're necessary if the student is preparing for life long learning.  Of course I'm biased as I was a liberal arts major (physics and math are liberal arts).

 

I've spent some time trying to link art and physical science programs in a couple of colleges. No details as it's been political and was interrupted by the pandemic, but I'm still enthusiastic.  The fact that one of the physics professors is in a rock band helps..

 

getting down to the bedrock

Some areas are built on foundations of fundamental principals that can be built upon.  For example many of the world's religions have a form of the golden rule in their bedrock.  Physics has a few of these cornerstones that are so deep they're considered beautiful and have become guides.  I've been thinking about one of them - complementarity -  a lot recently.  Particularly as it appears outside of physics in many areas probably including some you're used to thinking about.

 

Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein were contemporaries - peers actually.  Both were great sources of quotes.  Einstein's fame is such that it's difficult to figure out exactly what he did say without original sources. Bohr's lack of fame outside of physics makes it easier. Here are a few:

 

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.”

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think”

“A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.”

“There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

 

None were meant to be flippant and the last one is one of the richest quotes I know.  Really deep ideas have meanings that go beyond the surface.   As an example consider this question

 "is light a particle or a wave?"

 It turns out it's both, but sometimes it's most useful to describe it as a wave while other times you treat it as a particle.  It's impossible to apply both descriptions at the same time.   The essence of complementarity is there are different ways of looking at the world and each can have its own language and domain where it's true. 

 

You can step back a bit and look at a satellite in orbit.   Physics developed by Newton are good enough to put it there and predicting where it is to good precision, but if you're worried about the accuracy of its clock you need to bring in relativity.  Einstein and Newton offer very different theories that describe orbital motion and how clocks keep time.  Relatively turns out to be richer, but Newton's ideas are good enough for almost everything people normally do - that and I'd hate to describe the motion of a volleyball using special and general relativity.  

 

I won't go into quantum mechanics, but complementarity is at the core how you think about things.  That and like Newton and Einstein's models, there are boundaries where one is more useful than the other.  The trick is knowing both and where the boundary lies.  It's for another discussion, but I think complementarity is a good basis for talking about the concept of free will. 

 

Bohr was so taken with the idea of complementarity that he made it part of his coat of arms with a nod to Eastern religious philosophies and the Order of the Elephant.  (how's that for clickbait?)

 

Light offers another example. Newton used a prism to break whiteish sunlight into a spectrum of colors.  Later Keats objected to the beauty of science claiming Newton unwove the rainbow.  

Do not all charms fly/at the mere touch of cold philosophy?/There was an awful Rainbow once in heaven. 

 In reality something deeper is afoot.

 

 Consider a yellow light on your desk.  The wavelength of the light makes it look yellow, but if you are moving towards at a constant velocity you observe a shorter wavelength.  If you're moving fast enough it looks blue.  Faster still and it's ultraviolet.  If you're moving away the wavelength lengthens and it shifts towards the red.  In fact by selecting your velocity with respect to the light, the wavelength can be anything you want.   In this view of nature the color of light only depends on your velocity relative to it.   It may not seem useful, but it turns out to be one of the most important tools for measuring the size and age of the Universe. 

 

Complementarity appears all over physics and turns out to be a useful way of thinking about new phenomena.   Over time I've come to think of it in areas outside of physics.  The spoken word and a television show can both get across their own versions of something.  Neither is complete and understanding both can lead to a deeper appreciation.  Picasso and Rembrandt had very different portrait styles and both tell us something deep about their subjects in very different ways.  Mix different forms of art - a piece of music might describe the feeling of Winter quite differently from a painting, but both can offer deep if incomplete views of the feeling of the season.   Sports are offer many examples.  Movement in a sport can make statements that added with the emotion of the crowd give a more complete picture.

 

You can't use a flat Earth, geocentric universe, or being able to turn off gravity for an hour tomorrow.  The descriptions have to be valid in some domain  in the first place.  But having two good but very different representations of something in your head at the same time may just lead to a deeper understanding.  Usually you're not thinking about deep truths, but that's fine.  This doesn't come easily, at least not to me, but it's a lot of fun once you get the hang of it. 

 

 

a kid redesigns the olympic symbol

I was in the basement with the brand new Motorola 21 inch color TV and a children's telephone.  The wires snaked out and up to the roof where my Dad was on the other toy phone braving the Montana Winter as we tried to get a usable signal.  It was my first year of high school and the Winter Olympics would be on in a day or two.   The Olympics and we had a COLOR TV!  

 

We sort of got it working by the time the broadcast began.  The Olympic symbol was displayed and the story given

 

... the six colors [including the flag's white background] combined in this way reproduce the colours of every country without exception. The blue and yellow of Sweden, the blue and white of Greece, the tricolor flags of France, England, the United States, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Hungary, and the yellow and red of Spain are included, as are the innovative flags of Brazil and Australia, and those of ancient Japan and modern China. This, truly, is an international emblem.

 

It's a very clean design, but it offended my sense of mathematics.

 

My sister had very long hair at the time.  Long enough to sit on.  She was always working on various braids.  The year before I was curious about knots and braids and learned that a simple three strand braid becomes very interesting if you connect the ends.  Take three strands here colored red, blue and green.  Wrap them in a standard braid and go through one cycle so the colors end up where they've started.  (I like to think of braids as musical rounds)

 

 

Rather than repeat the process like my sister, bend them back and connect red to red, blue to blue and green to green.  You'll be left with three loops that are fully linked, but if you remove one the whole works falls apart.  Here's a nice image.  Note that they're not really two dimensional circles as they have to pass over and under each other.  Making this forces you to use three dimensions.  

 

Technically these are a special case of brunnian links - a nontrivial link (a link is a grouping of the loops here) that becomes a set of trivial (unconnected) circles if you pull out one of the loops.  Cut any loop and the whole thing can easily be pulled apart.  Do it with five loops and you'd have powerful symbolism for the Olympic movement - or so I thought.   I knew you can make brunnian links for any odd number of loops so it was time to draw.

 

I sketched a five loop version.  Cut and remove any loop and it all comes apart.  All I had to do was find some way of making a nice drawing.  My sister is the arty one.  She had all of the right kit including some high quality colored pencils.  She also happened to be smart enough to not let me use them - even if I had noble intensions.  

 

Plan B.  Every kid has Crayola crayons.  I selected five and, after a couple of tries, I had it.  

 

(pretend the colors are accurate.  my drawing here is pretty bad, but so was the crayon version)

 

The drawing went into a special international airmail envelope with an explanation of the math and symbolism.  It was addressed to the Olympic organization in Lausanne..  I have yet to hear from them.  Apparently crayon drawings from 15 year olds don't make the cut.

 

I draw quite a bit.  It's an integral part of how I think.  It isn't pretty and I consider it an ephemeral part of thinking and trash it as soon as it's served it's purpose.  If you want meaningful design it's best to use a real designer.

 

I'm looking forward to the games!

 

... so excited that they just start farting out light

Years ago one of the neighbor kids, probably about 11 at the time, asked me what fire is.  Sometimes frustrated parents point their question-rich kids at me.  The answer came immediately:

 

fire is what happens when atoms get so excited, that they just start farting out light

 

He cocked his head bit and he gave a  look that managed to combine skepticism with delight.  

 

 Questions are wonderful. The trick is to give a sort of accurate answer that doesn't rely on jargon or experience that the questioner might lack.  Ideally it will stir up a bit of curiosity.  Unfortunately jargon is hard to avoid and even simple terms can be a problem in any field.

 

The terminology problem is a serious issue in communicating the natural sciences. Bedrock explanations can be confusing unless you've devoted a good part of your life to them and the expert considers them easy.   Too much of the  terminology used in physics  - power, energy, quantum, theory, hypothesis, model, significant, natural, data, information, and entropy to start with - have very different meanings to non-specialists.   It is an area where I tend to struggle. 

 

Communicating science is damn hard.  I've become a  fan of better education - that a variety of approaches are appropriate and perhaps even necessary. Lectures and videos often fail because they answer questions before they arise and fail to engage deeply enough.  The printed word and pictures can ignite the thought process, but creating something that is interesting and entertaining is tough.  The best approaches seem to be multidisciplinary with different media types augmenting each other.   

 

A few days ago a strong recommendation for a Kickstarter comic book project on entropy,  I'm not a big comic book fan, but sometimes the right story, artwork and science come together at an accessible level..  

 

They're using artists with real comic book experience, a seasoned writer and a physics consultant who knows a bit about entropy.  I haven't seen the full physics approach but a friend with a Physics Nobel has and gave his seal of approval.   Before writing this I passed this by one of Sukie's friends who does comic books and illustrated children's books for a living.  He liked it a lot.  It will be about 140 pages ...

 

I'm in

 

There are only a few days left and they may not make their all-or-nothing goal, so sign on if you like the idea...   Entropy is widely understood making it a great choice.  If you permit, I'll ramble a bit.

 

A few of you love mechanical clocks.  The quintessential clock has a pendulum swinging back and forth. One of the first things you learn in high school physics is how to compute the period of a swinging pendulum.  Conveniently, at least for small oscillations on the Earth, a quarter meter long pendulum completes its cycle in about a second.   Size matters.  A grandfather's clock is slower still and a Foucault pendulum is majestically slow and it measures the turning of the Earth.    And for fun, why not express your height in terms of the period of a pendulum of the same length?¹

 

A clock of any sort measures the passage of time - a rather curious thing because it only flows in one direction from the past through the ephemeral present and into the future.  This arrow of time tells us the past is not the same as the future.   Completely obvious and hardly worth mentioning except it's connected to some of the deepest questions that exist.

 

When Newton discovered Newtonian physics, the still incredibly useful tool chest we use to describe most of the motion we encounter, there was a bit of a puzzle.  The equations work equally well going backwards in time.  So does quantum mechanics.  Physics at the smallest scale is time invariant.  But that's contrary to what you and I observe.  Outside of our dreams and science fiction we can't go back in time.

 

Entropy is the fly in the ointment.  Roughly speaking it's the measure of randomness, sort of a disorder, in a system.   Take a cup of coffee and a glass of milk.  At the level you and I observe them each is orderly.  Coffee is mostly uniform coffee and the milk is uniform milk.  Each is a low entropy system.  But mix a bit of milk into the coffee and you get wonderfully beautiful and mathematically complex swirls.    You have increased randomness in the system.  It has a higher entropy and by themselves the milk and coffee don't unmix. 

 

As time moves forward the total entropy of the universe increases.  This turns out to the why the past is separated from the future - why causes precede effects - why living things age.  The comic book should tell you more about this.

 

Curiously if you isolate a system and play around with it you can avoid the impact of entropy.  Adding energy to a closed system is one trick.  But a pendulum is very simple.  What if we made a perfect pendulum..  one in a vacuum (no air friction) and with a perfect bearing.  It's motion would be reversible.  Could you make a clock with hands that went backwards?

 

 
A clock is just a machine that turns the motion of the pendulum into a mechanical motion that moves the clock's hands  Tear one apart and you find a nifty little thing called an escapement - a wheel with asymmetrically pointy teeth.  The pendulum is rigidly connected to a two armed piece called an anchor.  It's motion allows the wheel to turn easily in one direction and effectively blocks it in the other.  If the clock was "perfect" the wheel could move the other way just as easily, lifting up and over and local time could move in either direction.

 

You have some of your coffee and let your mind wander.   There's this noise...

 

tick tick tick tick tick

 

That's the clue.  A tooth on the wheel hits the anchor and vibrates transferring a tiny bit of energy to the air making the ticking sound we perceive.  The metal also heats up a small amount.  The heating of the metal and air increase entropy.  The tick of the clock increases the entropy of the Universe a tiny amount.  

 

And there are curious puzzles.  Just after the Big Bang the early universe was very orderly... why?  Early on it must have been like a perfect pendulum or any other system that can move either way in time.  But it didn't and you owe your existence to it.

 

Max the Demon vs Entropy of Doom may be fun.  I hope it makes it's goal.  

 __________

¹ If it's swinging through a small angle you can easily show the period ~ 2Pi(L/g)^1/2, where L is length and g is local gravitational acceleration. If you're six feet tall it works out to a shade over 2.7seconds.  

__________

Recipe corner

 

Produce is currently spectacular.  I have a deep love for real tomatoes.  Here's a sandwich that marinates a bit.  It was spectacular with great tomatoes and would be awful with what you find in February.   This is just a rough outline so improve!

 

Gooey Tomato Sandwich

 

Ingredients

 

° a pound of ripe tomatoes..  go for heirlooms of a variety of colors. you deserve it.

° 2 garlic finely mined cloves

° 1 tsp capers

° 3 tbl extra virgin olive oil .. the good stuff here

° 2 tsp red wine vinegar

° some red pepper flakes'

° a dozen or so fresh basil leaves 

° a few fresh parsley leaves  (or substitute whatever)

° a really nice fresh baguette or similar fine white bread

° salt and pepper (a good finishing salt is appropriate)

 

Technique

 

° cut the tomatoes into thick slices or whatever shape you want.  Put them in a bowl and season with a bit of salt and pepper

° add everything else except reserve some of the basil and all of the parsley. Toss and let it rest for about ten minutes 

° split the baguette.  Spoon the mixture and it's liquid onto the bottom half of the bread.  Now sprinkle the parsley and reserved basil and replace the bread top.

° cut in to an appropriate number of pieces.. four is about appropriate here.

° cover with a clean dish towel and wait an hour before serving to let everything soak in.

 

 

 

perspective

Some details, sadly including her name, have faded but others are crystal clear.  My eighth grade art teacher gave us something profound.  Interesting at the time, but years later I began to appreciate how profoundly beautiful it was.

 

Other than a straight edge, pencil and a sheet of paper our desks were bare.  She asked us to stand facing the window.   "Close your eyes"  We were to imagine being on the prairie looking an our feet. I opened an eye and saw most of us were looking at the floor.  We were to imagine the line between our eyes and the point on the ground.   Then we were to mentally draw a line to a point on the ground some distance away.  "Don't worry about the numbers, but think about the angle the line makes with the ground..."  Then we looked ten feet out, twenty, fifty, a hundred feet, the length of a football field.  "What are the angles doing?  How fast are they changing?"  "a mile, ten miles, a hundred miles..  "how are they changing now?"  Now off as far as we could imagine vanishing off into space. The angle was changing so little as we went further away.   "Open your eyes"  It may have been an eighth grade art class, but I felt myself gasp. We were looking straight ahead to the horizon and had touched infinity.  

 

Next she showed us a photograph of railroad tracks receding into the distance.  She asked us to close our eyes and scan along each of the rails and notice what happens.  Of course they meet at infinity.  But parallel lines can't do that.   What if there were tracks a hundred feet to our left?  She gave us our first lesson in projective geometry and none of us realized it.

 

We sat down the the straight edge and she showed us how to construct a grid of equally sized squares without resorting to numbers  It was just drawing straight lines to the horizon and intersecting them with straight lines from other points.  Very neat.  That consumed the period.  I couldn't wait for the next class.,

 

A few days later we met again.  Now we were to imagine a semi-transparent piece of paper between us and perpendicular to the ground.  We were told to think about where the lines to the "vanishing point" - the artist's infinity would intersect the paper.  Then she took out a cheap print of a Renaissance painting, I remember it as the Giving of the Keys to Saint Peter by Perugino, and drew the perspective lines on it.  She told us the great artists of the Renaissance had been struggling to create the most realistic painting possible and had developed perspective to bring some of the three dimensionality of the world onto a flat two dimensional sheet of paper. 

 

My mind was blown.  I started seeing the world differently.  I knew that it had three dimensions and was Euclidian, but when you looked at anything a bit in the distance the two dimensional approximation of perspective was apparent.  This was a powerful tool.  It explained why movies and photography looked realistic.  It started me thinking about what a lens does.  

 

Years later I learned more about projective geometry - an area of math pioneered by the Renaissance artists.  I can't appreciate it to the depth of an artist, but it is a good metaphor for other things.

 

Some concepts in physics seem strange - even bizarre - to non-specialists.  Examples and popularizations often aren't clear enough, leading to even more confusion.  The trick is to find metaphors and analogies that preserve enough of the core ideas while being easy to understand.  Projective geometry - perspective to an artist - is rich ground for tackling some of the basics.

 

Four that are central to physics and art come to mind:  relativity, invariance, symmetry and complementarity.  Forget about any associations you might have heard about those words and physics (especially relativity).  This is more of a fundamental level of how to look at Nature in general and learn to ask the right questions.  It applies to art and probably many other fields.    So taking them one at a time:

 

Relativity You can paint an object from many perspectives.  All of them represent the same information about the object, it's just they're encoded differently.  The same subject can be faithfully represented without any loss.  (for physics think about simultaneity)

 

Invariance  Bits of the subject can look different when you change your perspective, but there are some that never change.  Consider straight lines on the subject that meet at a point.  The fact that they intersect at a point doesn't change in different perspectives,.  Those features that don't change in all possible representations are invariants. 

 

Symmetry  Now think of moving the subject rather than the artist -  rotating a subject on a turntable for example.  Arbitrary rotations may appear different, but the the sum of all views  from all possible perspectives doesn't change.  The sum of all of the perspectives is the projective description.  Here rotation is a symmetry of the projective description.

Another way of looking at this is to consider a few special cases rather than the totality.  Consider rotating a circle looking at it from one perspective - standing over it for example.  No matter what rotation you make - 2°, 180°, 42°, 234234234234234° - it looks exactly the same.  A circle is symmetric under rotation.  Now think of an equilateral triangle.  It only looks the same if you rotate it 120° - it has a three fold symmetry under rotation, a square has a four fold symmetry that pops up ever 90° of rotation  Symmetry operations can be thought of as change without change.

 

Complementarity  This one is related to the story telling from a few posts ago.  There can be many views of the subject that are equally good, but when you describe the subject you usually have to pick one - hopefully one that makes sense in the context of how you describe it.   This seems almost simple at first, but consider trying to take a picture of something very small - say an electron.   The electron has a position and some momentum.  When you make your picture you have to shine some light on it.  The light its own energy and momentum and, in the process of interacting with the electron, manages to muck things up.  If you're really clever you can set up your measurement to focus on one aspect of the electron - say it's position.  Now the interaction will disturb the electron's momentum a great deal.  You can also try to focus on it's momentum, but that will disturb the electron's position - ah the uncertainty principle.  The point is you decide which description you want and the other descriptions are rendered invalid.  Picasso would not approve.

 

Math can render physics incomprehensible to non-specialists, but principals common to art are often involved at a deep level.  It's nice to frame them in terms of something much more tangible - perspective in art.

 

And if you wonder why I keep arguing for education in the arts...

 

 

 

leaning into discovery

Watching a stream of the first two episodes of Genius by Stephen Hawking I was reminded of the words of one of my teenage mentors.  

 

Awe and wonder are usually listed as synonyms, but there is an old distinction. Awe leaves you so impressed that you don't know what to do other than feel it.  Wonder is deeper.  You are still amazed, but now you want to understand it better.  You come to learn that wonder is license to ask Nature questions for she is not unknowable.

 

Science education should inspire with a sense of wonder and provide a sense that paths exist.  A few of the science shows, I wouldn't count Genius among them, manage this.  They're expensive to produce, but there are probably lessons on making science palatable to a larger number of people.  The best provide stories and even inspire a few into STEM programs.  Lean-back science education.  How do you get people leaning in a bit more?

 

I've spent a few posts on my belief the current system of American science education focuses on filling a pre-professional STEM pipeline underserving and turning off a majority of students in the process.  I'd like to see something more relevant for most people.  

 

Anton van Leeuwenhoek was a hacker - a 17^th century optics hacker.  A few Dutchmen perfecting glass lenses had stumbled onto the basis of compound microscopes and telescopes.  Galileo heard of their work and made a telescope good enough to revolutionize astronomy and our view of our position in the Universe.  Leeuwenhoek went the other direction and created the field of microscopy revolutionizing biology and our understanding of life.  Little curved pieces of glass shook the foundation of our understanding of the world.  

 

It is hard to imagine Leeuwenhoek's excitement.  Almost everything he put under his microscope made him the first human to discover a bit of a tiny world that has been hiding on, among and in us.  His drawings are beautiful and appear in about a hundred or so letters to the Royal Society of England.  Robert Hooke was something of an English polymath.  He improved on Leeuwenhock's design and, continuing the tradition of just looking at things, discovered the existence of cells.  Hooke was also gifted at making accurate drawings.  Biology was on its way.

 

Too many think of discovery as something already found and archived in textbooks or wikipedia. Real discovery is nothing like that.  In fact there is still much to be discovered and some of it is very accessible.  You can take delight in personal discovery.  Imagine taking a scraping from your teeth to see what's there .. or perhaps see what's living on your sister's face by taking a sample with a bit of scotch tape.  Real and accessible discovery.  

 

Every kid should have at least one scientific instrument.  These need to be easy enough to use, they can't get in the way of discovery, robust and portable.  The idea microscope should fit in a pocket so you can look at things when you're wandering through a garden or wooded area - or perhaps your school cafeteria.  Anything that allows you to see beyond your senses is a candidate, but I think microscopy is best suited for the curious kid.

 

I once thought that there were science haves and have-nots based on economic conditions.  If you were lucky enough to be from a wealthy Western country you had a better chance of developing an interest in science than if you came from the developing world.  While that may be true statistically I'm now of a different mind.  I think there are those curious and not so curious people and they can be found everywhere.  The trick is to get something to exercise their curiosity and it has to work equally well for everyone.  It needs to work without electricity, Internet, technical sophistication and lesson plans.  It has to be extraordinarily inexpensive and easy to ship across borders.  It turns out just such a device exists.

 

Manu Prakash's group at Stanford created an origami microscope a few years ago.  The Foldscope is folded from heavy printed paper for easy shipment and had a relatively sophisticated lens group.  It is easy enough for an eight year old to put together and interesting enough to keep this significantly older physicist occupied.  It costs about a buck to make a couple of them which make a packet.  A few prototype runs have been made - there are about 50,000 of them all over the world.  No real lesson plans - it is better to play and discover on your own and communicate with a growing community by Internet and physical mail. 

 

At the moment the group is gearing up for a much larger run.  I believe the deal is everyone given the opportunity to buy one has to provide a second one to someone who they think wouldn't have access to a microscope on their own.  I can think of a kid in Cameroon.  In the meantime wealthy Westerners can buy very nice portable field microscopes.  There are a number of digital microscopes and microscope adapters for smartphones.  I'd recommend against just relying on digital images - there is something very deep about observing something deeply enough to make an accurate drawing - even if you're a not-so-good artist like me.¹ I'd count the ability to concentrate on something and reproduce it in the form of a sketch as one of the more powerful thinking tools I have.   Most of us draw when we're little, but most of us stop and unlearn.  I think you can make an argument for a basic art class like you can for math or science.

 

They go nearly everywhere and volunteers are translating the instruction sheet into a number of languages.  I read that it takes about $25 in postage and handling to get a Foldscope into South Sudan.  It is worth the cost. There are people with an interest and an ecosystem vastly different from anywhere else so it should be done.  I don't know what percentage of kids and adults are curious enough to use one of these as a discovery tool, but wouldn't it be wonderful if all of the kids on the planet had one available?

 

Comparatively rich kids have the ability to acquire much more sophisticated instruments, but there's a rub.  The "better" instruments may be too nice to take out in the field, too complex to understand well and not standard.  There is an advantage to having standardized instruments at some level.  That shouldn't stop anyone from spending money and looking at other classes of instruments.  In fact I think there is real opportunity for building robust, easy to use scientific augmentations for smartphones.

 

Foldscope is a brilliant idea - lean forward science education for anyone.  Of course there has to be an opportunity to discovery and play.  That means unstructured and unsupervised playtime - something many children in the wealthy Western world have very little of...   Too bad as the world is full of so much wonder. 

 

 

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¹ Lately I've decided I've taken too many snapshots and am not appreciating images so I now try to study a potential image before taking a photo - even to the point of sitting down and spending fifteen minutes sketching it to understand it a bit better.

 

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Recipe corner

 

Lumpia are sort of a spring roll from the Philippines.  The term is generic - many are meat filled, some are vegetarian and they can be deep fried or roasted.   Here's a variation that works well .. lots of ways to adapt!

 

Lumpia

 

 Ingredients

 

° medium sweet potato

° 14 oz tofu firm brick

° 1/2 cup diced green beans

° 1/2 cup diced carrots

° 1 cup shredded cabbage

° 1/4 cup chopped scallions 

° 3 garlic cloves chopped

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 1 tbl sesame oil

° salt and pepper

° spring roll wrappers (I'll cheat wherever I can)

 

 

Technique

 

° partly cook the sweet potato - throw it in the microwave for 2 or 3 minutes.  Skin and chop into cubes

° drain the tofu and slice into little cubes

° put 1 tbl of olive oil in a large pan over medium-high heat.  When hot add the tofu and cook until edges begin to brown. Remove tofu and set aside in a large bowl

° add the rest of the olive oil to the pan.  Add garlic and cook until soft and garlicy smelling - a minute or so

° add beans, carrots and cabbage and cook until softened.. maybe 10 minutes

° add scallions and sweet potato.  Cook for another 10 minutes or so

° dump the pan into the bowl with the tofu toss. season add sesame oil and toss again

° put some of the filling on each wrapper and roll'

° place on a baking pan and brush the lumpia with some olive oil 

° bake in a 375° oven for about 20 minutes turning halfway through

° serve!

 

 

egg illusions

Even though I'm not very good at it I find art a very important part of the playful part of math and science.  I've bemoaned the narrow-minded focus on STEM in schools enough, so here's a delightful example.

 

Before film it was discovered we have a persistence of vision - the mind stitches together smooth motion by combing something like 25 still images per second.¹  In the early 1800s the zoetrope was invented.  A drum with image frames painted on the inside would be spun.  It had a series of slits around the periphery that you would look through to watch the short animation.  These became toys of the Victorian era leading to more sophisticated design.  

 

Stitching moving still frames into an illusion of motion led to something of the inverse.   A blurry vibrating guitar string viewed using a bright light that flashes with a regular frequency appears to stop.  The stroboscope has a wide range of application - you've probably used one in a high school science class and electronic versions that only display the repeating parts of a signal are fundamental to electrical engineering.

 

You can write on the surface of a spinning object and by picking the right frequency of a flashing strobe light motion will appear.  Now what if you could do this on a complex surface?

 

The EggBot is a delightful little piece of tech.  A computer controlled printer that draws on spherical and roughly spherical shapes. Balls and, well, even eggs.  Jiri Zemanek at the Czech Technical University in Prague generates interesting patterns in Matlab which was used to drive his Eggbot.  Then he spins the eggs and adjusts the frequency of a strobe light.  Art, math, science and engineering and a bit of time for your imagination to take flight.

 

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¹ At least most of us think persistence of vision is what allows us to view motion in film.  It turns out to be more complicated and a combination of persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.  Persistence of vision is why you don't see the black spaces that come before each frame in a film.  The phi phenomenon is the apparent motion of a sequence of still images.  

 

hunting flow

A  large portion of the human brain is devoted to processing vision.  We turn light collected on two small surfaces into electrical signals that are converted into a rich three dimensional model of the world around us.   Simple tasks like catching a ball turn out to be beautiful examples of Newtonian physics.  Observing the world gave us a huge supply of problems at many levels of difficulty.  Over the centuries we worked through Nature's hints and problem sets developing amazingly predictive theories about how the Universe works along the way.

 

I sometimes wonder what discovery of physical law and art would be like for other animals if they had brains as powerful as ours.  Dogs with their sense of smell probably wouldn't notice as much of the beautiful geometry in the sky.  They'd probably concentrate on odors and would develop a science centered on chemistry.  Their art would be very foreign to us -  stories with rich plots on top of plots where observation is of the past rather than the present and time is calculated by the decay of an odor....  Whales are acoustic specialists, but the sounds they're sensitive to doesn't allow precise imaging.  Their intuitive geometry might not be very crisp and what we think of as simple constructions might be abstract.  Their vision isn't very good so they wouldn't be finding the patterns in the sky.  

 

Our physics and math progressed to a point but finally intuition beyond visual observation became important.  We struggle with what the equations suggest and rely on private visualizations to make sense of abstract fields like quantum mechanics and fields.  One has to wonder if intelligent spiders might might have several legs up on us grasping field theory.

 

Nature allows many lines of questioning - but I'll admit to being biased towards vision.

 

Visualization is a necessary skill in much of science.  More than a few physics departments offer courses through art departments to improve drawing and visualization skills.  I suspect most people who end up in science have been sketching and visualizing for years.

 

I've been drawing as long as I can remember.  I remember the kinetic joy of finger painting, but the real freedom came with pencil and paper.  My Dad would bring home rolls of inexpensive butcher paper and let my sister and I go at it.  We'd draw for hours.   Time slowed down or just disappeared as drawings just emerged.  Then we'd be pulled out of our trances for dinner or bed.   It is the first time I can remember falling into a state of flow.  

 

I still draw and sketch quite a bit for recreation and thinking.  Paper is an amazing technology when you think about it, but I would love to be able to easily capture my drawings digitally.   I've spent a fair amount of money and effort trying to do this, but nothing has been satisfying.  When something is important I hunt for paper and pencil and then scan or photograph it if it needs to be digital.

 

With this as background, Apple's iPad Pro announcement caught my attention this week.  I haven't tried one, but it may get me past the flow boundary.  If you don't know about it, take a look at Apple's promotion video from the announcement a few days ago:

 

This isn't a normal iPad.  iPads use a pointing device that, although convenient, isn't terribly accurate.  I use my iPad 3 for reading, browsing, email and other forms of communication, reading and even editing music and photos.  I leave my laptop at home when I travel.  It is very good at what it does., but...

 

the regular iPad fundamentally fails as a drawing device

 

Sure you can do some simple drawing and any number of styli are on the market  that are a bit more accurate than a finger.  When I was a toddler I progressed from my finger to a pencil.  I want a digital device that feels like a pencil on paper. 

 

Currently most digital artists use Wacom tablets - digitizing tablets that use a pen.  The tablet is usually held at a right angle to the screen.  Precision work is possible, but my hand feels disconnected to the drawing surface.  Additionally there is a bit of latency - sometimes you pen is moving faster than the image on the screen.  Flow is elusive.

 

Some artists use Cintiq screens.  They're an LCD screen that is sensitive to a pen.  Think of them as iPads with much better pointing accuracy.  In theory they're what you need, but there are some issues.¹ They have low resolution color screens separated by a thick piece of glass.  The image surface is far removed from the drawing surface causing parallax problems.  The screens tend to be heavy.  They're heavy, very expensive and need to be connected to a PC.   There are often driver problems when new OS and drawing software appears.  But there're the best thing going.  

 

I  need something that is accurate to the pixel level, and has a very low latency - the lag between moving the pen and having the image respond.  The Cintiq I used had a best case 25 millisecond latency.  Flow is very difficult to achieve if your image can't keep up with your pen.  The other issues, particularly the parallax, were annoying, but latency killed it.

 

The iPad Pro, if it is as good as the video suggests, is an enhanced iPad.²  It is just an iPad until you need the precision drawing demands.  Microsoft completely blew their demos when they showed crude drawing that is cleaned up in software and crude lettering - you can do that with your finger.  Some, not all, need to go beyond that.

 

For it to be useful I think I need a latency below 10 milliseconds.  I know I can detect and feel 15.  I keep asking if artists have tried it and there is some indication this may be in the right ballpark.  Apple is using faster sampling and screen drawing when the pencil is in use, so maybe ...  If it isn't quite there, they'll probably improve in the next year or two.  There are other issues like screen and pencil feel, but I think I can forgive them if everything else works.

 

So is this the iPad for everyone?  Certainly not.³  A normal iPad is more than enough and is something of a PC replacement for many.  But if you're a kid or draw, you would want a responsive and accurate pencil when you need to use it.  If you draw a lot the pencil is just an extension of your hand - you don't think about it as a drawing instrument.⁴

 

Rarely to I see technology that makes me sit up.  This is one of those times.  It is spendy, so I may wait a year for a more responsive model and would probably go for the standard sized iPad if the feature is extended throughout the line.  But we're getting close to computationally enhanced paper...

 

I'll leave with a video featuring an artist I met several years ago at Disney. Glen Keane draws for the joy of it.  The video captures a bit of why you draw early on.  He moves on to a VR drawing tool that asks some interesting questions, but I'm more interested in drawing itself - when you can just draw and flow away.

 

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¹ I used one quite a bit four years ago and tried a much better one last year.  The newer model was better, but is far from what I need.  Would I take one if someone gave it to me? - no...

² I've tried a Surface and would have bought one if it worked to my needs.  I fails the latency test.   Would I take one if someone gave it to me? - no...

³ Apple appears to be positioning this as a business tool in addition to the creative niche.   Would I take one if someone gave it to me? - certainly (donations welcome:)  Would I pay $1k for one?  - maybe, but it would have to past my accuracy and latency hurdles.  

Perhaps a more interesting question is would this be more appealing if it ran OS X rather than iOS?  File management is important for art.  Great art programs already exist.

⁴ You may have seen the pen called a pencil.  A pencil is frequently a better device than a pen for sketching.  I think used a better term.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

Sesame noodles adapted from an old newspaper recipe from ages ago

 

Cold Sesame Noodles 

 

Ingredients

 

° 1 pound Chinese egg noodles from an Asian grocery.  

° 2 tbl sesame oil

° 3 tbl soy sauce 

° 2 tbl Chinese sesame paste

° 2 tbl Chinese rice vinegar

° 1 tbl peanut butter

° 1 tbl white sugar

° 1 tbl grated ginger (fresh is important)

° 2 tsp minced garlic

° 1 to 3 tsp chili-garlic paste (I like 2, but depending on how hot you like it)

° half a medium cucumber peeled and seeded but into 1/8" matchsticks

° 1/3 cup chopped roasted peanuts (no skins)

 

Technique

 

° Add noodles to a big pot of oiling water and cook 'til tender, but slightly chewy.  Drain and rinse with cold water.  Toss with a bit of sesame oil

° Whisk together the sesame oil, soy sauce. rice vinegar, sesame paste, pb, sugar, ginger, garlic, and chili-garlic paste.

° pour the sauce over the noodles and toss.  Garnish with cucumber and peanuts.